JekoJeko

I have a number of writing commitments at the moment, so I’m slowly getting around to writing for here.

While it isn’t possible to get the idea of ‘filler’ down to an exact science, it always needs a convincing explanation. Try telling someone who felt like they were following a plot through every episode that they were just watching ‘filler’, and they’re not really going to be on board with what you have to say about the show. All artistic deductions are opinions, and they all need evidence to be convincing; an appreciation of the specifics of the material. Then the reader has something specific to dispute, rather than only a vague understanding of your viewpoint. I could, for instance, catalogue how every episode of Chuunibyo develops a character in some way, and then compare that to how the OVA /doesn’t/, in order to make a convincing case for what it filler and why the first season does not contain it. It would not take long.

Likewise, my note about K-On! was drawing attention to the fact that standards for a premise were never explored before or after one was called ‘thin’. It’s like if I said a show was ‘thematically challenged’ and left it at that, not making any discussion about what constitutes a good or bad theme, expecting the reader to share my standards when they aren’t at all expounded upon. It creates a viewpoint that merely floats in the air above the material rather than being grounded in it.

I loved Chuunibyou, and have refused to watch the second season because the first is such a single, well-contained plot with an ending I don’t need to go beyond – an ‘invisible boundary line’ for my interest to fall behind – added to the fact that everyone seems to hate the second season. With the second season having an addition to the title, ‘Ren’, it’s suitable to consider it as a separate work to the first, like it’s suitable to separate different renditions of Star Trek.

I agree with SpectreWriter above; the characters certainly evolve satisfyingly in the first season, with the climax of Dekomori’s character development being an unexpected tear-jerker for me. You never expand on why the show has a ‘thin premise’ (how is K-On!’s any fatter?) or what ideas are ‘recycled without improving on them’, or what exactly in the first season is filler (when the second season is the one constantly criticised for almost always feeling like filler – doesn’t each episode in the first season develop a character in some direction, preventing the tag of ‘filler’ from being applied?).

The article also falters on its research here; Chuunibyo was so heavily adapted from its source material that many actually noted (in protest or praise) that KyoAni didn’t want to be rooted by the LN’s publication at all. Things were /added/ to the LN to make it adaptable, as the Director, Tatsuya Ishihara, once noted in a NewType article:

‘Shinka Nibutani appeared in the novel, but Kumin Tsuyuri and Sanae Dekomori are anime original characters. The reason they were created was that there wouldn’t be enough characters for a TV series. Similarly, the story has been /arranged/ to have many new elements added.

The amount of novel material we had was insufficient even though it was published via Kyoto Animation’s KA Esuma label. In short, it feels more like /an original series/ from our company.’

Note at this point that the Director considers it ‘an original series’, singular. It wasn’t split into two; it was their own finished story that got a sequel that, according to reviews, disappointed many fans. Once you consider it under that light, many criticisms in this article drift away from it; perhaps new ones can be found, but they aren’t to be found here, where the two very separate seasons are wrongly mashed together.

Also, Eighth Grader Syndrome is not specifically associated with the occult; it encompasses many other delusions of fantasy and grandeur.

As much as it’s welcome to see a suggestion to shorten anime rather than lengthen it, it’s not evidenced enough here. The article assumes wrongly that the two seasons comprise one story and makes a number of vague accusations that, really, have probably been written about every anime by someone on the internet so far. Evidence is what matters, and the opportunity to delve into specifics has been missed.

Long comment again, but I guess it’s what I do.

I’m a born again Christian, Tyson. I see little chance of you being a priest, however, if you are calling one of your brethren a ‘loser’. You have made a terrible witness in this comment section.

Thinking about or noticing sex outside of marriage is not of sin; else, the word ‘prostitute’ in the bible would cause us to sin. Lusting after a woman outside of marriage, for sex, however, is. The battle is for the mind. We do not place ‘sin’ in the existence of something outside of us. Christ was tempted in every way known to man, and he succeeded. We can too; the strong Christian can be in incredible proximity to sexual immorality and pull through. How else do Christians provide guidance and the gospel to people in the prostitution industry?

And again, did you look at Fernand Léger’s ‘Le Grand Déjeuner’? Can you tell that they’re naked? Yes. Can you lust after them? I don’t think so.

If it’s okay to put links here, I think it’s worth adding that I’ve encountered, fought with and paid penalties from sexual media as a Christian; I once wrote about it at length here: https://unnecessaryexclamationmark.wordpress.com/2015/07/08/christianime-taking-every-ecchi-thought-captive/. What I learnt the most is that as much as I try to avoid sexual media, it’ll come looking for me. The enemy want sto pick a fight. Fleeing from sexual immorality, first, means fleeing to God, and we flee to him in our hearts and minds. If we do that when we are hit by sexual immorality in what we watch, we can stop ourselves from committing it ourselves, defuse the temptation and perhaps even find that we were deceived, and that this isn’t actually sexual immorality in the first place; it was just our temptations making it appear so.

Attitudes to sex in media like yours are why there are /more/ Christians committing sexually immoral acts; they try to blind themselves to the enemy rather than put on the full armour of God and fight him, and win.

Tyson, the Bible has sex in it. Song of Solomon is one of the oldest and best examples of erotica. God made sex to be a beautiful thing; it’s human beings that corrupt it with their minds. Thus, you can see sex in a film and not sin. You do not have to lust. Sex and nudity even can be portrayed in ways to never incite erotic feeling. Observe Fernand Léger’s ‘Le Grand Déjeuner’. Is that porn?

Also, putting sex in a movie will not make you burn in hell. That’s not how sin and salvation work, biblically. We are not saved or damned by our works; only our belief in Christ. But that’s a different issue to the topic at hand, so I’l leave it at that.

An incredible article, well-research and wide-reaching, in order to leave no sexual cinematic stone unturned. The introduction was particularly effective, as it very quickly and convincing encouraged a debate on ‘sex’ and ‘art’ and the cohesion of the two without immediately forcing a voice or opinion into the topic.

Thanks for taking all the time to put this together.

I’m disappointed with this article.

The definition of ‘literature’ at the start of here is very shaky. It relies on authorial – or the publisher’s/producer’s/curator’s -/intent/ to display something as art. Hasn’t New Criticism done away with this thought that we can only consider something as art if someone smarter than us has said it’s art?

Rather, we consider something art because we choose to put it into that position ourselves, because we see artistic qualities. A turd on the pavement is rarely going to be seen as art. Take a photo of it, however, next to a crumpled flier for someone running for presidency, and a bunch of footprints of people stepping around both, and we’re making something of it that’s going to make most people view it as art, for a number of reasons that are mostly self-evident.

A screenplay is /always/ literature, however, because it is a ‘written work’ (working from the OED definition, the bedrock this article has ignored); glamorising the definition only obfuscates the discussion. A ‘written work’ is all we need to say. It’s defined. It’s done. It comes from the Latin for ‘letter of the alphabet’, ‘littera’ and was formed into the Middle English for ‘knowledge of books’ – /books/; /written works/. A note/book/ is therefore also part of an artist’s literature. Debating the meaning of ‘literature’ without researching the origin of the words is just lazy. It took me a minute to Google it, check it, and undermine the entire focus of this article.

Likewise, a sketchbook is a work of visual art. Have you seen Ruskin’s sketches in the Ashmolean archives? I have. They are rough, protean little genius-marked conceptions of creativity. They have artistic qualities. They are art. If you don’t want to call them that, you’d sound like an idiot, but that’s fine – they simply won’t then be art /to you/. The rest of us will be able to work on different /levels/ of art, as one works on different /levels/ of literature, not trying to equate sketches to statues, but instead working out where they fall in a hierarchy of artistic accomplishment

Film on screen is categorically /not/ literature and can never be, as while it has signifiers, they are not and never can be /written/, ‘littera’ signifiers. Parallels can be drawn, but you cannot say Film is written – you can say it is /close/ to literature, and it indeed is in many ways, but you cannot say it /is/ literature. Both a film and its script are however forms of art, like a playscript and its respective play on stage are two versions – transformations, even – of one core work, the story the playwright has created or transformed themselves.

To say ‘even Shakespeare is not literature until it arrives on the stage’ is simply daft. Simply daft. It is literature off the stage, theatre on it. The use of the word literature here and throughout this article is, frankly, what academics would call ‘bullshitting’.

This idea that a /script/ as a weakened as a piece of work also fails to consider a script on its own merits. Was Wilde’s Salome weaker before it could be performed? How can we, as critics, say the very words on the page have less ‘merit’ because they have yet to be given life?

Your thinking is backwards, being heavily countered by the work of Shakespeare. As Ian McKellen notes in his reading of Macbeth, Shakespeare puts into his playscripts – into the poetry and the prose – all the instructions an actor needs to perform the part well. The value of the play performed is dependant on the value of the script. Likewise, no film will have good dialogue unless it is written well in the script to begin with; you can’t give an actor bad lines and expect him to go the work to make them shine. The mental image, the film, both of which are not literature, spawns from the text, the screenplay, which is written and hence literature.

You say to ‘Now imagine reading that line with no image or context attached other than the prior lines.’ You say that ‘There is no scene description on the script to create the world seen in the film, as would happen in a novel – a paragraph to describe the surroundings.’ But if there is no world created, how did the director create the world in his head for the movie to be visualised in the end? Perhaps other elements influenced what we get on screen, but then we just have to consider the screenplay as a component part of a whole – a whole that may not be entirely literature, as it may not be entirely written (concept art, for instance), but will contain bodies of literature such a screenplays, write-ups of scenarios, et cetera.

By your argument, ‘may i feel said he’ is not a piece of literature either – perhaps all of Cumming’s corpus is just a bunch of sketchbook scrawlings that don’t have enough ‘merit’ in order to reach your overly-glamorised definition of ‘literature’. How can we accept your argument and consider that poem literature? It has only dialogue. It has no setting. It could be staged as a play – it is staged as one in the theatre of one’s mind – and so might as well be a playscript. That it wasn’t written as one makes no difference to the poem’s formalistic qualities.

I find this article and its argument to be vapid. The lack of citations and wide critical reading, for such a wide topic, makes every subjective statement about the forms being discussed incredibly weak. Discussion is made within the article by ignoring definitions, not by challenging them; personal definitions in contrast with established ones are preferred without critical reasoning. It’s academic fantasy to want films to be considered ‘literature’; scholars around the world are comparing film /to/ literature, but none will ever mesh the two together under the latter term’s umbrella. A far more insightful discussion can be made on the ‘literariness’ of film, but that is nowhere to be found, even though it was expected from the title. ‘Literary’ is the quality of being /like/ literature, not being literature itself. This article has tried to mash the round peg of film into a very square hole, with as much grace as one would expect.

This is not what I come to The Artifice to read. But thank you for giving my the impetus to exercise all that my degree has taught me about this issue through this extensive criticism.

I think all the male actors were just insulted for not looking ‘good looking’ enough.

I think, when people read ‘of all time’, they can infer that the article is only sufficient up to its publication date. The ‘so far’ might absolutely clarify that, but it also implies that the writer didn’t think the reader was competent enough to work that out for themselves. All publications I’ve read (so far) with lists like these leave it out.

The note that there are great war films yet to come has nothing to do with the article, which is reviewing war films that have already come out. This is emphasised by the opening line of the article being able to stand without ‘so far’, as the title also ought to. Any positive effect of the addition in parentheses is forgotten due to irrelevancy.