THAT Animeblog

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Hynavian did a great post of this from a girl’s perspective, so I thought I’d complement her post with one from a guy’s perspective.

Same rating criteria too.

Fashion Sense – My personal grading system for the style; whether its original, stylish or just plain weird. [A scale from 1 to 10 where the higher the better]

Styling – The level of difficulty in achieving that intended hairstyle in real life. [Insanely

Difficult/ Difficult/ Normal/ Easy/ Piece of Cake]

Mobility – The level of difficulty in maintaining that hairstyle when moving around in real life. [Insanely Difficult/ Difficult/ Normal/ Easy/ Piece of Cake]

Upkeep – The level of difficulty in keeping the hairstyle the way it in real life. (e.g. whether water ruins the style, the amount of gel, how long the style lasts, upkeep, etc) [Insanely Difficult/ Difficult/ Normal/ Easy/ Piece of cake]

Comments – My personal inputs.

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Like a jigsaw puzzle, the structure of a cast can conform to rigid patterns. In the first post this was made evident with the brains/brawns dynamic shown by Ichigo-Uryuu and Mugen-Jin. In other action shows, however, the brains/brawn duo isn’t a necessity, and a binary will materialize in a different form, like Goku-Vegeta, who make up an interesting social class binary that is constantly emphasized by a sort of racial liberalism/conservatism (Goku saves humanity while ignoring his Saiyan ancestry while Vegeta always fights for Saiyan pride). In this installment, I’m basically going to look briefly at instances where the drive of a show is produced by the conflict of two lead characters. These two leads constitute the “lead paradigm” which must usually fit a binary, hence lead paradigm binary.

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Now, to clarify a bit, the first post put forth a model of signification, which in itself is fairly problematic (the details thereof I’ll address below):

visual appearance [signifies] personality [signifies] ideology

The second post briefly investigated how visual appearance itself is a structure of signs, so thoughts on the more “micro” elements of the character were developed. In this third post, I hope to look into the act of signification (to fix this model), the processes which glue these seemingly inert, semiotic paradigms together, using glasses, once again, as the main investigative clue.

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There’s one problem here with these kind of thematic studies; it’s how we methodology go about aniblogging, go about analyzing. Since some wordpress dashboards can be so fickle, posting embedded youtube videos proves to be quite the hassle at times, and so we’re forced to resort to representing one medium – video – for a single image. This kind of paradigm shift really limits the breadth of information just a few seconds of video has over a single image. Of course you’re allowed to call me lazy, but if I were to post 25 videos in a visual study instead of 25 images, would you really watch every single one? I obviously wouldn’t want to extract 25 clips; that would be a pain in the ass. It’s an incredibly difficult effort to signify that breadth of time with an inert frame, there’s not enough room for meaning in that 3^rd dimension, it needs the fourth.

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The main distinction to establish here is the difference between aesthetic personality and conscience. Aesthetic personality is shallow. It’s the surface of the person’s outer quality, how they act, not necessarily why; it’s about the “clothing” of their mind, how their actions look. Conscience is deeper. It’s the ideological motivation for a person’s action – hence why they act. While in actuality there is no (or at least shouldn’t be) causal link between the how and why of actions, anime – especially in the past few years – makes use of repeatedly played-out stereotypes and archetypes which have anchored onto the corpus of representation established by the rearticulation and recycling of character frameworks to signify a generalized type of person.

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It’s no secret; I love anime. I mean, if I didn’t love it, I damn sure wouldn’t be here, right? But sometimes I need to take a step back and ask myself why I love it so much. More specifically, why is anime so frigging addictive? What is it about Japanese animation, compared to Chinese animation, or United States animation, or German animation, that compels legions of fans to publicly masquerade as their favorite characters, outfitted in painstakingly constructed cosplay (with accessories to match!) How is it that anime has become a worldwide obsession, spanning countless social demographics and national boundaries? Isn’t ‘anime’ simply the Japanese loanword for ‘animation’?

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