Cognitive Resonance

Telling a Truth About Otakon (and Other Things).

The perma-link will be live this afternoon, blog time, which I think is either UTC or EST.

I can feel myself teetering on the abyss that yawns beneath all aca-bloggers, namely, not having enough bloody time. So while I get posts together on the symposium on Japanese politics I attended last week and the documentary Autumn Gem, which I saw today and which is very good, have some links from the current issue of Transformative Works and Cultures. Disclaimer: I know all three of these authors personally (which is why I'm linking to them).

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Mikhail Koulikov has a piece on "Fighting the fan sub war: Conflicts between media rights holders and unauthorized creator/distributor networks." 

sasha_feather has a piece on "From the edges to the center: Disability, Battlestar Galactica, and fan fiction."

And Alex Leavitt has a website review of Inside Scanlation.

I went to WisCon 34 this year, my first WisCon, and had an amazing time. Never one to start small, I moderated two panels on anime and manga: "Teamwork: How Anime & Manga Create a Feminist Space in SF" and "The Works of Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli." 

Both went well, but I liked what I personally said on the teamwork panel a little bit better. Essentially, I kept harping on the money, because there's this naive idea that anime and manga exist in this pure space of cultural expression or whatever and it's just not true. Anime and manga are multi-billion-dollar, multi-trillion-yen global entertainment forms, pure and simple, and ultimately I think the evolution in gender norms and how female characters are presented across genre is attributable in most instances to marketing, even if creators are only aware of such pressures subliminally. /cynicism

The Miyazaki panel was good, too, though I'm still digesting all the points brought up in it. Of course money is an important aspect of Ghibli too; Ghibli is a brand as much as it is a creative vision, and as I said at the end the studio has been trying to find a younger generation of directors who can extend and be faithful to both for years. We'll see, with The Borrower Arrietty, whether they've finally found a winner.