Ghostlightning, Studiotolatry & Memes [and other things I missed]

←[88] I’m probably one of the people Ghost talks about, the kind that easily get pulled into the trope-ish nature of what IK had coined “studiotolatry”. [read his original post here]

Blockquote to get it out of the way for subsequent comments:

there seems to be an unjustified focus on studios at the expense of people. Let’s get this straight: directors exercise considerable influence over their anime, whether it’s highbrow, hentai or anything in between. (Granted, the hentai director probably has less money. And less pride.) And narratives, stories, are the products of specific people too. Or, to put it another way, Sunrise don’t wreck trains, particular writers wreck trains, just as Gundams don’t kill people, Tomino kills people.

One thing I don’t get – and you can rightly accuse me of being a dumbass here – is what precisely the director does. So the writer writes the dialogue, the artists draw the thing, the director “animates” it according to his whim?

After glancing through this it seems like there are storyboardists and episode directors, and they’re not always exclusively reserved for the same person.

Actually…forget everything I just said. So, now, I think “studios” are like malignant tumors in that they have a tendency to represent its “contractees” or employees as the qualities which are produced by viewers. What everyone has been saying is that “Sunrise” doesn’t exist, only its constituent parts, and so we should blame those responsible, directors, writers, artists, etc.

So yeah, studiotolatry is a memetic thing, not a concrete thing, as we seem to prefer it. Hmmm

I’ve also noticed that it’s quite cool now to dislike the memes, the trappings, and other related subjects that made Haruhi and Lucky Star popular to begin with. While this is interesting to me, worth studying as a social phenomenon on how the perception of quality fluctuates as more people participate in the consumption and discourse of the subject, I don’t have the capacity yet to fully take this on.

Pretension notwithstanding, the discursive strategies used to criticize or challenge the mainsteam sometimes backfire. It depends on (1) where you write [in blogs, in territory] and (2) who reads it. I had always thought that “horizontal” criticism was more potent because it was, in a sense “legitimate” since it came from the same echelon. Then again, vertical criticism can be very potent due precisely to the difference in location. I remember seeing some little girl talk about environmentalism in a UN summit or something. Similarly, college freshman always hate all sorts of scholars for being convoluted bastards. Balance is difficult but not impossible – Lessig, Rushkoff, Hyde, and uh, people that champion “the people”. Don’t quote me on Lessig/Hyde ’cause I’ve never read their stuff directly.

The development and deterioration of memes is interesting. It’s a lot more than the preceding two paragraphs. To refer to more people I haven’t read, you could say it’s a Hegelian thing [Walter Kauffman says Hegel himself never used the terms], there being two opposing forces which destroy the meme and generate a new one. It’s interesting to consider if the ‘sphere necessitates a memetic quality. I wonder if we could exist without memes…it’s possible, seems a lot less fun, a lot more serious. I wonder if serious business is an incredibly prevalent/resilient/resistant “memetic ideology” that will always serve as an anchored antithesis to whatever thesis-like meme is running rampant in the ‘sphere. Referring to discursive political strategies, it matters greatly if you spell it SRS BSNS or serious business [or even serious fuckin{g/’} business]. Totally different connotations that can be and often are used very effectively. Using those two memes/ideologies seems to work on to whom it was directed moreso than who elicited it. I can’t really think of any recent examples of something pleading to s.b. and getting heavily criticized for taking recourse to standard ‘sphere political warfare tactics.

Alas I’m not nearly as optimistic as Ghost, I’m pretty prejudiced (I think ineffective or poorly utilized publicity images deserve it though). Kai-chan is right, we shouldn’t necessarily be so negative (saying we have the right to be negative isn’t that politically viable); the main issue at hand is to observe and understand the difference between personal blunders vs. structural, social conditions that nurture such dispositions (there’s also groupthink, interesting to think about in the team blog setting). I don’t want to end on a depressing note, so I’ll just say that I like sankaku complex for its pretty pictures and interesting tidbits on porn tax.