Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.

On My Blog Menu:

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Capitalist Lion
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Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
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Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue

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12/24/2001 - 12/30/2001
12/17/2001 - 12/23/2001

Thursday, January 9, 2003
19:47 - Bring On the Cultural Studies	(top)
It was only a matter of time after the hippie movements of the 60s became the subject of master's theses by people who were too young to have lived through it. Now, it seems, it's become the "in thing" in journalism and academia to latch onto any old phenomenon/fad/movement and elevate it to the level of Transcendentalism or Socratic philosophy. I refer to the report which was on NPR this afternoon, on All Things Considered, on otaku-- anime fans. It centered on the manga-zine Shonen Jump, which is launching a US-produced, fully English-language edition (though it still reads right-to-left, so as not to offend the purists) to sell to a new generation of anime consumers in the West. Now, this is fine: I have no problem with anime as a genre or an art form. I myself don't like the art style-- it's a point against any given anime show or movie, not a point in favor of it, and I'll watch a good piece of anime in spite of the art style, as long as the story is good. The anime I enjoy most is the stuff that doesn't look so much like anime: Miyazaki films, Cowboy Bebop, that sort of thing. But what I don't understand is this: Why is it that what so many people absolutely adore about anime, even among the supposedly intellectual youth who make up the biggest lump in the money-to-be-made distribution curve, is so pathetically insipid? Maybe the report was focusing on the wrong part of the anime convention it covered; it wouldn't be the first time. But in quoting its financial figures for the mainstreaming of anime, it cited the fact that what we now had was a generation who had spent their pre-teen years watching Pok�mon... and now they'd outgrown it, and now were watching Yu-Gi-Oh, which obviously is a much more grown-up show. Um. 'Scuse me? Do these journalists realize what Yu-Gi-Oh is? It's a show about a bunch of kids who have duels using magical playing cards. Playing cards. As in, cards that you can go and buy and collect. Each episode (though I'll admit only to having seen a brief glimpse) is just another set of duels, with canned power-up sequences and florid taunting language and statistics that make it clear which cards to buy-- no story any deeper than that. No grander vision. It's an even more blatant piece of manufactured merchandising pap than Pok�mon was, and that's saying something. Coupled with the report's characterization of the anime convention being filled with 15-to-17-year-olds blowing their life savings on Yu-Gi-Oh stuff, this thing even makes the "Chinpokomon" episode of South Park look like yesterday's news. And naturally, the whole otaku movement was being presented as the Next Big Thing: in an onrush of sociopolital irony, today's disaffected youth are reaching out for a non-American art form to call their own, a culture that's patently alien to adopt instead of the bland and boring one they were spoon-fed before the Saturday-morning saviors came to call. Now they have a generational identity! They have a language all their own! They have a culture that's defined as a wilful mixture of influences, and isn't that remarkable? Isn't that meaningful? Isn't this somehow a microcosm of our whole lack-of-direction-as-a-people-in-the-world-community thing? Can we write our master theses on this yet? Now, far be it from me to rag on the devotees of some obsession that I don't understand, nor on their self-fulfilling behavior at conventions full of like-minded souls. Believe me, I understand it all too well. But I'm just at a loss to understand one little thing: When was it that I became so old and out of touch with the minds of my fellow human beings that I can't even begin to comprehend the attraction of something utterly vapid that makes slobbering acolytes out of otherwise fully functional humans of at least average intelligence? When did Yu-Gi-Oh become a surrogate for C.S. Lewis or Walden?