Too Fond of Books

Book-wise, I've been meaning to blog about this one for quite a while:


Darkly Dreaming Dexter: yebisu9 and I enjoyed watching the first season of the TV series very much, and one of the guys at book group assured me that the second volume of the series was the best, writing-wise. And he was right. Lindsey's prose slides by like scenery on a car trip, curving around meaning ever so slightly, so the reader is never entirely sure about any character's motive in the story, or even who to root for. Being on Dexter's side is a disquieting sensation. At Comic Con this summer, I got a "I love Dexter!" badge, but after reading this book, I want one that says, "I am mostly on Dexter's side, but find his methods to be immoral by my standards, and therefore hard to reconcile." Each time I identified with him (especially during the scenes where he talks about "playing the role of a sports fan"), I had to take a mental step backwards and shake the feeling off, reminding myself that he's a sociopathic serial killer who has no qualms about dismembering his victims.

And yet... I could not stop reading.

And I found it highly ironic and funny that he was snared into proposing to his girlfriend in the most sit-com-esque method ever.


And on the other hand of the spectrum, we have the anime Lucky Star. Lucky Star's premise is that an ordinary high school girl becomes friends with an otaku girl, and comedy ensues. And some comedy does ensue, although a lot of it is on an almost DaDa level: the girls spend the entire first episode discussing methods of eating various food items (chocolate-filled coronets, for example, should be eaten so that chocolate cream filling doesn't fall out from the end that's not being eaten; it really sucks when you want to buy a certain kind of ramen, but someone else before ordered extra noodles, and now there's none for you, so you're forced to eat curry, which you don't like because it stains your school uniform, etc. etc.). In fact, when describing the series to aratana_miyuki, I said that it was like Seinfeld, in that it was a show about nothing, except that instead of the characters being neurotic New Yorkers, the characters are adorable Japanese high school girls who look completely unlike their respective ages and talk about manga, video games, and cell phones, instead of puffy shirts, really big salads, and the Soup Nazi.

However, I am somewhat embarrassed to say that I felt like I missed half of the jokes because I'm not enough of an otaku. And, thinking of the paragraph I am about to write about below this one, I am somewhat proud of not being one. Lucky Star is chockablock with references to previous animes, whether it's outright names (bleeped for copyright?!), poses, or animation conventions. (One of the best running gags is that Izumi Konata, the main character, shops at Animate (the largest chain of manga/anime and related goods), which is staffed by the commercial characters who advertise the store. Whenever she shops there, the animation quality switches to "Gundam"--very shounen and dramatic--style as the manager and shop keepers try to place goods where she will buy them and fail every time.) But a lot of the other jokes, about older animes and Gundam, in its infinite variations, completely escaped me. I did pick up on all the jokes about Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuutsu. The same group of people did LS, and the references and jokes pitch back and forth between the two series like two pubs right next door to each other with the same customer base. Konata works at a "Haruhi cafe", where she dresses up as Haruhi, bullies customers, and does the Hare Hare Yukai dance for their entertainment; Haruhi and Kyon's voice actors are characters on the show, in a segment called "Lucky Channel" (where they do nothing but bicker with one another.) One of the best jokes was Konata buying a dancho armband for Kagami (her friend), who has no idea what the joke is, but is bossy like Haruhi, and doesn't get the joke.

The characters themselves were pretty stereotypical, and as usual, I found the side characters more interesting than the main ones. I do want to give kudos to the voice actress who voiced the American exchange student, Patty, for performing her as fluent in Japanese, instead of the exaggerated fake "half fluent" that many voice actors employ for foreign characters.

But there was some recurring creepiness that I couldn't dismiss. And this had to do with the main character herself, and with her father, who was a minor but important character, particularly as the series went on. Izumi Konata is cute, a regular student, short, with long, blue anime styled hair. She loves manga, anime, and video games. And she puts up with all sorts of weirdness from her father.

Izumi-san, Konata's Dad, appeared early on in the series, getting hauled away from the sports festival, a camera in hand, escorted by two police officers. Later on, he waxes eloquent about how wonderful it is that he has three beautiful high school girls in his house--Konata and two of her friends. In another episode, he and Konata are watching the news, and on hearing the announcer's story of a pedophile who'd kidnapped and imprisoned a little girl, Konata's father says he understands the urge. Each time, this sort of thing was obviously supposed to be played for laughs, and Konata always dismisses him, saying things like, "Don't talk about weird things." But... well... this is creepy and strange. And if my Dad, or my brother, or my male friend, talked about anything like that, or got escorted off campus for taking panty shots, I wouldn't just dismiss it. I don't know what I would do, but I certainly wouldn't laugh.

And this brings me to my major problem with the series: Konata is a male otaku's dream. She plays boy's games (her mother died when she was young, and she says that her dad raised her alone), even ero-games, which strikes me as particularly odd. She is cute, genki, and driven in her hobby and obsessions. (Her strategizing about how to get ahold of [X] rare good or collectible drove much of the comedy between her and her friends, who seem bemused by her hobby.) But, most importantly, she turns a blind eye to the actions of the men in her life. It's their hobby, she seems to rationalize, can't do anything about it. What this says about the state of masculine identity in Japan (and the state of feminine identity, for that matter) is another essay for another time. I couldn't shake the weird feeling and as a result, didn't really enjoy the series overall. It certainly had its good moments, and some of the jokes were funny, but the subtext was just too much weird. The whole series actually made me a little ashamed to have once called myself an otaku.

I also couldn't help mentally comparing this series, which celebrated otaku culture, to the American series and/or movies which have attempted to do the same thing with fan culture here, and the major difference seems to be that whenever Western fandom looks inward, an element of self-loathing surfaces. (The highly reviled "Trekkies" comes to mind.) Nerds are nerds, and they're outcasts because they're weird and NOT LIKE OTHER PEOPLE. (Although "Chuck" and movies like "Knocked Up" seem to be on the verge of "cooling up" the male nerd; the female nerd remains largely stereotypically ugly and uncool.) Japanese series, OTOH, either ignore the otaku culture altogether or celebrate it, unabashedly (Genshiken, although it has its critical moments, is fairly positive about otakus being just another group of people who want to fit in with each other.) It's a weird trend, to watch two groups turn inward on themselves and come up with wildly differing results.