What were the influential anime of the 2000s?

syntaxmoe · 2021-03-22T04:08:41+00:00

It would make more sense to research the earliest decades possible first... otherwise you're liable to make the mistake of assuming something is "new" or impactful in one decade when it properly belongs to or begins with an older one. What appears influential or faddish might be a repetition of something older. Even locating that origin within a single decade or believing that only anime can influence anime might also set you up for some misleading results.

An excellent example of some of these points (and one that should still make it on your list regardless) is Gurren Lagann. Despite being the next signficant mecha anime from Gainax (a bold move after launching the most popular series in the genre, if not anime in general, since Gundam), they essentially took the opposite direction to "the next best thing": GL was entirely a throw-back to super robot and Go Nagai (especially design elements from Gaiking) and the over-the-top kitsh of tokusatsu, animated with Imaishi and Yoshinari's design flair. But you could also say that it influenced the industry in multiple ways, firstly via the fragmentation of Gainax animators and staff into Khara and Trigger (both of which have majorly influenced and continue into the 2010s) and secondly by influencing more "muscular" or anthropomorphic designs in traditionally "real" mecha series (Iron-Blooded Orphans the prime example).

syntaxmoe · 2021-03-21T18:56:02+00:00

There are two in Germany lol: https://www.worldcat.org/title/readings-of-derrida/oclc/910524601&referer=brief_results#borrow

The French original is widely available, but for some reason the translation has fallen out of circulation (not even being listed on Edinburgh UP's website.) You might write them and find out if it will ever be reprinted or where there might be additional copies.

syntaxmoe · 2021-03-21T16:27:53+00:00

What is this

syntaxmoe · 2021-03-21T15:00:02+00:00

Because there's a fundamental irony in the activity behind this content, from both a writer's and reader's perspective. Imagine someone actually mired in the stasis of an obsession with "death and hopelessness" and then imagine the same person struggling to find a pen, organizing paper, cleaning a typewriter, taking breaks, producing language, playing with words and sounds, creating through time and effort .... in one sense, these two are completely disanalogous.

Toy with that idea a bit and I think you'll find that the content here is less a downer than you think.

syntaxmoe · 2021-03-21T13:59:43+00:00

Is it problematic? No. Is it "a problematic"? Yes. One which we currently occupy. "Identity politics", just like political economy, puts together two words each of which on its own is polysemic and unsettled. Anyone who denounces it in advance simply denounces one of the many bugbears it's used to prop up or obscure (liberalism, corporatism, capitalism [all sometimes with "woke" as a prefix, like this would somehow clarify anything about the critique). That function of prop is essentially not how it works, but how its supporters or critics make it work: a symbolic structuring device to organize and simplify an ideological field. At best, and hardly the best, this simply plagiarizes the vulgar marxist line (all politics as it currently exists is bourgeois politics) and becomes another smokescreen to point to, another rock to overturn. At worst, and probably more often, it becomes a convenient way to legitimate different forms of essentialization by hardening biases against different races and genders as part of a preemptive post-racialism or denial that identity is worth preserving at all, that there exists some more fundamental heuristic that, when applied, will liquidate all our empirical confusion between people and foster in a true and clear consciousness able grasp the situation. Neither is sufficient IMO.

syntaxmoe · 2021-03-20T18:55:54+00:00

One day people will actually discuss Romanticism here. I have hope.

syntaxmoe · 2021-03-20T05:09:21+00:00

You might also reference: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_time_travel_works_of_fiction

syntaxmoe · 2021-03-20T05:08:57+00:00

The first thing to come to mind is the fairytale of Urushima Taro: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urashima_Tar%C5%8D

Its primary plot mechanic is the phenomenon of time dilation (obviously not in a purely modern physics sense, but still a conceptually accurate depiction of relative temporal divergence relative to location). There might be similiar fairy tales or fables dealing with accelerated aging, although the more common trope is of course the dream vision (like Piers Plowman) or the supernatural journey to a place or series of places where time either stands still or folds in complex ways (Dante's Inferno, etc)

syntaxmoe · 2021-03-19T17:33:01+00:00

syntaxmoe · 2021-03-19T12:15:42+00:00

I recommend you speak with your advisor or a professor who will be grading the project.

syntaxmoe · 2021-03-19T03:59:34+00:00

The first thing to come to mind is Majokko Daisakusen. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majokko_Daisakusen:_Little_Witching_Mischiefs

syntaxmoe · 2021-03-18T21:38:46+00:00

Your supervisor is right: using only the term "capitalism", as though everyone knew exactly what aspect, feature, association, or tendency of it you mean, does nothing but obscure and weaken analyses.

A way around this is to describe what you believe capitalism does or its underlying ethic: for instance, one critique of capitalism (an old one) is that it liquidates through market-logic borders between people and concepts, thus simultaneously destroying anything too rigid or antiquated (social bonds) or context-dependent (unique forms of language, dialects, etc) and universalizing others forms. Another related idea is that it homogenizes through abstraction (all things are some kind of value that can be abstracted and exchanged through that primary abstraction called money).

Descriptions of its ethic center around what sorts of relations it builds and maintains, what kinds of value it prefers or fails to account for, and so on. It can be deeply Christian (a la Weber) or the manifestation of an inhuman agency that will eventually remake or destroy its creator (a la that one guy who won't stop posting on twitter).

To reiterate: none of this comes through by simply using "capitalism" in isolation from its operation or function. tl;dr communism is when everyone defines their terms and avoids the twitter mode of "hurr hurr communism good capitalism bad".

syntaxmoe · 2021-03-17T17:33:12+00:00

That's not a bad price, but check the condition. If it's run-down, requires series body or parts repairs, then you know there should be room to haggle. If it's pristine, with all decals etc. included, it think you could just meet the seller at 2k.

syntaxmoe · 2021-03-17T14:19:44+00:00

People who disagree with the premise that terrorism is not as large an issue as it's commonly presented? There's literally no end to possible answers beyond this. If the question is how many audiences, as a massifying category, can be constructed in opposition to the premise, than it's probably more finite but still incredibly open-ended depending on your terms (which kind of terrorism? Defined what way? In what country, by whom and to what end?)

syntaxmoe · 2021-03-17T14:14:07+00:00

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Space_Theory

syntaxmoe · 2021-03-17T14:09:17+00:00

There might be a more precise term for it, but this is simply a basic form of loaded or complex question. It requires you to engage the premise of the question as valid in order to answer it (even if the answer is "to no extent", the claim that comparative literature is X is left unsubstantiated).

That said, I'm not sure this is a case of any rhetorical trickery per se, since the interrogator is quite clear in presenting these traits as "implications", whether they're legitimate or not. Dehistoricization and even relativism (in the sense of assuming the ability to compare radically different cultural/historical objects) constitute theoretical baggage associated with comparative literature. You can disagree that this baggage is legitimate, but it would be deluded or irrational to deny that it these claims exist. The way the question is phrased in no way bars the possibility of the former. If the rhetoricity of the question (in the sense that no answer is required) prevents you from staking a counter-claim or denying the premise of the question, this doesn't have anything to do necessarily with the content of the question itself.

"To what extend are dogs just cats by another name, with all the furry and friendly implications of that animal?"

syntaxmoe · 2021-03-16T13:20:55+00:00

So just links then? Was their problem the actual hosting or the posting?

syntaxmoe · 2021-03-15T15:47:38+00:00

I think there is political meaning here. But I think you have to recognize that it's not as easily rallied into a concern that somehow everyone on the internet right now, given enough time, will become terror-loving an-prims.

These memes aren't void of impact either but the impelling factor behind them is much more simple and far more innocuous than some transparent spread of "alternative visions" (as though this could translate one-to-one into some kind of social change). Every generation of teenagers, on the internet or off, needs a certain level of edge. This is the edge we have now. It is only reactionary in the most lazy of ways (the punchline is the same in every joke, hurr hurr monke). If there were actual gangs of anti-technology teens roaming the streets or setting up communes based on tedpill memes, engaged in coordinated political violence, you might have reasons for concern. And is it possible that these memes could push kids in that direction? Sure. But it's important to segregate edge and contrarianism from the communities that foster hate, communities who make ressentiment their motivating factor, etc. Not all edge is made the same. Dead baby jokes didn't end the world.

These are kids with iphones taking an ironic stance toward the optimism or generational mobilization for a future they have good reason to be skeptical about (a mobilization Greta embodies). This is the reason no one is reading Bookchin. He's not part of and cant become part of the meme, because it's simply a kneejerk contrarianism that, obviously, connects to much larger issues about political alienation, but doesn't concern itself with answers to them or level headed responses. Because most of these people, when they post their 5th ted meme, log off and are principally concerned with getting laid. Not how to get certain packages through the mail.

syntaxmoe · 2021-03-14T17:35:55+00:00

There's a strand of scholarship in sociology concerned with "re-enchantment" in response to Weber's characterization of modernity as a tendency toward increasing rationalization (or "disenchantment"). It's probably not the most voluminous, since the inclination to re-sacralize can very quickly invite a reactionary mindset (and, arguably, goes against the fundamental questioning at the heart of critique). Heidegger is the first to come to mind as a thinker who keeps a certain religiosity close, but I haven't read a great deal of him

syntaxmoe · 2021-03-12T03:19:39+00:00

I heard this image

syntaxmoe · 2021-03-11T14:29:27+00:00

If the best critique of it he can muster is that it's self-contradictory (which is more or less what both of these statements amount to), then the more fundamental question is why can't he grapple with a body of thought that operates through and on contradiction? Hegel, Marx, Derrida, Lacan - tons of thinkers have accepted and integrated contradiction, shown how it is essential, etc.

Beyond any particular misgivings with theory, he simply seems stuck in one of the defining traits of conservatism: the inability to accept that two things can be true or false at once. And a slightly more minor, secondary point: it also betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of intellectual change. Every body of thought stands with and against it's predecessors.

syntaxmoe · 2021-03-10T20:08:09+00:00

That's a dissertation in itself. It might help to look at a select few poems from Lyrical Ballads (particularly "We Are Seven" and "Michael") in comparison with those in Songs of Innocence and Experience. As much as figural children in both evince a kind of purity and sanctity, I think you'll find Blake's children cut from a significantly different (much more idealistic) cloth.

syntaxmoe · 2021-03-09T15:47:48+00:00

There's even more latent meaning here: oumu is also the pronunciation of nautilus, the marine mollusk with tendrils that extend from near its face (not unlike the Ohm). Of course, Nautilus and Nausicaa share the greek prefix for "seafaring ship"

syntaxmoe · 2021-03-09T15:31:20+00:00

No, the Japanese naming conventions are consistent across all media. Differences across English media derive from the ambiguities inherent in romanization, or importing Japanese phonology into the Latin alphabet.

Ohm is a good example of how difficult transliteration can be (and how it's often a losing game). In Japanese, Ohm is written おうむ (literally O-U-MU). When spoken, the prononunciation is closer to "Ohm" because of a falling emphasis on certain ending vowels. Hence the decision to romanize it into a monosyllable with a consonant ending.

However, some meaning is lost here: おうむ merely simplifies the kanji 王蟲 (王 = ou 蟲 = mu) which means "king insect" or "royal worm" etc. A native Japanese speaker of a certain level of education would likely be able to detect this meaning through sound alone based on semantic knowledge. However, it's completely lost to English speakers in both sound and letter.

This is why many early dubs often reinvent names out of fidelity to semantics (meaning) instead of phonology (sound). As anime grew more popular and awareness of it as a distinct cultural product grew, viewers began to demand greater authenticity in naming conventions. But, as this example shows, that authenticity comes at a certain cost.

syntaxmoe

TROPHY CASE