Underage anime girls aren't the only objects of glassy-eyed idolization out there. Witness Wakaranai's response to Avril Lavigne's Make 5 Wishes:
It really just pains me to say the name of ‘manga’ and all it stands for [Including harems, salaryman porn, women working out their issues through yaoi, battling an endless succession of enemies to be the best, and a lasting phobia of pubic hair? -Ed.] being whored out to the mindless cultural retardation of US pop-culture, [As opposed to the intelligent acceleration of Japanese pop culture. -Ed.] to create some soulless marketing abomination which will be lapped up by the unsuspecting public and mistrued as being an actual manga.
Who knew you could Humbert Humbert the concept of manga? The author elaborates in a comment further down:
I don’t actually think manga is inherently better than any other genre or cultural phenomenon just because it’s manga.
Except for two lines down where she says manga "is far less mindless and trite" than Avril Lavigne and what she represents:
But if you think that MTV and its associated musical culture (The pop charts etc) is of the same creative calibre as the average manga release then you should seriously rethink your analysis.
Later on, another commentator on the blog writes:
Wow…..that’s so….disgusting! How could they? Why do people always feel the need to widen their marketing spectrum by invading popular pop-cultures like manga, just for the sake of money?
Manga, on the other hand, when kept pure in race (especially race) and thought (cultures should be kept separate and unequal), is fueled by creative and artistic integrity. Not money. The truth is, such is the publishing industry that editors welcome their artists with stardust kisses and everyone operates on budgets of fairy dew and moonlight ambrosia. Honest.
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2 comments:
This is Washi who wrote the post from Wakaranai. Just throught I'd leave a little response. Apologies for any spelling or grammatical errors, but this isn't really worth the effort of checking over.
[As opposed to the intelligent acceleration of Japanese pop-culture. -Ed.]
Yes, as opposed to the 'intelligent acceleration' (this makes no sense) of Japanese pop-culture. The propogation of a subculture or genre through exposure and increased availability due to greater consumption is different to shamelessly imitating an art-syle on the premise that it is 'fresh and popular' and using it to market to an entirely seperate cultural identity, which, if consumed en masse, will cause a change in the impression of what 'manga' is. This is not neccisarily a bad thing; several cooperative efforts with the manga industry in Japan have produced some interesting works of art, but when they revolve around the self-indulgent image of a particularly uninspiring pop-star it is already doomed to be completely shit.
[Except for two lines down where she says manga "is far less mindless and trite" than Avril Lavigne and what she represents:]
A genre being "inherently" worse than something else is different to being worse through its representation by its actual content. Reaquaint yourself with the English language before you try to use it against others.
[Manga, on the other hand, when kept pure in race (especially race) and thought (cultures should be kept separate and unequal), is fueled by creative and artistic integrity. Not money]
And now you resort to putting words in my mouth, which could not rationally be derived from my comments before you started hacking them to pieces with your witless, obnoxious comments. This has nothing to do with 'race' whatsoever; Americans are just as capable of producing works of art as any other country - just not Avril Lavigne or any other such teen pop-idol trash. Also, I never said nor implied that the manga industry was not built on the basis of profit - of course it is. But there is a massive amount of variety, artistic talent and originality to be found. Not all manga is produced by this principal, but of the whole manga genre there is more of it to be found than in the likes of Britney Spears, Avril Lavigne (etc). It's not as if I was comparing music as a whole to manga - use some commonsense. I was comparing those artists to a much larger and more diverse genre (manga) and you seemed to have mistaken that for me saying Japan is culturally superior, that the manga industry does not run off money, and that all manga is perfect. Great comprehension skills.
Overall your comments are pointlessly derivative and self-aggrandising. Just because you seem to have nothing to say about anything, I hope you're content sitting on the sidelines making the odd snide remark. I'm interested in seeing what you have to say to this; I'm certainly up for a reasoned debate.
Feed mindless [cultural] retardation into the antonym machine and you get... intelligent acceleration.
As far as I can tell from the blog entry by Make 5 Wishes' author, the original intended audience for it is Japanese and Korean Avril fans via the "digital downloadable market." So although it will see release in the US, the intended format isn't really "manga" and Americans weren't even the original target audience. That's why I think it's missing the point to decry the whoring of manga to US pop culture. (Just for kicks, the project itself is produced by a Canadian group who merely says Make 5 Wishes is in the "Japanese manga style"; d'Errico at least is Canadian, and so is... well... Avril, even though she's earned her share of greenbacks.)
Avril's fans in Asia aren't about to labor under the impression that it's "real" manga; I think it would be pretty hard for readers in the US, even the "social effluent that comprise much of Avril's fanbase", to labor under that impression either. It's called "just look at the cover."
I also don't think it revolves around the self-indulgent image of anything. It looks to me like Avril's involvement was mostly okaying the use of her name/image and a generic press release line that was probably written by a publicist anyway. Somehow I doubt she's living out any fairy godsongstress fantasies through this project. The thinking, probably not on her part, was likely that dhe has lots of fans in Japan and Korea, so let's just give them what they want. Also, Dysart has done "legitimate" comics work; from what I've seen of the sample page, I don't think this is shaping up for eternal greatness, but it sounds like he wasn't out to throw the match on this project - he claims he was shooting for horror.
But back to the textual reading. Examining the following sentence:
But let me be frank: manga is NOT pop-culture to the degree that Avril Lavigne is, in Japan or anywhere else, and certainly it is far less mindless and trite.
Removing the unessential clause, we get the following sentence:
But let me be frank: manga is NOT pop-culture to the degree that Avril Lavigne is, and certainly it is far less mindless and trite.
So there are two possible things "mindless and trite" could be referring to: pop-culture, or Avril Lavigne. If the former, then there are two further possibilities: pop-culture (the genre of pop music and its associated subculture) or pop culture (the cultural phenomenon). In either case, manga is described in the same sentence as being far less mindless and trite than a genre/cultural phenomenon. Not any particular type of manga, just... manga.
Let's say what you actually meant to refer to by "mindless and trite" was Avril Lavigne, whom you described as "one of those popular 'artists' that teeny-bopping cretins tend to obsess over." This brings us back to the understanding that Avril Lavigne is "mindless and trite" compared to manga. But the reasonable inference, which is not hard to draw since you refer to her a sentence later as a representative of a "portion of an industry", is still that a certain genre of music (for which she is shorthand or representative) is far inferior to manga because it fails to display any kind of talent or ingenuity. Again, not inferior to any particular type of manga, just the all-encompassing term... manga.
This is then followed by the assertion that MTV and its associated musical culture is not of the same calibre as the average manga release (whatever that is). Since the gist of your own words is that MTV/pop chart music (and without any qualifiers such as "some" or "most", one can only assume you refer to all MTV/pop chart music) is not of the same creative calibre as the average manga, the rational deduction is that in your opinion, all MTV/pop chart music is below average when compared to manga. Hard not to read a message about the general superiority of manga into that.
Now, about the issue of "inherent": manga, as you know, is an art form that encompasses a huge variety of genres and styles. But you chose not to distinguish any of them, simply using the overall term manga. Merely by having the inherent quality of being manga, any type of manga is folded into your analysis in which manga is, on average, better than MTV/pop chart music.
In short, none of this seems to jibe with your claim that you don't think manga is inherently better than any other genre or cultural phenomenon (and the words "any other" include the genres/cultural phenomenons you evinced a clear distaste for) just because it's manga.
Also, if you read the post more carefully, my closing comment on the purity of manga does not actually follow a segment written by you. And the preceding quote before the closing comment is clearly attributed to "another commentator on the blog" and not its author. Great comprehension skills?
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