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I truly am interested in Koro's intentions for wanting to teach Class E, so I might have to keep watching. Beyond the academic help he's giving the students, he's also teaching them life skills. It may seem like the fact that the students have to assassinate him would be distracting, but it's helping them (as you stated) be more creative and confident in themselves.
When I heard the synopsis of what this show was about in class, I was intrigued, hence why I voted to watch it. The episodes that were assigned were also an interesting cluster, and made me want to watch the rest of the show JUST to see if the students are able to kill their teacher. There is a lot of irony right from the start of this show. The teacher seems to be such a nice guy, who genuinely cares for his students, and wants to see them succeed. But he's actually the target for his entire class of assassins to kill by the end of the year. Teachers are supposed to be a guiding adult figure in which one can trust and look up to. And this teacher, despite seeming un-killable, puts thought towards teaching his students the learning curriculum they are tested on at the end of each term. Koro also teaches his students that it's okay to fail, as long as you don't give up. By instilling this lesson into his students, they are more encouraged to keep trying to kill him in new creative ways. This promoted a lot of creativity among the students as well as forcing them to work together and communicate to come up with new strategies. We also see in the last episode assigned that Koro's students actually do benefit from his teaching, which strengthens the irony of this show. One of his students was getting bullied, and instead of stopping it, Koro waited to see if his student would do what he taught him to do, which is to hold your ground. The student then made a snide remark to the bullies, who got scared and ran away, proving that even though Koro is to be killed at the end of the year, his lessons are still valuable to his students when he's alive.
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Assassination Classroom (S1 ep 1, 5, 6, 16 S2 ep 11)
★★★★☆
I feel like Assassination Classroom can't be analyzed with just four episodes. From what we watched, I just feel like I'm missing so many important details and plot points. I can speak on what stood out to me though, which was the impact of social class on education. I read that this comes from a want to pressure the students. If the kids know there is a tier system, then they're more motivated to work harder because they don't want to be placed in a lower class. It would be similar to class ranks, but with the classroom system, everyone knows where you rank. In my opinion this is completely counteractive. We even see in the anime that before Korosensei, the students have kind of just accepted their place in the school/society. Those in the upper ranks then aren't even learning because they want to learn, rather their working to keep their superior ranks. You could even argue it applies to Class E as well who was working to compete with Class A. Sure, they're studying a lot due to the competition. But how much are kids actually retaining with systems like this in place. Aside from that, I want to speak on the assassination aspect of the anime since it seems to be in important plot detail. I'm not too sure what all that is about but it did remind me of a book I had read called Range. It basically talks about how it's better to know a range of skills rather than specializing in one thing. One of the chapters goes on to talk about teachers who teach completely unrelated topics in addition to the subject they teach and students are then able to apply this and be more successful when working with the subject in the future. I could summarize that better but my point is that the fact that the student's are on a mission to assassinate Korosensei is also helping them grow as people, as we saw with Nagisa.
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It was sad seeing David become a cyberpunk, especially after everything his mom did to avoid that. But ultimately society led him to that decision. Everyone was against him and being left alone, he really didn't have anyone he had to make proud anymore. He needed a way to stay alive and his chosen method was to become a cyberpunk.
Cyberpunk Edgerunners (ep 1,2,6,10)
This show highlights the social problem of division of the social classes. The first episode shows the treatment of the lower class in a night city. The show opens up with David trying to wash his academy uniform, but the washer was not able to continue washing his clothes due to insufficient funds. He tried to use a bootleg version of the software that was needed for his class. His mother is seen as tired from working hard to get David a good future in the academy. However, most children of the wealthy are able to afford to go to the academy so David was sticking out like a sore thumb. When David and his mother were in a car crash, the ambulance came they had to scan both David and his mom to see if they were important customers. Once they pronounce them as not important customers, they left them injured at the scene. Everything in this show is ruled by money. Even the doctor's decision was dependent on how much money David paid to save his mother's life. It is sad to see everything in the night city is dependent on money, even medicine. It shows that the poor are not able to climb their financial status as they are consistently challenged by society. Hence, the appeal of committing crimes for easy money is appealing.
David becoming a cyberpunk was a bit sad. His mother, a former cyberpunk, had tried her best to give David a better life than hers. But, in the end, he became a cyberpunk. He had learned to steal, fight, and even kill from Maine and the crew. From Maine's words, he was becoming a man, especially after sleeping with Lucy. When Maine turned into a cyber psycho, he told David that this was his end and he should leave the scene. David had tried to become the new Maine with his new body and tech ware. In saving Lucy, he risks his psychosis and died saving Lucy. Well, at least Lucy got a chance to go to the moon.
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Cyberpunk Edgerunners (ep 1, 2 , 6, 10)
★★★☆☆
When this show was voted, I wasn't quite sure what could possibly be analyzable about this, but the anime ended up being an excellent depiction of the effects of capitalism. Everything in the Night City was determined by money. What school you attended, what medical services you received, etc. Although it was a bit more extreme in Cyberpunk, this is exactly what our capitalist society is like. If you want to attend a good university, you need to have the funds for it. Just being a UF student, countless of people will tell you they considered UF because of bright futures. And at hospitals, they won't refuse to treat you but at the end of the day they do expect you to pay up. And the treatments you receive will depend on what you're willing to pay for. Your quality of life all depends on what you can afford and that need for money ultimately led David to become a cyberpunk. This was a choice he needed to make in order to stay alive. Connecting it back to the real world, consider how people make career decisions based off salary. People will stray away from arts or humanities because of the idea that they will make zero money (which may be true), letting capitalism determine their futures. Something that would more closely relate to David's situation is people who choose to go into sex work and other similarly frowned upon fields. Everyone always says "they must've grown up without a father" or "their parents must be so disappointed," but consider how much money these people are making. Everything is about what will give us enough to survive and additionally live a satisfactory life. From what I've seen, cyperpunk seems to be a very popular genre. I've always seen it's appeal for the futuristic aesthetic, and I've wondered if that would be the future of our fashion and cities. But now I'm wondering if the emphasis on capitalism could actually lead us to live in a society such as Night City.
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It might make more sense to clarify that the hospital is a psychiatric hospital. Rumi is under care there but she still sees herself as idol Mima. The real Mima, on the other hand, has become more famous and confident in herself. We see this through how the nurses are whispering about her and the way Mima carries herself. There's a deeper meaning to it all about identity, showing that Rumi is unable to be herself as she's stuck in a fantasy but Mima has been able to make a name for herself.
Perfect Blue Review
Review: 7.8/10
This was a very interesting watch. I guess I can check off watching a rated R movie for school. The thing about this show besides being very intense, is that all that happened is actually true. Things that happen in this show can and may have happened to many people in the film industry and Hollywood. A lot can be talked about with this show.
First off, the biggest theme that stuck out to me was identity disorder. We first see that Mima is a pop star singer that wears cute dresses. She knows what her job is and what happens outside her job. The rest of the movie Mima changes her job and enters the acting world which is seen by her agents as the "next big thing" for her. In this new world she experiences a lot of new things. I feel like she was questioning whether she should leave the pop star singer role being torn between her old career that she loved and this new acting career. She is also struggling with all the new stuff in the acting world. I think the role to play a rape victim in the show just added to all the stuff she was going through mentally. I think as an actress you need boundaries and going into a role like that right away is just terrible especially if you don't know what the scene entails and if the film makers and other actors have the best intentions for you in general.
I was talking with my friend who knows someone that got sexually abused and it has the victims thinking less of themselves, nicely put. It is much more worse than my words as we saw in the movie. Now going forward, Mima begins to loose touch of reality. The movie begins to cut scenes and transition from dream to reality so much that when you thought it was reality it was a dream and vice versa until you're confused yourself. I think they did this to have the viewer experience what Mima was going through and what people who go through the same things experiences. If this is really the case this movie deserves a higher rating. I do not know the full story but apparently Heath Ledger experienced something like this with his role as the Joker in Batman. He was one of the best if not the best actor to play Joker but he couldn't separate his role as the joker from his own personal life. From what I heard this ultimately lead to his death.
The stalker was super creepy and the fact that her agent tried to kill her at the end and killed others I am assuming was a shocker. I guess she was never on board with Mima's decisions in acting. But to go and kill people around her and someone she was close with. I can't imagine the things Mima was going through.
Can someone please explain the hospital scene and the last scene. I was so confused when it ended like that. Why was she all smiley and happy? Is she good now or what? I would also like to add that there were so many dudes in the audience as a pop singer which kind of concerned me straight from the start. I was on board with her acting if her fan base as a singer is mostly guys. It was a little sus.
Anyway, I actually think I might recommend someone watch this movie but probably only if they bring it up. This actually comes in second for this semester of how intense it was. Behind Barefoot Gen of course.
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Perfect Blue
★★★★☆ + 0.5
This movie has been on my watchlist for the longest but everytime I put it on I thought I was watching the wrong movie because of the way it starts. When I told my brother I was taking this class, one of the first things he asked me was if we were watching Perfect Blue because it's "perfect to analyze." I have to say he does have a point, so I'm happy this movie made top 3 in the voting pool. I've been thinking about the idol industry a lot lately after Moonbin from the K-pop group Astro passed away Wednesday morning. Police say it is believed he took his own life, which has sparked a lot of discourse about mental health. Amongst my friends and I, we've always joked we wouldn't make it in the industry because of how overworked you are, how the fans treat you, and the perfect image that is expected of you, but we've never considered the mental toll it takes on those actually experiencing this. Idols will always put up a front that they're doing well, so no one really knows what goes on behind closed doors, but Perfect Blue is an excellent film that exposes the dark side of this industry. For one, there's producers pushing you to not be yourself. Mima was making decisions based off what she thought would make the producers happy rather than what made her happy. And in doing so she was upsetting her fans as well for straying away from what they want. There's no perfect scenario for those in the spotlight. One thing Perfect Blue showed that I never considered was how producers may be affected. The more Mima strayed from this perfect idol image, the more Rima seemed to try to salvage it but taking up that identity.
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Something that's ironic to me in what you pointed out is that both heavily right-winged and left-winged media will warn about the other side pushing out misinformation, while they themselves are pushing out misinformation as well. Connecting it back to today's world, we really need to be careful about where we get our news to make sure we're getting nothing but the truth.
Thoughts on Sensoron
This was undoubtedly an interesting manga to read. It was clear that the manga was some sort of propaganda for Japanese nationalism. It seems like it was very far right-wing as it often criticizes the left wing.
This manga mainly criticizes how media often invents fake quotes and re-used images out of context to dehumanize a country or to push their agenda. It gave a lot of examples of how European and US media recycled images from entirely different events related to Japan in order to paint them as the evil in the world. The manga argues that since they were no conclusive evidence that Japan was the cause of the atrocities mentioned in the manga, they shouldn't be apologetic. This argument is flawed because it could be a pure coincidence that the newspapers use the same pictures to describe similar events that have Japan's name on them. Most news outlets nowadays use similar images with different headlines based on who their audience is, so it's not far-fetched to say that news outlets are manipulative and will only release news that gets the most reaction from the public.
One of the main messages of this manga is that not everything that you read in the newspapers is true. Throughout this manga, we see how everything in the newspapers is full of bias, flaws, and misinformation. This message is relevant to today's world, where everything can be modified by artificial intelligence to make it look like it's real. We have to double or even triple-check our sources to avoid getting false information about certain events.
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Sensoron
☆☆☆☆☆
It seems as if the topic of war always comes with the justification of who was in the right. Sensoron tries to convince us Japan were the "good guys". But let me not word it like that, because the manga kind of goes to say that its not clear who the good or bad guys were. Sensoron's goal seems to be to paint Japan in a more positive light. We see their crimes being downplayed while other country's crimes are being portrayed more negatively. It makes me wonder the power media like this has to influence its audience. How many people pick up a piece of work like this and believe its narrative? The portrayals in Sensoron are based off a lot of misinformation, and for people who don't know history, is this something they'll be able to recognize? In the end, whatever message country's want to spread to justify their involvement in war. You're never truly going to have a "good" reason for participating and we just need to learn from history instead of covering it up through twisted truths and misinformation.
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The movie kind of skipped over how Mitsuha got everyone to evacuate the town (I assume to create suspense in the end of the movie) which might cause confusion, but the high school wasn't in the blast zone of the comet so even though the comet still hit they were able to survive (hopefully that clears up any confusion). I have to agree that I love how they keep finding each other, and also the fact that subconsciously they know that they're looking for each other. It's such a beautiful story about fate.
Your Name
SUB/DUB
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
I just got back from a chem test that I definitely failed but hey at least this movie was good.
Honestly, when it comes to themes I'm not sure exactly what we were meant to get out of this. Obviously a very different vibe from Hetalia.
One thing I enjoyed was the fate aspect of the movie. Almost like everything in our lives is already planned out for us and we are just to sit back and watch it unfold. We don't know who or what we are looking for in this life, and it is likely we will only know when we see them for the first time. There is something so beautiful about how they continue to find each other throughout their lives.
I'll be honest I thought the girl died at the end so I was a little confused at the time jump but I'm guessing they somehow saved the town despite us seeing the explosion? Not exactly sure there but I did like them trying to convince people that there was going to be a strike on the town and that they needed to leave just for no one to listen to them.
I also got a sense of like "what does it mean to be you" because they were switching bodies but despite what body they were in, it was their mentality that made them individuals. It is what allowed for the people around them to notice that something was going on.
I think this movie simultaneously showed that time is an illusion and can be changed as we see fit, but also that there are some things that are just unavoidable and you may be able to run away from them but it is still their and eventually the universe will make you confront those things.
Not very deep this time sorry ya'll but I need to sleep after that exam I'm a potato.
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Your Name
★★★★★
I absolutely love this movie and I'm so happy we got to watch it for this class. I was never one to analyze the meaning behind this movie, but I feel like knowing what everything means makes the story much more impactful. To me, Your Name is a story of human connection, but also fate. Mitsuha and Taki were destined to meet. Even if they forgot each others names and who exactly they were looking for. They recognized this connection the second they met again in the future. The fact that the two of them meeting (through their body switching) helped save a whole town would also explain fate. Additionally though, the town was saved through the connection these two formed with each other. They grew to love and trust each other and were able to somewhat work together to warn the town of what was to come. Other connections in the movie also helped this effort. Mitsuha wouldn't have been as successful without the help and trust of her friends. Who knows what could've happened if her father chose to not listen to her? There's an interesting point about the movie I read regarding Taki not writing his name on Mitsuha's hand. Anyone I've talked you will tell you how stupid that was on his part, but maybe Taki was the smart one for writing "I love you." The memory of the names wouldn't have lasted. Even when they thought they remembered the names, the memory vanished within a minute. So what would've happened after Mitsuha washed her hands? Would the name just be forgotten again? Would she have written it down elsewhere? and would she have remembered what this name means to her? I think the fact that Taki wrote "I love you" really connects back to the idea of human connection because in writing this, Mitsuha is left with the memory of what they felt for each other. These feelings are how we form our connections with other people that bring us closer to each other.
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I am here to pay my respects to the 3k word Hetalia analysis. For one, I never would’ve guessed you actually don't like the show, but I think you bring up a fair point. Where do we draw the line of stereotyping and racism? I really think it's going to depend who you talk to since not everyone takes offense to the same things. I did notice how heavy the show went in on the stereotypes for Italy vs Japan, which did make me wonder how these character portrayals would differ had they been written by different countries.
Hetalia
I cannot rate this with a good conscience ❤
I have autism and Hetalia is my special interest so this is literally 3k words long and I have absolutely no regrets. I could have gone on longer but I wanted to remain relevant to the class. If you don't reply to me I will cry.
I'm gonna break this into a few sections so you can skip around. I'm going to try and stick to just season 1 with this discussion, which won't be too hard cause it's the most insane one. Also, I just want to say that I wrote this all before I read the attached article and I'm now seeing that I literally could have written that article because I know everything about Hetalia.
When do we cross the line between stereotyping and just straight-up racism?
Hey, why are we idolizing WWII Germany?
Oh, we are portraying war as silly and funny, okay cool.
Is this Japanese Nationalism? (a surprisingly controversial argument)
The Sub and the Dub are 2 totally different shows
The Fandom (and linking back to other class-related terms)
Okay I'll name one good thing
Alright, let's get started.
1.
A lot of people will argue that Hetalia is not racist at all because they are making fun of everyone. If you are portraying all of the countries as their most common stereotypes then it evens out in the end. I would argue that this is in fact, not the case. Especially when you set your show during WWII. I will give Himaruya credit in that he mostly focuses on European countries to make fun of, making a lot of the stereotypes less so targeted at minorities. However, a lot of these jokes are still highly insensitive and frame some countries in a worse light than others
Just look at the difference between how Northern Italy is portrayed as opposed to Germany or Japan. Or how France is a predator, Belarus is into her literal brother, and Spain is seen as a creep. It is often times mocking an entire country's intelligence, appearance, or personality. While it is not always that serious, it does lead me to the second point.
When you personify a country and mock it, you aren't just mocking a piece of land, you are mocking an entire population of people. These jokes may seem harmless but they can still be hurtful. While I don't believe that liking Hetalia translates to your actual views on world events, it can unconsciously impact your real-life thoughts and behaviors.
(also why does Britain see imaginary magical creatures, what is that referencing? According to the wiki, it is some popular folklore story of a rabbit who lives on the moon but like.. what? If Himaruya was doing this much research into these countries' cultural backgrounds why is he portraying them like this?)
2.
This show portrays WWII Germany in too positive of a light for my liking. I've noticed a trend in anime where they seem to love Germany (or Germanic aesthetics) a lot (AOT I'm looking at you). Now I'm not well-versed in the interpersonal relationships between Japan and Germany, but the idolization is not it. The way that Japan in this show is portrayed as being literally obsessed with Germany is the biggest example (Italy is also shown having an immense appreciation for Germany and is often gushing about his positive qualities, even writing him a song while he was being kept prisoner). But I mean look at how Germany is portrayed, even his stereotypes are mostly positive, he is hardworking but helps out his fellow allies, makes great food, and is super strong. His only negative trait is that he sometimes doesn't understand social scenarios and that makes him very awkward. However, he will always go out of his way to try and better understand his friends (like Italy) by purchasing books to try and help him learn the appropriate way to act in scenarios).
This is 10x worse in the dub but we will get there. When one of your main characters, the one you are portraying in the best light, is a literal war criminal hot anime boy, you can understand why I would be concerned. I mean they gave him the whole blonde hair blue eyed appearance like come on. Now I'm not going to go into depth on fandom or anything here but Hetalia knows that its demographic is young tweens (primarily girls) so how can you be surprised when this portrayal of Germany leads to WWII fanfics sympathizing with Germany and 14 y/o girls in German military uniforms doing questionable things. (also Germany becomes a canonically gay character in Hetalia in like season 4 or something and that just makes me so mad, like yeah, of course, the gay character is WWII Germany that so cool) (okay, I would like to clarify that technically Sweden is the only confirmed gay character. Sweden is bad representation though because he has one-sided feelings for Finland and makes him uncomfortable by constantly referring to him as his wife)
3.
I mean yeah, obviously this isn't going to be an accurate portrayal of history but some of this is just totally misinformation.
Austria invading Germany is literally just Austria annoying him in his house for a really long time. But also there's like actual wars... and like all of the events of WWI are canon... and like there are some really serious episodes
Also, we literally see a bunch of countries going to war personally, like fighting on the frontlines. Which to me confirms that these people are all literal murderers, like mass murderers lowkey.
Do you know how many weird USSR jokes there are throughout this? So many. Lithuania is pretty much just in a running gag where he keeps getting manipulated by Russia into coming back to live with him. (Yeah, there are so many USSR fics as well).
ALSO! why is the American revolution portrayed as the saddest thing to happen thus far, the storyline is stretched out from episodes 16-20 and it is all drastically different from the tone of the rest of the show. Britain is literally on his knees crying saying that he can't shoot America (which also implies these countries can physically harm/kill each other). Like that is the war you wanted to make all sad and sentimental? Why? Is this how Japanese people think that we view the Revolutionary war? Because that is a pretty inaccurate view.
Anyways back to the original point. Some historical events should not be played for laughs sometimes. It is incredibly disrespectful for actual victims of these tragedies to portray these events as funny or goofy.
Though I will give credit because Himaruya does make all sides of the war look like idiots who have no clue what they are doing, which is a sentiment I can get behind.
4.
As a both non-Japanese and non-Korean person I can not really give my opinion on this however I can share with you both sides of the argument. This is mostly in relation to the original comic strip, but has some relevance to the anime as well. I just wanted to bring it up because it is interesting to me. (This is briefly mentioned in the article but I wanted to expand on the argument).
You may or may not have noticed that there is no South Korea character in this show, however, there was in the original comic. In the comics, South Korea is a pervert who is constantly touching Japan and he also takes credit for the inventions of other countries. Now I'm obviously not going to go into the past history of these 2 countries because that would be incredibly long but the South Korean National Assembly reviewed Hetalia and determined that it was a "crime against South Koreans, akin to slander". So yeah, South Korean people were not happy with this portrayal and the character was inevitably removed from the anime before release. (This is a real picture of the South Korean National Assembly reviewed Hetalia, the corner shows South Korea groping Japan inappropriately)
There are two opposing views to the Japanese Nationalism take and I'll link them both (Belittling Japanese Nationalism Hetalia: Axis Powers is the title of the first one)
The first one pretty much argues that Hetalis is not Japanese nationalism because it paints Japan in just as negative of a light as all of the other countries, no one is left out of being made fun of. Japan is seen as socially awkward, emotionally repressed, and obsequious.
The second argues that Japan is often shown to be more intelligent than other characters as well as often being of the voice of reason (especially compared to China) and most of his negative attributes are not nearly as harmful as some others in Japan’s case, even his “negative” stereotypes are inoffensive, as they pose no threat of meiwaku.
I think we see in the dub that Americans are a little more willing to make fun of themselves. Though there are a few good Japan self digs, like the capitalism joke in one of the first episodes.
5.
Oh boy I've been waiting for this.
The dub is 10x more offensive than the sub. Most people consider it a crack dub.
So many of the jokes are rewritten that it is practically a different show. The sub is from a Japanese perspective and the dub is from an American perspective.
First of all the accents in the dub are so bad like it is actually atrocious. Japan is really annoying because not only is his voice stereotypical but he always says 'nani?' instead of 'what?' as if that is a normal thing that people do. The narrator is the best part of the dub and she is hilarious.
So I don't really feel comfortable even typing out the jokes here so if you want to hear them I included the time stamps for the three nazi jokes I remember in season 1 (the last two being worse).
Episode 1 (1:35:1:38)
Episode 7 (2:13-2:19)
Episode 48 (1:28-1:31)
Those are just a few examples and it gets worse. The dub literally had no reason to include these jokes because there is not even an insinuation of them in the sub and it makes literally everything a million times worse.
I will give the dub some credit for being so utterly ridiculous that it's funny. I will provide a few timestamps for the funniest jokes that only appear in the dub from the first 19 episodes (but I really recommend looking up Hetalia dub funny moments on youtube because some of them are really priceless):
Episode 13: (1:45-2:05)
Episode 14: (1:12-1:22)
Episode 17: (0:59-1:15) (2:06-2:11)
6.
Now I've had this post typed up for a bit and originally I wasn't going to talk about the fandom but after reading the article that he assigned (and going through the fandom unit), I see that there is a lot of reference to fandom in particular so I want to at least mention it.
Not the 2 biggest problems with the Hetalia fandom are racism and the fetishization of gay men.
As mentioned in the article, there have actually been multiple fan incidents of them dressing up in WWII German military uniforms Germany/Prussia cosplay, and standing in front of temples with fake guns or doing nazi salutes in convention photos (If we want to bring racism and fetishization of gay men together there were two people who kissed in a holocaust memorial museum in Italy and Germany cosplay... there is no picture of this so it might be a rumor but it was well-known so it is worth mentioning). There were also a lot of people using imperialist Japan flags in cosplay/fanart and writing incredibly inappropriate fanfiction about real-life events.
If you would like to see any of these incidents feel free to look up "Hetalia the Boston Incident" I don't really wanna include the photos here.
The fetishization is not unique to the Hetalia fandom, but it is amplified to the max. Obviously, within Hetalia, there are almost no female characters, so this leaves only male characters to be shipped with one another. Now suddenly Germany is an uwu gay bean and not an actual war criminal. At the moment of writing this Hetalia has 32105 M/M fics on ao3 which is only one of the three fanfiction sites, with ao3 not even becoming popularized until after the peak of the Hetalia fandom. (the most popular ship being America/England who refer to each other as brothers in the show as England raised America, showing another problematic part of the fandom). I would argue that Hetalia has one of the gayest fandoms (My Hero Academia is giving it a run for its money though) and I agree with the article that it is inaccurate to say that this is only done by straight cis women. The fact of the matter is a lot of queer teens used Hetalia as an outlet to express their own sexuality through these characters. The straight women that do fetishize BL are likely only doing so because anime creators suck at writing good female characters.
I think that the "level of gayness" turns straight fans away from watching the show (again MHA is the same way today) as it is hard to interact with the fandom without seeing some yaoi content. However, many people view this as something wrong or cringy, when in reality it is a normal part of fandom culture. When gay people have such little content that is actually gay, you cannot blame us for creating our own through characters that we like/relate to. Again, I think the only issues that arise here are the problematic ships that give young people a bad impression of relationships (abusive, incest, pedophilia, etc) or the arguable problematic ones like China/Russia or Lithuania/Russia as again these are real countries with real political relations. (However, I will never forget the time that there was Russia/China fanart on the news, maybe they approve and I shouldn't be complaining)
The thing is, Hetalia only seems so bad because the fandom is so large and so young. A lot of shows have fandoms that sexualize the characters and have kinda problematic fans, but the sheer volume makes things seem worse. This is something that we covered when we watched Genshiken, but there is a lot of negative stigma behind this fandom in particular, but it is just a loud minority that gets a lot of news coverage between fandoms.
It also raises the question "Is a show responsible for the response of its fans?"
Because while Himaruya has no control over what people do with his characters or how they interpret a plot, if a majority of people are leaving your show spouting vaguely racist rhetoric and interpreting your show one way, isn't there some validity in that interpretation? I think a creator has to be aware of their audience, which in this case is a very young and impressionable audience who might not understand how offensive some of the things they are doing really are. They don't hold the same ability to separate fiction from reality.
That being said Hetalia had a large impact on fandom culture as a whole, largely starting things like 'ask a character' panels (along with like homestuck but we don't talk about her). If you go to any convention you will probably find a Hetalia cosplayer, and if you watch any dub there is probably a voice actor from Hetalia there.
I also want to mention Hetalia is also a fandom full of cultural capital, If you don't know every niche fact, you're not a real fan, If you haven't read Auf Wiedersehen Sweetheart you haven't even met the entry-level requirements to be a fan. There are also no characters that are too sacred to be altered within the fandom. If you want to put Germany in a maid dress have at it, if you want to see all the characters as girls you're in luck cause Himaruya literally drew them. Fanfictions can take place anywhere from WWI to the present day and you can put any characters in any scenario and make it believable. There are thousands of pieces of fanwork, fan art, fangames, and fan AUs. These characters are malleable to fit your personal preference and there is really no way you could be mad at this as Himaruya does this himself, with no real established canon.
a Hetalia fan once said, "No one cares if Hetalia was written by a Japenese Imperialism apologist when you're 31 chapters deep into a human Au soulmate fic about Austria inviting Prussia to see his boyband perform in Berlin"
Himaruya is also the king of moe characteristics because he turned these Hetalia men into any cute thing he could think of, Chibi versions (Chibitalia), female versions (Nyotalia), and cat versions (Nekotalia). He has no reservations about drawing the characters in a dress or in cat ears. He gave the characters human names to allow for more standardized human AU's and made a DS dating game. He encourages fans to take his characters and use them in their fanworks as they see fit, canon is up to interpretation itself. I think Himaruya himself was a huge part of fandom culture (not that I could tell you cause no one knows anything about the guy) and saw how the female characters were often treated by fans and turned it on its head, allowing for females to sexualize the males this time.
Also, none of the male characters in this show resembles a Hegemonic form of masculinity. Even the most masculine character in the show (Germany) can be seen doing more "feminine things" like wearing a dress or proposing to a man. Which, you know, I guess is a good diversion from things you would typically see in an anime of this nature (but again there are a lot of instances of characters being feminine being played for laughs, like a man being girly is something inherently funny). Feat. Germany proposing to Italy with a tomato ring.
7.
I am Hetalia's biggest hater, however, I cannot deny the impact that it has had on my life and how much I love to talk about it. Hetalia is what introduced me to anime and fandom (and tumblr) for the first time. I met a lot of people I still talk to today because of this show. It encouraged me and a lot of other people to actually get interested in history. Thanks to this show I can identify every country in Europe, and it was a lot easier to remember historical facts if I just imagined the Hetalia characters. Also, Auf Wiedersehen Sweetheart is a literary masterpiece and there is a reason it almost has a five-star rating on goodnotes (https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/22064556) I love you George DeValier I hope you're doing good wherever you are.
I would like to make it abundantly clear that despite everything I've said that might make me sound like a woke blue-haired liberal, I don't really think this show is some horribly racist show or that the people who enjoy it are racist. I just wanted to provide a deeper outlook on the impact a seemingly dumb show can have on real people. I can't really blame the show for the terrible response of the fandom and it did honestly get better in later seasons that are not focused on WWII.
Despite all the bad stuff, it is a relatively funny little 5-minute watch, and you can really just jump in at any point you want to. If you don't take it as seriously as I do you might even enjoy it a little.
If you actually read this far I have major respect for you, I'm really excited to see what the general consensus on this show is.
Prussia and South Italy were my favorites in case anyone cared
If you're wondering why I didn't do my presentation on Hetalia despite my extensive knowledge, it is because I would be incredibly biased and I would go off the rails I think.
Also, my biggest fear is current Hetalia fans finding this and killing me, that might seem irrational but the Gundam fans found me last time so I wouldn't put it past them.
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Hetalia Axis Powers (ep 1-19)
★★★☆☆
Hetalia Axis Powers was nothing of what I expected it to be. Honestly, I don't even know what I expected it to be. I watched this dub and was caught off-guard with the jokes that were being made. My first thought seeing how the countries were stereotyped was "did this offend anyone?" and, in fact, it did. Although they weren't depicted in the show, Korea took offense to how they were depicted in the web comic and banned streaming of the anime. It was a strip where Korea grabbed Japan's "breasts" as a way of representing how "Korea doesn't understand personal space." I believe it's based off a territorial dispute between Japan and Korea, but of course from the Japanese standpoint, the Koreans are the issue here. Considering it's a Japanese anime, it did seem as the stereotyping was light for the Japanese character. It wasn't anything that shed them in a bad light. Japan's character was depicted as soft and sensitive, which is a stereotype we also saw referenced in Genshiken. I mentioned earlier I watched the dubbed version, but from what I've read, if you were to compare the subbed and dubbed, the dubbed emphasizes the countries accents more (including Japan). My main theory for this being that the Americans who dubbed don't care to protect Japan's image and therefore are okay mocking their accents. In my opinion, as someone watching in America, I'm not offended by the way America is portrayed. I feel like Americans also tend to believe these same stereotypes about ourselves (and maybe the other countries as well?). But I'm curious as to what many other countries responses were to this anime. Reaching this point of my blog post, I'm realizing I'm saying a lot about Japan protecting their image but Hetalia started as a Dojinshi. If this is how Japanese citizens view Japan's image, what does it say about Japan's sense of nationalism? And while I'm the topic of it, I wonder how Americans would write Hetalia if it were from our point of view.
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I love how you point out this cycle of human behavior. It is true that humans live selfishly to satisfy their wants and needs. It's why even living through global climate change, people don't choose to be more environmentally friendly because it is more of a burden to them. Why fly on a regular airline with everyone else when you can afford to travel in your own private jet whenever you can? It's interesting that even the new life forms followed after human behavior.
These 29 cutscenes made me have an existential crisis. At first, I had little to know idea what was going on and kept getting everyone confused with each other. I was also confused at the different types of "people" such as the Blades, Drivers, etc. But the last two cutscenes we watched where the world's Architect explained everything helped me so so much. After reassessing the video game series, the two main ideas I pulled from this were obviously environmentalism and then the grand narrative. We see from the beginning that these characters are living in a different fantasy world that exists above the clouds. And I wondered what was beneath the clouds and why they couldn't just land and live on the ground. We now learn that humans have once again destroyed the earth and had to become creative in how to rebuild not only a new world but new life forms. This took the idea of environmentalism to a whole new level. The people in this game couldn't live with themselves their destroyed world, so instead of adapting, they just made a new one with "tools" to make life easier for them. The new circle of life didn't require as much energy as blades would eventually turn into titans on their own and in turn bring new life. Comparing this to Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, we see again a women that has the role of "saving" the environment and being very mother nature. Pyra/Mythra had to make the ultimate decision to sacrifice herself in turn for the others to go back to the world and help save it. The other thing I noticed was the Architects thoughts on human behavior. He viewed humans as animals since they only lived selfishly for their own wants and needs. He lost hope in humanity and the grand narrative since no humans were working towards it. This is why he created the new world with the Conduit, and created new life forms. But we see in the end that the new life forms are just like the humans before them, which leads me to think that the cycle will just repeat itself. Overall, VERY interesting series just based off of the cutscenes!
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Xenoblade Chronicles
★★☆☆☆ + 0.5
This is different from what we've been watching in this class, but I think it's cool that we were given the opportunity to analyze a video game. Maybe because I lacked context about what the game itself is based on, I was kind of confused though. It did keep with our current topic of discussion which is the environment. It seems like Xenoblade is where humans are to redeem themselves for destroying their world. But the redemption just doesn't happen. It's an interesting point that humans are destined to destroy the environments they live in. I suppose it would be due to our greedy nature, the main concern of humans isn't whether the environment around us is being sustained but rather how far we can develop our cities and technology. I find it intriguing that even after experiencing their own destruction, humans don't choose to protect their environment. It's something we're living through right now as the consequences of our development our predicted, but no one chooses to live more environmentally friendly to prevent this destruction from happening.
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You worded this way better than I ever could've. I agree with every point you're making. We as humans aren't considering the damage and setbacks that come with the "progress" we're making. If we think about the state of our environment right now, it already seems like nature is already taking back the Earth.
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind
Surprisingly enough, I hadn’t seen this one yet. A lot of my friends have hyped it up and I was very pleased with the viewing experience. It was a fun, beautifully animated movie about environmental awareness and human nature. I really loved the music and medieval/semi-futuristic aesthetic the anime had, very Miyazaki in my opinion. The plot follows a post-apocalyptic world where nature has reclaimed most of Earth after a devastating war. Humans are now on the brink of extinction and must band together to survive the monstrous insects and poisons of nature that are holding humans back from terraforming and expanding again. Princess Nausicaä herself is the intermediate between nature and humans and hopes to bring about peace and understanding between the two to allow both sides to live in harmony.
The fact that the movie is post-apocalyptic provides commentary on human nature. It shows the thirst for war humanity has had in the past and how that inevitably concludes with both sides of the battle suffering and eventually fizzling away. This idea makes sense as a commentary from a director coming from a post WWII era. The destruction caused in the anime resembles that of the Second World War where every side of the conflict suffered immeasurable loss, leading to a toxic environment afterward (symbolized here with a literal toxic atmosphere). Humans constantly fight and create structures that not only destroy themselves, but the world around them. This leads us to the most obvious theme here which is that of environmental awareness.
Humanity has burned fossil fuels, polluted the water and air, and destroyed ecosystems for hundreds of years all for the sake of progress. However, the progress is actually a setback as we are not only eliminating the natural resources we have available to us, but also destroying the natural process and intrinsic benefit nature has. Furthermore, living organisms and their habitats are displaced and destroyed, resulting in a net loss of biodiversity. We humans are animals too and have natural habitats. In our goal of expansion, we have overstepped our boundaries and destroyed the world of our fellow creatures. We have taken and have not until recently paid much attention to giving back to nature. The idea in the anime that nature has reclaimed the world acts as a warning to us that our continuous destruction of nature will result in our extinction. Though nature may not take back Earth literally, its natural processes we take for granted (like oxygen production and water purification) will cease to exist. Animals and diverse species will also perish and we will be left alone to fend for ourselves in a hazardous, polluted world. The reclamation of nature serves as a way to reflect on what we do. Just as the insects and toxic forests pushback humans in the movie, we push back nature and animals in reality. Princess Nausicaä acts as the voice of reason that we as a society should listen to. She is praised and loved because she is caring and compassionate to the world of nature. She represents how we should view activism for nature in our day and age. We shouldn’t ridicule it nor ignore it for profit, but instead listen to its reason and information and band together to preserve our world and live in harmony with it.
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Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind
★★★☆☆ + 0.5
I'm so happy we got to watch another Miyazaki movie, I love his work. In my humble opinion, this film is a critique on human interaction with the environment. The way we live our lives is ultimately negatively impacting the environment. With all the pollution we produce, it made me think about how Nausicaä said the forest (jungle ?? tbh I already forgot what they referred to it as) was toxic because the soil wasn't receiving clean water and nutrients. Think of the fish in the oceans and rivers who are dying out because of toxins dumped in the water. Another thing I was reminded of was how we're expanding into the everglades. Nausicaä mentioned they can't coexist with the insects which would be the same as us being unable to coexist with alligators, snakes, etc. The problem is us expanding into the animals' habitats and them adapting to the unfamiliar changes. I really hope I understood the themes and message of this movie correctly because my letterboxd review for this movie was "if Greta Thunberg was in a ghibli movie."
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I suppose the movie really did want to show us what "lowest of the low" meant because there was too much questionable stuff going on. I have to say, I'm on the same boat as you with being confused about this series. The only thing I can comprehend is Shinji's character.
The End of Evangelion
…What did I just watch? In all honesty, this movie left me more confused than the final episode, 28, of the series. Perhaps I wasn’t paying attention enough, but this movie definitely offered more graphic and maturer content than the series. In the first few minutes of the movie, we see Shinji is in distress because Asuka is in the hospital and is unresponsive. My thing is, when did Shinji and Asuka become so buddy-buddy? In the previous episodes, we saw how tense any interaction between Shinji and Asuka was. Maybe this friendship “blossomed” in the between episodes, but still Shinji was at an all time low in this movie and it showed. However, why the heck does it pan to Shinji’s hand that is covered in a white, sticky substance…? *bombastic side eye* This boy was literally boo-hoo crying over Asuka being unresponsive and had the audacity to become aroused to her half naked, prone, and unresponsive body? Like what? Shinji even says in the hospital room that he “is the lowest of the low”, and I completely agree because what in the world compelled him to do that? Don’t even get me started on Katsuragi KISSING Shinji???? (RIP Katsuragi) But what? Then she says “that’s how grown ups kiss”. Maybe I wasn’t paying enough attention, but this series left me more confused and flabbergasted than I’ve ever been before with a series.
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