I’ve been too busy composing my final year university dissertation, which is focusing on British TV news comedy shows. The main driving force behind the dissertation is that The Daily Show with Jon Stewart has gotten massive commercial success, along with huge critical and academic acclaim. It’s brought a welcome critical voice to the compliant media using a satirical format that has brought in the previously political apathetic youth and so on and so forth blah de blah de blah. Does Britain have a Daily Show equivalent in news comedy? The rather blunt answer is yes. It’s called Have I Got News For You and it even predates The Daily Show. But I wanted to use a similar critical eye that academics used when praising The Daily Show to British news comedy programmes and see if they stack up.

This is not the dissertation. What I’m writing here is some sort of attempt to collect my thoughts on the 4 shows I covered, before I write up my findings in a proper academic way. It’s got nothing to do with anime, but I wanted to try collecting my thoughts on what I’ve researched in writing somewhere before I wrote it up properly, and at least putting it here will allow me to see what others think.

Warning: It is a very long post.

A show that I think rather fails at any form of news satire is Mock the Week. Headlines are removed from full context with the mocking of appearance in photographs of politicians. The news segment they’re supposed to be covering is stated blankly by centre man Dara with no real conversation of the topic in question. Having 7 bloody people on the panels is part of the problem, particularly when the gruffer laddish humour charges in to make a dumb joke about jerking off.

However I’m inclined not to be overly critical of it not delivering any sort of proper news satire, because its main aim is clearly to just be a comedy. The fact they have an entire segment devoted to a random topic coming up and the comedians rifling through their stand up routines a picking out a part that remotely connects to that subject should be enough of a sign that actual news satire isn’t their priority. They aren’t too bad at being a comedy show. Dara Ó Briain is a genuinely funny man when given the chance, but is too nice to ever really give any political satire. Also he’s the presenter, so can’t really do much anyway. Hugh Dennis is pretty funny too. In fact, Hugh Dennis appears to be the one guy who tries to actually comment on the news items in question, but the sheer amount of people there means someone usually gets in after he’s finished a grand total of one line.

Can’t say much about the rest though. Andy Parsons simply isn’t funny. Frankie Boyle is shock humour for shock’s sake. Their regular guests are pretty shit too. I don’t think there are very many people in Ireland who think much of their ‘national treasure’ that is Ed Byrne. Milton Jones is funny, but his humour is surreal and mainly based off puns, which offers nothing to the discussion. And then there’s Russell Howard…

One of the other shows I covered was Russell Howard’s Good News, and god bless the guy because his heart is in the right place. You can tell what his intention is. He’s sick of fear mongering and brainless coverage in the news and he wants to counteract that. And occasionally he gets it right, such as mocking News of the World’s incessant fear-mongering saying that everything gives you cancer. OK, easy target and low lying fruit, but still worth saying. When you consider we’re comparing these all to The Daily Show, where the political landscape and state of the news networks in America means that you have to stoop just to reach the low lying fruit, this is still worthwhile.

But christ above he can’t cover news properly. Let me run you through a typical Russell Howard piece. Bring up news story. Make joke about the person on screen’s appearance. Explain the news story further. Rubbish the entire story for no apparent reason bar his own scepticism. Instead of explaining why he’s sceptical, show a youtube video of a cat. Make joke about masturbation. Move onto next segment. Instead of satirically tearing apart the logic behind the news story, as Ian Hislop off HIGNFY would do, he discredits it by using a personal anecdote. This leads to a huge amount of his pieces starting with “this one time, right, one of my mates, right”. On Mock the Week, where he has even less time to impose his personality, nearly every single time he opens his mouth is with the dreaded “one of my mates, right”.

Oh right, I mentioned Have I Got News For You, henceforth just the ridiculous acronym HIGNFY. Running for over 20 years, it’s rather set in its ways, which isn’t strictly a bad thing at all. It’s a direct descendent of That Was The Week That Was, which The Daily Show is also inspired by. Well, since it was the first news satire television programme, technically all these shows are descended from TW3, but HIGNFY was set up deliberately to capture the original take of TW3. The show does have clear political influence, particularly since politicians appear on the show. Mind you, the clearest way it has influenced politics is, arguably, getting Boris Johnson elected as Mayor of London. Since I don’t live in London, I’ve never had to care about what his abilities as a mayor are, but he’s funnier than most of the actual professional comedians on Mock the Week. I think he hams up his doddering posh boy persona, which makes him oddly lovable and hilarious as a result.

The easiest way to show how HIGNFY is good is to compare it to Mock the Week and Russell Howard. As I explained before, the people on the show are genuinely interested in taking apart a news story and actually talking about it. Obviously Ian Hislop is the chief at this, but any gaps he misses are invariably filled up by Paul Merton, who is far cleverer than his goofy persona would have you believe. Sitting in on those panels for 20 years would mean he’d eventually absorb enough ability to tackle news satirically. Also for the guests they do bring on, christ is Ian Hislop good at tearing them apart. One of the episodes I covered for my research that was particularly memorable was when a minister for foreign affairs was on. Before the show he had apparently gone on twitter asking for advice, and people told him the “little shit on the end would tear him a new one”, which seemed to cheer Hislop up and do exactly as advertised.

Ian Hislop is indeed a little shit, obviously revelling in political scandals so he can tear them apart, but the show needs him to do so, particularly when you compare to the overly nice Dara from Mock the Week. He makes no concessions for that either, something Paul Merton likes to mock him for himself. What’s odd is Hislop isn’t actually that funny a lot of the time. The jokes often erupt after he has satirically examined the news story in question. It’s not just him obviously, even the folks in charge of putting up words on the teleprompter for the host to read out are really good at what they do. OK their jokes are pretty obvious a lot of the time. I’m convinced they are contractually obligated to make at least one joke per episode about Eric Pickles being fat. But hey, it’s a running gag.

HIGNFY is also more ‘dignified’, shall we say. The humour on Mock the Week and Russell Howard could be described as ‘laddish’. And by laddish and mean blatantly sexist. Russell Howard in particular can’t make a single reference to any woman without commenting on her shaggibility. Mock the Week normally has a full male cast. On the occasion they’ve had the one girl, she rarely gets a word in edgeways. Meanwhile on HIGNFY, there was a particularly memorable segment once where the host asked one of the female panel members what she thought of the royal wedding bride’s dress, and she responded with “could you ask that again, except this time more condescending”. OK, it’s calling out sexism on its own show, but it shows that the one time it could creep in, it was shot out by the panel members themselves.

On the episodes of Mock the Week I covered, there was one girl who appeared twice, who was so forgettable I can’t even remember her name. But the jokes she did do help me segue into my next area: racism. The girl in question was Nigerian, and on both occasions she was called up to do a stand up segment, she did one about her race. Meanwhile HIGNFY had the black American comedian Reginald D Hunter. The only reference he made to being black was when there was a news segment about a Cadbury advert that was perceived as racist. When the host asked if Reg accepted the apology Cadbury gave, he said “let me ask the Black committee board and see what they say”. Again, it’s calling out the own show for a touch of racism, but the fact they called out the one time it happened speaks for it all.

Both the issues of sex and race are rather interesting in comedy as a whole. My kingdom for a black comic who does not base half of their fucking routine off them being black, you’re even less original than the comics who base their routine off air travel. The total lack of female comics is a rather touchy issue, particularly since there isn’t an immediately apparent explanation for it. It doesn’t appear to be institutionalised sexism so much as its society not valuing women with a strong comic ability as much as they do for men, which speaks to a much wider sexism problem that gets into a big auld feminism debate. But my point is that HIGNFY both comments on these and rises above them

And now 10 O’ Clock Live. The newest kid on the block. The one with the big talent behind it. The one that claims itself to be trying to bring a satirical look at the news, exactly like that present on The Daily Show. Does it succeed? Short answer is not quite, but a damn good effort regardless. The show received a lot of critical damning on many fronts while it was airing, which may be partly because of the hype that surrounded it. Particularly comparisons to The Daily Show seem to be damning, although I’d argue people put The Daily Show up on a pedestal, and is hardly perfect all the time itself. Maybe I’m being kinder because I came off watching several seasons of Mock the Week and Russell Howard, but 10 O’ Clock Live was a breath of fresh air next to those shows.

Easiest way to cover the show is cycle through the 4 presenters, starting with Jimmy Carr. His quick coverage of the news segment that each show starts off with is similar to that HIGNFY does with its witty quips after each news item, except Carr is even more direct about its satire of the story. He has made quite a name for himself being a shock comic. Now I do think there is a place in comedy for shock comics. Even though I dismissed Frankie Boyle earlier, he was at least more interesting than the other panellists on Mock the Week. However Carr’s barbs are often more barbed and less nasty for the sake of it, which makes them easier to laugh at without feeling like a horrible person. You are actually laughing at the joke rather than the intent of the joke. Well, most of the time anyway.

His sketch segments don’t work quite as well though. I feel rather harsh criticising individual ones, as the nature of sketch comedy like these is that they don’t always work. Every sketch comedy, from Monty Python to Daily Lives of Highschool Boys, has had sketches that simply don’t work. Heck, even a lot of Jon Stewart’s segments don’t quite work. He does sometimes brute force his way through them by being an inherently funny comic, as does Jon Stewart. Also I’m easy to please and Jimmy Carr in a dress is sometimes enough to make me laugh. But enough of them don’t work for me to sometimes feel just a bit silly to be watching them at all.

Charlie Brooker is the kind of guy who attracts rabid fans of his style of ranty satire, but I think his ability is limited. For example, he’s a complete failure at talking about anything that requires nuanced coverage. But in full rant mode against something that’s clearly wrong, such as Gaddafi or media coverage of the Japan Earthquake, he’s the star of the entire show. Thankfully the show seems to realise this, even going so far as to reference his cynical nature about everything when the cast go into their round-table discussions. Just so long as the show remembers that, I think he’s great.

David Mitchell is the one who is clearly the most emotionally invested in the news coverage, and the one who has done the most research of the cast, which is clear when they go into round table discussion. He’s the one that usually brings up the best points. The show realises that, which is why he tackles the interviews and topics that require slightly more nuanced coverage than Brooker can do. But he’s just not very good at these interviews. Jon Stewart feels more earnest when interviewing, and is capable enough an interviewer to force proper discussion from the interviewees. Mitchell just doesn’t have that. He feels genuine and earnest, but interviewing skills means he neither asks probing enough questions, nor is able to control the large debates. When a politician goes onto HIGNFY, they are playing by the rules of the show itself, which is why Ian Hislop always gets one over on them. Mitchell can’t beat politicians at their own interviewing game.

He isn’t helped by the liveness of the show. Frequently a discussion will have to be cut off before the discussion can really get to the heart of everyone’s problems and some sort of agreement, with them having to cut off to an ad break. Also the live studio audience doesn’t bloody help, what with even the guests trying to play up the audience by suggesting they hang bankers. Mitchell even chastises the audience more than once, telling them it’s not a bloody pantomime. I think a lot of this is simply down to practice, because he definitely has the right intentions and is going about it the right way. Also since I’m mentioning some other problems with the show, christ is this show ever the most left leaning thing on television. This is coming from someone who had the Guardian website as their homepage for a few years. Yes the Tories are in power and satire should be largely directed at those in power, but christ above is it ever overly liberal.

Then there’s Lauren Laverne, who simply does not belong on the programme. I get her roll. She’s supposed to be the presenter to get the other guys talking, but she just doesn’t fit next to 3 professional comedians. She simply isn’t funny. Her comedy segment feels forced. As much as I talked about the lack of women in comedy earlier and how terrible that is, I can’t shake the feeling watching her that she’s simply here because she’s The Girl. She’s a good presenter, but she doesn’t fit with the show’s format. I mainly covered the first season for my dissertation, but I did see the final 2 episodes of season 2. They cut out a bunch of the content to fix the problems of having ads cut halfway into segments. No more of Mitchell’s rants, which is a shame but it made sense when Brooker is better at them anyway. Plus they cut down Brooker’s rants to one per episode, which works because it means they focus on one thing Brooker to cover per episode. But Laverne seems to have gotten even more comedy content to do. Either focus on being a presenter or get an actual comedian in.

Honestly speaking, I think the show is pretty great. I think it’s often more daring and cutting than HIGNFY is, and often even more so than The Daily Show is, although Daily Show is operating in a different environment. It produces some brilliant satire at times, and I hope it doesn’t get cancelled because they appear to be ironing out the kinks. What’s oddly one of my biggest criticisms is I don’t really see why it has to be Live. The one time watching it where they got breaking news in was the No Fly Zone instated over Libya, and all they did was go “ooh boy is there going to be a war”. The sketch nature of it means they’re better pre-recorded anyway. The only other signs of it being live were the cast occasionally fluffing their lines and Jimmy Carr improving occasionally, along with an irritating audience. Ditch the liveness, and change the name to 10 O’ Clock Late or something.

So umm yeah, good job reaching this far, you crazy person who read all this. This is a layman’s version of my dissertation. I’d be really interested in hearing opinions on what people think of the shows in question.

We all know AMVs. Spliced together scenes from anime to the backing track of the creator’s favourite song. Everyone has their stories of how a certain AMV got them interested in a certain anime (although I’m struggling to think of a personal example). However some AMVs cobble together clips from various different anime. Sometimes it’s just because it looks cool, but other times they have a specific goal in mind. There’s a trend, originating from the Japanese side of fandom, of taking clips from a single animators work and cobbling them together to show off their animation style.

Click here to view the embedded video.

This Sakuga MAD (since I feel like being weeaboo for a change) has clipped together the work of Hiroyuki Imaishi, the famous director who did Gurren Lagann. The guy has a rather unique animation style that is much more cartoonish than what you’re more used to seeing in anime. It’s interesting to see, from an animation standpoint, how he brings his style to other anime that normally aren’t quite as cartoonish, such as Full Metal Alchemist. There’s plenty of these sakuga MADs out there (cheers to J159 for this link). I recognised a grand total of 3 of the names on that list, and they were all people who had taken more prominent roles as directors as well as just animators, namely Yuasa, Koike and the aforementioned Imaishi.

So this is all very interesting and stuff, but the title of this post implied I wasn’t particularly a fan of these. More specifically, sakuga nerds rub me the wrong way. There’s a tendency to focus on the fluidity of the animation or the dynamic nature of the camera angles, not the directing or how this animation adds to the story. Yes I take interest in animation myself and frequently comment on how it’s used in an anime, but that’s because I’m watching a visual medium. Your visuals should tell the story as much, if not more, than any of the talking should do. All the dramatic camera angles and exaggerated facial expressions are used to tell part of the story. But sakuga nerds seem to frequently ignore this part and just focus on the quality of the animation in of itself.

Sakuga MADs are a perfect example of this. The clips are divorced from their original meaning. We have no context for what is supposed to be going on here. Actually I take that back, we do have context: the animator whose name is credited for having provided us with that clip. The story is not about the cartoon in question, but the animator himself. Not only have we removed the context of the anime itself, we’ve changed it to meaning solely about the animation. Even the anime themselves blend into one single animation style, because that’s the entire intent. Highlight how this animator uses similar techniques on each anime they work on. It’s animation for animation’s sake.

“But Scamp” I pretend to hear you say. “What’s wrong with that? Can’t someone enjoy animation as something different to the story?” I guess that yes, there is nothing wrong with that. If you get your kicks from enjoying quality animation, then good for you. It rubs me personally the wrong way, because I want every part of an anime, and any storytelling medium, to ultimately contribute to the story itself. I’ve said it many times before, from cuteness to tits ‘n ass, everything should contribute to the story. But then why should I demand that everyone hold the same views? I shouldn’t, basically. But if you follow that line of reasoning, then you run the risk of never critically assessing anything you review, when everyone has different ideas of how the quality should be judged. There are people whose enjoyment is based entirely upon how many lines Hanazawa Kana gets. You have to set out a stall of what constitutes quality, and I’ve set out mine. If you like watching anime simply for good animation, then that’s your prerogative.

There is a specific example I can think of where sakuga nerds really piss me off though. Sometimes for long running shounen series, most notably with Naruto, they bring on board a team of animators for a specific key episode. Generally this means much better animated fight sequences and the Naruto fanbase are incredibly pleased by the results. Sometimes though they bring on board slightly more experimental animators and the results don’t really sit well with the Naruto fanbase. Not having the knowledge of what’s going on here, they try to explain the problems by maybe this episode got a very small budget, or maybe the animators were simply lazy. Sakuga nerds will occasionally show up for these episodes alone to marvel at their favourite animators work. And then they have the balls to mock the Naruto fanbase for criticising the episode when they haven’t a fucking clue what the context for this episode was? How the animation style for this episode might have totally gone against the mood the previous several hundred episodes had been building up? They have the arrogance to declare they know better as to when an episode of Naruto is of superior quality? That pisses me off.

Fanservice does not just mean boobs and panties. It’s anything that has nothing to do with the story and is only there to please the fans. An example would be showing a shot of an older character who has nothing to do with this plot, but the fans happen to like. Say, for example, the game Portal showing Black Mesa logos for fans of the Half Life franchise. However, the most common form of fanservice is showing off the assets of the characters in the show. A panty flash here, a shower scene there. You know the drill.

Fanservice has the negative reputation it has, asides from the obnoxious and distracting elements it often holds, is because it’s used as an attempt to disguise the total lack of anything worthwhile beyond the boobs. The problem now is there are those who see any form of attempted titillation is seen as a negative thing by association. The pavlovian response is that, because the camera is currently staring into the dark abyss of a cleavage, it’s just here for fanservice and therefore a bad thing. Quite often it is, but there’s plenty of other times where sexuality is rather important to the scene in question.

Take Bakemonogatari, an anime with a rather keen fascination with the female body (sometimes with female bodies a bit on the young side, but whatever). In episode 3, Senjogahara, our slightly frightening female love interest, goes to the park with Generic Male Lead Araragi. At this stage, there hasn’t been any romantic feelings between the two, but Senjogahara had fallen for him as a result of the first two episodes. The entire episode is basically spent on Senjogahara flirting with Araragi, trying to get him to recognise she likes him and for him to fall for her (at least, the episode was that, until Araragi went off to molest a little girl, but whatever). The camera, in classic Shafty style, swings about Senjogahara’s body, focusing in on little details like the hem of her bra poking out over the top of her dress. But with these fanservicy shots, they’re almost always shot from Araragi’s point of view, normally with a bit of a wobble in the camera. It’s showing that Araragi is noticing how sexy she is, and getting rather uncomfortable when she leans too close.

The cynical side of most of you are probably thinking that this is so the viewer can feel like Senjogahara is looking over you, the loser male viewer, touching yourself as you watch cartoons. But it’s not like the two can’t exist together. That’s precisely the point I’m trying to make. Sexy and sexuality in general is not something that has to exist solely for the purpose of titillating the audience. It can be woven into the story and the themes. You only need to look at Revolutionary Girl Utena to see that in play on a more abstract level. I’m not talking about eroticism for the sake of eroticism. Go to 2-D Teleidoscope, Listless Ink or Girl Cartoons for stuff like that. I’m talking about eroticism for the sake of Story.

This scene would not have made sense even if Angel Beats was 200 episodes long

When an anime doesn’t end up quite as good as the concepts and plot it tried to tell suggested it could be, varying theories as to how it could have been succeeded get thrown around. One of the most common gripes is that it needed more episodes. Off the top of my head, anime I’ve seen this theory thrown out for are Angel Beats, [C], Xam’d and Jyu Oh Sei, although I’m sure there’s plenty of others. However, in all 4 of these cases, I am not convinced that more episodes would have helped. It would have just resulted in more of the same.

Take Angel Beats for example.

1. The world it created made no sense. It needed more episodes to explain it thoroughly.
2. It didn’t explore the side characters very well. They needed more episodes to give them more depth.
3. The tone of the anime shifted unnaturally and felt jarring. It needed more episodes to smooth out the transition.

Yeah, I don’t agree with any of these. The tonal shift is what the director, Seiji Kishi, does in all his shows. He deliberately uses it for either comedic effect or shock value. Now I don’t think he did that particularly well in Angel Beats, but that’s a different story. Given more episodes, he would have continued using that tonal shifting style anyway. The characters lacking depth didn’t come about through lack of exploration of their characters. Almost all of the characters that didn’t have their back stories explored were one-stock joke characters anyway. There was no back story to tell. Giving them back stories would have come off as trite. No extra episodes would have changed that, unless the show changed their personalities entirely, and that’s not what they wanted to do in the first place. As for the plot making no sense, that’s because the very core of the plot was borked from the start. The world would have made no sense no matter how long they tried to explain it, because the very fundamentals of it made no sense. More episodes would just have made it make no sense even slower.

Jyu Oh Sei races through what seems like it should be a sci-fi epic in the space of 11 episodes. But none of the scenes that occurred necessarily felt rushed in of themselves. The reason it’s so short is because the show didn’t really care about its characters or developing them. It’s token, soulless development. Giving it more episodes would have simply made the anime drag through scenes the viewer didn’t care about. Keeping it short, in my humble opinion, actually kept it watchable. It could be argued that it needed to take better care of developing its characters and giving them personalities and souls, but that’s a problem with the story, not because it was given too little episodes.

And so on and so forth. My key point I’m trying to make is the lack of episodes in of itself isn’t what these anime are lacking. It’s a different problem. In solving that problem, the show might naturally need more episodes to do that in, but don’t trot out the excuse of needing more episodes when something is flawed. Obviously there are cases where more episodes were obviously needed. Anything where the plot doesn’t finish obviously needs more (although sometimes you get people wanting every single bit explained, resulting in some twats asking for more episodes of Madoka), and some genuine cases where an anime with a finished plot still needed more episodes. But please, think about what the problems with the anime in question are before you start claiming it was flawed because it ‘needed more episodes’.

No really. Hear me out. If you’re not already using  a feed reader, this will be the most useful thing you’ll read all day.

And if you already use a feed reader, feel free to totally ignore this post.

But what does Google Reader do, and why should I use it? I’m glad I pretended you asked! Google Reader is a single site that informs you when a different site, be it blog or imageboard or news site, updates with new content. What this means is that you don’t have to visit each site independantly, hoping that there will be a new update and then slinking off in a huff when there is nothing new to read. You can simply visit your Google Reader page and it will tell you when there’s a new update. From there, you can either visit the site and see the new post, or you can read it inside Google Reader itself. Plus you can subscribe to anything you want to see updated. From blogs to news sites to a comment section to a tag on an imageboard to a tumblr site to anything. There are other feed readers like Google Reader, but GR is the most popular and it’s the one I use.

Setting up a Google Reader account

Getting a GR account is a piece of piss. Chances are you already have a Google account anyway. If you have a youtube or gmail account, you have a Google account. Go to the GR homepage and you’ll be greeted with this.

Simply type in your gmail/youtube account in. If you don’t have one, hit create an account and follow the instructions there.

Right, GR account set up. But you’re not subscribed to anyone yet, so it’s looking rather empty.

So now we’ve got to subscribe to a few places we like. You like The Cart Driver? Of course, why wouldn’t you. What a fantastic blog this is with incredibly useful information about Japanese cartoons provided in an entertaining manner. Let’s subscribe to The Cart Driver! There are two ways you can do this. First, you can look for a ‘Subscribe to Feed’ button on the site. Oh would you look at that, there’s one right there on the sidebar!

When you want to subscribe to somewhere, look for an orange button like that. The thing you are subscribing to is called an RSS Feed. Click on that to subscribe to the RSS feed of The Cart Driver.

…is how it should work, but the RSS Feed button is a mysterious magical creature that doesn’t always do what it’s supposed to do. For example, it could give you a simple page like this.

Which is all very easy. Hitting the big “add to Google Reader button” will do the job for you. However, as I said, the RSS Feed button is a mysterious button and will sometimes produce something like this.

ARGH! Clearly this is not helpful. However never fear! For there is a second and much easier method to subscribe to sites. First, go back to your GR account and hit the ‘Add a Subscription’ button.

A text box will appear when you click ‘Add a Subscription’. In there, paste in the url for this site, thecartdriver.com, and click ‘add’.

Huzzah! But just being subscribed to one blog isn’t worth much. That’s not using GR properly. Let’s now subscribe to Ogiue Maniax, which you should do, because it’s an awesome anime blog.

Now where’s that RSS Feed button…ah, I see! Right up the top left. Alternatively, you could just paste in the url of the website into the ‘Add a Subscription’ place and forgo the whole ‘search for a rss feed’ button.

The great thing about feed readers like GR is you can subscribe to pretty much anything that updates with new content. You like Zero Punctuation videos? I know I do! Stick that url into GR and you get updated with every new video. You like naked pictures of Horo from Spice and Wolf (NSFW obviously)? I know I do! Stick that url into GR and you get updated with every new picture. Do you like Cyanide and Happiness comics? I know I do! Stick that url into GR and you know the drill. It’s not a foolproof method, and sometimes it throws a hissy fit when you try to throw in something too specific, or the site isn’t optimised for feed readers. But it works 99% of the time.

Let’s say you’re having trouble coming up with what else to subscribe to. Google Reader will provide you with recommendations. Under the ‘browse for stuff’ on your GR sidebar, go to the header marked ‘recommendations’. However if you’ve just set up your account, there won’t be anything there yet. There is a trick I’ve learned though. Click on The Cart Driver in your feed subscriptions. Go to the drop down bar marked ‘feed settings’ and click ‘unsubscribe’.

Ta-da~! A list of blogs people who subscribe to The Cart Driver also subscribe to. Just make sure when you’re done checking them out, you resubscribe to The Cart Driver. It would be awful to forget to do that.

If you don’t like one of the sites you’ve subscribed to, it’s very easy to unsubscribe, just like that. What I like to do is subscribe to any blog I like a post or two of, and unsubscribe later if I find I don’t like most of their stuff.

There are many other tips and tricks to Google Reader I’ll leave you to figure out yourself. However that’s the very basic beginners guide and some tricks to help you find blogs and places you’d like to subscribe to. If you have any questions about Google Reader, please do ask. No matter how stupid, I promise I’ll try to help you. This actually matters to me, because when someone is subscribed to your feed, it’s an effective method of keeping them reading your blog.

Cuteness is a very simple way of appealing to the viewer. It runs the same way something sexually titillating would work. Here’s some boobs, now get a boner. Here’s a kitten, go kyaaa~. That’s the highly simplified version of events. A more likely scenario would be something slightly more complex. Here’s a generic male lead who accidentally falls over and grabs hold of some babes breast. The girl blushes before knocking him away. The aim of this scene is still sexual titillation. Self-projection into the male lead and imagining that the girl likes being grabbed by the boob. For cuteness, it would run something along the lines of having a fancy male character blushing when he realises lead female has seen him rescue a kitten. The end product is still attempting to generate a kyaaa effect.

I don’t like this. The appeal being merely cuteness is such a cheap method of drawing thrills from the viewer. There’s no story here. No characterisation, no humour, no expertise. It’s not that I can’t enjoy cuteness, but to gain such cheap thrills is lame. Compare this to giant robot fights for a second. I don’t get any enjoyment from simply watching bullets and beams being fired everywhere. I haven’t a clue what’s going on in the fights during Gundam Seed, and it merely ends up being a parade of colours that is dull to sit through. The fights in Broken Blade clearly demonstrate each move in the battle with incredible care and precision, highlighting how clunky these machines are. You actually get the sense that these are real machines and the moves tell a story in their own way. That’s a proper use of robot battles.

Cuteness has do something beyond the cheap thrills to appeal, using cleverer methods via storytelling to get across the cuteness. The mini squid girl segment from Invasion Squid Girl is fantastic at this and one of the few times cuteness has actually appealed to me because it told a story through the cuteness. Either that, or the cuteness has got to serve another purpose. Back to sexual titillation for a second, there was the pole dancing scene in Panty and Stocking. The deliberately sexualised manner of it was a parody of the magical girl transformation sequences and how otaku loved seeing their magical girls naked midway through the transformation. The sexualisation served a purpose and the scene would have felt unnecessary and pointless without that layer behind it.

To bring this post in a full circle, let’s go back to Chiyo for a second. Dressing Chiyo in a penguin suit is cute. But the humour of the whole situation is the reactions of the other characters. Each character’s reactions add to their characterisation. Of course Sakaki would explode at the sight of Chiyo in a penguin suit, but the other characters all being subjugated to the extreme cuteness and blushing like Sakaki showed how goddam cute she really was. That’s what made it even funnier when Tomo’s gut reaction upon seeing the waddling epitome of cuteness was to push it over. That’s how you use cuteness. It’s a means to an end, not the end itself.

There was a cart driver is Castle of Cagliostro. Almost certainly The Cart Driver. Same cloak and everything

This was originally going to be a Year In Review post but the ending of Kuragehime sucked enough to make me have to reconsider whether it was better than Durarara or not. Plus, I was bored of trying to dredge up any romance anime this year in which I gave a shit about the actual romance while looking for excuses not to give that incomprehensible mess Gundam Unicorn any awards even though it looks and sounds so damn good. So instead, here’s some new years resolutions. Not just my new years resolutions though. Some new years resolutions for you lot too. Because I’m nice enough to share some of mine with you guys.

I will: Watch some big franchise anime

Towards the end of last year I dipped my toes into some of the biggest anime franchises around, but this is the year I’m going to properly delve into these franchises. Watching Castle of Cagliostro has made me yearn for more Lupin III. The lack of much decent mecha around nowadays means I should probably watch some of that massive Gundam franchise so I can actually understand what’s going on in Unicorn. There’s a hell of a lot of other franchises I’d like to try as well, from Votoms to Patlabor to Slayers. Heck, it doesn’t even need to be a ‘franchise’ per say. I’d love to watch some of those longer running series like Ruruoni Kenshin, Hikaru no Go, Hajime no Ippo and Galaxy Express 999.

You will: Stop writing banal crap on twitter

Sorry person-who-wrote-this, but why did you write this? Who did you think would care?

Twitter is cool. It’s understandably difficult to understand its appeal when you’re not on it, seeing it as the 140 character limit seems like it should degrade intelligent dialogue. But what it achieves is forcing people not to babble and express a coherent thought in as few words as possible. No really, it’s better than it sounds. But it doesn’t help when people decide that the format on twitter means they can write whatever. I ask you, denizens of twitter, before you hit that ‘tweet’ button, to ask yourself “why would anyone care about this tweet?”. Why do we care that you are awake? Or going to sleep? Or having a shower or eating biscuits or looking at photographs or any other banal activity. Or how about a disconnected tweet that tells us nothing? Or one that tells us that you are feeling angry for no apparent reason? It’s not difficult to stop writing uninteresting stuff. In fact, it’s easier than actually writing said uninteresting stuff. Just don’t hit that bloody ‘tweet’ button!

I will: Watch Terribad anime

Actually I’m not talking about Hida Sketch. I mean the stuff that that everyone hates, not just me. But goddamit, I HATE this show

The urge has finally hit me. It comes to each and every anime fan at some stage in their lifetime as a fan. The need to discover what is truly the worst anime of all time. It’s time to break into that vault of the truly legendary terribad anime. Eiken, Apocalypse Zero, Violence Jack, Garzey’s Wing, Mars of Destruction, Gundoh Musashi and a whole lot more that anime fandom have otherwise forgotten about (ayone ever heard of Abunai Sisters? Thought not). There’s a huge vault of truly terrible anime out there waiting to be thrown up upon. I now feel it’s time for me to dive into that pile. Wish me luck~!

You will: Call out sexual titillation-only anime for the crap they are

Yes, I’m not just talking about crap aimed at men in their 20’s who can’t handle real women. I’m talking about the Y chromosome too

To-Love-Ru is a terrible anime. Miracle Train is a terrible anime. Kiss X Sis is a terrible anime. Starry Sky is a terrible anime. Rosario to Vampire is a terrible anime. All generic, fan-pandering crap that relies on the viewers being enthralled by beautiful anime characters and fanservice shots instead with voices that make your hearts melt or dicks stand to attention are terrible anime. “Stop lapping up this crap” is what I want to say, but people want their boobs. They want their parade of identical bishies and wish-fufillment magical girlfriends in skimpy clothing. Whatever about that. What you need to do, though, is not pretend they are anything other than this and, more importantly, stop pretending that an anime that uses sexual titillation as its main appeal is a good thing.

I will: Try out a new way of talking about anime on the internet

For the record, I was wearing the hat in that video before I heard of Zero Punctuation

Sorta. What I mean is try something that’s not just text-based like this. Something instead of a new blog post. Something like audio, like maybe a podcast (except make sure I’m not just another one of the endless parade of ‘bunch of guys chatting about the latest news and what they watched’ that saturate anime podcast land currently). Or learn to draw simple facial expressions so I can write web cartoons and comics, because making people laugh is much easier in that format. Or video reviews, which is what I’m most interested in giving a shot. Something like Zero Punctuation, except with anime. Not exactly an original idea and I’m sure a search on Youtube would reveal plenty of other people trying the same thing. But I think I am funnier than them, have an existing audience to use as a springboard to stardom and, most importantly, I have an accent. Besides, it’s not like doing reviews of the latest weekly airing anime I watched was an ingenious or original idea now, was it?

You will: Learn the difference between Equinox and Solstice anime seasons

I’m not sure how many seasons have to go by before anime fans get it into their thick skulls that the spring and autumn seasons are always better than the winter and summer seasons. That’s how things are. Anime companies release their big guns in those seasons. The 2-cour shows are released then (although there’s been a dearth of them recently) and the bigger companies like Bones and Production IG release their anime around then. If a winter or summer season has 4 anime worth watching, then it is a good season by comparison to previous winter and summer seasons. Actually let me use this space to try add two phrases to anime fandom’s collective lexicon: Solstice Seasons = Summer and Winter seasons, typically has less anime that are shorter and poorer quality. Equinox Seasons = Spring and Autumn seasons, typically has more anime by the bigger name studios, including many 2-cour or longer shows. Learn the difference

So why cover Dominion Tank Police? Vintage 1988, dubbed a few years later (actually it was dubbed a fair few times, both in America and England. For the purpose of this post, I’m talking about the one dubbed in England). It’s based off a manga by Masamune Shirow, the guy who wrote Ghost in the Shell. It’s about the mad Tank Police gang, who are quite literally police who chase criminals in tanks, and their constant failures to capture a criminal and his pair of ex-stripper catgirl sidekicks. It’s very much a campy, comedy anime, albeit the last episode changes tone to something a lot more serious and deep. It’s a pretty awesome OVA, one of the best I’ve seen in my recent trawl through plenty of other terrible ones. But I’m here to talk about the voice acting.

The dub is very hammy altogether. Plenty of characters totally overact their pieces. The catgirls are given what appears to be 1930’s New York accents. The researcher given the most ridiculous faux-Einstein accent. They even change the music for the opening song. The thing is, the Japanese voices are exactly the same. They are just as hammy and ridiculously overacted as their English counterparts. The catgirls slur their words together, although I can’t place the accent. The various members of the tank police are acted with various forms of the shouty excited voice. Both sides are strangely hollow during the more serious parts (although it makes a bit more sense for the character to sound hollow in context). While the hammyness of the acting adds to the overall camp feel of the anime, in both cases I think it’s partly down to plain poor acting than it being actually intentional.

It’s no secret I’m totally indifferent to seiyuu names and who voices who in my anime. This isn’t because I think voice acting is irrelevant though. That’s more down to each seiyuu having no say in the eventual quality of the anime. But it’s also down to simply not paying as much attention to how the voices are done. Honestly, the sub group a greater factor to your entertainment than who voiced the anime. When it comes to dubs though, you’re listening solely to the voices and therefore notice every nuance in the actors voice. When it comes to Japanese voices, you accept what you hear because you don’t know what the language should sound like. Hence you’re normalised to hearing the bad acting and accepting that as how it should be voiced.

That said, this can still be used as a reason for watching sub over dub. You are, in a sense, innocent to what voice acting should sound like so accept what you hear in the subbed version. That very innocence can actually improve your perceived quality of the acting and any flaws get accepted as how it should sound. Terrible acting in a language you actually speak is way more distracting than one you don’t. I’m not making the claim that English-speaking voice actors are better than Japanese ones (despite thinking that Crispin Freeman is better than any Japanese seiyuu), but that the Japanese voices are far from the infallible and perfectly voiced things weeaboo seem to believe they are.

Besides, not all the changes the dub make are bad. Compare the engrishy Hot Dance in Cherry Moon to the English version Tank Police. Both are awesome camp pop, but I marginally prefer the English version.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

So.…why? Why are a lot of my favourite anime littered with large yaoi fangirl fanbases? Forget Hetalia for a second. Hetalia is a female version of moe. Why do the likes of Durarara, Death Note, Code Geass etc. attract both myself and yaoi fangirls? Well, the first and obvious answer people would come up with would be that I am, in fact, a women. Now that’s quite an easy thing to check the answer to aaaaand…nope, I’m male. The second answer people could come up with is that I am gay. For the sake of research, let’s test this theory.

Nope, not doing anything. Now a women, upon viewing this picture, would feel her nipples go hard. A homosexual man would get an erection. Myself? No erection (and in case you were wondering, no, my nipples aren’t hard either). Now time to test another picture.

Pretty hot stuff. Women upon viewing this picture would probably close the browser window, or perhaps critique Eri’s taste in lingerie. As for myself, I’m displaying the typical bodily reaction a male would upon being sexually aroused.

But maybe the reason I like these sorts of anime has nothing to do with sexual preferences! I know, it’s shocking to think but maybe it’s true. Perhaps the reason I like these anime with homoerotic tension is because they’re the only anime that have any sort of decent male character relationship dynamics.

Think of what attracts yaoi fangirls to a certain pairing for a second. Beyond the typical hot guys and they happen to exist in the same universe (sometimes even that’s not a requirement). The two male characters have strong feelings for each other. Whether it be interest, friendship, loathing, fascination or any other type of emotion that means both characters find themselves thinking about the other frequently. There’s a spark between the two that make them fascinating to watch together. There’s a fantastic tension between the two when they’re together. To use our favourite Sushi Chef’s phrase, the two have a ‘complex’ about each other that draws them together.

This type of relationship can happen between a male character and a female character as well, but in these cases it’s quite clearly implied many times that the two have romantic feelings for each other. It’s incredibly rare to find a male/female relationship dynamic that isn’t romantic that has anywhere near the same tension as a romantic relationship would have.

What about female/female character dynamics? I’m afraid I’m drawing a blank on that one. Maybe it’s because I’m a man but I never find these friendships, hatred or any sort of fascination between the two ever that interesting to watch. While there may be one interesting character in the relationship, the other is often this do-good girl who runs around with a smile on her face, ever intent on being helpful or moe or whatever.  The other female character has a passing interest in the other, usually with one hand on their hip, a wry smile and saying “you’re an interesting person”. OK, that’s a gross overgeneralisation, but there doesn’t seem to be that much proper exploration of female/female character dynamics.

I really tried to think of a female duo I enjoyed watching, but none of my favourites threw up anything. Hellsing has a fantastic character dynamic between Alucard and Integra, as well as Alucard and Victoria (in the original Hellsing that is. Not Ultimate. Ultimate sucks balls), but nothing between Integra and Victoria. Black Lagoon? You’d think Revy and Balalaika would be interesting to watch but there’s no spark there. Ayanami and Asuka? Nope. Tessa and Kaname? Nope. Yoko and Nia? Nope. Anything in School Rumble? Eri and Mikoto are rather interesting but there’s certainly no spark there.

Even take some classic examples people might use. Haibane Remnei with Raki and Reki. Nope, I never found them interesting to watch together. I was much more fascinated by the world than the characters. Azumanga Daoih and the two teachers? They were fun but that was about it. Mai HiME? Hugely boring cast of characters so much so that I can’t remember there names, let alone whether they had interesting relationships. Minami-ke siblings? Chiaki and I AM BOSS were fun to watch but again, nothing doing. In fact, the only female/female character dynamic I could come up with that I enjoyed watching was the Noir pairing of Mireille and Kirika. They were fascinating to watch together and watch their relationship slowly change throughout the series.

But that’s it on the female/female character dynamic side. Male/Female there’s Horo and Lawrence, Nodame and Chiaki, Jinto and Lafiel, Senjogahara and Arararagi, Murasaki and Shinkurou, Sagara and Kaname. Male/Male character dynamics there’s Light and L, Shizuo and Izaya, Mugen and Jin (love the unspoken conversations that went between these two throughout the anime), Simon and Kamina, Reinhard and Yang (they rarely ever meet each other, but the presence of the one is always on the others mind), Vash and Wolfwood.

Or maybe I’m not looking in the right places. As you can probably tell from most popular search engine term being ‘durarara episode 24′ I originally started writing this post almost 3 month ago. Since then, I’ve stumbled across a series that gives evidence contrary to what this post says.

Noizimi, the guys who put up legal streams of Irresponsible Captain Tylor that is actually available in my country, put up the first two episodes of MariMite. Within 5 minutes of the first episode I saw everything that bores me about anime. It was a bunch of girls being insufferably nice to each other in its near purest form. An all-girls catholic school where nobody is allowed to move quicker than a light stroll. Where female/female character dynamics are on the menu for the rest of eternity. Yet I reached the end of the episode and found I didn’t hate the thing. It took me until the second episode before I discovered why. When the girls were talking about leaves falling and their favourite type of nuts, it’s as boring as any other ‘bunch of girls being insufferably nice to each other’ anime out there. But the rest is politics in the guise of a yuri anime. They hide harsh put downs as polite rebukes. The characters are fascinated by each other and find their minds constantly stuck on that other person. Unlike the many other shows with a Mary Sue leads or moe girls, these characters are actually interesting to watch together.

So maybe female/female character dynamics are as fascinating as male/male character dynamics. I’ve just yet to watch those anime that do it well yet.

Let me tell you a little story. Once upon a time, not that long ago, I was a newbie to anime fandom. I had seen about 10–15 series, most of which were in my predominately fruitless search for the next great seinen romance. I was not particularly internet savvy, having never before searched the internet for anything other than social networking sites. But despite this, I worked up the courage to post on an anime forum. I’d read all the forum rules so I wouldn’t go making some newbie mistake, despite not having a clue whether I was flaming or trolling or not because I had no idea what either of those words actually meant. But still, I posted a question, something about how many anime did I have to watch  before I could reasonably call myself a knowledgeable anime fan.

In a proceeding forum exchange, there was one guy who decided it was his rightful place to make as much fun out of this newbie as possible. He was about as condescending as one could be, totally turning me off the site from there on and leaving me feeling a lot more hurt than any future encounter over the internet ever left me (this coming from a guy who ran that shitstorm known as the Aniblog Tourney so I’ve had my fair share of abuse hurled my way). But this guy’s tirade hit me more than anything else. It wasn’t as though he had anything useful to say either. He just wanted to be the big internet bully and show off to his forum buddies.

This incident all came rushing back to me thanks to Scott Pilgram. Why? Because this cunt had a Scott Pilgrim forum avatar. I never knew this when the original exchange happened. I only recognised this when I saw Scott Pilgram artwork. It was that guy there in the picture, with the ears and tail and everything. The fucker.

I’m writing this and thinking to myself ‘cry moar’, which is part of the reason I felt like writing this. Infected by internet culture, I’ve become used to dismissing what idiotic newbies write about anime, not knowing much better. Eventually though, they’ll grow up into regular forum posters, imageboard visiters and commenters and know as much about anime as that person who dismissed them all those years ago. They don’t know any better and probably know they don’t know any better. But all you’re achieving by doing this is turning people off what you love so much. You’re influencing a new generation to not want to watch your favourite stuff. This is also the main reason people don’t want to watch older anime. You’re turning them off by being condescending pricks.

Be nice to newbies. This is such a basic lesson it’s hardly like it applies to anime at all. I don’t want to turn people off Arakawa Under the Bridge simply because I was a dick to them. Seasoned veterans can handle it. Thick skin develops if you use the internet long enough. But don’t be condescending because they’ll harbour that loathing when they become seasoned veterans.  Heck, look at me. 3 years on and here I am, a bountiful casket of knowledge and wisdom pertaining to all Japanese Animation and related products, loved and adored by millions. Fuck you random forum guy. You probably got the burnout anyway.

And I never intend on watching Scott Pilgrim.