I’ve always found it interesting that the heroines in anime are often strong, independent, and motivated. Whilst, the male heroes are often indecisive, reckless, and incompetent. The presumption is that this is because of the predominance of male anime fans. I’ve heard speculation that male characters are designed so that male fans can put themselves into the story in place of the male leads. This is more natural selection than design, IMO. (Specifically, I’m thinking about harem comedies, but I think it affects other genre.) The fact that these male characters do relate to so many anime fans is telling.

However, the fact that the female characters are often more popular than the male characters tells us something else. It isn’t always what one would think.

It has often been mentioned that the least interesting character in a harem comedy is the male character. This makes sense, if taken from the perspective of a male viewer experiencing the show through the male lead’s eyes. The other (female) characters play off the male lead to progress the story. The male isn’t as important as the female characters, in that sense.

Moreover, it doesn’t matter what the male character is supposed to be or be thinking in the context of the story as much as what the viewer is experiencing through his eyes (what the viewer is thinking). Thus, again, the story must progress through the use of the female characters. Because the story has to utilize the female characters to move the plot along. These characters become more defined, more human, and more relatable.

What happens when there are no male characters? Can you just give all the girls super powers, big guns, no pants, and mecha?

Will it be enough? Apparently.

Strike Witches is at its heart a magical girl show. There is nothing spectacularly different from any other magical girl show (aside form the striker units). But, like many others of its ilk, it proves that when it comes to anime you don’t need guys when you have a bunch of girls. You just need to give them big guns, independence, intelligence, and the ability to kick ass.

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I almost didn’t post this because there are a lot of contradictory examples that appose the arguments I made here. However, most of the ones I could think of have to do with the female lead being indecisive or incompetent.

I finally got around to watching what the subbers called the “pre-air” version of Tamayura. It’s a cute little show about a girl who likes to take photographs and her friends.

It’s only sixteen minutes long. We learn absolutely nothing about the characters besides their initial traits/fetishes (likes pictures, likes smells, likes to whistle, likes cute little boys, etc).

Fu isn't all there, if you know what I mean.

As some of you may know, I live in the bastion of dirty hippie liberalness that is Austin Texas. For the longest time, I’ve been meaning to go out to the capitol and take some pictures of the renovation on the dome. I had some stuff to do downtown this morning. Because of that, I figured I would kill two birds with one stone (no birds were harmed in the process of taking these pictures).

(click to enlarge)

Here is a picture from the top of a parking garage. I’m not totally sure when they started work on the dome. I visit the Capitol quite often, though. My guess is that they put it up really fast.

Here is a picture from across 15th street on the north side.

Here we see the view from the south side, about mid way up the walkway to the entrance.

Here is a view from the middle of the walkway facing south down Congress Ave. It’s Sunday. There is almost no traffic (because nothing is open).

Here is a picture of the “pit” (that’s what I call it) on the North side of the Capitol. I’d say it’s about twenty feet across and two stories down. It drills right through the underground extensions and is accessible from both the E1 and E2 levels.

When members of the House or Senators can’t come to terms on legislation they are put in the pit to fight to the death. You should have seen it during the last session with the Voter ID stuff. We called it bloody Tuesday.

There is also a dance group that practices down there.

There is never a flat chested teenage girl in a zombie movie. It’s a rule.

HotD doesn’t break any new ground when it comes to the zombie genre. The most unique aspect of the show is that it is probably the first “classic” zombie themed anime I’ve seen, ever. The basics are all normal. Some unknown pathogen is turning everyone into a mindless flesh eating killing machine. It is contracted through a bite. Everyone and their mother is being turned into a zombie. The whole world has gone to hell.

If you look closely, there is a bullet dodging some boobs

HotD is blazing new ground in the field of boob-physics, though. I’ve never seen breast move, in an anime, as they do in HotD. It isn’t just bouncing. These things have minds of their own. There is (literally) a scene where boobs dodge a bullet, individually. Yeah, you read that right. One boob moves out of the way. Then the other boob moves out of the way.

The scene where we see shock wave dissipation through boobs is very interesting. I think they could have done better. Obviously, they decided to animate that scene though simple assumptions about how boobies would react to short high-frequency shocks. Personally, I would have started with a computer simulation, followed by some experiments with high-speed digital cameras and ballistics gel, then animated based on the available modeling.

But, that’s just me. Nobody cares about what I think, anyway.

Also, little girls supplying ammo seems to be another level of adorable.

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Why didn’t I use “breast” instead of “boobs.” Well, “breast” is too mature of a word and “titties” is too immature. I decided on a happy medium.

A while back I started, again, to read a book that I had fallen away from due to other concerns. I try to be in the act of reading some book all the time. It may take a while, but I eventually finish reading these works.  The Age of American Unreason, authored by Susan Jacoby, seeks to analyze the historical decline in intellectual thought through our recent history spanning mostly the years of the author’s life. Moreover, it chronicles the progression of American society from a great respect for intellectualism to a distrust of intellectuals. In the book she recounts personal stories about her interaction with the intellectually inclined during her formative years.  These personal moments are interspersed amongst the larger analysis of society during her time at university and as a writer for media such as newspapers and magazines.

The book is temporally linear. Towards the end of it we begin to see references about television and the internet. In particular, she mentioned that the promise of the internet (the information super highway) was never achieved and was curbed by popular media. That promise being a more informed and intelligent public. That is hardly the case, now.

We have Wikipedia and Google, combined they are two of the most useful tools to ever grace the hands of the human species. The internet has given us more information than we could possibly digest in a lifetime. Yet, most people don’t even use it.

Media culture has degraded the level of discourse in society. Attention spans are woefully short. Among the most popular websites on the internet are Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter. If you don’t fear for your sanity, read the comments on any Youtube video. Facebook needs less face and more book. Twitter only lets its users post messages of 140 characters or less. The saddest part about this is that 140 characters seems to be enough.  However, I cannot be too sure about that length. They may have expanded it to fit in more “omg”, “LOL”, and “refudiate.”

One could argue that Google and Wikipedia are also among the top visited websites in the world. One could also argue that people go to Google to search for Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter. The number of people who go to Google to search for Yahoo keeps going up every year. These are not indicators of a newly emerging class of a well informed and intelligent peoples.

New media is killing your brain cells. Mostly, it’s video that is the problem. Short, irrelevant, and easily digested video is destroying our thoughts.

Watching most video is, for the most part, a mindless pursuit. The reason video is so much more popular that literature is because it is very much a direct line to our minds. Seeing and hearing are functions of the brain that are hardwired to work whether we want them to or not. Viewing a video is about as taxing as breathing. It takes effort to understand the meaning behind the video, but how often do we do that? For that matter how much is present there to take in? When the people producing the videos understand that anything more complex that something blowing up or something cute flashing on screen every few minutes will engender a change of the channel, we get what we deserve.

Many blogs focus almost exclusively on the negative aspects of anime series. They fixate on how bad a show is, from their prospective. In the best cases, we see praise being given to a show for individual aspects. It may be a single episode or character. Almost never is a show wholly praised as a masterful work or even a great animation.

The initial volley of arguments are leveled on the creators. It’s the creators who missed the mark. They are the ones who took the story in the wrong direction. They made the story too simple or dull. For who was it made? If it were a question of simply art, then we would know that the artist rarely creates for the audience. But, it is not a simple question of art. It’s a question of commerce. Money is the driving force for our media economy. In the new media, simple equals larger audiences and more money.

The chicken begot the egg, and the egg was rotten because the chicken was vapid and stupid.

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On another note, I’ve got a few shows to watch before I go to bed.

Okay, I made it through Comic-Con 2010. Technically, Comic-Con ended Sunday. It took me this long to recover from all the walking, waiting, and flying.¹

For those of you that don’t know, Comic-Con International is one of the largest comic/sci-fi conventions in the world. It’s a magical place where you pay money to stand in lines for hours and wait to see famous people talk and answer questions for fifteen minutes.

On the first day I decided to try and get into Hall H, the biggest conference room in the San Diego Convention Center. Here is a picture from the very back of the line at about eight in the morning.

The line goes to the end of the grass field, turns a corner, goes down the other side, then across a street into another winding line before finally getting to the building. If I had to guess, I’d say there were several thousand people lined up.

After about two hours, I made it to the part of the line that had tents. It was roughly another two hours before I finally made it into Hall H, where I camped for the rest of the afternoon. I totally missed the Tron Legacy panel by about two hours, for which I had lined up in the first place.

It wasn’t all waiting in lines. Don’t get me wrong, it was a LOT of waiting in lines, but I sat in on some really interesting panels. The two best panels I attended were the ones on Penn & Teller and Blood Factory. Penn and Teller were hilarious. The Blood Factory is a project to produce short (5~10 min) horror films by Danny DeVito, amongst others. The films are extremely graphic, bloody, and funny. Plus, as was stated during the panel, they do have messages. Although, those messages may be obscured through blood and vagina monsters (don’t ask, you have to see it when it comes out). Let’s face it, if you’ve been watching anime for any period of time you’ve seen some type of vagina monster. It shouldn’t be anything new.

I also saw the first episode of the Iron Man anime. It wasn’t that bad, but it wasn’t that good either. Judging by the trailer for the show, it should get a bit better later, on the action front. Who knows about the story?

San Diego was fun. I’ll have to visit again someday. There was talk about moving Comic-Con to another city because San Diego’s convention center doesn’t have the capacity for the current crowds at Comic-Con. I can attest to this. It was packed all day every day of the event. The longest waits were for the big name panels like Burn Notice, Tron Legacy, or just to get into one of the big convention rooms like Hall H or Room 20 where they had the best lineups. The smaller panels usually didn’t have huge lines, and in most instances were more entertaining with more unique subjects.

Also, I got a sunburn.

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1. No, that’s a lie. I’m just lazy.