I Am Completely Serious

* This post about Errol Morris's latest documentary is being linked around a lot. It's about a woman who abducted and raped a man in the 70s, but was only sentenced to one year (which she never served), apparently because the UK criminal justice system at the time wasn't quite sure it believed men could be raped.

This sounds pretty awful, so why's the post say this: The subject matter here seems right in the wheelhouse with other Morris profiles of the delightfully weird in films like Gates Of Heaven and Fast, Cheap & Out Of Control.

I mean, "delightful" is not the word I'd use. I think I'd probably use some other word.

* Since I've been encouraging people to watch Baccano!, I should probably warn for two items of mild racefail in there.

1) There's a Mammy stereotype whose role is basically to fret about the fate of the rich white girl.

2) One of the two newspaper reporter guys, Elean, is a black guy who shows similar tendencies to fawn over the same girl, and also gets humiliated a lot - not any more than the other reporter guy, but given that there are only two black characters in the show, it comes off as a little iffy.

* I tried making pinto-bean-and-salt-pork curry, but it didn't really work as well as the pinto-bean-and-salt-pork miso soup.

(Pinto-bean-and-salt-pork miso soup was a great idea, by the way. Thank me. Unless you're watching your sodium intake. Then you must curse me, for I come bearing your destruction.)

The post includes a variation upon the phrase "I don't care whether they're black, white, or purple." Always a good sign!

Unrelatedly, it's alarming when you put down some thing you're reading, go back to it a couple days later, and upon googling discover that one of the people discussed therein has died in the interim. Specifically, Shio Sato died on the 4th, and I was reading this interview with Keiko Takemiya.

I was writing a response to a comment of chomiji's and it got out of hand, so it's getting its own post.

At the core, 95% of shounen manga are fantasies of power. Most of them specifically work with the idea of an "inner strength" that's greater than outer strength - because, you know, most people reading manga are not big huge muscle-dudes. So the idea that this person of apparently ordinary physical size and strength could become the hero that everyone looks up to and fears, because of some internal quality, is very appealing.

Manga depending on this idea - and this occurs in shoujo as well as shounen - usually have some visible symbol of "inner strength." Bankai and transformations are Bleach's. Displaying and using your inner strength is simultaneously an act of aggression and a form of communication - if two shounen manga characters beat each other down with all their inner strength, they nearly always at least respect each other at the end. Sometimes they become BFFs! (See: like, half of Ichigo's current relationships with guys. He has beat most of these people up!)

In the most compelling shounen manga battles, when you agree to "show someone your true power," what you're doing is offering them a kind of intimacy, because you're showing them your soul.* And like in real life, making that offer requires a certain surety of oneself. This is why, when a Bleach character has summoned his Bankai for the first time in the past, he's always looked cocky or solemn or angry. He may also look tired or like he's under strain (Ikkaku did, and I think Hitsugaya?), but he never looks scared, because it goes against genre logic for a person who's not sure of himself to voluntarily put his soul out in front of someone else. It would be self-destructive - hence the trope where someone who's panicking or deluding themselves about something tries to use their secret technique, and either can't summon it, or loses control and kills themself with it.

Now, in later uses of the "true power," it's okay to portray it merely as a weapon, because the reader's already familiar with the character's soul, even if the opponent isn't. If every opponent reacts the same way to the revelation of the hero's power, the readers will start rolling their eyes. This is part of why characters like Ichigo just keep powering up throughout a shounen series. It's not purely escalation of the danger level; it's also a reassurance to the readers that the characters still have depths yet to be explored, and that they're growing and changing.**

(Some of the most successful manga of this kind are, I think, the coming-of-age stories, where these transformations mark a character's movement towards self-knowledge and responsibility. In my experience, shoujo manga does this better than shounen - Sugar Sugar Rune and Divine Melody are my favorite examples. Though Divine Melody still has time to kill everybody and break my heart.)

So, what all this was leading up to was: Soi Fong's first use of her Bankai, which is also the first time a female character has used Bankai in combat. ( Spoilers up to the end of Soi Fong's fight with Barragan (I don't remember the chapter number). )

This term describes a situation in which a female character possesses some sort of power comparable to or greater than that of male characters, and her possession of this power is shown to be toxic to her and to those around her.

The power in question might be psychic or magical powers, martial arts skill, political power, wealth, business acumen, skill at sports, cooking skill, board game skill - or any other sphere which a sufficiently motivated manga artist might attempt to transform into a competition. "Power" can also apply to simple self-confidence, particularly in conjunction with a lack of romantic interest in or rudeness to a male character intended to be sympathetic.

The toxicity of power commonly manifests itself as a lack of self-control or self-knowledge on the part of the female character. In its classical form, lack of self-control leads to Crazy-Eyed Antics. This is when a woman who had appeared emotionally stable earlier in the narrative - at a time when she either did not possess her power, was not exercising it, or was not exercising it to its fullest extent - opens her eyes wide and develops dark circles under them as an accompaniment to destructive behavior. When engaged in Crazy-Eyed Antics, a character is as much as or more of a danger to herself and her loved ones than she is to her enemies. Beloved childhood stuffed animals should be stored in a safe place during episodes of Crazy-Eyes.

( Common triggers for Crazy-Eyed Antics include: )

More examples requested! (Also, is there a TV Tropes entry with a similar premise to this?)

Edit: Please note that there are major spoilers for the end of Avatar: The Last Airbender at the bottom of the Dreamwidth comments!

For some reason I thought this was the last volume… I guess I’m happy it’s not?

But I’m disappointed by the sense I’m getting that, in the long run, no shounen manga dares stand in the way of the almighty Shounen Jump formula. For one thing, the formula seems to require that the female characters either stop getting fight scenes, or make them the froofy passive-looking metaphysical kind.

For another, there seems to have been an executive decision that Soul Eater lose his hat, acquire a hairstyle somewhere between present-day-Ichigo’s* and Edward Elric’s, and completely change the shape of his face and eyes. Because it’s not okay to have a protagonist who doesn’t look exactly like every other protagonist?

Also, Black ★ Star has suddenly become the number-one angstiest member of the cast? The guy who pronounces a little star in the middle of his name to emphasize how special he is? The one who was introduced as a parody of Naruto!? Yet he is now More Special Sasuke! It’s like the manga’s IQ is progressively getting lower.

If Patty ends up getting angst, too, I’m just going to retreat into writing fanfic where everyone’s an adorable moron again.

-

* Hey, remember the good old days when Kubo Tite actually had a recognizable personal style? Whatever happened to those days? THE SHOUNEN JUMP FORMULA HAPPENED TO THOSE DAYS. If Mizuno Junko ran a manga in Shounen Jump, within twelve months it would become a story about a fourteen-year-old boy overcoming his rocky relationship with his dad through montage-intensive training to become the best evil naked zombie drug dealer gigolo nurse.

** I just checked and Soul Eater actually runs in Shounen Gangan, not Shounen Jump. Close enough!

(Crossposted to SarahPin.com, Dreamwidth, and LiveJournal. You can leave comments at whichever.)

Hey! Nobuyuki Anzai! Can we please go like two chapters in a row without your problems with women making themselves visible! Because that would be nice! Thank you!

Also, scanlators. Listen. You know I love you, but for the love of Christ. This guy’s name is Hamelin. You are making me very crazy.

(Crossposted to SarahPin.com, Dreamwidth, and LiveJournal. You can leave comments at whichever.)

(Originally published at SarahPin.com. You can comment here or there.)

Accomplishments this weekend:

* I purchased, laboriously hauled home, and assembled a small wooden shelving unit for the kitchen. This all makes me feel very macho. I even managed to avoid putting any the sections in with the unfinished side wrong-way-around.

* I rearranged the kitchen to accommodate said shelving unit. I have put a power strip in there and plugged both the microwave and rice cooker into it; I will hope that this doesn’t overstrain it.

* Got a case and inkpad for my hanko, so I can actually use it if necessary. (It hasn’t been necessary so far.)

* Until today I’d only been able to find one ATM that would take my American debit card, and it was twenty-five minutes walk away and in the middle of nowhere. But now I’ve I located another - it’s also twenty-five minutes away, but it’s in a big shopping center, so I can combine errands. And I’m 99% sure I’ve found a third, five minutes away FTW! I have enough cash that I haven’t tested that one yet, but it’s a Japan Post Yucho machine, and those all seem happy with American cards.

* Deposited some money in my Japanese account so I can get a cell phone.

* Failed to actually get a cell phone, because the place I went to didn’t have any English-language pamphlets. Japanese cell phone plans are intentionally complicated - they’re mostly incomprehensible even in translation. I’m not giving these people any money without English documentation. Will try at another store before work tomorrow. (I know the damn pamphlets exist because I saw them in Tokyo and Okazaki.)

* Discovered a good reason, aside from fashion, to have a matching hat-scarf set: The scarf’s presence around your neck makes it very easy to prove to the Lost and Found people that you are also the owner of the hat.

I own four hats, and have now lost and recovered three of them once apiece. I wonder if, when I finally go through this process with the fourth, I will at last be safe, or if the cycle will simply begin anew.

* Finally remembered to buy headphones.

* Examined prices for curtains and toaster ovens, items I intend to purchase when I finally get my friggin’ paycheck.

* Totally failed to pick up my resident alien card. I have to do that sometime between today and a week from today or a Bureaucratic Nightmare Possibly Ending In Deportation will ensue, and I had made an entry on Google Calenders to remind me to do it today, and Google Calenders didn’t send me the damn reminder email argh. It would have been a lot cheaper to do it today because I would’ve had time to take the damn bus, but if I have to get it done before work I’ll probably have to take a cab.

* Totally failed to do any lesson planning yet. But I have Ideas. I think I’m going to do a holiday thing and teach the older kids about Lupercalia.

* Levelled my Tauren Druid up to 125 in Enchanting. (Why can the horrible Native American stereotypes become moronic Celtic stereotypes…?) This isn’t actually an accomplishment.