Dat Freak

It’s a story a lot of us 90s kids are familiar with: going back over a cartoon we loved as a kid, only to discover we missed all the adult-targeted humour that was fuel-injected into every episode. At the best of times, it adds a new dimension to a show that’s still entertaining to us, years later, making it even better.

It’s been over a decade since I’ve watched Freakazoid! on TV. I caught some episodes on YouTube a while back, but apparently that wasn’t enough for the final click, for it wasn't until a short while ago I was hit with the sudden and very powerful impulse to rebuy and rewatch the entire series. Now I totally love it all over again.

Freakazoid! has always been my favourite of the Amblin/WB animated comedies, ranking above Tiny Toon Adventures, Animaniacs and Pinky and the Brain. I don’t know what it is, but I keep being drawn to superhero spoofs, even though I’m not that big a fan of superheroes. I’m smart enough to know that not all superhero stories are endless tales of black-and-white morality and shallow characterization, so it’s not a misplaced mean-spiritedness that drives my interest, either. Nor is it feeling that superheroes are somehow more absurd than the rest of SF and fantasy. I don’t know what it is, but I love The Venture Brothers, Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law, The Tick, Mystery Men, and so on.

The appeal of Freakazoid! is easy to discern: it’s just the type of humour I grew up with and still love when it's done right. Just when I feel I’ve become exasperated by the endless tide of pop culture parodies, fourth-wall breaking, and celebrity impersonations, another good cartoon comes along to remind me that this type of humour can still be used effectively. Freakazoid! is a great example, even if it might be the nostalgia talking.

However, it’s the characters that really sold this show to me, then and now. I loved the character of Freakazoid, and it ain’t hard to see why. Yeah, people hate “random” humour too, but Paul Rugg plays Freakazoid with such loud earnestness, there’s no way I’m not going to think he’s awesome. Ed Asner, western animation’s quintessential Grumpy Old Man, is wonderful as Sgt. Mike Cosgrove, the guy whose reaction to the must absurd situations is always his crotchety deadpan. Freakazoid’s family is also great, bland sitcom-folk with the occasional bouts of weirdness.

The only weak link in the good guy” cast is Freakazoid’s girlfriend Steff. While the joke probably is supposed to be, “She’s Freakazoid’s girlfriend with almost no personality, you know like superheroes have”, given that the rest of the characters, male and female, are funny in a more individual way (Dexter’s mother may have a creepy Stepford grin, but she’ll also eat 24 pizza rolls offscreen), I still wish Steff had actual characterization instead.

Not keeping to a steady viewing schedule in my childhood, I had no idea that The Lobe was Freakazoid’s arch-enemy. It makes a lot of sense: not only is The Lobe ostensibly the rational mind to Freakazoid’s silly insanity, but often The Lobe seems like he believes he lives in a world that takes itself more seriously than it actually does, while Freakazoid knows exactly what the score is.

David Warner gives The Lobe a voice full of grandeur and conviction that fits this perception of the world, and it makes him even funnier. Of course, The Lobe can delve into comedy with the rest of the cast, including the entire “Bonjour Lobey” musical number, but the idea that he takes things more seriously than anybody, even Gutierrez, (who is a weenie) remains strong. This gives Freakazoid and his arch-enemy the kind of opposite dynamic that apparently makes for good hero/villain conflict.

The Lobe is probably my favourite villain in the series for these reasons (though it’s a little disturbing that his hands and his head are a different colour, and that he thinks a pterosaur is a dinosaur). Up behind are Cobra Queen and Cave Guy, even before they were a couple. The reptilophile in me says that casting reptilian characters as evil is usually a bad thing, but there are so few female reptilian characters that I’ll give Cobra Queen a pass. It doesn’t hurt that she isn’t protected from slapstick, and unlike Steff, she’s funny as an individual character (I also positively love the design of her tusked, horned cobra). Cave Guy, well, he’s just hilarious because he’s a snooty, pretentious caveman in a loincloth, though I still wonder why he’s blue. In short: I ship it.

I don’t miss any of the back-up segments from season one, and I still can’t say whether I prefer Freakazoid! in a shorter or longer episode format. If I were to pick the back-up character I liked the most, it would have to be Lord Bravery. As a kid, I totally didn’t get that he was a Monty Python pastiche, but now it’s perfectly obvious and awesome. It’s just that I don′t mind jettisoning any of them for a Freakazoid-only series.

I want to give a special shout-out to the episode “House of Freakazoid/Sewer or Later”. At some point, my household TV stopped getting Freakazoid!, save for a channel that had perfect audio but extremely distorted picture. However, on a day when the station came through, I managed to watch and tape a rerun of this episode, and watched that thing into the ground. Since it had a werewolf (albeit based on the Wolfman rather than the more wolf-headed werewolves that I prefer) and giant snakes, I considered it the best of a bad situation.

Freakazoid feels like a cartoon made by funny people, for funny people, to please themselves, and thankfully coming out with something the rest of us could watch. The names of the writers and I loved it as a kid, and I love it again now. What the hell was I waiting for, taking so long to buy it?

Picking out the voice acting greats is also fun, and recognizing the names of writers well-known in nerddom.

The Sad, Tortured Little Audience

I've become one of those fans who dislikes a canon and wishes it were different. Before that, I was someone who followed the absolute word of a creator or creators of a work,  seeing it as the primary thing above all else, and was totally happy to do it. Fannish works were fun indulgences, but there was still a hierarchy involved.

And after wrestling with the feelings brought about by this change, I still believe this. No matter how much literary theory I read, the creators will always be above the fans, and the ideal state is for a creator to do what they want, without worrying about pleasing the fans. Fans are free to imagine their own versions of things, and can offer any criticism, but it does not exist on the same level as the original work. Creative ownership is paramount, even when I dislike what results.

Thus, I have a boundary: a fan can say anything they want against a creator's work and actions, imagine any alternative scenario they wish, but when they start to say that fans own a work, that the creator must obey them, their arguments lose all value.

Naturally, this makes this entire George Lucas/Star Wars debacle fascinating to watch. I know there's nothing in the middle of the road but yellow lines and dead possums, but I find things to hate on both sides of the debate.

Before the boundary was crossed, I agreed with the disgruntled Star Wars fans. Yeah, what Lucas has been doing with Star Wars sucks on a lot of levels: he keeps tweaking the original work, and refuses to release the originals in the same good quality that the Special Editions and the other films and cuts have been. He uses excessive CGI, his scene alterations usually make things worse, and he’s apparently a terrible writer when unfettered by editing or collaborators willing to disagree. It’s just so easy for me to buy into the image of Lucas as a vain dude surrounded by yes-men and piles of money, who tries to frame everything as a grand and considered part of his vision.

But when the cry comes down that Lucas has done so much damage to the Star Wars franchise that it ought to be taken away from him for its own good, I come to side with Lucas, however grudgingly. The same is true for claims that Star Wars is now “bigger” than Lucas, and thus he has to take the millions of fans into consideration as well. That’s when the line is crossed.

Refusing to offer a good release of the theatrical Star Wars cuts is just being rude, nothing more, and nothing less. To offer that coveted release would simply be the nice thing, something for Lucas to do out of the kindness of his heart (or a desire to add to his money bin). Yet like all good deeds, the choice to do them rests on the one who could do it. Lucas apparently won’t, and that’s his prerogative.

This notion of ownership is of such concern because, while I am a nerd, but I also have aspirations of production. Although I make those little vows never to go back and remake my own work, to always push forward and try something new, I keep asking myself, “How would I feel if fans started to say my work should be taken away from me, because they disagreed with its direction? Pretty damn sad.” I want to claim possession of something I made, I want it to be mine. It’s satisfying. By all means, discuss the direction and connotations of a work, but don’t grant equal shares of ownership to everyone who’s ever invested themselves in a text.

While severing Lucas from Star Wars may seem different than demanding an author put a fan-favourite couple together, or give their favourite character more scenes, they are all ultimately the same things. They all rely on the principle of “We own you”, and it’s not a statement that many authors want to hear. Creators are not gods, but they do have power. Fans can have that power when they make original works, but they shouldn’t have power over others’ work.

It’s true that the name of creator is not as simple as it appears, especially with films. Many people were involved in making Star Wars the phenomenon it is, and I believe them when they say that Lucas needed the input of other people to produce something refined—that is true of all artists, because even novelists have editors. Yet the subjects related to the notion of a "creator" are so fascinating and so integral that it’s not worth it to give up idea that works of art have creators whose actions are worth paying attention to. Lucas and others need to exist as a focal point when discussing their works. The author could be dead, but never buried. Therefore, name Lucas as the originator above all else, because he generated the ideas that would become Star Wars.

And yet he can is what I always come back to. If Lucas wants to keep doing those things, he can. He doesn’t owe it to anyone to stop. To feel this way is not passivity: it is simply giving Lucas his due as a man who has made something. And because he is, he can do what he wants, even if it means being a rude bastard.

The Peculiar Olympians: Shizuku Tsukishima

“The Peculiar Olympians” is a series of blog posts about my most favourite fictional characters. They are each here for some combination of sympathy, empathy, inspiration, humour, quality, staying power, and/or significance to my relationship with fandom. These are not all the characters that I like, but they are the ones that have stood out to me the most. The list is also alphabetical and nothing more.

Like most anime nerds, I worship at the Church of Ghibli. And yet I find that among all the iconic films produced by the studio, the one that stands out the most to me is a relatively obscure work, one not headed by the giant Hayao Miyazaki, though he did have some notable involvement. Yoshifumi Kondo’s Whisper of the Heart is a story that resonates, a coming-of-age tale made for a different sort of child than usual.

This different child is Shizuku Tsukishima, a girl who loves to read and finds beauty in the mundane, for whom even discovering a new shop is an adventure. Her eternal sense of wonder is charming and uplifting, and she also dreams of becoming a fantasy writer. She’s the kind of kid I wish I was, though in some ways I am.

Shizuku is a junior high school student who finds that every time she takes out a book, the same person took it out just before her: Seiji Amisawa (using library cards as a plot point dates the story, but is no large issue). Seiji turns out to be a boy of her own age, with aspirations of becoming a violin maker. He could be going to Cremona, Italy, to learn the trade instead of high school.

Shizuku, feeling inadequate in light of Seiji’s drive, resolves to write her first novel before he decides whether to leave. In doing so, Shizuku neglects her schoolwork and possibly her future, but gradually comes around. She needs to wait to get good, as she and Seiji will wait for each other, and get married when he comes back from Italy--after high school, since Seiji has also compromised.

I fell in love with this film upon first viewing, and each time I watch it, I love it even more. There are flaws, certainly, but Shizuku resonates so much with who I was, who I am, and who I wished to be, that her place in my personal character canon is doubtless. Shizuku’s story also remains grounded: for all Shizuku’s dreamy and sometimes melodramatic nature, which the film does not condemn, Whisper of the Heart reminds viewers that one needs to work to follow their dreams, and there will be obstacles and heartache. It’s a bold statement, and one that does not detract from the film’s sweet nature, but merely adds a new dimension to it. Pragmatism will not be confused with cynicism, and it only sweetens idealism when combined with it.

Of course, Whisper of the Heart did not begin as a film, but instead as a manga by Aoi Hiiragi. I don’t usually say this (and feel a bit guilty when it’s a male-headed film versus a female-headed comic), but I enjoyed the film adaptation far more, because Yoshifumi Kondo, the director, and Miyazaki, the screenwriter, added greater dramatic tension and more focus on Shizuku and Seiji’s artistic pursuits.

In the original comic, Shizuku’s main concern is whether Seiji loves her or her older sister, a product of the standard romantic misunderstandings. In the film, Shizuku’s conflict is more layered and distinct, and Seiji is much less of a jerk. Her bookish aspects still exist in the manga, and she’s still an appealing character, but Shizuku’s manga story does not touch upon the conflict involved in being a creative person who is just beginning to write. That’s not to say I dislike the manga—I certainly like it a lot, and it’s a shame that Viz never published an official translation in English. The film is, however, what I prefer.

Instead, much of the English market’s attention goes to The Cat Returns, which is a sort-of spinoff from Whisper of the Heart in that it re-uses some of the original film’s feline characters (the dapper cat-doll Baron and the fat cat Muta), re-imagined as sapient fantasy creatures. Perhaps it is one of Shizuku’s stories, but without Shizuku herself, and her own story, I’m not interested at all in The Cat Returns. In fact, I’m a bit jealous that its manga was translated, and so was a storybook, while Whisper of the Heart was comparatively neglected.

Julia Phelps

I’ve bought more girls’ toys in the past couple of years since...ever, and that includes my actual childhood. The natural culprit is My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, but just as that show began making waves outside the target little-girl demographic, Monster High was making something of the same headway. There’s been no explosion of guy nerds or notably visible fandom interest in Monster High, but there’s still the feeling that this is another little girls’ property that has made more nerd headway than I usually see.

My relationship with girls’ toys is complicated. I’ve come to realize that fandoms do exist in the same way for girls’ American cartoons as they do for boys’ ones, but I still find that things targeted towards boys have more appeal to me. Not necessarily in that they’re more “butch”, but they tend to have storylines with more conflict and more firmly rooted in fantasy and science fiction, all of which I prefer. Femininity needs to be respected, but it also needs to be said that storyline types shouldn’t be gendered, and that stories with conflict and non-saccharine fantasy aren’t necessarily masculine things. I still can’t shake the feeling that the parameters for female entertainment are actually narrower than those for male, and it’s not just a matter of what women like being automatically disrespected.

Anyway, I know that its high school setting dooms it to a more domestic conflict, but it still bothers me that Monster High’s adventures usually have little to do with the fact that the characters are monsters. I also still consider the positive qualities of Monster High to be overrated: it’s not that much more developed or daring than most other girls’ toylines, and to call it such depends on a far too pessimistic vision of what girls’ toys promote. Girl’s toys have always been about friendship and “being yourself”, and only try to promote a narrow female ideal through unspoken means.

Just as with FiM, my primary focus was on a nerdy female character. My favourite character in the toyline is undoubtedly zombie girl Ghoulia Yelps. I don’t like zombies as a monster genre: I just see them as dull and gross. However, Mattel keeps making me adore Ghoulia, who started out as the smartest kid in the cast and is now portrayed as a bona fide nerd.

I’m always drawn to the intellectual characters, and Ghoulia, being a zombie, can only speak in groans of various pitches. It’s an appealing and funny contrast between her intelligence and her physical mannerisms, as well as the expectations of zombie smarts. There’s a further joke about a zombie being “brainy”, which the doll manufacturers have been playing up by putting brain patterns onto her latest outfits.

Besides this small cleverness, Ghoulia is also the closest the cast has to an actual female grotesque. While Monster High bills itself as being about “freaky being cool”, naturally the characters are still designed to be mostly human and attractive, with small features like odd ears or skin tones, or tiny fangs--although to the series’ credit, it mostly goes for handsome male monsters, too (mostly). Ghoulia, however, has a twisted spine, shuffling legs and her mouth often hanging open, with the occasional thousand-yard stare or twisted smile; in one cartoon short, a fly comes from her mouth. Her toy likenesses eliminate these tells, and she isn’t really that “monstrous” at all (and as if to make up for it, her “boyfriend” character is probably the ugliest one), but I like to give some props to the fact.

In her own way Ghoulia still has a great character design, one of those whose colour and shape immediately strike the viewer as memorable, in ways they usually cannot define. I love most of Ghoulia’s outfits and the way her red and black and white clothing works with her blue colouring, even if her enormous platform heels still hurt to look at.

For the San Diego Comic Con, the Monster High exclusive toy was Ghoulia sporting some in-universe cosplay. She was dressed as the Flash-like Deadfast, a jokey play on zombie slowness. She had her own tiny fan-comic accessory and con badge, and it was enough to induce a sugar coma. Not enough to make me dig out my wallet to buy one, but thrilling enough that a girl’s toyline had considered such blatant displays of nerdery.

This continues outside of the SDCC exclusive, with the related web short “Daydream of the Dead”, in which the costumed Ghoulia imagines herself saving a rare comic at a convention. If Ghoulia were real and Deadfast fictional, we would all be crying “Mary ‘Sue!”, but because they’re both fictional, the story becomes cute instead.

Another toy release for Ghoulia was a set of extra clothes to dress one of her dolls in. Said set includes a tiny comic book, a Deadfast t-shirt, and a tiny action figure on a teensy blister card. It’s absolutely adorable, and is another purchase to add to my Monster High collection when it reaches Canada, even if I’ll have to rebuy a Ghoulia doll to dress her in it.

 In addition, there have been small hints throughout the franchise that horror nerds might be part of the process, in the form of little references and injokes. In Ghoulia’s case (the one I’ve paid the most attention to), her long hair and hairband may be reminiscent of Barbara from Night of the Living Dead, and her red and black outfit with musical decoration might be an oblique reference to “Thriller”. Her pose in the artwork for the “Dawn of the Dance” sub-line is also quite reminiscent of the Thriller Dance.

Kid’s toys don’t directly and malevolently slam intelligence, but girl’s toylines tend to push “normal” characters far harder, setting their premise in the real world and leaving them as ordinary humans. Who would have thought they would have gotten nerdiness so spot-on?

What is sadly not surprising, however, is that while Ghoulia is considered part of the main cast, “Daydream of the Dead” is the first time she has been the central character in a cartoon (“Cyrano de Ghoulia” doesn’t count, since the viewpoint characters actually were the rest of the cast who were helping her). It might just be because she can’t speak English and so would be harder to interpret without other characters to filter her words through, but it’s hard not to imagine that the world isn’t ready for a nerdy character as a lead, even if she is fashionably dressed and relatively conventionally beautiful. Thank goodness FiM had better luck with Twilight Sparkle.

I also like that she enjoys fast food and is best friends with Rich Bitch Cleo De Nile, and attracted to jock zombie Slow-Moe…it makes her a little bit different than other nerd characters, showing that Monster High isn’t quite so strongly bound to the weird American obsession with high school class divisions.

However, Ghoulia isn’t exactly a deep or resonating character; I’ve pretty much said all there is to know about her. There’s a lot of clever little jokes and a good character design, but that’s it. This ensures Ghoulia is confined strictly to the C-list. But it’s a good C.

Some Words with a Mummy

All right.

Okay.

To recap: I wasn’t a fan of the original ThunderCats anymore, but the remake series showed promise. It suggested it would radically rewrite the premise and tone, in order to produce a work of some quality, with world-building and shades of grey and all that good stuff.

The truth is, not so much.

I saw the most recent episode “Journey to the Tower of Omens” and decided to give up. All the interesting plot points from the pilot have been discarded, and the story is proceeding with some very ill-advised pacing and replacement plot points.

Some might say these dropped threads are excused by the entire game change--the city was destroyed, the heroes are now fugitives, etc. But you know, why introduce plot points at all, if they must disappear so soon? The plot points should certainly have changed, based on the new circumstances, but not disappeared entirely.

It’s all running like a well-oiled machine, and that’s the problem. Things happen for the characters when they want them to, and interpersonal conflict or moral ambiguity is nowhere to be found unless one starts looking at obviously unintended subtext.

Look at the latest episode: they find the legendary long-lost ancient temple of unknown location only a handful of episodes after they set out to, and it happens when Snarf accidentally starts a fruit avalanche. So much for making characters struggle for what they want.

Furthermore, we are asked to accept via flashback that it was perfectly okay for the cat race to hide the information about the past and future from the other animal races, depicted as rapacious, red-eyed shadows. There is no sense that this is meant to be ironic, or retain that darker side of the cat empire through Cheetara’s blind loyalty…it’s straight-up fantasy racism, and it’s kind of creepy.

While I’m not a kooky furry otherkin about it, I do like just about anything reptilian, and I was happy at the idea that the lizard race now had legitimate grievances against the cat race, a slight step up from the usual treatment of “ugly” animals as unambiguous villains. And as someone who likes to see intelligent antagonists, I was anticipating the enemy animal races to be smart by ordinary standards, not only in comparison to the stupidity of the original mutants.

However, for several episodes, we’ve only seen lizards as generic soldiers, and the final straw came in depicting General Slithe as the typical Dumbass Minion. He trusts the captive hero when he tells him he doesn’t know where the MacGuffin is, and tries to smash an important artifact out of simple frustration. Mumm-Ra then berates him for his troops’ apparent incompetence, but does nothing about it, doing his own threat level no favours. It’s pure antiquated cheese, just with better voice-acting--almost exactly what Megatron kept doing in the original Transformers TV show.

Basically, I say, with tongue slightly in cheek, I wanted Slithe to be Londo Mollari: a patriot who made a deal with the devil to lift up his people. But there are worse things to want, aren’t there?

This kind of thing isn’t hard to do. Even with better motivations and better brains the lizards would still be enemies, and even hailing from an imperialistic regime, the cats would still be the heroes--kids would still get it, because cats would be the viewpoint characters. And yet, some depth would increase suspense, keep the audience guessing, and lead to a more intense conflict. There was no reason to ignore the things that lead to this war breaking out. Even with a city burned, characters would still remember.

In a world like this, is there even any room or need for other enemy animal races? What could races of jackal/monkey/rat/vulture-people bring to the world that the lizards already haven’t? I don’t care if the writers plan to give the former mutants names and working brains--what matters even more is if they have a reason to be there, one besides existing in the eighties cartoon. Will they?

Grune, the villainous ThunderCat, is another failure. He is motivated only by simple lust for power, in a way that doesn’t feel unique to his character, but just as an evocation of that lazy kind of children’s cartoon villain. He had no deeper reasons for betraying the kingdom, nothing intrinsic to his personality. By all appearances, he had a great life, and what the heck does he actually get from Mumm-Ra, besides more ill-defined “power” than he could get as a celebrated general of an empire?

There was no sense Mumm-Ra would be a deeper character, so I was prepared to consider him the devil the lizards made their deal with. However, the series still manages to muck things up. There’s the aforementioned lack of action if his servants are indeed incompetent, and that he himself is hastily jumping into combat. Mumm-Ra feels like he should be that kind of villain who only makes an appearance when things are about to get dire, and who otherwise remains hidden in the shadows, building up his aura of mystery and fear.

Furthermore, now Mumm-Ra is furnished with his own car, a giant pharaonic face on treads that looks pretty silly. He also adopts his super-powered form, and as others have pointed out, while he was strong enough to take out several clerics in his mummy form, in his super form he is beaten by the five heroes instead. I don’t have too big of a problem with that particular storytelling convention; everything else I mentioned is worse.

Mumm-Ra is also just plain cooler in his mummy form. There it’s just slightly more of a surprise that he is capable of fighting, and there’s an eeriness to him that’s one of the more effective things about this show. That, and his powered form looks kind of dorky, with a mish-mash of armour and a loincloth made of carpet samples, wings looking cool but making his design even more cluttered. I also prefer his whispery voice to the original cartoon’s gravelly bombast. Of course, when he’s riding around in a giant metal face, these things tend to get lost somewhere.

“Journey to the Tower of Omens” tosses in a flashback of Mumm-Ra leading the cat people when they were a technologically-advanced race. It throws images at viewers without any time to digest them, leaving the audience confused rather than wanting more. Depicting super-Mumm-Ra standing at the bridge of a spaceship is also too jarring a contrast. I’m all for genre-bending, but this is just doing what the older series did: throwing together blatant science fiction and fantasy elements without any structure or logic to them. Mumm-Ra was an alien warlord, yet covers himself in bandages and calls on evil spirits?

All this, and I haven’t even discussed the heroes yet. There’s just too much cohesion going on here.  Sure, it would seem petty for Lion-O and Tygra to retain the same rivalry after their people were just exterminated, but their relationship should have transformed into something were conflict still remained. All Tygra does now is quip occasionally, while accepting Lion-O as the head. Are they going to be fighting over Cheetara? I’d hope they could come up with something better.

What happened to pointing out that the cat race ran on imperialism and Lion-O could be a more peaceful king than before? Now he’s just doing generic hero stuff without any individual personality, and we are obviously expected to feel sadness over the fall of the old king, despite his conquering ways.

Cheetara…Cheetara. She’s loyal to the king, and that might be enough of a motivation, but she doesn’t feel that defined as a character. The adult males are all connected somehow, leaving Cheetara feeling like the odd one out. Panthro is pretty cool, but he grows to defer to Lion-O far too easily; by the end of his first appearance, Panthro is ready to worship the neophyte king he was snapping at before. Furthermore, Panthro’s past with Grune is brushed over far too fast, leading to a greater lack of satisfaction for not explaining the characters’ motivations better.

The kids and the pet are pretty much just the kids and the pet. I expect Wilykit and Wilykat’s treasure quest to make a return, but right now they’re not doing anything interesting. Snaf is still cute as a button, but his cartoony antics are a little grating.

Overall, ThunderCats has answered with a resounding “No.” to the question of “Should we care about these people?” I’m just not interested in any story this series has to tell. If the material in between was at all exciting, I would be willing to have faith and wait until the earlier plot points were resolved, but it’s not. In the same way, sometimes I can sit through bad stories if I care enough about something or some character, but here I just can’t get emotionally invested in anything. I automatically default to believing the worst about this show.

(I did enjoy episode four, though).

The production values are top-notch, but the stories are so bland and full of wasted potential. It’s saddening, because I really was looking forward to this series. I didn’t expect anything perfect, but something close to the of the better action series of the last two decades. This show has the look, but not the moves.

Meet My Friend, Calamity Jane

I love anime; I can name off several series I have on DVD, and about as many manga. Yet I’ve moved beyond the stage where I believed that all anime could be defined by a single set of positive (or negative) traits. Instead, I view anime more as a body of entertainment that can produce some wonderful works, but also things that are horrible, boring, or trite.

Which means that I was in no mood to agree with ….this. I like many of the videos on this site, just like I like many anime, but this is….wrong. This is allegedly the Top 11 American Anime video, and it’s an absolute mess.

Starting with the term “American Anime” itself.  No matter how you would try to define “anime”, slapping “American” onto it would be either an oxymoron or redundant. If you define “anime” as cartoons from Japan, it’s an oxymoron. If you want to be super-snobby and remind us that the Japanese use “anime” to refer to all cartoons, then there’s no reason to assign special traits to “anime”, hence making it redundant to refer to “American anime”.

Now, I have seen other nerds who want to use the term “anime” to refer to all animation that attempts to have depth, regardless of country of origin, which is just what Suede is doing. However, the term “anime” has never, on any large scale, been defined purely by its content. This simply would not stick, as one would have to ignore the dozens of anime who do not fit this narrow description. To narrow “anime” down to only being cool and action-oriented sf and fantasy with drama is completely disingenuous. It’s exactly the same as considering all anime to be tentacle porn.

Furthermore, the tone of even series like Avatar: The Last Airbender are more reminiscent of local cartoons than of anime. There are some indefinable qualities of tone and artwork that ensure even the best “anime style” cartoons do not feel like a Japanese work dubbed into English. There are many cross-cultural plot conventions and character types, but many others that are distinct to Japan, either in terms of content or presentation. This is another reason why “American anime” does not exist.

These examples of “American anime” are thus defined as much by this new narrowed definition of “anime” as by any direct Japanese influence. Just as the arguments hinge on taking a narrow definition of anime, they also rely on taking a very narrow definition of American cartoons and attributing every deviation from that format to anime influences and nothing else. Anime apparently created character arcs, character death, emotional intensity, dramatic atmosphere, ongoing plot threads, heroic robots, dark endings for the heroes, slick and kinetic sci-fi style, and...split-screen animation. No other possibilities are introduced, even though entertainment is never created in a vacuum of its own medium.

In this case, animation doesn’t just feed off other animation, foreign or otherwise, to create new works, and cartoons can’t Gargoyles was influenced by cop dramas such as Hill Street Blues, and Samurai Jack draws from live-action film as well. One can’t look at something that you don’t see often in American cartoons and immediately conclude it must have come from solely from exposure to anime. And even if anime were the sole guiding hand in creating these series, they still would not be “American anime”, because the term just does not work.

Yes, there are still problems with the American animation industry. There is the Disney Monopoly, and some anime for which it will be a long time before something similar exists on American television or direct-to-video. Yet these issues will not be helped by treating anime as a thing that American cartoons must inevitably leech off to be interesting. If anime was to contribute anything to expanding the complexities of American cartoons, it was to be just as one of many possible sources of inspiration, and to prove that certain types of series could be marketable...not that they could even exist in the first place.

The Peculiar Olympians: Shinji Ikari

“The Peculiar Olympians” is a series of blog posts about my most favourite fictional characters. They are each here for some combination of sympathy, empathy, inspiration, humour, quality, staying power, and/or significance to my relationship with fandom. These are not all the characters that I like, but they are the ones that have stood out to me the most. The list is also alphabetical and nothing more.

Though I never rank my favourite things, for a while I considered making Shinji at least the number one character on the list, because his appeal was so different from that of the other characters’, though not entirely foreign, either.

In the year 2015, Earth was devastated by a global catastrophe known as Second Impact. Life has resumed a semblance of normalcy after the 2000 incident, but now the Angels have reappeared: strange creatures with bizarre and multifarious shapes, who cannot be successfully combated by ordinary human forces. Fourteen-year-old Shinji Ikari is summoned by his distant father, Gendo, to be the pilot of Evangelion-01, one of a series of humanoid fighting machines designed to combat the Angels. As each Angel comes, Shinji and other characters must deal with the pain of their own psyches in addition to the stresses of combat, while some try to understand exactly what circumstances created the world they find themselves in now.

Shinji Ikari has been a favourite of mine for a long time, and I’ve grown to find the widespread nerd hatred of Shinji to be stupid and overblown, instead of staying offended by it. Strangely enough, this came right on the heels of my urge actively ensure that my own writing contains stronger and active characters. Writers may not have to write just what they feel like doing, but diligently watch their characters’ movements to make sure the potential audience remains interested. It’s a sobering lesson to learn.

However, this is what makes Shinji so interesting—he manages to be compelling in spite of breaking the rule that a character in popular fiction, no matter their personality, must always be ready to act. In allowing his angst to sometimes paralyze him or fuel bad judgements, Shinji is sometimes misread as exaggerated and theatrical, when the opposite is true. His is a portrayal that shows exactly what happens to people in the depths of despair; such realism is often avoided because it doesn’t make for good storytelling, but there are always exceptions. There is a strange beauty to the raw portrayal of a mind trapped in its own pain, an aspect to life that popular fiction usually avoids.

Shinji is not entirely detached from the streamlining effect of fiction, however, which is fine with me. There is still a plot, after all, and there are times when Shinji proves himself able to take action for moral reasons, and to be humorous or endearing. He’s a character with multiple facets. There are times when he also takes highly immoral actions, including one that should have put him off my radar for good, yet it didn’t. In the end, Shinji does choose what may be right, although the series leaves viewers to decide if the abstract principle was as fulfilling as the actual outcome.

All of my interest in Shinji Ikari is for more than the sake of clinical dissection, however: I do have a genuine liking for the character. I enjoy the way he’s written, and I also find Shinji to be likable and good-natured when not under pressure. That doesn’t excuse him from any moral condemnation viewers care to make, of course, but it goes some way to being a fan of Shinji instead of a detached observer.

I have found that only Shinji in the original TV series, and the film End of Evangelion, to have that appeal. In the manga, and so far in the series of Evangelion remake movies, Shinji’s portrayal is toned down. He can be slightly more aggressive, and his scenes of surreal introspection may be glossed over. As a result, his character is made bland, if not entirely standardized.

(However, I do believe the original Shinji would have reached into the void to rescue Rei Ayanami as he did in the second Rebuild film, because Shinji is not entirely passive, and cares about other people. That’s why Shinji came back in the original episode 19, which the movie scene roughly aligns with.)

Nor do the characters that inspired Shinji, or that Shinji was inspired by, possess that same compelling quality. I did like Tsukasa from .hack a bit, but even had I not had problems with the series, he wouldn’t have been as striking as Shinji. Nor do I find any similar character alleged to be an improvement on Shinji to be an actual improvement—it’s always silly to think a character can be “improved” on by another different one.

I also don’t ship Shinji with anyone. Any fan pairing rising out of Evangelion seems inevitably dysfunctional, and there’s no fun in speculating about those. Asuka and Shinji hate each other as much as they love each other, and not in a cutesy way. Kaworu and Shinji had no substance, which was the point—Kaworu represents the ideal world that Shinji cannot have, and so he must be killed. And so on and so forth.

Overall, while I know very few can get a character like Shinji right, it’s this very feeling of rightness that draws me to the character. He is written how writers are discouraged to write characters, yet I find him compelling in a way that no other character quite is. It’s not the point that Shinji is realistic, for characters in popular fiction don’t have to be, but that he is fascinating.