Switched to Flickr because my FUCKING photobucket bandwidth ran out really FUCKING early this month
Trapeze 3 was probably my favorite episode of the show yet, largely because I identified directly with the character driving it. Toriyama has the same obsessive-compulsive disorder that I do – a constant need to check things. And he has to be just as bad as I am. It’s not enough to wonder if he’s reused his plot devices, he actually makes a list of every plot device he’s used to check back on! And then he can’t even trust his own list! Very much something I’d do. But anywho…
It bothers Toriyama that he has fallen into a pattern. A lot of this fact comes from his heart just not being in the romance literature that has made him popular and well-off. Maybe he was into it back at the start, and maybe he does genuinely enjoy the age-gap romance trope, but he’s burned himself out on it. He’s just so afraid of loosing his success that he doesn’t want to leave behind romance novels. I completely know where he’s coming from.
I have created many, many stories over the years (none of which have ever managed to become projects, but maybe NaNoWriMo can change that!) and at some point, it became very evident that they were all the same goddamn thing. I ALWAYS have to portray openly sexual characters. I ALWAYS have to write in lesbians. In some of my projects, I became worried just about the fact that there were so many lesbians that no one would think the story was believable (are there no goddamn straight women in this city?!) My stories must include death, usually turbo-violence, but even if I leave violence out, most of the characters are going to die. And I like to have a young female lead who usually becomes immortal at the end of the story.
Like Toriyama, I get very worried that I’m falling into formula (which is embarrassing when you haven’t even WRITTEN ANYTHING YET) because I don’t want to find myself being ‘that guy who writes about lesbians’. But maybe that’s a less accurate comparison, because I really DO want to write about lesbians. So maybe it’d be more accurate to say that if I were to become fearful of being an all-lesbian author and wrote a straight story and it got popular, I’d probably feel like I had to write straight stories for popularity, and it would quickly become a bad road to go down.
I wonder if anyone's noticed that I steal all my screenies from Anime Kritik...
But hey, I’ve never written a novel, so let’s move to something I can compare more accurately. (I’d get into how, like Toriyama, I write tons of sex stories in spite of being a virgin, but I actually enjoy doing so, kind of ruining the comparison.) Let’s take blogging instead, which I’ve done for years and recently gotten a lot more successful with! I desperately want success for my blog, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t selling out in some way. I am definitely trying to make my style easier for people to get into. In some ways, I am doing this for my own benefit (cutting my old aggressive attitude and improving my spelling and grammar), but there are some things that I’m definitely doing to sell out. For instance, episodic posts (though once again, I’ve failed at that! All that’s left is Trapeze!)
It’s come to a point where I’m honestly somewhat scared of making posts that I don’t think people will read. The posts that I take the most pride in or that are on my favorite series are rarely the ones that get a justifiable number of hits/comments. I could do a million and one posts on Boogiepop and Others, but I promise you I wouldn’t get one single comment unless I linked my posts to Andrew Cunningham and begged him to comment on them (which I have done a couple of times in the past!!!)
And what did I do when I was faced with this problem? I actually went ahead and joined an entirely new blog. When I decided that I wanted to still make obscure posts and talk about things that wouldn’t get comments, I actually went to a whole new place to do it. I assure you, if and when I make my Boogiepop and Others posts, it will be on that blog. And I want to think that this is probably what Toriyama did in the end. Did he forsake the romance genre altogether? I’m sure he didn’t. I’m sure he still wants the success, and I’m sure that he can find ways to innovate and enjoy the genre, but I also think that he’ll do a lot of more personal books and maybe infuse those elements into his romance novels as well. As Anime Kritik put it: “The new Toriyama/Hoshiyama will write his novels as he sees fit, without denying either the romance side or the serious side.”
And that’s great. I want him to do both, and I want to do both. Obviously, if I didn’t want success, I would destroy this goddamn stressful blog and go be artfag somewhere – but no, I DO want success, or else I wouldn’t have come this far, and the same goes for Toriyama. And that fat old guy can fuck himself! Maybe Toriyama isn’t huge on romance in the meat, but that doesn’t mean he can’t write about it with fervor! I am obviously not a lesbian, nor do I even know any lesbians, but I still write about them with the utmost passion!
Alright, enough of that, notes on the episode. Shinichiro Miki was great as Toriyama and all of the other voices continue to be superb, just as loli Irabu continues to make my balls hurt, especially when he/she/it was reading Tomorrow and commenting on how deep it was. The animation was a vast improvement over the last episode, and I especially loved the scene where Toriyama and the old dude bare it all in an argument. Like Cunningham, I’m wondering how the fact that Toriyama was a woman in the novel changes things. I think it’s funny that Remm is just now noticing the animal head thing. Is he blind? :p. Anyway that’s all I’ve got, this post is getting too huge.
My Sword Is Unbelievably Dull 
It’s probably a good thing you’re leeching from AK. Every other picture here (and on SAD, come to mention it) is showing as “bandwidth exceeded so FU” instead.
When you say you write lesbians, do you mean genuine lesbians or lesbonings (a word I invented to mean lesbians presented in media for the titillation of men). As someone with some small writerly ambitions myself I often find it difficult to write, say, female characters, simply by virtue of the fact that I am not one. I can’t imagine the faff I’d get myself into attempting to write a category of person I was entirely unfamiliar with.
And I’m not sure I follow your logic on the unpopular posts. They might not draw as many comments, sure, but do you really think they’d detract from your overall comment count?
One hundred and thirty eight words so far and not one on the aubject of the OP.
…
I still think there’s something interesting to be said about the Mayumi/Toriyama dynamic beyond the obvious fact that she’s actually doing something here, but it still eludes me.
Sorry if this comment reads a little odd. I’ve been listening to Denki Groove’s “Kanpeki ni Nakushite” on repeat for an hour and a half now and I can no longer tell the difference between breathing and dancing.
I write lesbians the same way I write other characters – inexplicably. I can’t actually write characters, becaus I don’t understand people as a whole. More accurately, I don’t seek to write realistic characters. I want to pull one of my alltime favorite quotes, from the great Satoshi Kon, in reply to a question about why Perfect Blue and Milennium Actress both had female protagonists.
“I like women (laughs). Of course with Perfect Blue it was necessary to use a female character because it was about an idol. Between that film and Millennium Actress I had several plans to make films, but unfortunately none of them worked out. One of these plans was a story about a male protagonist. But in the end I made two films about a similar character. This may seem meaningless, but it does mean something. It’s because female characters are easier to write. With a male character I can only see the bad aspects. Because I am a man I know very well what a male character is thinking. Even if he is supposed to be very cool, I can see this bad side of him. That makes it very difficult to create a male character. On the other hand, if you write a female protagonist, because it’s the opposite sex and I don’t know them the way I know a male, I can project my obsession onto the characters and expand the aspects I want to describe. However, my next film doesn’t have one central female protagonist and until I made Perfect Blue I didn’t describe female characters that much, especially in manga. Once I did, I found out it was easy to write them. ”
As for my logic on unpopular posts, do not consider it ‘logic.’ Consider it ‘digital boy is a nutcase’.
Did you just manage to turn an episodic post of Trapeze into a post about yourself??
Also, those screencaps suck..oh, wait..
Himself and lesbians. :D Legendary.
Though, isn’t relating everything back to personal experience a valid journalistic technique?
I consider myself an ‘otaku gonzo journalist’ so yes :D
“We can’t stop here, this is Shounen Bat country?”
Snorting ground up pocky off of the breasts of Senjougahara body pillows?
Taking a hit of acid and then watching Kaleido Star
The blog thing hit too close to home…
Inexplicable lesbians? How does that work? Is it that no one can tell why they chose the couple they do or something like that?
‘otaku gonzo journalist’
I must say I liked the posts where you seemed to be very angry, so I’d like to read one of those again. Actually, what kind of voice do you have? You should try to do a ZP-style video.
I’ve considered doing a ZP style video actually, but I don’t have a way to make it artistically interesting and I can’t quite figure out how he gets the speech to flow so well (is he memorizing the whole review? Or is he cutting audio together?) Anyway, I’m wondring if you can tell me which angry posts you liked exactly.
As for inexplicable lesbians, lol. I don’t even know how to explain it…
-Why Yuuya Satou is a Sad Excuse for Tatsuhiko Takimoto (Welcome to the NHK Related, For Those of You Who Have No Idea Who I’m Talking About)
-The Reason a Phrase Like “Shounen” Exists is So You’ll Stop Bitching About Shows That Weren’t Meant For You
-Everybody Gets One – Anime’s Personal Rage Machines
not that angry but still counts: These People Can’t Act!!! Another Example of Dubs Failing Horribly
this one reminded me of ZP’s Psychonauts review:
Watch Geijutsuka Art Design Class, Talk About It, and Get it Subbed Faster (OR: GA – Hidamari Sketch Turned Up to Eleven and Played in Fast-Forward)
he cuts out the breathing pauses: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/the-escapist-presents/1063-Audience-Questions-for-Yahtzee
Ah, see, I’m fine with writing in that style. What I’m getting away from is some of my posts from before I became Fuzakenna wherein I had a very ‘GR ANGSTY TEEN’ approach to anime blogging. What I’ve gotten away from is being accusatory and mean, but I still do a lot of anger in the sense of cuss words and fast reading.
Like what you did on my place? Geez, you.
Anyways, meet someone who’s the exact opposite of what you did, blogging-wise: Me. There are reason as to why a gentle approach suddenly becomes full of RAEG and vice-versa, and my case may be something along the lines of unrestricted writing. However, I do find out that a part of the audience seem to become a part of what I write, and as someone with responsibilities to the Fourth Estate, I suddenly felt pain when I weave words that subconsciously hurt the potential readers. So I toned myself down a bit, yeah.
Pingback: Manga no Tsukurikata ch. 18 – Cover Issues « Suspended Animation Dreams
Pingback: The Crisis We Bloggers Also Face: November, Empty Eggs, and Kuchu Buranko 3 « Rainbowsphere