Show #62 – Fujoshi Wave Discussion Post Anime Boston 2008
Show #062 Direct Download: 
OP: Dr. Zeus song from the Simpsons
ED: Incidental Music from Oguie’s fantasies in Genshiken 2
Notes to be completed later.
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Not my fave episode…
I like Ninja Consultant, but this ep sounded an awful lot like flame bait… It *almost* sounded like old school fans talking about the good old days when fandom was 95% male, before the internet ruined everything. Almost.
1. My attitude lately has been “fujoshi FTW!!” Maybe it’s cause I just read Mousou Shoujo Otakukei. Or because internet intelligencia convinced me that reverse harem and BL series are smart, artistic, and an antidote to the “boys only treehouse — girls keep away” attitude that plagues many fandoms.
2. I saw 2 eps of Harukanaru TV, and it was okay. But ever since I discovered Altogether 2005 and 2006 (see haeleth.net for links), I’ve been interested in discovering more, better ren’ai games and visual novels. Why? Because only a few “crazy” internet people know that they can be well written. In fact, one of my goals is to form a small game publishing company and get licenses for Otometeki Love Revo — a full fledged otome game / dating simulation.
3. Your next episode should be “fujoshi strike back.” YA RLY.
4. Finally, the podcast right after yours in my iTunes playlist was a discussion of the movie “Hackers,” talking about how the male-oriented movie got female fans. Was refreshing.
Re: Not my fave episode…
Wow, I think you’ve misunderstood Noah, like, completely, but he is kind of hard to understand at times.
1. Noah and I super double-love Mousou Shoujo Otakukei, being published here as Fujoshi Rumi, and you can read my review of it here.
2. The Harukana manga is super-bad, I haven’t seen the anime. Are you trying to say that visual novels can actually be good? Because I don’t believe you.
3. I think you missed the point of the show, if it had a point. Noah isn’t annoyed by fujoshi or being a curmudgeon about the good old days of fewer girls in fandom. If anything, I think he’s extra-happy to have more girls at cons and as fans. That said, Noah gets mad at things he doesn’t understand… He’s not angered by the existence of fujoshi, he’s just shocked, like “When did this happen?” like one day there were almost no fujoshi, and then he skipped Akon for like ten years and the next thing you know Shonen Jump is for girls and Dr. Who is making out with his assistants. What happened? When did we cross that line?
Noah is different from someone like Daryl Surat – Daryl refuses to watch Avatar the Last Airbender because fangirls have “ruined” it for him. Ed Chavez believes fangirls ruined Shonen Jump, because prior to Saint Seiya it was all yankee manga that he loved about manly men. I don’t think Noah cares one way or the other – Noah is only interested in good stories.
4. The Hackers episode of Greatest Movie Ever is next on my playlist. It’s one of Noah’s favorite movies. It has really bad ADR, like, super bad, to the point where you wonder if they dubbed in a new script in post production.
Re: Not my fave episode…
I have to agree with Erin and Noah. I felt that in no way did anyone sound like they were hating on the influx of girls into anime fandom and any type of geeky fandom in general. It was more an examination of why and when did it all become more sexual.
I think the main thing that everyone missed in the conversation, which explains why everything you mentioned has happened, is simple. Society in general has become a great deal more sexualized. I sure there are reasons that fandom in general has become more sexualized but the major root is society in general has moved be being more openly sexual and fandom whether we believe it or not is a part of society. People just talk more openly about sex and almost all media has a tendency or at least opportunity to be more sexual. Fandom has just been swept along with society in general.
I do not want to sound like the crotchy old man who wishes that we could be back in the old days when things were better but these whippersnapper young kids have to be all vulgar and making everything about the sex. I don’t feel I am making a judgment about it. I’m generally OK with people being more open about talking about sex and pairings.
I do on the other hand feel that people should realize when their pairings are totally in their heads and not some secret between them and the author. Or that anyone who does not realize this is a plain idiot.
I do have to agree partially agree and disagree with Noah. While I don’t believe that an author listening and sometimes altering his plot by taking fan taste into consideration is always a bad idea I don’t think it in anyway opens the door to good ideas either. Sometimes an author might get good ideas or see a situation or relationship differently due to listening to fan input. But I don’t feel that an author should arbitrarily just change plot or relationships because fans want it. That just leads to shlock.
As for throwing in fan service and especially relationship fan service to make people happy, well that is the nature of the beast. I think this has always been happening and I think it is naive to assume otherwise.
I will admit I am a Type-Moon fan so I guess that makes me a visual novel aficionado in the most general sense. I really like Kinoko Nasu’s writing but I’m not sure I would throw it in the category of great writing. I’m hesitant to throw it into the category of good writing. At most I will throw it into the category of writing that entertains me.
Then again I liked Higurashi no Naku Koro ni so maybe I am a visual novel fan. Oh no ;_;. I am a bad human being.
I personally think that Daryl Surat is inclined to hate anything that is popular. I don’t think he necessarily hates everything that is popular but anything that is popular seems to already have one strike against it whenever he watches it.
Hackers is a good movie but in that it’s good bad it loops back to good way. My favorite hacker movie is still Sneakers.
As for my feelings on Fujoshi well … I will leave that for another time. Sufficed to say I feel they are a different breed than female fans in general.
Show #62
Changing plot points to satiate fans has ALWAYS been part of the storytelling tradition, going back to the earliest cavemen sitting around the campfire. Almost everything is a collaborative effect on one level or another, whether it is the influence of a single editor or producer, or a mailbag full of fan letters.
The pantheon of Greek mythology, Beowulf, and the Grimm Fairy Tales (which in their original forms are VERY bloody and sexual) are all examples of enduring stories which were, by their very oral tradition, written by committee. And, like the new fandom, they are often rewritten to reflect new times and new values.
I think Noah’s biggest problem is that he bought into the image of the director/writer/auteur. Unfortunately, this is a hollow sham; a myth that Hollywood perpetuates without really believing itself…
While stories should, in the conventional sense, be there to entertain people, and stories are in that way collaborative, what must be remembered is that most people do not know how to tell a good story.
It is a dangerous, dangerous path to just follow what the fans want, because often what they want is very much to fulfill their own desires for the story without taking into account the story as a whole or realizing that you can’t just create a plot point and work backwards. You can’t even quite work forwards towards a plot point, for that matter. It requires going back and forth over and over until a story is cohesive and powerful.
In other words, a story has to make sense, and if too much of that precious story time is used in order to show what fans want without regard to how it helps or hurts the work itself, then it amounts to nothing.
(Daryl Surat)
Did I forget to reply to this forever ago? I guess I did.
I personally think that Daryl Surat is inclined to hate anything that is popular. I don’t think he necessarily hates everything that is popular but anything that is popular seems to already have one strike against it whenever he watches it.
Stop confusing me with Paul Chapman. I know he’s “White Daryl Surat” and all, but still.
Even though this directly contradicts with my “Noah is always wrong” credo, he’s right on the money when it comes to his evaluation of modern works like Avatar, Harry Potter, etc. The key difference between “then” and “now” is that creators KNOW there is a MASSIVE fujoshi fanbase out there, and they specifically tailor and/or alter their stories to accommodate them in pursuit of the almighty dollar.
Ed Chavez is absolutely right about Shonen Jump after about 1987. What’s been running in that magazine for the past 20+ years is by and large not “shonen.” It’s “neo-shonen” since they’re specifically engineered to appeal to female readers too. The Shonen Jump tables at Comiket you mentioned being constantly swarmed almost entirely by girls is proof. But where Ed and I potentially differ is that I’m not saying neo-shonen is intrinsically inferior to shonen. I am just saying that the spirit embodied by Hitman Reborn is not the same spirit embodied by Violence Jack or Fist of the North Star.
The sort of fanservice and pandering present in neo-shonen properties as well as Avatar, Harry Potter et al is a lot like the arrow in the FedEX logo. Ordinarily you’d miss it entirely. “What, there’s an arrow in the FedEX logo?” But then it gets called to your attention, and once you see that it’s there you realize its presence is no accidental coincidence. It’s deliberate. AND YOU CAN NEVER IGNORE IT EVER AGAIN.