Geek with Family

Knights Scream, Princesses Cry

(Major Spoilers Ahead!)

Anime, with all its progressive ventures into the future of humanity, cannot get past the stereotypical gender roles required to add up to a romantic adventure’s sum. The audience must feel the pain and yearning that the lead female romantic interest feels as she waits and prays for her man who is off in the war. The man of war or knight expects his woman or princess to be home praying for his safe return. The princess is expected to breakdown under the overwhelming will of the knight. She can only provide support through prudent advice and the warm memories she has left her knight to think of in his darkest times. The woman must maintain a good and virtuous face for the common people so as not to alarm them to the knight’s hardships. It is an accepted notion that the knight will feel angry and get caught up in the overblown tempers of war screaming his way to victory while the princess will tend to domestic issues and go to bed crying every night when she receives bad news from the front lines.

At least that is what conventional epic romances strive for.

Continue reading Vision of Escaflowne - Anime TV Series Analysis - Gender Roles

Popularity: 12% [?]

Your butt is falling asleep from the hard plastic chair you have to sit in while you try to listen to the finer details of today’s lesson on acute triangles. Eyelids droop around the classroom due to the drudgery of math. The sleepiness is contagious, and you soon find yourself drifting off. You dream about your high school crush eating lunch with you in the cafeteria - corn dogs and crinkle fries. In the middle of lunch and when you’re about to kiss your crush with a mouth full of dog on a stick you wake yourself up with your own snoring. The math class is still there, with its dry erase board, outdated computer terminal, bespeckled instructor and bored class. Somehow, you are surprised that you did not wake up into an anime dimension fantasy complete with familiar yet fantastic princesses, dragon to slay with your giant mecha suit of armor and a world to save with your newly awakened superpowers.Anime characters may act surprised when they are magically transported to some shadow dimension, but we know that they have to expect it the whole time because it has happened so many times to fellow classmates and peers. If I was an anime private school student that had a tendency to drift off into sleep or faint away at the slightest over expenditure of energy I would definitely want a dimension jumping friend.

Continue reading Nodding Off in School - How to Magically Transport Yourself to Another Dimension

Popularity: 8% [?]

Last week’s Seinfeld presented the self-referential concept of leaving on a high note. The joke centered around George sharing one good sarcastic comment at a meeting and then extinguishing its good humor with a descent into tastelessness. Jerry suggests he go out on a high note, like the great showmen of years past. This plan succeeds to a point. It is an idea that more franchises in the entertainment industry should take to heart. It happens all too often that a once grandly marketable entertainment giant gets overexposed and watered down to the point of self-destruction.

Continue reading Strangling the Life Out of Your Obsessions - One Encore Too Many

Popularity: 6% [?]

(Major Spoilers Ahead!)

My first exposure to Mamoru Oshii’s movies was over my shoulder. While working at Golden Age Collectibles in Seattle, WA, the staff and I would preview selections from our library of anime imports on a TV behind the register. These weren’t translated at all, just straight Japanese so we would turn the sound down in favor of the older staff’s lame CD selections, like Annie Lennox. Because I was supposed to be working and not watching TV the whole movie of Patlabor 1: Mobile Police was just like the opening credits–fading in and out of black, with murky cut scenes in between. With these short, random glances, I took Patlabor to be some military mecha bore-fest full of foreign talking heads. I was almost right, this film didn’t exactly fit into my anime-action ideal at the time, which involved teenage biker gangs with telekinetic powers (Akira, if you can’t guess).

Continue reading Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell, Patlabor 1 and 2 - The Coup Trilogy - Anime Analysis

Popularity: 12% [?]

I have always sucked at video games. In fact, I have never beat one. On average I am extremely lucky to get to the second level of the game on the easy setting. FMV special ending cinemas are not a treat I’m destined to see any time in the near future.

Because of my fear of closure and death I always give up on the game in the middle of the very last level. Falling for all the traps in the last castle of Legend of Zelda, I give up. Unable to beat the queen-alienesque uber-boss in Phantasy Star, I give up. After 40+ hours of wasted Saturdays roleplaying my way through Final Fantasy III (VI), I give up on the last maze, not even coming close to teleporting to the boss. I can’t win, my fear overrides my desire or hope for a sense of accomplishment.

Continue reading I Beat a Video Game! - I Just Wasted 20 Hours of my Life!

Popularity: 5% [?]

The concave and convex flowing lines of armor plating, skintight leggings, and sleeves into huge puffy boots and heavy gauntlets dazzle my eyes and give me odd feelings all over my body. Don’t get me wrong, I’m no hentai (pervert). But, darnit, anime is sexy. Continue reading Sexy Mecha - My Anime Moonboot and Shoulderpad Fetish

Popularity: 6% [?]

More than a year ago, I was on a corporate retreat, and after a ferry ride around Lake Geneva a coworker’s wife asked why her husband and I liked anime so much, what made it a great form of entertainment. I stumbled through my answer, randomly mumbling about mecha, character designs and story lines. She wasn’t convinced. Anime can be everything and anything. But its strengths reside in the common mind of the adolescent male. The animator can sometimes also be the fan-based audience, and he knows what he wants. What is fun to create is even more fun to consume. Giant robots, nubile girls, and the fantasy worlds of anime are a great escape from reality. "I am the pilot of that robot, I am that princess’ boyfriend, I am the savior of that world." Any otaku waits through his day job and the drudgery of the real world to go home and be distracted by his favorite anime. The more tangents followed from real life the better– thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours spent on video games, video tapes, fact-finding (of fiction) on the internet, toys, models, and film-books to admit the least. It doesn’t resemble a healthy life, but that’s not what we’re asking. We want something new and cool and something alien to suprise us into bliss. It would not be feasible to hold an attraction to anime because of any superiority to western cartoons. This is a misconception held by many lesser fans. Technically, many anime series are little more than slide shows that showcase underwhelming character designs that are meant to distract you from the thin storyline. So the next time you’re sitting on the couch salivating over some new release, take inventory of those around you. Is she reading a magazine? You might want to reassess your dazzled attraction to the smoke and mirrors of anime. I still haven’t provided a stable answer for the attraction and/or obsession. I don’t know if it is something that can be rationalized. The irrational explanation is a sad hanging-on to what made a geek happy when he was twelve. This seductive immaturity can ruin many attempts at socializing, but provides an empty satisfaction only known to the otaku.

Popularity: 7% [?]

1987. I was a freshman in highschool, and my best friend’s best friend had connections. Not normal highschool connections, like fake IDs or syblings who could drive, but connections to the east. This friend of a friend’s father knew another businessman that traveled to Japan all the time. This man would bring back cool stuff for his kids, like laserdiscs. Akira has its moments. None too spectacular on a recording of the import disc played back in a 2-head VCR at SLP, it had tracking problems to say the least. Of course when you’re 15 you don’t really care about tape quality, we weren’t AV geeks yet. We watched the tape in his parents carpeted basement on a small crank-dial TV. I remember not understanding much of anything because it was in Japanese, and none of us could figure out the ending. We just ate up all the ultra-violence and mecha. Afterwards my friends played keep-away from me with a Nerf (Nerf or Nothing) football in the basement hallway, and we knocked a relief painting off the wall, at dinner with his family we blamed it on his little sister, this only got us into more trouble. I wanted the Akira tape, to view again and again, but the friend once removed wouldn’t give it up. He eventually let me borrow it and I never gave it back.

Continue reading I Experience Akira for the First Time - Somebody’s Dad Went to Japan for this Laserdisc?

Popularity: 6% [?]

Pace has a hole in their 606 bus schedule on Saturdays that spans from 10:20 to 11:20. The CTA’s Blue Line drops me off at 10:25 and I have to wait. While I wait, all the CDs I have with me become useless and unlistenable. While I wait, three highschool sophomores ollie, grind and slide over and on the slickly painted wheelchair access bus depot islands. While I wait, two 13 year olds fake fight in the kiss n ride parking lot and the smaller one throws a punch too hard. While I wait, a smelly, grossly overweight man paces with his ornate walking stick and the jangle of the parade of buttons and pins adorning his acid washed jean jacket, tight over his shoulders, he’s going where I’m going.

Yoahan Plaza is a mall in the middle of Arlington Heights, IL that is made up of a Japanese grocery store, book store, video rental, stationary, tourist trinket trap, and food court. I guess Arlington Heights must have a large number of Japanese to accommodate this mall. My main interest, among many other otaku, is Asahiya Bookstore. It has a large anime book section and a whole wall of current manga. As a caucasion, it’s hard to keep a low profile in this place, sometimes I pretend not to go straight for the anime, and take a detour into the fashion magazines. I don’t belong to any anime clubs run out of the local colleges, so it seems odd and disturbing when I see a large (3 or more) group of people huddled around a new Tenchi film-book loudly discussing how rad it is. Then when they go to pay for the thing they can’t believe how expensive it is. Asahiya has its own inhouse monetary conversion system– ¥100 equals $1.40. This seems ridiculous with the current state of Japan’s economy where ¥100 equals $0.80 or less. Maybe they have to pay tariffs. So I smile to myself when the obnoxious college kids grow even louder and more uncomfortable at the checkout.

Continue reading I’m Just Another Obnoxious American - My Monthly Visit to Yoahan Plaza

Popularity: 4% [?]

The current debate over human cloning and genetic engineering is tame when compared to the Frankenstein-esque scenarios so common in speculative fiction. With today’s technology, human cloning is just another device for conceiving a child. It has nothing to do with mass-producing slaves for labor on off world colonies or pilots for an army of giant robots.

So what’s the big deal? People’s fear of this new technology could stem from the megalomaniac attitudes of the scientists supporting it. Richard G. Seede, the Chicago researcher that would enjoy cloning humans for barren couples in the next three months, made a statement that epitomizes the cautionary morals of Neon Genesis Evangelion and Blade Runner, “Human cloning brings us one step closer to God.” One step too close, many would argue. This extra step causes the creator to invent monsters that that can only turn on their masters.

Continue reading Neon Genesis Evangelion - Anime TV Series Analysis - Science’s Children

Popularity: 8% [?]