The funny thing is, wildarmsheero is right: Code Geass doesn’t have a pretentious bone in its body. It’s the fans who are the pretentious ones. The show is just noise and pictures, and it’s the fans who shove the meaning on it. We’ve been here before, and we don’t need to say anything about Code Geass at all - it can just be enjoyed. Nevertheless, some of us find it even more enjoyable if we do say things about it, so, while we don’t need to talk about Kallen, I want to. It’s viewer’s prerogative time.

As I noted in my last entry on the show, Kallen’s resemblence to Domon Kasshu has become something of a running joke. To briefly run through the main similarities, both have the same hairstyle, both pilot mecha which are the last, best hope for (Neo) Japan, both are attracted to potential partners who have white-haired fathers, both use a burning-right-hand-of-death as a signature attack and both are hotblooded. Indeed, certain /m/en have decided that Kallen is the daughter of the hotblooded King of Hearts and Rain Mikamura, part of Domon’s rather large speculative family (that image is only one version). I’ve no idea if this similarity is intentional or not - though I suspect it is - but then that’s not the issue; we see it and that’s what matters

Badass mother.

The key thing, as I see it, is how the hotbloodedness - the shouting, the assertiveness, the red mecha - is out of place in Code Geass. Omo pins Kallen down: she’s ‘[h]ardly a paragon of competence, [. . .] the contrast to that “JUST AS PLANNED” hook some Code Geass viewers dig’. Domon Kasshu’s not exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer in G Gundam; much of the show’s plot, such as it is, is built around him not spotting important things. But that’s ok, because the world of G Gundam is one where hotbloodedness and martial skill win the day. (Winners in the hands of a Gundam God, as it were.)

This is not the case in the world of Code Geass. I’m not sure it’s even correct to conceive of Geass’s conflicts as things which are won or lost, but in any case if they are won they’re won by supernatural powers, preternatural intelligence and pure rhetoric. So, while Domon was the hero in his show, Kallen is the hero’s tool in this one. And I think Code Geass rather points this out with Kallen’s tendency for endearingly o’er-hasty actions, like interrupting a diplomatic discussion while wearing only a towel.

In fact, Kallen provides a lot, though by no means all, of the fanservice in the show - being seen about her ablutions (three times so far), wearing a bunny-girl costume and of course piloting a mecha with a motorcycle seating system and camera angles to match. [According to a biking relative of mine, motorbikes were one of the first spheres in which Japanese engineering really kicked in. This may be relevant to the Guren's design.] Kallen is the writers’ Mikuru, which perhaps provokes ‘fourth wall moe’, a desire to protect a character from something outside the show itself.

The other thing about Kallen, of course, is that she’s a half. Or a double. Or rather, she’s really neither a half nor a double, just a human being, but as far as her fellow Britannians are concerned she’s a half (hence Milly’s efforts to conceal the fact). Indeed, she has four names; naming conventions being what they are, we could arrange them in a pleasing chiasmus, as Kallen Stadtfield Kozuki Karen. I’m using ‘Kallen’ because of Wikipedia (a good example of said website’s not-always-positive ability to establish orthodoxy) and because it’s what appears on her friends’ phones when she calls.

The ninth episode of Code Geass, ‘Refrain’ is Kallen’s episode, and it focuses on complicity, in the form of Kallen’s mother and the hotdog vendor, both of whom serve Britannians and both of whom turn up later as Refrain addicts. Given how several of the other refrain users are reliving Area 11’s time as a free country (’Nippon! Nippon!’; ‘Japanese technology is the best in the world!’) I’d say the episode is also jabbing at some people with a nostalgia habit (here in Narnia you’d make a killing selling Refrain at the Last Night of the Proms).

Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha A’s features a group of magical antagonists whose combat terminology is in German, although this is by no means the only foreign language used in the series (Bardiche and Raging Heart are noted for their English, while ‘Asura’ is a Sanskrit term and so forth). Quite what the status and connotations of the German language are in Japan I’ve no idea (though I’d like to find out) so I can’t guess what the intention of the staff behind Nanoha’s German is.

For my part though, as the viewer rather than a creator, mixing magic and German brings to mind Goethe’s Faust and also the eerie casting scene in Der Freischütz. Not unhelpful associations, though it’s a little disorientating to be watching a magical girl throw bullets and thinking of Kaspar and Max. Unfortunately, because I actually understand a fair number of German words, sometimes the effect isn’t as impressive. When Vita shouts ‘pferd(e)’ I chuckle, because I can’t help but think of Karura:

HORSE: A type of Pleasure involving horses, HORSE is considered both desirable and acceptable. Brown and bay horses are most commonly used.

This HORSE experience illustrates the difficulty of encountering, in anime, non-Japanese words from a language that you yourself comprehend.

Allow me to pause, and recommend Avatar’s account of subtitling A’s. It’s interesting to read how all this works at the coalface, so to speak, and Avatar highlights how many minds the script has to pass through before it reaches the subtitle viewer:

I know practically no German whatsoever, of course . . . but that’s almost certainly the case for the translator as well, especially if they’re working from a script with the German poorly converted into romaji (and listening to it being read by VAs who don’t know German either, and even that is assuming that the Japanese writer didn’t blow it in the first place, which happens a lot too.)

In a glass darkly, or what?

Anyway, foreign words sound cool and a bit mysterious. You can see this in English: I’ll stick with Faust and use Kit Marlowe’s English Doctor Faustus as an example. Marlowe gives the bad Doctor a long summoning incantation in Latin which would sound much more pompous and stupid if Faustus just reeled it off in English. Latin, with its antique literary and religious associations, supplies a mystique which English doesn’t have (to an English-speaker).¹ The same thing’s going on when ‘Wandering Swordsman: Recollection’ becomes Samurai X: Trust & Betrayal. (And why not? Samurai sell better to English-speakers than mere swordsmen.)

The other effect that foreign words have relies not on mysteriousness but on comprehension: ‘Ah, I see what they did there!’ A simple and classic example from English-language media is the name of the hero in The Matrix. ‘Neo’ is ‘new’ in Greek, and it’s also an anagram of ‘one’. ‘Ah, I see what they did there!’ say the fans, deriving some pleasure from the thought that some people won’t have seen was done there. Or they look it up later and derive some pleasure from the thought that, even if they didn’t get it at the time, they can at least use Wikipedia.

This is, in fact, a form of intellectual fanservice. It can be played on many levels, depending on the complexity and obscurity of the foreign words used. The Servants in Fate/stay night are a fine example of fanservice for mythology buffs. Neon Genesis Evangelion’s opening sequence is, like the segmented structure of Foucault’s Pendulum, an exercise in fanservice for fans of Kabbalah. Kyon’s nickname is fanservice for fans of the Cynics. ‘Vader’ means ‘father’ in Dutch. And so forth.

Even after learning a foreign language, one translates the words into one’s first language in one’s head. It’s only languages learned in early childhood, and languages learned through long immersion, which completely lose their mystique. So the two functions of unfamiliar words - mystique and comprehension - are not really mutually exclusive. Put a main character in a Gundam called Justice, and you (first use) make him sound cool and also (second use) make a point about a change in his character and role to any fans who understand the word. Put him in a Gundam called Infinite Justice and you (first use) make him sound really cool and also (second use) make a rather blunt allusion to the original title of Operation Enduring Freedom - but perhaps that’s territory best left unexplored.

OS GLADII MEI SVM

This can be a complicated and confusing business for a native English-speaker. Sometimes, something which might sound utterly badass in Japan comes across as silly-sounding. For all I know, sometimes the opposite happens. Sometimes these things can pass through silliness into badass territory on the other side: ‘I am the bone of my sword’. And sometimes, as in the case of My Otome’s ‘Garderobe’ Academy, one doesn’t know what to think: Cupboard? Toilet? ‘Guard-Robe’ (which is not unlike the word’s origin anyway)?

Yet - perhaps because of these confusions - I like the use of foreign languages in my anime. By turns the use of foreign tongues makes me feel cosmopolitan, massages my ego, amuses me, and sends me Wiki’ing furiously. Now and then - as with the collision between Vita and Der Freischütz - it actually does something unexpected, brilliant and probably unintended on the scriptwriter’s part, and these moments of ‘*clasm’ (’Linguaclasm’? ‘Glossaclasm’?) are one of the things I watch anime for.

In fact, I’m beginning to enjoy it more when English is misused in anime than when it’s used correctly. This is probably because I love wordplay so much, but - to take Code Geass as the almost-inevitable example - I like the way Britannian Knightmares have a loading screen which says ‘we shall be the shields which defend our momeland’. Why use ‘motherland’ or ‘homeland’ when you can have both? Similarly, the eyecatch says ‘Lelouch of the Revellion’. It’s almost certainly a mistake, but, as an accidental combination of ‘revolution’ and ‘rebellion’, it reflects the Black Knights’ uncertain status (a ‘revolution’ is more egalitarian, at least nominally), and it also reminds me how much I revel in the show as a whole. Strangely, the standard of Geass’s English can be quite high.

Linguists divide languages into family trees, and I’ve heard English described as the world’s ‘rape child’. It’s an odd yet accurate metaphor. The precedent for all this was set by the Normans, whose conquest of England has certain superficial parallels with the fate of Area 11 (the arrival of new, more mobile warriors in the form of mounted knights, for example). It’s thanks to the period that followed that English-speakers usually have at least two ways to say what they mean, one with words derived from Old English and one with words derived from Anglo-Norman. And because I like the idea of new words, I’m broadly in favour of the Japanese - or anyone else - (ab)using English, however disrespectfully it’s done.

Char was forever attracting young female newtypes and the indefinite article.

I was discussing this recently with a friend who enjoys josei manga. He pointed me to the discussion page for josei’s Wikipedia entry. One Wikipedian suggests that ‘josei’ may have been appropriated by English-speaking fans, and proposes renaming the article, and then a Japanese user chimes in:

‘Josei’ in Japanese connotes woman or women in general usage. Josei in Japanese does not connote ‘comic books intended for women’. If English-speaking anime fans think Josei connotes ‘comic books intended for women’, they are raping our Japanese culture by showing no respect for Japanese language.

[I should point out the misuse of 'connotes'; it's irritatingly common for people who have English as a first language to confuse denotation and connotation, so I'm not surprised to see it causes problems for people who learn English as a foreign language.]

Now I normally try to avoid reading the politicking of Wikipedians, and I’ve no idea whether they’re actually right, but I’ve noticed that fans outside Japan are frequently more comfortable with an adopted Japanese words. A little digging around reveals that a lot of our loanwords (like ‘hentai’) have been wrenched from their contemporary Japanese meaning - not that this means we should be trying to preserve ‘original’ meanings. I suppose I’m just newly aware of the importance of the mouth saying the words to the words’ meaning. (Not unlike the difference between ‘yaoi’ seen on a book and ‘yaoi’ seen on a paddle.)

Maybe the use of foreign languages is an exercise in остранение (now I’m doing it too), defamiliarisation - and here we come back to the first use for foreign words. Flip the girl upside down, silhouette her and throw some English in (’she found herself on an island’ might be a good start) and you’ve created something considerably more interesting than just a picture of a pretty person and a comment next to it. I don’t want to sound too cynical about that, because that’s how these things are done.

I recall seeing an Othello set emblazoned with the slogan ‘The mysterious game from the East’. Although Othello was formulated in Japan, I’d hardly call it ‘mysterious’ - but of course if it’s ‘from the East’ then it must be mysterious in some way.

Notes

1. A mystique which is subverted at the close of the play when Faustus uses a terribly inappropriate quotation from Ovid, ‘Oh, run slowly, slowly, HORSEs of the night’ (’O, lente, lente currite, noctis equi‘). Faustus is terrified because devils are coming to claim his soul but he quotes a lover wishing the night would pass slowly so that he can spend it in his mistress’s arms. This is probably a joke Marlowe threw in for the well-educated members of his audience (see the second reason I propose for using foreign words) as well as a subtle touch to remind us how sin-bound Faustus has become. (Marlowe, unlike Goethe, chose to give the story a BAD END. Very BAD indeed.)

UPDATE: Author comments on остранение and the dangers of o’er-broad terms (two subjects not unrelated).

This is probably my only chance ever to type this, so I’ll take it.

This blog of mine glows with some awesome DICTION! It’s burning prose tells me to convince you! Take THIS! My text, my pictures and all of my spoilers! SHINING BLOGGER’S WORRRRD! Go! GO! GO!!

It’s ritualistic. I find it useful to think about mecha shows which for convenience’s sake we’ll pigeonhole as ’super robot’ in terms of ritual, and Mobile Fighter G Gundam is right at the top of the Magic Words pile. Not only is there ‘This hand of mine . . .’, there’s also a shedload of signature attacks and, of course, ‘Gundam Fight! Ready . . . GO!’ G Gundam itself extracts a lot of mileage from modulating its rituals, varying the wording and the speakers to emphasise various things (finishing with a duet, the ‘Love-Love Sekiha Tenkyoken’); then the phrases take on a life of their own and furnish /m/ with a heightened, (over-)dramatic armoury of expressions.

It’s also a ritual which marks the show’s emotional climax in the forty-fifth episode, ‘Farewell Master! Master Asia’s Last Breath’. The episode’s title makes it obvious that Master Asia will be making his exit, which you might think would lessen its impact. Normally, perhaps it would, but this is the world of ritual, where you always already know what’s coming even if you don’t know quite in what manner it will come. And it’s the manner of ‘Master Asia’s Last Breath’ which adds the crowning emotional bite.

Whenever Domon and Master Asia perform ‘Look! The East is burning Red!’ it’s a precious moment: it’s introduced when they first meet in Shinjuku (YouTube for reference; the ritual begins at 3:33) and repeated only rarely as the series proceeds. It’s also enthralling in its ludicrousness. This is just a massively amped-up form of greeting, or a celebration of the School of the Undefeated of the East. Like a lot of the best things in life, it seems essentially pointless.

But its performance in the forty-fifth episode is still - for those of us willing to accept G Gundam’s terms and premises - the emotional culmination of the preceeding story. Finally we (well, me - you may have figured it out earlier) realise why the East is meant to be burning red: it’s the sunrise. And the ritual is the ultimate reconciliation between master and pupil, the passing on of a legacy and also a mechanism to ensure that Master Asia can realise the error of his ways and still go out shouting - an important consideration in a world where even the horses are hotblooded.

The sunrise is especially appropriate because of the nature of Master Asia’s plan. Master Asia is really a (much) manlier version of Princess Mononoke’s San: noticing the devastation caused to the Future Century’s Earth by the Gundam Fight and by human habitation in general, he resolved to remove humanity. (I suppose this makes him an eco-Char.) As Domon points out, Master Asia’s solution is an overreaction as a paradise without humans would be rather pointless. (Indeed, from Berkeley’s perspective, if a tree falls in the forest and no one’s there to hear it, there is no tree.) So it’s fitting that Master Asia sees the sunrise from the beach and declares it ‘beautiful’. (This Ghibli moment is a little odd when it’s ∀ Gundam which is usually tagged as ‘the Miyazaki Gundam’, but then ∀ has a certain ecological awareness too.)

Anyway, as a counterpoint to Master Asia’s aspirations, G Gundam repeatedly showed us rural idylls and then used the Devil Gundam to completely trash them. Most of the Guyana arc, for example, is spent in a landscape of wide lakes and lush forests. Then, when the Devil Gundam arrives, it turns into a hellish disaster area, with earthquakes, fires, and disgusting mechanical tentacles infesting the landscape (quite a lot could be written on the way G Gundam associates machines and corruption, including the Devil Gundam tentacle-raping a planet). The same thing happens to Lantau Island and Neo Japan as the series continues, with the process happening more quickly each time it repeats.

[Incidentally, the way the panoramas are drawn actually reminded me rather of Monet, in the way they look, well, blobby. And one of the shots of a Hong Kong street strongly resembled Pissarro's series of paintings of the Boulevard Montmartre. I can't help but wonder if this is all intentional, but I know so little about both Impressionism and animation technique that I'm at a loss.]

Master Asia certainly does a great deal of damage to the environment in the process of trying to save it. But then there was something badly wrong with his chosen tool, something with miraculous powers that fell to earth and was corrupted. Or, in other words, I’m both irritated and entertained by G Gundam’s habit of throwing vaguely allegorical names at you and then probably not doing anything with them. Probably:

Despite the terrible things I’ve done, there has never been one Devil Gundam cell on my body!

Put your faith in our Gundams!

I was amused to learn that the God Gundam and the Devil Gundam underwent a renaming program for the US dub. I suppose YHWH Gundam was unpronounceable. ‘This shrub of mine burns with an awesome POWER! It’s flaming voice tells me to bring the Israelites out of Egypt,’ &c.

Blogiography

• The Nihon Review reviews G Gundam.
• OGT muses on the experience of rewatching it.

‘Pizza Butt’ is an inelegant nickname. I propose ‘Beauttocks’ as an alternative.

You may recall that in the first episode of the first season of Code Geass, one of the resistance fighters, having been wounded, reaches out towards a button next to a picture of his family, mutters ‘Nippon banzai!’ and blows up the truck he’s driving. Now I am not Japanese, and in fact I have my doubts about the act of suicide, but I nevertheless found this moment rather stirring. The scene as a whole, however, is also rather disturbing - and not, I hasten to add, because of any patriotic fervour or jingoism, but for a rather subtler reason. This, remember, is the context: the resistance have got their hands on a container of what they think is a gas weapon from the Britannian military, and the lorry carrying it it is trying to escape through Tokyo’s old subway system.

Gas. Tokyo’s subway system. You don’t have to be Professor Plum to know why this combination of weapon and location makes Mr ‘Nippon banzai!’ seem rather less heroic, but for anyone who hasn’t figured it out yet, it was Aum Shinrikyo on the Tokyo Metro with the Sarin. This doesn’t mean there’s some kind of reductive equivalence being drawn between Area 11’s resistance and Asahara’s cult - though given Lelouch’s comparison of himself to the Messiah at the Battle of Narita it would be interesting to compare the Black Knights to a cult - but it does mean it’s very hard to look at the screen and go ‘Yeah! Nippon banzai!’ - and if you are doing that, you need to pay closer attention.

I’m not an expert on Japan, but I’ve been told that nationalism is one of the hot potatoes of Japanese politics, for fairly obvious historical reasons which I shall avoid mentioning like a dubious History textbook. This show is certainly prepared to talk about nationalism. As well as overtly handling it by featuring resistance fighters - or terrorists - it refers to those aforementioned historical reasons covertly: the day of the year that Britannia invaded Japan, August 10th, is the (real-life) anniversary of the day that Japan’s leaders decided to surrender in 1945, for example. I cannot, however, think of a moment of uncomplicatedly heroic nationalism in Code Geass. There’s always a figurative container of nerve gas unsettling things inside the resistance fighters’ metaphorical truck. In general, the Black Knights are characterised by dubious methods and blind obedience to two people - C.C. and Lelouch - who don’t see the liberation of Japan as an end but as a means.

* * *

‘Wider still and wider
Shall thy bounds be set;
God, who made thee mighty,
Make thee mightier yet.’
[And we think other nations have strange rituals!]

So much for jingoism. Let’s talk about empires. Code Geass’s rather complex alternate history - you could accuse Okouchi of implausibility, if you thought plausibility and history had anything to do with one another - places Britannia in charge of the entirity of North and South America. Understandably, questions have been asked about Britannia’s connection to the United States of Reality.

How you react to this connection rather depends on your political views. If you think the USA is an expansionist power which likes to invade other countries to get its hands on their resources, then of course you’ll think that Britannia is a representation of America, because that’s what Britannia is. As it happens, I don’t think that that’s a fair description of the United States; I’d agree that the US doesn’t exactly have a shining track record, but it’s no Great Satan and it’s ethos is miles away from, and considerably more confused than, the Britannian Empire’s (of which more below).

So I don’t think Britannia’s just a thinly-clothed stand-in for the US. It certainly makes viewers think of the States, and it may serve as a vehicle for (thinly-)veiled criticism of certain recent events in US foreign policy. (For proper anti-Americanism, try Gasaraki, or Angel Cop.) But it’s up to the viewer to go ‘Yeah, the US is like Britannia, and therefore sucks!’ Or, alternatively, to go ‘Yeah, this show’s criticising the US, and therefore sucks!’ Both remarks fail to account for Code Geass’s ability to muddy waters.

Code Geass isn’t a simple portrait of America’s foreign policy. But it certainly is a portrait of conquest and colonisation, which is one of the things that makes the use of a stylised British Empire so appropriate: we were lucky enough to be Top Nation at a time when it was more-or-less acceptable to go around conquering places and settling in for the long haul. Various features of the Empire’s rule play on the colonial process, including it’s use of collaborators: returning to the very first episode, the masked soldiers who are dropped in to ‘cleanse’ the Shinjuku ghetto are honourary Britannians, who are promised full citizenship as an incentive. And there’s Suzaku, of course.

‘Social Darwinism’ is the in-phrase to describe the ethos of the Britannian Empire, and it’s applied with considerable thoroughness, right down to the way that Emperor Charles (and that’s a bad sign) manages his family. I know I’m not the first to note that Lelouch himself runs along similar lines in his attempt to overthrow Britannia: consider his remark that the Battle of Narita is a good way to weed out the weaker Black Knights. However, unlike the state of most (if not all) historical empires, the Britannian system of values is more-or-less coherent: the strong should rule the weak, and the Britannians are the strong. Granted, it’s amoral, but you never hear them complaining when they’re defeated - though that is something Lelouch has yet to actually properly do. (This is reminiscent of Reinhard von Lohengramm’s suggestion that he’d be happy to be succeeded by anyone who’s clever enough to usurp his position.) It’s a bit like an empire as it would be if Akagi designed it: not the White Man’s Burden but perhaps the Mighty Man’s Privelege.

* * *

‘Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold:
Bring me my Chariot of fire!
I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor Shall my Sword sleep in my hand . . .’

Why ‘Britannia’? Well - and from this point on I should say I’m only expanding some ideas proposed by iniksbane - a good place to start would be McCarthy’s remarks in a recent Anime World Order podcast (I’ve transcribed her words, but the punctuation’s mine and I sliced bits out for flow):

‘England is kind-of like Japan’s Narnia [. . .] Everybody is very friendly, the villains all sound like Jeremy Irons. It’s not a real place. And I think that one of the things about being a small island with a very established monarchy and a very interesting racial mix which we try to pretend is completely homogenous - but which isn’t - is that we are a mirror for Japan.

We have a very traditional education system [. . .] we have a society of people who tend to be understated, who tend to be socially quite compliant, socially interested in keeping the peace between each other [. . .] and if you start to look at Japan as Japan really is, rather than Japan as most people perceive it: as a society with big regional variations - that’s parallelled [yes, that's how we spell it ~ T.A.] in Britain; as a society with big economic variations across the country, in industries and in areas for posperity - so really we are very close to each other. [. . .]

And for that reason, I think that Japan has begun to use Britain as a mirror, as a way of saying things about Japan that they fear, or that they dread, or that they’re not sure of, by holding them up in Britain.

This seems relevant to Code Geass, particularly so since the ‘British’ elements in the Britannian Empire are taken from the fantasy of Britain, of knights, aristocrats and the Arthurian tradition (I’m sure Saber is rattling in her grave). In fact, there’s a certain Celtic tinge (fringe?) to the show, what with the Arthurian nomenclature for special Knightmares and Schneizel’s ship, the fact that the first member of the Britannian line was a Celtic leader, the use of Scottish place-names for mass-produced Knightmares and of course the ‘Geass’ - though the connection to the geis of Irish mythology has never been officially confirmed. Or denied.

[Incidentally, quite a lot of medieval Arthurian literature was actually written in France, which suggests that Arthurian Britain was serving as a kind of mirror back then too. And when the English did write about Arthur, they sometimes did it in a rather knowing way.]

So, if this fantastical Britan(nia) is serving as ‘Japan’s Narnia’, then Code Geass could be read as a ‘taste-of-your-own-medicine’ colonial narrative (and, trust me, Japan’s medicine was, at times, bitter stuff). One of the popular interpretations of The War of the Worlds runs along these lines: the theory goes that Wells has suburban Britain invaded by technologically advanced, mecha-piloting aliens as a way of saying ‘See? Not very nice, is it?’ And there are certainly colonial resonances in the book, such as one character’s prediction that the Martians will train some humans to collaborate with them in hunting the rest, and in the way the Martians eventually succumb to disease (disease being the way to die in the colonies).

* * *

And if you absolutely must apply Rule 34 to Beauttocks, please remember that she has a (vaguely psi-shaped?) stigma underneath her left breast. Titillation is one thing; inaccuracy is quite another.

Ultimately, while it takes place in a colonial setting, Code Geass is a cartoon about a few specific people, and giant robots, fighting. It’s not a non-fiction book about imperialism. What’s most visually memorable about this show are the attributes of its characters: Lelouch’s eye, mask and voice; C.C.’s hair, straightjacket and pizza obsession; Karen/Kallen’s Kasshu headband and Guren Finger; Suzaku’s snazzy white-and-gold uniforms, et cetera, et cetera. Perhaps because it is a story that primarily wants to be fun, Code Geass thumbs its nose at cleometrics and indeed at the marxist (small ‘m’) approach to history in general. It is not about mass movements but about the mistakes made by a few important people, whose actions affect vast numbers. It is a wildly entertaining tragedy. [The negative flip-side to this coin is that it's also a story told in an extremely aristocratic style. The ones who have been chosen are (wo)men of destiny, and the rest are pawns.]

In fact, by being about the mistakes of a few people, Code Geass lines neatly up with one of my few strongly-held beliefs: that most of us spend a lot of our time screwing up to some degree, and only figuring out where we went wrong afterwards. Who really knows what’s going on? The Emperor, and perhaps C.C. Who isn’t morally blinded? Euphemia, through the sheer power of naïveté, (ironically) Nunally and perhaps the Emperor, in a rejection-of-morals way. The rest of the cast stumble along, doing their best. Although Zero, on one side, and the Purists, on the other, would like to persuade you otherwise, the factions are too morally and (for that matter) racially muddled to be reduced to ‘good’ and ‘bad’; freedom fighters don’t have to be nice people, and collaborators aren’t necessarily villainous. Countries and movements are ‘made up of a large number of individuals, who all have their own thoughts, feelings, and emotions’.

So while it’s worth recognising the colonial slant of Code Geass - and I’ve a sad feeling that there’s a lot more to say than I have said - it’s unwise to try to reduce things down to a purely colonial interpretation, just as it’s unwise to try to argue that Lelouch is superior to Suzaku, or vice versa. It’s partly unwise because, as I pointed out above, Code Geass is anime, not a thesis, and fiction tends to be confused about what it wants to tell you, because it’s too busy trying to give you a good time. It’s also unwise because, beyond the limitations of being entertainment, this particular piece of entertainment consciously works hard to complicate things. This is Code Geass: whittle everything down to catchphrases and you’ll find you’re handling intellectual Sarin.

Acknowledgements

This is all Bateszi’s fault for asking difficult questions about Code Geass in the first place.

Well, it’s mostly his fault; the incoherency of the entry itself is because at the moment I’m revising for some exams with the focused attention of a man riding a unicycle slalom to escape from a swarm of wasps while eating peas with a cocktail stick and construing Pindar’s Odes. Into San-bloody-skrit.

Gratitude is due to iniksbane, whose own entry on the subject, linked above, examines Code Geass’s place in the corpus of Goro Taniguchi, whose previous projects have also said some rather pointed things about poverty and exploitation. It’s an analytical method which I (try to) avoid, so it’s good someone else is around to do it so well. And I should also thank Hige for pointing out how the British and the Japanese both seem to have a sense of nationality which is implicit rather than explicit.

In the absence of an appropriate image, I present an image of
the search for one.

Are you sitting comfortably?

Then I’ll begin.

I was intrigued to hear that BBC Radio 4 would be touching on anime briefly this Sunday evening, although I was rather less intrigued by the fact that the coverage would be on Radio 4’s concession to children’s programming, Go4It. As you can probably tell from the way the title is spelt, Go4It is trapped by two incompatible facts: to attract its target audience it needs to be cool, but it’s on Radio 4, which is not cool.

(A courtesy for international readers.) Radio 4 is the BBC’s flagship radio station, and it’s mostly for members of the concerned middle class. It’s under an obligation to be Worthy, and its content is sometimes mistaken for high-brow radio. (The really high-brow stuff airs in Radio 3’s spoken word slots, because Radio 3 has such a small listenership that its controllers can put on whatever they feel like and no one will notice.) It also has a certain left-leaning slant to its comedy programming, because it’s very hard to find enough good right-wing comedians to fill a panel. (And you can’t mix the two: that would mean a fight, and while it might be interesting to hear Andy Zalzman holding someone down while Mark Thomas moved in with a chair, it wouldn’t be very funny.) But this is by-the-by.

Anyway, I never listen to Go4It for a number of reasons: I’m not a child, it’s rarely very interesting even for children and it airs directly after The Archers. Beyond those marks against the program, the air of concerned Worthiness that hangs about Radio 4 is so strong that even if I was a child I’d probably avoid Go4It like I’d avoid Char Aznable.

An artist’s impression of my reaction when The Archers theme plays on the radio. It’s not exactly a program for kidz who are hip and with-it.

But still, I thought it might be interesting to hear exactly what Radio 4 wanted to tell whoever does listen to Go4It about anime, so I tuned in. Turns out the entire program was devoted to Nipponophilia, with the anime item coming about a quarter of the way through. Impressively, the producers had Helen McCarthy on for an interview. McCarthy is very knowledgeable and - more important for this interview, perhaps - she’s able to adjust her diction over a very wide range, from her Barbican lectures to (as in this case) talking to children.

What was actually discussed? The children on the program mentioned Pokemon (one remarked that she enjoyed it ‘when I was little’), Yu-Gi-Oh! and Hamtaro as anime that they enjoyed. McCarthy mostly talked about three Miyazaki works (My Neighbour Totoro, Howl’s Moving Castle and Spirited Away). Normally I’d feel a little put-out if someone only talked about Miyazaki, good as he is, but it struck me that anime for children that’s available over here essentially breaks down into ’stuff like Pokemon‘ and ‘(some of) the works of Hayao Miyazaki’. If forced to choose, I suppose the latter is to be preferred, and I do wonder if the Miyazaki focus indicates a touch of Reithianism [Cultural Note: in brief, the principle that radio should give listeners what's good for them rather than what they want, named for Lord Reith, first Director-General of the BBC.]

Still, it’s a lot better than the blood’n'tentacles aura surrounding anime in Britain during the ’90s. I also noticed that McCarthy managed to succinctly distinguish between ‘anime’ and ‘manga’, which are sometimes conflated (posibly because of Manga Entertainment’s influence). And in the program’s opening quiz, one of the scores was just a little above nine thousand. Coincidence? I wonder.

Julian: GAR & Biggles - In Space!

Legend of the Galactic Heroes’s opening two episodes of space warfare made it clear how the series’ military confrontations look and broadly function: fleets line up and manoeuvre, space fighters are sent in and beam weapons are fired en masse. Interestingly, because both sides’ spaceships are submarine-shaped, they’re much easier to hit from the side than from head on, so whenever we see a fleet taken in the flank the results are literally explosive.

Given the show’s compelling heroes and the gripping political upheavals, I did not expect much variation on this theme. Writing about the show before I remarked on how gently the spaceships were introduced and established, so I gave up hoping for eye-popping spaceborne action. Trust the Legend, then, to blow me away with a multi-episode battle-stravaganza, only enhanced by the usual liberal helpings of human drama and political machination.

How awesome is the Death Star? Very awesome. I know that, you know that and indeed your mother knows that too (I asked her yesternight). The Legend (and the original novels were written in the early Eighties) takes the Death Star concept of a big, spherical fortress with a huge laser and - true to form - gives it its own unique spin (ah-ha). The sea of liquid metal as an outer shell allowing friendly ships to pass through and carrying floating gun turrets isn’t just a cool concept: it also makes for wierdly beautiful spheres of shining metal in space. That’s not the best thing, though.

Apparently, the Lord of Mordor sees all.

‘The best thing, and the thing that clearly distinguishes the Legend from Star Wars, is the very fact that there isn’t just one of these fortresses. They’re evidently unusual but not unknown, as the previous siege of Geiersberg during the Lipstadt conflict established (I now realise it was setting us up for this larger battle). Furthermore, as one of the Empire’s admirals points out, Schaft’s plan isn’t an out-of-the-blue technological development but a logical progression: with a fortress like Iserlohn in your way, it makes a kind of sense to bolt lots of engines onto your own fortress and try to fight fire with fire.

The Legend can go for episode after episode without any violence - on a human scale - at all, but when the axes are handed out things get quite bloody, quite fast. This is the mark of violence which is graphic yet not gratuitous. (Black Lagoon’s violence is both, while Seirei no Moribito’s is neither; Bleach is bloody but not especially graphic, yet extremely gratuitous - it’s heartily enjoyable sword-porn.) Or, to put it another way, the violence is bloody because real violence is really bloody, rather than because the animators wanted a sanguinary money-shot every episode. I said ‘quite bloody, quite fast’, because ’speed’ and ‘red’ are the two key words to describe the Legend’s martial encounters. The impact of speed imparts shock - and this is where it is similar to Seirei no Moribito - and so does the flow of blood.

Of course, a viewer such as myself is perfectly capable of enjoying the violence as though it is gratuitous.

This particular battle’s own close-combat encounter, between everyone’s favourite bred-from-the-genes-of-Chirico-Cuvie shock troops, the Rosenritter, and enemy boarders, is especially speedy because both sides are mounted on what can only be described as space-bikes. The sudden clashes between the two sides as they raced over the molten surface of Iserlohn reminded me of the way Malory describes (in a rather stylised way) tournaments - which is fitting, given that these are the Rosenritter. Then there’s the way the gouts of blood from the casualties freeze as they spill out into the cold, unfeeling vacuum of space. (I apologise; I must be feeling poetic today.) These guys always bring me the best violence. (Poetic and geekily referential.)

Moving up in scale somewhat, these fortresses’ presence in this battle also allows for some exciting fleet tactics, with fleets sallying in and out of Iserlohn and at one point chasing each other around its surface. The siege as a whole reminded me rather of the Battle of Alesia, although Kempf is certainly no Caesar, which may be why he loses. Iserlohn is Yang’s home, and this was really Yang’s battle: it’s sway was decided by his absence and then his presence. It was also his pupil Julian who made the crucial suggestion which lead to victory, and his ‘Guest Admiral’ Merkatz who executed Julian’s plan, vindicating Yang’s work as an adoptive father and his decision to trust the Imperial defector. And it was (yet) another telling comment on the series’ two governments that Yang was absent because he’d been hauled home by politicians who feared his power (perhaps rightly - I have yet to watch beyond Episode 34), while Reinhard was absent because he didn’t want to be associated with the campaign if it failed. Lohengramm’s advantage indeed.

Anime, in my experience, is not exactly bursting with massive battles. It could be the effort required to animate them, or the competing attractions of personal, heroic violence, or some reason beyond my comprehension. At any rate, I consequently treasure those moments - frequently when a long show is drawing to a close - that action on a vast scale erupts. Hence, in part, my affection for Char’s Counter Attack, which gets down at the very beginning to the kind of battles which usually appear only once per fifty episodes of Gundam (hooray for feature film budgets). Hence, too, my ecstatic reaction to the clash between Iserlohn and Geiersberg: it doesn’t get much better than this.

It’s a mixed-up muddled-up shook-up world.

Prompted by the intricacies of the Haruhi genderswap, the vicissitudes of Minami-ke’s Mako-cakes and Baka-Raptor’s recent defiant (and probably tongue-in-cheek) statement that ‘Kyon is not a girl‘. [Regarding the above image: yes, there's version without cropping and with panties. No, I'm not posting it.] ‘Once you’ve fap’d to a trap, can you never go back?’ Granted, this subject is hardly new (here’s one example of many others’ entries on it, and here’s another) but I’m not averse to picking over the bones at someone else’s banquet. I’m a student: food really is scarce.

‘Trap’ implies a relationship. Someone (the viewer) is at risk of falling into the trap. To be an effective trap, the character obviously has to look convincingly female, otherwise what you’ve got is more like a minefield with a big ‘WARNING: MINES’ sign in front of it: a deterrent. Quite what the negative consequences of being ‘caught’ are is somewhat unclear, but a hint can probably be found in the phrase ‘One is GAR for men and gay for traps’. Being caught supposedly induces some kind of anxiety about one’s sexual orientation. This being the ‘net, such anxiety is in most cases more a humourous than a serious matter.

What’s particularly interesting is the influence of what you might call ‘canon fact’ on fan reaction. I say canon fact because we’re handling fiction, but fans still think it matters whether or not a character is physically female. Take my initial picture as an example. Laura Rola is the female alter ego of Loran, the hero of ∀ Gundam; the picture depicts (as far as canon is concerned) a man dressed up as a woman. It’s a trap!

But for those who (poor souls) have never watched ∀ Gundam and are unfamiliar with its canon, it’s just a picture of a pretty girl in white stockings and a comely state of disarray. To riff on my Laertes, there’s no penis objectively inherent in that image. In fact, if the penis resides anywhere, it resides in the canon, which itself is something the viewer brings to the table. (You dirty viewer you, wondering around with a canon full of penises.) A good trap is visually indistinguishable from a woman, and in the world of the *boorus, the visual is all that there is.

Consider the case of Mako-cakes for a moment (and I’m sure others have realised this before me): within the Minami-ke canon (s)he’s treated by those characters who don’t know (s)he’s a trap exactly as though (s)he’s a girl. This is the pivot of a lot of the jokes surrounding Makoto, which have an extra coating of irony because it was his heterosexual lust for Haruka which Kana used to persuade him into crossdressing in the first place.

The situation becomes more complicated when we just have one image which appears to be a genderswap - as with the picture of a younger, female CHAR which I have used before. This image feeds off the Mobile Suit Gundam canon for its effect, but isn’t part of that canon. Are we to consider this a trap? Well, ‘if it looks like a duck,’ &c. Then we have situations where a character undergoes a within-canon change of physical sex, as in Ranma ½ - currently receiving Den Beste coverage [yes, a pun] beginning here - and, for a more permanent change, Kashimashi: Girl Meets Girl. (Apparently physical changes of gender function rather differently in hentai.) Is this still a male mind in a female body? In Ranma’s case, perhaps. In Hazumu’s case, I really have no idea. Is it fair to talk about ‘a male mind’ in the first place? You tell me.

Finally we have the development of a separate canon (Fate/stay night did this to the Arthurian corpus)¹ as is the case with Suzumiya Haruki no Seitenkan. This, I suppose, tests the viewer’s ability to switch between canons; if you haven’t invested too much in the Haruhi canon, you can separate out the fact that Kyon is not a girl from the fact that Kyonko is not a boy. To continue in the same vein, recently DS created a kind of separate canon split off from real life - well, real internet life, which isn’t very real at all - which swapped the gender of a real person’s ‘net persona (or, as Kaiserpingvin likes to call it, nexistence). At this point, however, one either has to start talking about how there’s no division between fiction and fact anymore, or stop talking, and since I don’t want to do the former, I’ll shut up. Anyway, the canon-coherent implications of Ranma ½ are rather more worrisome.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go and attend a free lunch, the bribe for being a research subject. University really is just one big culinary adventure.

UPDATE: Author comments. I think I was aiming at the humiliation people outwardly express on imageboards (’Does this make me gay?’), which is presumably mostly pose. Doubtless the ‘indignity of being deceived’ is what is inwardly felt.

Notes

1. This too is, I suppose, a pun: said series genderswapped Arthur, splitting off from the corpus of Arthurian literature, and altering Arthur’s corpus. You cannot imagine how smugly self-satisfied I am at thinking of that.

Eagle-eyed viewers of Code Geass R2’s first episode may have spotted that Lelouch is reading Dante’s Divina Commedia while Rollo gives him a lift. (As a child, I never loved anyone enough to give them my last Rolo.)

Slightly more obsessive viewers will have discovered that he is in fact reading the Purgatorio Canto XXII.

In Sisson’s translation, these lines run:

Already the angel was left behind us,
The angel who had shown us the sixth circle,
Having erased a scar on my face;

And declared those who hunger and thirst after righteousness
To be blessed, and he had accomplished that
With no other words than a sitiunt.

And I, lighter than when going through the other openings,
Went on, so that without any effort,
I was following the swift spirits as they went up;

When Virgil began: ‘Love, set alight by virtue,
Has always set alight another love
If only its flame appeared outwardly.

And so forth (the interested can hunt down a translation for themselves, since I’m not going to type out tercets till my fingers tire). Evidently the text that appears on the screen is a real translation of Dante, although it appears to be arranged very oddly. Translators usually either attempt to retain the tercets or dispense with verse altogether and plump for prose, but this one seems to have gone for a rather unpleasant mixture of verse and prose, two verse lines to every printed line. Looking closely, it seems that Lelouch’s text might be a paraphrase, as it covers ground much faster than Sisson does. Then again, Sisson was trying to translate into blank verse, so he may have padded around the edges.

Furthermore, there’s no way that even the Purgatorio would fit, with that print size, into the relatively slim volume that Lelouch is wielding. It must be an abridged, paraphrased or study-excerpt copy; perhaps Stadtfield Academy’s library is understocked - or maybe it was blown up at the conclusion of the previous season, and the librarian hasn’t got around to replacing the full edition yet?

Lelouch is reading a slim pamphlet in the first episode of the first series too, but we never see what it is.

I’m sure you can make some connections between Purgatory and Lelouch’s state for most of the episode (this is an amusing instance of the ‘Everyone Is Jesus In Purgatory‘ trope, I suppose). And, indeed, C.C. might act as a kind of Virgil, leading Lelouch back to himself.

Sadly, the detail of Purgatorio XXII doesn’t seem to have any conveniently obvious parallels to Code Geass. It features a conversation between Virgil and Statius regarding Statius’s conversion to Christianity. There are also some pithy words from a tree (this incident in itself is probably itself a reference to the third book of the Aeneid) regarding moderation, with various examples from history and scripture: ‘Daniel / Despised food, and he acquired wisdom.’ [I'm afraid to say I fail to imitate my biblical namesake on both counts.] Lelouch could do with exercising a little moderation but something tells me that if there is a message here, it’s not that.

This is probably a good example of fairly blunt symbolism, rather than a truly subtle allusion. But it’s a nice piece of intertextual fanservice for English-speaking viewers with the right combination of bookishness and fanboyish obsession. Or rather, it’s fanservice for me. I think you should see now why I sometimes feel this show’s written just for my pleasure.

Symbolism and fanservice aside, this also shows me a more sympathetic side of Lelouch - he may be a siscon Machiavelli, but he’s well-read, which excuses a multitude of sins. [It's like the standard otaku reaction to Lucky Star's Konata ('She's just like me!'), except with poetry instead of doujinshi and eroge.]

Blogiography

• Interested in more symbolism speculation? Give Kaioshin-sama’s observations on the Tower of Babel a try (it’s the penultimate paragraph in his post).
• Stripey also remarks on the Tower of Babel.
• If, on the other hand, you want some speculation as to what happened at the close of the first season, Ubu has had a go at reconstructing events. (But what happened to Nunally?)

Tama-chan telling it like it (sort of) is.

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears (no, not like Kaiji would). I come to bury studios, not to praise them!

Hyperbole aside, where am I coming from? Well, like most things that happen (I have a historian’s genes), this entry has several contributing causes. One is DiGiKerot’s remarks ‘On Anime and Directors‘. Another is a comment that Brack recently dropped on Bateszi’s blog, which puts into words something I’ve been worrying about for a while. It reads, in part, like this:

. . . the majority of anime fans don’t even know who makes their favourite shows, let alone who makes shows they’ve not seen. They are more likely to know who writes the manga or novel an anime is based on than who directed, scripted or animated the anime version.

I’m not going to say anything new today, but sometimes I feel like reminding the world just how Serious a Business our anime discussions are. So let’s talk, once again, about how we talk about anime. Here’s a question for you: have you heard of Miyazaki, Oshii or Kon? (Yes, I’m aware that Miyazaki claims not to create anime. He is wrong. He does.)

How about Tatsuyu Ishihara? Heard of him? He only directed Air, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, and Kanon (yes, 2006). Oh yeah, and some show called Clannad. Not exactly a stellar record of success, so it’s no surprise that searching Nano for ‘Ishihara’ on the fifth of April produced exactly fourteen results, as opposed to eighteen pages’ (so roughly 180 entries) worth if you search for ‘kyoani’. It’s no surprise, because Ishihara had no role in the creative processes of the shows I listed above. No humans have; said shows are all products of that mysterious deity, Kyoto Animation, from whom all blessings flow and to whom all praise is due.

No, I’m not taking a swipe at Kyoto’s fans here. I’m simply using the most dramatic example I have to drive home my point: there seems to be an unjustified focus on studios at the expense of people. Let’s get this straight: directors exercise considerable influence over their anime, whether it’s highbrow, hentai or anything in between. (Granted, the hentai director probably has less money. And less pride.) And narratives, stories, are the products of specific people too. Or, to put it another way, Sunrise don’t wreck trains, particular writers wreck trains, just as Gundams don’t kill people, Tomino kills people. (Though I need a whole separate post to consider whether the ‘trainwreck’ is not actually ‘any story which refuses to pander to the debased, novel-attuned tastes of the modern occidental anglophone viewer’).¹

So if I heard that Goro Taniguchi had left Sunrise and was going to script and direct a moe-moe visual novel adaption, I would be there. Because, as a Taniguchi fanboy, I would know that we would be in for Shakespearean bombast, twists and a cornucopia of win. (Whatever it is that he smokes when he’s writing, I want some!)

As for animation? Well, here the studio is somewhat more significant. (Here’s a good example of the justified use of a studio’s name to draw together a group of anime for close study.) But directors have influence here too. To quote Bateszi:

Gurren-Lagann’s director Hiroyuki Imaishi’s previous work Dead Leaves was animated at Production IG but it shares such a visual resemblance/sugar rush style to said epic mecha show. [I might add that Imaishi was animation director for FLCL too. Evidently a man to watch. From a distance, in case he explodes.
~ Animanachronism]

And this focus on the studio is the root cause of much of the bile caused by fanboying or fangirling. A small but significant minority of anime fans are violently opposed to admitting the worth of anything produced by Kyoto Animation precisely because of the obsession with the studio posssessed by another small (but vocal) minority. Both groups are equally dogmatic, of course, and both groups are incoherent in their studio-centric viewpoint. It’s like trying to talk about chess using the vocabulary of table tennis: it hasn’t worked, isn’t working and will continue to not work until you stop trying to call the bishop a bat.

In a sense, this is actually a levelling exercise too. Why is it that we only credit arthouse directors for their work? Is it because (to ask that classic sarky undergraduate’s question) ‘Shigofumi isn’t Art’? Because no grown-up in his or her right mind would enjoy a show about giant robots, fighting? Because Miyazaki won an Oscar while Ishihara merely defined tearful moe for legions of fanboys (not to mention the way ‘Kyou’s thighs’ are now firmly lodged in the consciousness even of those of us who resolutely avoided The Irish Family)? Because the sorts of people who write about Kon are prepared to spend a minute on research, while the sorts of people who write about Ohta are as intellectually broken as Mako-cakes just downright lazy?

[It feels a little odd that I should do this after proclaiming the Death of the Animator, but I guess I'll use the fact that reviewing anime and analysing it are different activities as an excuse.]

Notes

1. Maybe if I use lots of polysyllabic words they won’t realise that they’re being insulted. Maybe. More seriously, I’m convinced that narrative art doesn’t have to have a convincing storyline, or at least it didn’t have to until relatively recently. But then it could be that I just have low standards.

EDIT: Author comments on Jeff’s comments below; Avatar comments on Author’s comments on Jeff’s comments. I suppose this is the Law of Unintended Responsequences in action.

As my Japanese is nonexistent, I’m just hoping it’s nothing scurrilous written on the box.

1. Where does moe (or moé for the pronunciation pedants among us) happen? The site of moe must be in the viewer. When, therefore, we say of a character that she or he ‘is moe’ we are identifying the presence in her or him of traits which provoke or stimulate moe in us (and perhaps in an imagined community of ‘people like us’).

2. Moe is, to put it another way, a subjective event in the viewer’s mind, stimulated by the presence in a ‘moe’ character of certain qualities (youth, naïvité, innocence, weakness, glasses, cat-ears, a maid’s uniform, cyborgification et cetera, et cetera).

3. It would therefore be possible to produce a society of fans whose moe was stimulated by a completely different set of qualities, if that society saw those new qualities as things to be protected, cherished, succoured.

4. Moe is not the same as sexual arousal. It does, however, operate in a similar way: the qualities a character possesses can stimulate arousal in the viewer - if, of course, the viewer feels those qualities to be sekushay. The wide range of traits and qualities which people find arousing is therefore a useful model for the variety of traits which stimulate moe. The word ‘fetish’ is therefore not literally applicable to a moe trait, but may serve as a useful metaphor.

5. It is worth noting that certain viewers find that some traits stimulate both a moe reaction and a sexual reaction. A maid’s uniform implies a power relationship, which may provoke moe or arousal - or both. A doubled reaction - both sexual and moe - to youth may be where the lolicon comes from, but ‘Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen‘ - that’s Deutsch for ‘I don’t like little girls, so I couldn’t say’, by the way.

[There are alternative formulations. For example, in my understanding moe is restricted to parts of the upper-left-hand quadrant of this moe compass. If you're interest is piqued by the lolicon/moe issue, you may wish to peruse 'If Moe is to Survive, Compromises Must be Made'.]

6. Since a desire to protect, cherish, succour is a necessary (though perhaps not a sufficient) part of moe, feeling moe means the viewer is making two speculative assumptions, that

1. he or she is stronger or more knowledgeable about the world than the character who is provoking the moe; and that
2. he or she is in some way able to enter the character’s world (to do the protecting, cherishing, succouring)

7. This is moe’s most dangerous element. Imagining (1) to be true leads very easily to pride, and certainly encourages the viewer to be blind to his or her own weaknesses. It is self-centred. Imagining (2) to be true is an exercise in hopelessness. Moe, uncritically accepted, can therefore become hopeless, foolish pride: hubris.

[Alert readers may notice that Kodomo no Jikan questions (1) by portraying characters who are likely to stimulate moe but who are also knowledgeable about the world - too cynical, in fact. The franchise does not completely deny (1), however, since these characters are also portrayed as having moments of genuine weakness.]

8. There is, therefore, a need to question the moe that one experiences. It is not an emotion, or structure of emotions, which must be rejected - but neither is it a consequence-free emotion which can be unthinkingly enjoyed. The same might be said of most (but definitely not all) of the emotions which are provoked in us by anime characters. Do not cease, gentle readers, from your mental fight, and do not let your critical sword sleep in your hand (stop laughing, you at the back).

[The 'fun'? That was the fun I had writing it, not the fun you had reading it - a situation perhaps analogous to a recent experiment in mass manipulation executed by a group of cunning minions. And be thankful you didn't get an entry explaining how the resemblance of School Days: Magical Heart Kokoro-chan's nipple control-wire assemblages (image shamelessly 'borrowed' from jpmeyer) to dairy equipment is a comment on the milking of a successful franchise. Because I very nearly wrote one.]

Blogiography

• OGT identifies a new trend in more characterful moe.
• Apparently moe has come to define a genre for some people. Koneko-chan considers this through the lens of ANNtv’s Kanon V1 review.
• [NSFW; also vitriol.] Many moons ago, Akamatsu attempted to describe moe. Detecting obfuscation at work, Reverend Ragu saw fit to launch an all-out assault on the idea that moe can ever be disconnected from sex. Not for the faint-of-heart.