Category: Manga Historiography
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43. Why Do Scanlations Persist?
This post really ought to be about my new manga transdub project, but it appears I’m back on my bullshit, because the whole discourse surrounding the “wrongness” of scanlation that I constantly see on social media, frankly, drives me bonkers, in part because people on “either side” of the issue never seem to be asking…
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42. An Apology for Scanlation
In the end, the point of all this is to say that copyright is a legal and not a moral framework, and as such its principles are fundamentally mutable in accordance with what we want our culture of knowledge and creative exchange to be. If that goal is, as those who first envisioned copyright wanted,…
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41. The Imperial Fantasia of Ghost in the Shell
I’m not here to defend Ghost in the Shell in any of its manifestations, for as regular readers of this blog already know, I find it mostly to be authoritarian drek for ammosexuals. Only Stand Alone Complex comes close to living up to the series’ intellectual pretensions, perhaps because it has much more time and…
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40c. The Mobilization of Shōjo Culture pt. 2
The theatrical elite that seek to shape Maya’s destiny have, quite literally, no regard for her genetic family, only for how her social relations might be reshaped so as to further their own ends. Similarly, as we see in the kindai period, education, particularly those educational institutions created to serve elite/bourgeois ends, fractures family in…
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Mononoke: 20 Years of Animated Imperialism
Mononoke is for many, once even for myself, a sacred object, a relic that embodies a transcendent anime ideal and to which, much like the bones of martyrs, the “true fan” must pay obeisance after a long pilgrimage. Even now with my ideological misgivings I have to admit that the film is breathtakingly beautiful, its…
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40b. The Mobilization of Shōjo Culture pt. 1
There were–and remain–then, two forms of sexual expression that were both mandated and directly overseen by the Imperial (now “democratic”) state: motherhood and prostitution. With motherhood, the state controlled the means of reproduction, the means by which imperial subjects were created and inculcated with certain values. Prostitution was sanctioned by the state in order to…
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What Translation Conceals, or How to Make Bad Choices Well
It is, perhaps, a bit unfair, even if useful and necessary sometimes, to pick apart someone else’s translation, to linger creepily over its supposed faults, and generally slap it about with the sloppy phallus of your smug superiority. I myself only started to eschew these bouts of accusatory dick-waving once I had spent a considerable…
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23c. Third World Manga, or Sazae-san Blue
I had, of course, intended to finally talk about Hasegawa Machiko this week, but I must momentarily defer yet again, for as I was laying out today’s post, it occurred to me that there were a couple of aspects of the two examples of Tsurumi Shunsuke’s manga criticism I posted last week and the week…
What is Manga? 