By jennifu, on May 14th, 2012 
Detective Conan is probably my favorite manga of all time; certainly many series are objectively better, and there are tons of times that I’ve been more excited about a newer series for a short burst of time, but Conan’s the only series that has held my interest continuously for a decade.
Unfortunately for me, Detective Conan is a very difficult series to proselytize. The characters and readers are young*, the setup for a lot of mysteries is rather contrived (for some reason someone always dies whenever Conan goes camping/tags along for some award ceremony characters/eats at a restaurant), and there’s a LOT of filler– unlike even Naruto or Bleach, where there’s “too much filler,” Detective Conan is actually predominantly filler. I always make the joke that there’s one major plot development per year in Detective Conan, and that’s actually pretty true. The manga has been running for 17 years with (at the time of this writing) 800+ chapters, so it’s certainly understandable why it’s kind of a daunting series.
I think this is all a crying shame because the plot of Conan, whenever it shows up, is actually pretty intense and thrilling. There aren’t many other kids’ shows with such high-stakes showdowns against crime syndicates and terrorists (and really, there aren’t many other kids’ shows with as much blood and death). The characters, including (especially?) the minor ones are generally very distinct and likeable, and the romances– some of them heartrending– develop believably, even if it takes decades. There’s a reason that the anime’s television viewership demographic consistently ranges 8-40– certainly it’s written for and enjoyed by children, but its appeal is far broader than most kids/shounen manga.
Since I’m trying to get more people to read Conan, I’ve compiled a short, fairly spoiler-free reading guide for the first 200 chapters, with more to come. I know it’s unreasonable to expect anyone to read all 800+ chapters of this manga just for the promise of awesome but sparse plot, so I’ve included information about which chapters are actually important, along with some short notes. (more…)
By jennifu, on February 3rd, 2012 
In 2011, MIT Anime received a mysterious package in the mail, simply postmarked “From Japan.” The envelope contained a bunch of small anime-related flyers, along with a two-page letter in English and a stapled supplementary packet. While the actual anime-related materials were pretty innocuous, the printed content is crazy and hilarious paranoid enough that I feel like I have to reproduce it here for shame, partially because it’s laughable and partially because I am actually offended.
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By jennifu, on January 26th, 2012 
I was active in the MIT Anime club all throughout undergrad (and even as cruft*, I meddle in their affairs way too much today), and during those four years, there was enough drama and insanity that I often felt I could practically write a memoir about the whole thing.
When I applied to MIT, I’d read about the anime club in admissions blogs and had really high hopes– if MIT is arguably the nerdiest college on the planet, surely the MIT-brand anime club itself must be a veritable otaku mecca– and in some ways, the real thing exceeded my expectations, while in others it failed miserably. (I have to admit that my first choice school was Stanford– sunny weather and in the same state as AnimeExpo!– but alas, it was not meant to be.)
After years of sitting in on officer meetings and hearing the previous generation’s reminiscing about anime clubs past, then trying my own hand at running a club, I feel like there’s a lot of weird knowledge and wisdom in this world that most otaku don’t see, so I’d like to impart a bit of it to readers.
In this first of a potentially-several-part series, I want to cover what MIT Anime was like “back in the day,” and some of the things that have changed since in the environment for anime clubs.
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By jennifu, on January 20th, 2012 In August 2010, “hikikomori” was added to the Oxford English Dictionary, joining the ranks of such fannish terms as “anime,” “kawaii,” and “otaku.” While most of these words are only in common use in otaku lexicon rather than in general English, it’s interesting to note that some of these types of “poppy” and “fannish” words are a bit more universal in contemporary Chinese, doubtlessly because of the proximity in culture and geography to Japan.
This makes particular sense in Taiwan, which was governed by Japan for 50 years before becoming the de facto-independent Republic of China, and some artifacts of this rule exist today in both (some) island attitudes towards Japan and certain artifacts or landmarks. (Notably, the “Shibuya/Harajuku/Akihabara” of Taipei is still called Ximending 西門町, a very Japanese placename.)
Here are some of the Japanese slangy terms that I encountered in Taiwan and Mandarin language (and if you know of other interesting terms or corrections, I’d love to hear about them).
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By jennifu, on March 14th, 2011 Oops, I forgot about this blog!
Um, anyway, I’m going to try to revive it and post more,with some more casual entries. Today, I’m starting with my independent project from last term, a semester-long research project I conducted on investigating general trends in anime and manga fans’ consumption of the respective media, and how these in particular related to their practice of piracy.
Research design was to post a survey on AnimeNewsNetwork’s forums with a lot of general questions about how much people consumed, how much money they spent, etc., with a somewhat limited focus on actual piracy-related topics in order to try to prevent response bias (my impression is that didn’t seem to work very well). I then used JMP, my statistical package of choice, to note relationships between certain types of responses and to segment the fans into three separate groups.
The full report: 23 pages, with about 47 of additional appendices (including the original survey).
Piracy as Promotion, Revisited: How Unauthorized Sharing of Anime and Manga Translations
Relate to Legitimate Consumption, Three Decades After Its Advent
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By jennifu, on September 7th, 2010 Ah, maid cafes– truly one of life’s great pleasures. As a gaijin female, it’s true that I don’t quite fit the target demographic of the maid cafe, but there’s actually a lot in it for girls too– eating cute sweets and drinking fancy teas while being treated like royalty and pampered by servants dressed with frills and lace in an adorably-furnished establishment with doilies and pink wallpaper and crystal chandeliers? Yeah, not exactly a men-only world.
I’ve never been to a Japanese maid cafe, but I did visit all four maid cafes and a butler cafe in Taipei. This piece serves as a bit of a review of these cafes, not so much to suggest where to go if you happen to be in Taiwan (since that’s probably not applicable to many people), but to demonstrate some of the different styles of maid cafe in the vast number of variations. I’ve given each location is own representative trope anthropomorphism for comprehension’s sake.
(One interesting thing to note: They do greet you with “お帰りなさいませ、ご主人様/お嬢様！” (Okaerinasaimase, goshujin-sama/ojou-sama, or Welcome home, master/my lady) in Japanese. Everything else is in Chinese though.)
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By jennifu, on September 1st, 2010 
It should come as no surprise to people that know me that I am a huge fan of shoujo manga (possibly somewhat ironically): I’m a sap, I’m kind of girly, and I love drama. But concerning the actual subject, shoujo manga itself seems to be one of the more talked-about demographic categories– manga scholar and Seika University professor Matt Thorn focuses on it, Japanese mags such as Sho-Comi have gained media attention more than any other for their risque content, and followers of the American industry note it for its appeal to a rarer gender of comic book fan.
But a different perspective than all of these (cultural, content-related, demographic) truly separates shoujo and jousei manga from their shounen, seinen, and even Western counterparts– the sequential art. Where comics visionary and all-around smart guy Scott McCloud differentiates Western comics and Japanese comics, shoujo manga specifically goes several steps forwards. The paneling and visual storytelling is unlike any seen in the other major subgenres and subcategories of global comics– non-linear visual flow, a distinct set of common panel transitions, extensive (and effective) use of bleeds, etc. Stephanie Folse notes, in one of her wonderful series of manga analyses, how the easy-to-read non-linear sequential art of Fruits Basket particularly made it appealing to beginning manga readers in the West, even without its fanciful story. In my explanations, I often go as far as to say that shoujo manga might be the most evolved of the various “kinds” of comics in terms of sequential art, at least in the mainstream realm; nobody believes me (and I would venture to guess that this disagreement erroneously has more to do with the trite content than the presentation of shoujo manga), so I am going to attempt to defend this statement.
This first post of a multi-part series on the subject is going to explore one early shoujo manga and some of its early hints at the language we see today. I plan to include other, more thorough parts examining the evolution of the style and the final modern form, as well as the future of shoujo manga visual storytelling. Here, I am focusing most on paneling– placement, size, and shape of panels, as well as composition of objects inside the panels– rather than other aspects of shoujo manga– such as drawing styles, symbolic visual language like screentones and iconography, or narrative and character tropes.
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Recent Comments
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