Whoof, well, May seems to have passed me with the force of a small aeroplane engine, leaving me sitting on the proverbial runway in its wake with my hair pointing in all directions and smelling of jet fuel. Semester is over and I’ve handed in my finalised, beautiful, in-depth project proposal, and now I have free reign to spend the rest of the year researching at a slower pace and writing my novella. Huzzah!
Somewhere in there, because I can always wriggle in time for this sort of thing (and because I needed a break–I spent the ANZAC Day public holiday tucked up in bed with my laptop and multiple cups of tea), over this month and last month I’ve been trying out a Crunchyroll subscription, which is why there are two–two!–whole, shiny new anime being written about in this roundup.
Oh, and I have a Twitter now! Though it will mostly be used to link to the blog you’re already reading, hey, give it a look.
On the bloggo this month:
ToraDora! Wrap Up Post (oh my gosh guys, we did it!)
Sense8ional: A Sense8 Review (re-posted from Popgates after the death of Popgates’ pop culture section. Now to sit down and watch season two…)
A Magical Girl Education: Sailor Moon (in which I finally watch the iconic magical girl anime in its original uncut form and am full of hearts and rainbows but also a little bit confusion)
It’s a Metaphor, Max: The Storm (in which the other big supernatural plot device in Life is Strange makes no sense either, so I attempt to suggest that it’s also symbolic)
On Lady Geek Girl and Friends:
Web Crush Wednesdays: Trash & Treasures (in which the podcast recommendations continue! This one’s about trashy movies and queer stuff)
The Bittersweet Taste of Orange (in which I peer at a high school drama about suicide and time travel and try to work out of I liked it or not)
Magical Mondays: Flying Witch and Magical Realism (Flying Witch is what I spent that public holiday bingeing. Oh, it is a delight. But also worth writing genre meta about!)
What Are Ya Readin’?
Well, this first recommendation is actually something to watch. Pop Culture Detective’s video essay on the ‘Born Sexy Yesterday’ trope looks into the recurring pattern in sci-fi and fantasy of a woman-shaped robot, alien, or superbeing of some other description, who is naïve and childlike, but while also being a badass and… sexually available to the (presumably male) protagonist. One of those things is skeezier than the other, but the whole thing is an awful mess, and the video makes for a fascinating discussion and exploration of the trope and why and how it’s iffy, and why you should you probably never smooch the robot.
Now, here’s some food for thought: Does Marvel Have a Second Movie Problem? Well, yeah, it does, this article argues. The second instalment in most of the franchises—see Thor: The Dark World, The Avengers: Age of Ultron, and most recently Guardians of the Galaxy Vol.2, which the writer uses as their jumping off point—are notoriously mediocre and feel… weirdly like filler, a thing that technically shouldn’t be possible in the movie medium. Except for Captain America: The Winter Soldier, because in all my reading and various conversations about superhero movies, literally no one has ever tried to tell me that Captain America: The Winter Soldier is a bad movie.
Forget zombies, says The AV Club: the “hot new villain” in games about young adults is the world itself, a supernatural manifestation of the crushing pressure and sense of hopelessness young people are forced to deal with in today’s existence. While I’m not sure how I feel about “hot new” anything being used unironically, this article gets to the heart of what makes darlings of mine like Oxenfree, Life is Strange, Night in the Woods (a new favourite) and, yes, even Until Dawn, so resonant and powerful in the way they shape their conflicts.
Want to learn about the long, strange and detailed history of queer representation in anime and manga? This is a transcript of a convention panel/presentation on exactly that. It’s long, but fascinating, super in-depth, and full of neat things to know about iffy (or not so iffy, sometimes) tropes and their historical origins. I never realised “bara” as a nickname for buff dudes came from the Japanese word for “rose” and its association with a gay magazine, but now I’m so educated…
Oh, guys, I want to like Sakura Quest so much—the initial reviews were so good! It’s about a twenty-something on a quest for meaning in the workforce! But alas, this show just seems to be smacking me on the head with a rolled-up newspaper trying to get its message across, which is leaving me with nothing but a headache. Atelier Emily’s post about sincerity in the show articulates this problem very well.
I KNOW. OKAY. YOU HAVE NO CONCEPT OF ‘SHOW DON’T TELL’
To loop back to the theme of queer anime/manga, translator Jenny McKeon wrote a post for AniFem this month recommending some safe and not-gross yuri manga, also briefly exploring the history of the genre and the various problems it can run into. Also rife with problems (but still worth mining for hidden gems, as this next post tells me) is the “boy’s love” genre, which this writer side-eyes for its strange reluctance to actually acknowledge its characters in a queer context and its bad habit of treating its women characters like crap, despite supposedly being a safe haven for women to explore sexuality…
Speaking of The Gaze and its affect on characters within a story, this post discusses comics and superhero movies and how they’re tangled up in the issue of what women want to see versus what men assume (and want) women want to see. Also on the theme of silly writing in the genre, here is an article imploring writers to let superheroes be emotionally vulnerable sometimes, damn it.
And finally, here is a paper exploring representations of fanfiction in the works of Rainbow Rowell (including my beautiful problematic fave Fangirl) and arguing that, hey, maybe fanfic is a good thing, emotionally and creatively (I was lucky enough to sit in and see this presented when I volunteered at a conference last year, so it’s very neat to finally have a link to share it with the world).
What Are Ya Listenin’ To?
I haven’t had the chance to engage with much of the ol’ internet radio this month, but I have to throw out a recommendation for Our Fake History. Did Anastasia really survive the execution of the Russian imperial family, or was her miraculous reappearance a case of sensational mistaken identity? Did Nero fiddle as Rome burned, or was that just a rumour fabricated by contemporary Christians and later rulers who wanted him to look bad? Was there a real Trojan War, or did poets just make that shit up because everyone loves a good battle drama? These are the questions this passionate history teacher asks and discusses, attempting to debunk myths, historical hearsay, and crazy-ass theories to get to the truth, while also acknowledging that even if something didn’t happen, per se, sometimes the fake story is still too good not to tell.
I’m going to cause trouble and recommend the giant three-parter on whether or not Atlantis really existed, because that was an absolute whirlwind of fascinating bizarreness, including mythology, underwater volcanoes, Nazi science, arguments about what Plato meant, and straight-up conspiracy theories. I was downright doing this by the end of it:
Or, if you don’t want to dive into something that long and in-depth, try the episode on the Minotaur labyrinth. The interplay of myth and history is a mesmerising topic, and this guy is such a natural storyteller that I was engrossed for hours.
In other exciting news, AniFem’s podcast is now on iTunes and Stitcher and stuff, which seems to mean it now appears in most podcast apps! It’s early days yet, but they’ve got end-of-season discussion, some staff Q&A, a retrospective on Revolutionary Girl Utena and some neat stuff on Ghost in the Shell.
Oh hey, and Eurovision happened! I would like to congratulate the soulful fellow who won for Portugal, but also thank Moldova for injecting some genuine pizzazz into my life with this hot nonsense:
Thank you as always for reading my little slice of the internet, and take care out there.
The Afictionado 