Dreadful_Wraith

Miura: You know how they said on [the TV show] Manga Yawa that I was bad at drawing? They’re absolutely right. Ever since high school, I’ve been trying all sorts of different things to combine being good at drawing reality with being good at drawing manga art. If I were doing a story like Fist of the North Star, I would be able to really concentrate entirely on just drawing well. The manga I want to create, however, has aspects to it that can be downright shojo mangaesque, and I wouldn’t be able to pull that off if I went all-out Fist of the North Star in terms of art. So I have to strike this balance between delicate drama and Fist of the North Star, and after much wrestling with this I finally ended up with my current art style, although I imagine that it will still be subject to change.

–Ah, so you try to give a certain delicacy to your art as well as the story. I actually have this personal theory that Berserk is really a shojo manga, but I take it then that it wouldn’t come as much of a surprise for you to hear that?

Miura: Makes sense to me. Shojo manga is all about expressing every feeling powerfully, and in that sense it’s not as contrived as manga for men. Men’s manga tends to come off as more calculated to sell well, whereas shojo manga are somehow just… fluffier. I realize that’s not a very descriptive word, but anyway, that might be something I have in common with shojo manga.

–You have fluffiness in common?

Miura: I guess what I mean is, like, in order to express emotions, logic comes second, whereas it’s usually the other way around.

https://mangabrog.wordpress.com/2015/12/14/berserk-artist-kentaro-miura-interview-i-actually-dont-think-i-could-let-such-a-long-grim-story-end-with-a-grim-ending/^___^

This applies to all piracy, but I'll just post it here since a thread on lemmy.ml's anime board made me think about it. Just some quick thoughts on a truism that people just repeat over and over until it's just assumed to be true. The initial sentiment that piracy is always a problem of access to commodities as opposed to other factors was initially made/said by Gabe Newell, who is literally the owner of a digital games service which makes its money almost solely from making other people's games as available as possible across the globe. He's also a capitalist whose shown no real positive conception of economics for the greater good, so it'd be nice if fellow leftists had some skepticism on what his motivations for this ideology might be.

I'm pro-piracy, so I'm not here saying not to pirate. What I think though is that this is mainly used as an easy deflection from what the real problem of the digital consumer economy is. Because capital seeks to constrict and control the market stuff like borders, copyright law/DRM, etc. which are enforced by the state will always exist under capitalism. Atomized capital finds it beneficial for each individual capitalist to try to squeeze as much money out of purchasers via upselling, DRM, region locking, copyright litigation, etc. rather than to pool their resources together internationally or whatever. And if the market is ever dominated internationally like that either via monopoly or cooperatively by the capitalists (a cartel, essentially) they still have the same motive to try to control consumers to make profits more dependable and attempt to extract more from them because of investors and the profit motive.

This means that the "service problem" will literally always exist as long as capitalism exists and capital will be forced to compete against piracy so long as they can't stop it. Which is good in the sense that consumers have a outlet to still get what they want without having to pay these companies if they don't want/need to (essentially re-cooping some of their lost surplus value form capitalists on a societal scale). But the problem of how do we get money to the people who make art is still there, even if capitalist control of digital art/software crumbles, piracy advocates just don't realize it yet. The capitalist mode of production doesn't mesh well with near-infinite reproduction, so they try to stifle it via the aforementioned ways. The means by which piracy even occurs is by computers and the internet which are both heavily subsidized by worker's tax dollars and the government, so people are already contributing to making art cheaper to distribute for these people. We should be encouraging people to look at the mode of production itself rather than the symptoms of it (again it's DRM, region locking, etc.) and socializing the production and funding of art.

"It's a service problem" also focuses almost entirely on consumption rather than production, which is a pattern you'll see with westerners/western leftists, so the question of #1 how to fund and facilitate production doesn't come up and #2 'where do workers get their buying power from and how much of it do they have' also never comes up. This entire thing doesn't even question where workers get the money to pay for these goods from, it's totally divorced from macro-economics. They just assume that if they made the market frictionless enough that prosperity would happen, which we should obviously know is false. Workers are already maxing out their means of consumption on necessities and luxuries, they're already deep in debt, there's no more profitability to be squeezed from them and the workers of the art too are also squeezed of most of their surplus value.

The growing issue of piracy will become more and more as profitability continues to plummet, but making it more convenient won't make it (much) more affordable or increase profits. Making it more convenient will also never happen in the peripheries outside of the imperial core as they will never have the collective buying power or infrastructure to make it worthwhile for companies to invest in making their products available there. There are some profits lost due to inconvenience, but saying the only problem with production and economy is convenience is liberal and idealistic, it attempts to reify the supremacy of the market.

One of the more memorable first episodes of anime this fall was Talentless Nana, a thriller series starring a young student with a dark secret. Curious to see why my friends were excited about it, I did some research of my own and found something bizarre in the process. Talentless Nana was based on a manga whose story was written under a pseudonym: looseboy. "Could this be the looseboy I know?" I posted on Twitter in a daze. "looseboy, the porn game writer?"

Like the main character of Talentless Nana, as a young student, I too had a dark secret: I played visual novels. I read all three routes of Fate/stay Night. I soldiered through Muv Luv. I sought out the anime Humanity is Declined specifically because the source text was written by visual novel luminary Romeo Tanaka. These games could be overstuffed, repetitive, and deeply sexist. But don't underestimate visual novels. YU-NO upended conventions in 1996 in such a way that modern games steal its twists and are still labeled forward-thinking. Infamous video game auteur Hideo Kojima cut his teeth working on spin-offs in the hugely influential Tokimeki Memorial series. And Hajime Isayama, the creator of Attack on Titan, admitted in this interview in Brutus Magazine that he had been inspired by the 18+ mecha epic Muv Luv Alternative.

Does a good job outlining some of Jun Maeda's quirks as a story writer and anime director. Their predictions about the show seem likely to come true as well.

It’s Thanksgiving time in the USA, and with more of us opting to stay home, many of you probably want to get cozy with some manga to read--so what better time to recruit returning guest Casey (aka MinovskyArticle) to gush about some of our favorite older manga titles? Officially we have a list of 10, but we give out WAY more than that once you count our tangents and honorable mentions. So grab a warm drink, maybe a snack, and get comfy with this extra long manga-centric podcast episode!

Stream the episode above or [Direct Download]
Subscribe on apple podcasts | Stitcher | Google Podcasts | Spotify

Relevant Links:

• Check out the list of our 10 picks (& a handful of our honorable mentions) at the podcast’s new Bookshop.org portal! While a few of our recommendations are for the digital releases, if you purchase any of the physical books we talked about via my Bookshop.org affiliate portal, not only will you be supporting local & independent bookstores, but I’ll get a small percentage of any sales through it as well!
• Follow Casey on Twitter!
• My theme song music was done by Kerobit! You can find more about them on their Twitter!

Support the work I do on this podcast by leaving me a tip on Ko-fi! Want to have your name read in the special thanks segment on the next episode? All you need to do is buy me 2 or more “coffees” on Ko-fi!

As always, feel free to leave me your thoughts on this episode or ideas for future episodes here—or email me directly at [email protected].

Thanks for listening!

From the final note of the recently released -- like today -- The Intuition Of Haruhi Suzumiya. I've added aniDB links to the staff members here to show their work history more easily.

A Final Note

Words fail me when it comes to what happened at Kyoto Animation on July 18, 2019. I feel like I could write forever and it would never be enough, and that this is something beyond the capacity of mere words. So there’s not much that I can write here. What I can talk about are the little memories stored in the corners of my mind. So many Kyoto Animation staff members helped animate this series. I can’t thank them enough for what they did. I only met a few in person and spoke to even fewer, but there are a number of moments that remain seared into my mind even after all this time.

So the following are my personal recollections.

If I remember right, I first visited Kyoto Animation early in 2005. One of the first people I met was Yoshiji Kigami. He introduced himself by saying, “Kigami, written as tree and above.” Clear, easily remembered—and I’ve never forgotten it. But I’m afraid I was unaware of who he was at the time. It was much later that I learned he was one of the world’s top animators. But even I could tell the rest of the staff had the utmost faith in him.

The character designer and chief animation director for The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya anime was Shouko Ikeda, and I remember her being in those meetings very early on. She gave me a warm smile and then asked very pointed questions like, “How does Haruhi smile?” Off the cuff, I said, “Like a half-moon on its side yawning open,” and then figuring it would communicate the idea better, I drew a few pictures on a piece of paper. If you’re curious what that answer led to, check the key visuals Ikeda drew.

Naomi Ishida was the color designer, and I remember her from a visit to the studio with Noizi Ito. The two of them were looking at an image of Haruhi on a monitor, getting really nitty-gritty about the specifics of the coloring. I especially remember when they got to Haruhi’s shoes. Ishida had a mouse in one hand and asked Noizi, “How’s this?” “A little darker.” “Like this?” “That’s it.” To my eyes, the two colors were basically the same, but to the two of them, they were worlds apart. The craftsmanship was astounding.

I first spoke to Futoshi Nishiya (chief animation director of the second season and The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya) while visiting a hospital to do location scouting for the movie. At the time, there was concern about a new strain of influenza, so when a bunch of us rolled in wearing masks and carrying cameras, the patients gave us some very strange looks. I was sitting on a bench in a waiting room, and Nishiya came over to me, looking very serious. I wondered if something had happened, but he said, “I may have made the characters too cute. What do you think?” I could see it being a problem if they weren’t cute, but how could “too cute” ever be an issue? I said I couldn’t see the slightest smidgen of an issue, but he was clearly still thinking about it. I couldn’t help admiring his perfectionism.

Yasuhiro Takemoto was the director of the second season and The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya, but all my memories are from the nigh weekly script meetings we had for the first season. I remember more about the idle chatter than the actual scripts. We talked about all kinds of stuff, from the World Rally Championship to Wimbledon to old Famicom RPGs. I wouldn’t necessarily call myself the most social person in the world, so I suspect this was his way of keeping me engaged. In hindsight, I really appreciate that consideration. The last time I met him was several years ago, at a Kadokawa thank-you party, and as we parted ways, we said the lines everyone takes for granted: “We’ll have to go drinking together sometime.” The fact that we’ll never make that happen leaves me with nothing but grief.

I wrote this to the best extent of my memory, as accurately as I could, but perhaps some of these memories are faulty. I hope you’ll excuse that.

Finally, there are two things I feel should be said.

I won’t forget you.

I won’t forget what you did.

If you agree with these statements, read the subject as plural. Feel free to rewrite them as you please.

My memories are tiny things. Other people have far more memories than I do. Those memories belong to them.

I intend to treasure the modest memories that remain with me.

Thank you so much.

Miyazaki has sometimes been considered a pacifist, and some of his earlier works indeed warned of the dangers of war and other social ills. However, he has undoubtedly moved to the right.

In an essay he published only a couple of days before The Wind Rises, for example, Miyazaki voices support for the Japanese “Self Defense Forces” missions in Iraq and the Persian Gulf, supposedly because Japanese troops didn’t fire a single shot and suffered no casualties.

The filmmaker rejects his previous admiration for “neutral countries like Switzerland or Sweden,” arguing that armament is necessary “to a degree,” and warns about the “expansion of China.” He questions the international division of work from the standpoint of national self-reliance and blames “overpopulation” for war, claiming Japan should have a population of “around 35 million,” without explaining what should be done with the remaining 90 million or so people!

On the domestic front, Miyazaki accepts austerity measures uncritically: “We have to become poorer inch by inch. It’s the way it is, and it can’t be helped.” So rather than having “hopes for the future,” one must focus on the present: friends, family, work. Lastly, he dismisses prevalent “anxieties” of the younger generation, saying, “So in the past, there were no worries? … If you’re in good health and working, that’s enough. If there’s no work, make your own.”

Miyazaki does not openly glorify imperialism and war, but his promotion of militarist symbols such as the Zero fighter, his equivocal position on World War II and war in general and his appeals for a focus on the purely private, immediate sphere objectively help to disarm his audience in the face of such dangers as the next regional or world war, which would immediately involve his native Japan too.

These political and social positions inevitably lead to a deplorable stance in regard to artistic questions. In the same interview Miyazaki was also asked: “You say you can’t be responsible for anything that happens beyond your figurative boundary, but in reality you are influencing countless people through your films. What do you say about that?” The filmmaker replies: “I make films as a business, not as a cultural endeavor. My films just happened to be successful. If people weren’t interested in what I make, my company would go belly up in no time.” A very limited outlook indeed.