|
Sailor-Arrakis posted:As ridiculous as the content of the show is, I do not understand the threads getting gassed. The first episode was bizarre and surreal enough to spark interest and most of the blatant, over-the-top symbolism kept me laughing the entire time instead of cringing. Not sure what I was expecting going into a show about lesbians and bears, but it ended up being much more entertaining than I could have imagined. There are far more tasteless/boring/fan service-y/poorly put together shows that get dedicated threads in ADTRW. Right, and with the new regime, they're likely to get gassed too. Our anime overlord is harsh but fair.
|
#
¿
Jan 8, 2015 02:27
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 17, 2024 18:16 |
|
|
Effectronica posted:"Ōkawa Haruyoshi, who was seven years old and the son of the Sankebetsu village mayor at the time of the incident, grew up to become an excellent bear hunter. He swore an oath to kill ten bears for every victim of the attack. By the time he reached the age of 62, he had killed 102 bears. He then retired and constructed the bear harm cenotaph (熊害慰霊碑 Yūgai Ireihi?), a shrine where people can pray for the dead villagers." Right, but how many of them did he gently caress?
|
|
#
¿
Jan 8, 2015 03:01
|
|
|
Cao Ni Ma posted:Thats why I said it was weird, because it would be lesbians bullying lesbians. You can assume that everyone in the town is gay, so unless japan has a strange gay on gay bullying problem it wouldn't make sense at least as presented right now. There's definitely more to it than just this and it probably involves what the two different species of lesbians represent. I've got a theory here, but it involves a lot of  about the Japanese attitude to homosexuality and media depictions thereof, so stop me here if you're not interested in that/don't want to talk about the sociopolitical subtext of a show about underaged lesbian bears.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 8, 2015 04:21
|
|
|
Srice posted:If anything a thread for an Ikuhara show seems like the perfect place to go hog wild with that. Right, you asked for this, and thanks to submitting my assignment yesterday, I've got a clear schedule. Let's do this. OK, first off, let's state the blindingly obvious - this is a show about yuri. It's called Yuri Bear Storm, the female characters are labelled 'yuri', and there's a literal court that determines what is and is not acceptable yuri. Since Ikuhara is one of those highfalutin directors who includes messages and themes and all that poo poo in his work, it seems reasonable to guess that we're looking at an examination of the yuri genre and Japanese attitudes towards female homosexuality in general. It's not 100% sure what he'll say about this, but it's clear that he's addressing it. With that in mind, let's look at the history and origins of yuri as a popular literary genre. Around the early twentieth century, a socioliterary trend called Class S took off. Inspired by the Western concept of romantic friendship, which had been imported via Victorian literature during Meiji Japan's frantic Westernisation, it held that girls should form close, romantic friendships with each other in order to train themselves as proper wives for their future husbands, as part of the 'good wife, wise mother' philosophy brought in to indoctrinate Japanese women as good little baby-factories for the expanding empire. It had a lot of cross-pollination with the legendary Takurazuka Revue founded in 1914, which I'm sure many Ikuhara fans are familiar with. For the uninitiated, the Revue is a musical theatre troupe based on traditional Japanese kabuki, with the big twist that rather than being all-male, the actors are all-female. It's loud, hammy, garish, and hyper-stylised - sound familiar? Anyway, Takurazuka occupies a complex place in Japanese feminism and LGBT rights. It's often viewed as a liberating force, allowing women to escape the bounds of their gender, but while the actors are women, the whole spectacle is very male-controlled - the directors and backstage staff heavily skew towards men, and the original creator of the Revue, Ichizo Kobayashi, was a wealthy industrialist (the president of the Hankyu Railway company, in fact, which is why the Revue's named after the Hankyu Takurazuka line in Osaka and the actresses are all employees of Hankyu Railway) who created it as a training ground for housewives in-keeping with the Meiji 'good wife, wise mother' ideal. Class S had a major impact on Japanese attitudes to lesbians. It meant that same-sex relationships between girls were acceptable if they didn't go too far, and if they were stepping stones on the path to a proper, heterosexual marriage. Adult lesbians were shunned and treated as immature/in need of a good hard dicking. This was reflected in Japanese lesbian fiction, yuri, where two options were traditionally presented to the main characters. One is 'Story A', a light, fluffy romance juuust this side of a close friendship where two girls like each other, discover they like each other... and then the final curtain slams down like a guillotine before the relationship can develop beyond holding hands, gazing soulfully into each other's eyes, and maybe a kiss if they're lucky. More sexual lesbian relationships tend to end in death or some other permanent, tragic separation, as the girls receive karmic retribution for violating society's norms, in much the same way as Hays Code-era crime movies showed gangsters being cool and awesome for almost their whole runtime before they were abruptly punished for their crimes in the last few minutes. Now let's look at how this applies to Yuri Bear Storm. There's a clear contrast between the bears and the humans set up here. Kureha and Sumika's relationship is extremely chaste and desexualised, but still faces systemic opposition. The girls are dwarfed by enormous buildings and literally walled into their society. Their world is bright and colourful, but very regular and ordered, with a miasma of paranoia and oppression. The bears, on the other hand, are free and enthusiastically, aggressively sexual - they're responsible for 90% minimum of the fanservice and sexual imagery, and eating is an obvious metaphor for sex (rape, in fact). As opposed to the tame, Story A yuri of the human world, they're the predatory 'psycho lesbian' villain stereotype of innumerable Japanese and Western shows. They present a threat that can only be fought by conformity with the social order that controls Kureha and Sumika's lives. Even the bears aren't free, though - they're subordinate to the Court of Severance, the only men in the cast so far, who decide what is and is not acceptably sexy, beautiful, and cool yuri. Remember what I said about the organisation and purpose of the Takarazuka Revue? In fact, if Ikuhara's being self-aware, this might even be commentary on the fact that he, a guy, is directing a yuri show. "Will you be invisible? Or will you eat humans?" is a really telling line - the arbiters of yuri are asking the bears to choose between what is socially acceptable (tame, desexualised same-sex relationships) and unleashing their lust in an aggressive, blatant, and destructive manner. I wouldn't be surprised if the goal here is to preach a middle ground that goes against what either the Court of Severance or the human world will allow - a stable, loving, and openly sexual lesbian relationship. Certainly, that's what the opening seems to champion, with Ginko, Kureha, and Lulu ending it leaning against each other in a happy, naked heap after expressing their mutual affection with a string of kisses. Basically, the evidence so far seems to suggest that Ikuhara's purpose here is to say 'yo, Japan, your attitude to lesbians is kind of hosed up and restrictive - let the girls have their fun, why don't you?'
|
|
#
¿
Jan 9, 2015 23:47
|
|
|
Ibram Gaunt posted:Hrm, I don't agree. Hey, like you said, deciphering this poo poo is fun, and Ikuhara's one of those directors who relies on themes and symbolism enough in his stories that you're likely to find something interesting if you dig for it. Honestly, I thought the case was reasonably solid here for an analysis based off a single episode - it certainly fits with the interests that the director has loudly and repeatedly expressed his enthusiasm for.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 10, 2015 00:21
|
|
|
Namtab posted:Sounds great. Not at all hosed up. I talk about that in the very next sentence. They represent the 'psycho lesbian' stereotype, which is indeed hosed up and pretty much the only way overt lesbian sexuality is allowed to be expressed, as something evil and destructive (but totes sexy, you guys). Think the busty nurse who tries to murder the Major in Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, or Nina Einstein the racist table-fucker in Code Geass. In traditional yuri, you either get to be in a chaste, sexless relationship almost indistinguishable from close friendship, or you're an oversexed, immature, predatory freak. If you're lucky, you might get the 'sexy rapist' treatment of a seme (top) in yaoi, but things are probably still going to end horribly for you - the only difference is that it'll be treated as a tragedy rather than something to celebrate (think Chikane from Kannazuki no Miko, which is a pretty iconic yuri work even if it's kind of poo poo). I would not be at all surprised if a theme in the story is of Kureha and the bears finding a healthy, affectionate way to express their sexuality even as the authorities of both sides try to deny it. Darth Walrus fucked around with this message at 15:37 on Jan 10, 2015 |
|
#
¿
Jan 10, 2015 15:23
|
|
|
Namtab posted:I know you did and I'm not having a pop at you. Yeah, I think the endgame is definitely important here. A lot of people were giving KLK's rapey stuff a pass because they hoped it would lead up to something thematic and important, and then haha nope it was just there for cheap shock value and could have been comfortably edited out. Ikuhara, meanwhile, is getting goodwill because talking about teenage sexuality, including its most shocking and unpleasant aspects, is kind of his thing, and he usually does a decent, insightful job of it when all's said and done. This is a bit more overtly fanservicey than his norm, but, again, there's moderate odds that he's going somewhere with it. It could well end up as creepy-for-the-wrong-reasons fetishistic poo poo, but there's reason to want to wait and see.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 10, 2015 15:46
|
|
|
Effectronica posted:In any case, I'm really suspicious of anything that relies too heavily on assuming YKA is primarily an ouroborotic commentary on the yuri genre. Utena was a commentary on magical girl shows and an outre example of the same, but it also had its own things going on besides being pure commentary. That's reasonable, but they're making it incredibly obvious how self-aware and self-referential this show is. I mean, the first episode literally starts with a banner saying 'YURI', every character has 'yuri' somewhere in the name, there's omnipresent lily imagery... they're really rubbing your face in the fact that 'HEY, GUYS, THIS IS A YURI SHOW', and when somebody makes a theme that obvious, it's reasonable to assume it'll have something to say about it. On an interpretation of the lily-licking scene that isn't just the obvious 'Ikuhara has a thing for underaged lesbians, and it is weird', it may be commentary on rape fantasy versus rape reality. It's treated as some sort of dream/magical vision - Kureha appears to be asleep during it, and literally wakes up from it afterwards. Now compare how eroticised it is with the scene where we (and Yurizono) see what bears eating someone really looks like at the end of the episode - it's shot for pure horror, with hideous sound-effects and nothing fanservicey about it at all. If it does turn out to be thematically-relevant, it might be commentary on Japanese romance's habit (which yuri is not immune from) of eroticising something ghastly and hosed-up. This might be underlined in later episodes by Ginko and Lulu's first attempt to eat Sumika for real being played as scary and not sexy in the slightest, reinforcing her hatred of bears and building up the show's central conflict. If a healthy romance does develop out of this, it'd probably be Sumika initiating it, because the bears can't do it without bringing their established rapey baggage along. It's possible that everything will go straight to hell and we'll get a more regular shoujo-romance rape-is-love message, but Ikuhara's generally pretty good at avoiding that.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 10, 2015 18:40
|
|
|
ViggyNash posted:Yes, because Ikuhara is totally literal in every aspect of Utena and Penguindrum,. Plus, well, lesbians eating each other is hardly obscure, subtle symbolism.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 10, 2015 20:49
|
|
|
Effectronica posted:Okay, yes, let's play this out. From the first episode, the bears infiltrated past the "Wall of Extinction" because... they're horny? They need to rape to live? It's something that's obviously sexualized, but when you look at it from that perspective, it suddenly becomes incoherent as anything other than some truly disturbing fetish pornography with a bunch of nonsense attached. They don't need to get through the wall, they just want to. Ginko says it herself - 'gently caress da police, we're bears.' And if you take them as the stand-ins for evil hedonistic psycho lesbians, who exist to defile pure Japanese maidens in ways deemed acceptable by the dudes arbitrating the Court of Yuri, it does indeed fit.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 10, 2015 21:43
|
|
|
ViggyNash posted:Put simply, the rape imagery is itself symbolic of some point. Less eroticised rape imagery, maybe? Because I totally get why you might want to make it less fanservicey, but with the themes being addressed here, rape imagery is pretty much inevitable.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 10, 2015 22:14
|
|
|
Dan7el posted:I will say that there seems to be a lot of construction going on in the skyline/background. I wonder what the imagery for that is supposed to suggest? If I were to guess, and that's what I'm doing now, I'd say all the cranes and such indicating massive construction are representing some kind of parallel intent-creation that Ikuhara is trying to represent. I wonder if the buildings will begin to become more finished as the story goes along? It would be interesting to see. That one's easy - this is a society that's constantly building walls, literally and metaphorically. Those looming, ever-rising megastructures give the world an oppressive, claustrophobic edge. despite its bright, cheery surface.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 12, 2015 01:15
|
|
|
Wait, so the president is also a bear, and ate Sumika? That doesn't fit in the slightest with most of the scenes we saw from her perspective this episode. The obvious explanation is a kill-and-replace, but I cannot for the life of me figure out when the switch might have happened. Manchurian Kumandidate, maybe? And yeah, if you have a low tolerance for sketchy fanservice, this probably ain't the show for you.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 12, 2015 21:27
|
|
|
ANN's Nick Creamer has been doing some cool and interesting breakdowns if you want to get into the show's cinematography, themes, and symbolism: Episode One Episode Two
|
|
#
¿
Jan 13, 2015 05:14
|
|
|
XboxPants posted:I thought these were good, he picks up on a few things I missed and haven't seen discussed here, like the bird symbolism, though I think it's still not quite clear exactly what that's meant to represent. Birds are generally pretty obvious symbols of freedom. Maybe they represent the potential that the current system is repressing? Bears and humans are both the oppressors here. And I think those breakdowns help clarify the purpose of the Court of Yuri - it's not just a symbol of patriarchy dictating the girls' lives, but it's outright ritualised bullshit gibberish that the 'defendants' are supposed to passively endure (so, still a symbol of patriarchy, but more so). I think that we're building up to Ginko and Lulu (or maybe Sumika) interfering with the Court's procedure and taking a more active role, at which point the stock-footage pattern should change dramatically. Darth Walrus fucked around with this message at 13:25 on Jan 13, 2015 |
|
#
¿
Jan 13, 2015 13:18
|
|
|
Harettazetta posted:If you hated KLK for the stuff it did, and are defending this show, congratulations. I think it's less about what they're doing, and more about where they go with it. KLK gets a lot of extra crap for its skeezy content because it never actually went anywhere interesting or insightful with it, and just tacked it on for cheap shock value. When you eventually decide the theme you're going for is 'yeah, none of this makes sense, which is awesome' after a muddled mess of a second act, people are going to have a lot less patience for any sleazy poo poo you put in because it didn't serve a purpose beyond cheap shock value. Ikuhara, meanwhile, has a lot of goodwill from previous shows to burn through with YKA, and the theme of teenage sexuality is front and centre and subject to some moderately coherent examination so far. I think everyone recognises that this show has the potential to collapse into a Kill-la-Kill-style mess or a standard creepy shoujo rape-is-love plot, at which point the risqué content becomes a lot less defensible, but I think it's OK to wait and see until the show's over/we get a better idea of where Ikuhara is going for this. Remember, KLK's sexual content got defended while the show was running, too. It's only with the benefit of hindsight that we can say 'nope, it was worthless'.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 14, 2015 02:41
|
|
|
trucutru posted:Isn't he the "Nisemonogatari is not a fanservic-y show" dude? He backs his observations here up with some pretty decent, consistent evidence. You got any specific criticisms of these breakdowns?
|
|
#
¿
Jan 14, 2015 06:08
|
|
|
I'm wondering (and it's getting discussion on that blog as well) if the birds might have the inverse symbolism - caged, domesticated living ornaments. The school architecture does have a certain birdcage vibe to it, with that mass of narrow, sharply-outlined windows, and even the interior design is sort of cage-like.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 15, 2015 04:26
|
|
|
If you want to learn a little more about lesbians in Japan, this is actually a decent, well-sourced article despite the site it's on.quote:Lesbian double suicide was not uncommon at that time, accounting for around thirty percent of all suicides between 1932 and 1935. 
|
|
#
¿
Jan 16, 2015 22:23
|
|
|
The academic article from which it draws that statistic (and a good deal of other information) is basically pure  , and probably still quite show-relevant. This being a story about yuri, I'd be surprised if we don't have at least one attempted suicide in the remaining episodes.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 16, 2015 23:02
|
|
|
Cao Ni Ma posted:On Bears gently caress if I know! Ginko and Lulu seem to genuinely care for Kureha at a level that isnt "I'm going to eat you". Ginko says it a lot sure, but I'm guessing she's actually repressing those base desires because she finds Kureha's love admirable? They still aren't part of the "invisible storm" and they seem to go out of their way to help the "other" to the point that they'll attack members of both the storm and other bears. On the other hand, the other bears have been shown to be greedy, manipulative and mean. It looks like Ginko and Lulu had to make a deal with the devil this episode. In order to save Sumika, they had to reiterate their adherance to the 'predatory lesbian' model allowed by the Court of Yuri and kill another innocent girl in her place. The obvious implication is that working within a flawed system can only get you so far - in order to make genuine change, you have to reject and rebel against that system. Ginko and Lulu don't want to be simple predators, but they're trapped by their roles, and I'd guess it's Sumika who'll have to free them in the long run. Another Creamer writeup, if anyone's interested in those. Darth Walrus fucked around with this message at 23:27 on Jan 19, 2015 |
|
#
¿
Jan 19, 2015 23:17
|
|
|
Phobophilia posted:Yo, have you guys been reading one another's works? Not on my end, although I am surprised by how similar those writeups ended up being. I guess we were just drawing from broadly similar sources. I'm pleased to see Ekens getting this series to cover. She's an extremely solid critic with a great eye for detail. Her GARO: The Animation reviews have been particularly fun, drawing out what makes an apparently generic shonen fighter unique and interesting.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 20, 2015 12:45
|
|
|
On a related note, this academic article I linked earlier seemed to get a lot more relevant this episode. It's really, really easy to draw parallels between the Exclusion Ceremony, in which Sumika is vilified for daring to get herself killed, and the literal competitions to write the best satirical poems about lesbian suicide in Meiji Japan.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 20, 2015 14:14
|
|
|
Rand Brittain posted:He could be another freakishly-young 50 like Hideo Kojima. Or Araki the Eternal.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 20, 2015 15:30
|
|
|
AnacondaHL posted:The horror film imagery is interesting, but it's probably Eva-style Christianity Imagery Just Cuz It Looks Cool. I don't think that's quite fair. It's shallow symbolism, sure, but that's because it's alluding to something shallow. Evangelion took surface skims of rich, complex cultural concepts and symbols in order to lend itself a sense of mythological gravitas without really connecting with what those themes and symbols meant. YKA is just establishing a scary, claustrophobic atmosphere by borrowing cinematic tricks used by other stories to establish a scary, claustrophobic atmosphere. It's not exactly trampling over the deep symbolism of the Overlook Hotel's carpet pattern.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 20, 2015 16:43
|
|
|
Sharkopath posted:I think the obvious sort of ending is Kureha and the Bears learning to love in a new and more honest way and changing the systems from both sides, but I feel like that kind of ending would actually disappoint me a bit and feel out of place, because the tone of the show and the world in it is weird. This episode confirmed that what the bears are doing is actual murder, so all the aesthetic horror references aren't actually that shallow. With the oppressive, encompassing environment, stock characters, and everybody dying all the time it's structured way more like a psychological/slasher horror series than a romance one. I think it makes more sense when you remember that the bears are also victims who have this system imposed on them. Basically, if you're gay, society only allows you to be either a predator or a victim (and is perfectly happy with killing you if you're a predator). The Court of Yuri is just the flipside of the Exclusion Ceremonies.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 20, 2015 19:23
|
|
|
Sharkopath posted:Oh yeah as a statement of the actual world its totally true, but I haven't seen much of that in this show as it is. The bears, all of them so far, seem to revel in the eating. I think if that's an aspect of the world you wanted to expound upon you could do it even in earlier episodes like this, but instead even the two main bears are straight up taunting people before they kill them. Earlier I thought the eating was more metaphor or an obfuscation of the exclusion of people chosen by the Storm, maybe even them being removed to outside the wall, but this episode told us yeah they were killing and eating other people before her. The thing is that the show's demonstrating that even if you're totally OK with a system, it can still hurt and exploit you. So far, we've had three enthusiastic adherents of the system end up dead because of it - Mitsuko, her girlfriend, and the girl running the Exclusion Ceremony. As for our main bears, they seem to be at a very early stage in their character development, where they're mostly on board with what they're doing, but starting to have doubts. Ginko is pretty sure she should be eating Kureha, but mostly because that's the only way a bear's allowed to express affection, and she's getting all hesitant and experiencing crossed wires over it. I'm sure she'd justify it as 'I want to eat her instead', but the fact remains that she got into a deal with the devil this episode to save Kureha's life. Lulu seems like even more of an outlier from the bear norm, loving Ginko in a way that goes beyond what's acceptable by the rules of the world. Note how she said 'I won't give up on love' this episode, the catchphrase of Kureha and Sumika's taboo relationship, and how she pleaded with the Court this episode, promising tem that she'd eat as many girls as they wanted if it would let her 'protect Ginko's love'. There is some genuine friction starting to emerge here.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 20, 2015 21:02
|
|
|
Effectronica posted:I find it pretty hilarious how basically all the analysis tries to get around the fact that this is a show where lesbian sex giving you magical powers is something that happens in every episode so far. That's something to get around? 'Lesbian sex is awesome, rapemurder is significantly less awesome' is a pretty good way to boil down this series's themes. If you'll permit me to be a giant pedant, though, I don't remember the Yuri Approved stuff actually doing anything (let alone anything useful) until the latest episode. It mostly seemed to be the Court going 'fine, fine, you can keep mooning after this human girl, just remember to keep up your rapemurder quotas, ya hear?'
|
|
#
¿
Jan 21, 2015 02:20
|
|
|
Beef Waifu posted:I'm pretty sure more than half of the posters in the thread realize it's titty anime and some are trying to say it's not. I think the latter is massively incorrect, but hey everyone's got their opinions. As long as it doesn't get as bad as the KLK thread (Read: Some dude doing a run down of not sexy this scene is supposed to be and the severity of it), it's cool. I'd say it's a show about titty anime that also happens to include a hell of a lot of anime tits. The purpose of the anime tits is because (a) teenage lesbians make Ikuhara horny, and (b) he's an artist genuinely interested in how art works and what it has to say about society, and his preferred form of art to examine is lesbian titty anime (with the occasional gay dick anime thrown in for good measure) because teenage lesbians make him horny.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 21, 2015 02:35
|
|
|
Effectronica posted:"For behold, I saw Ikuhara as he fell from Heaven like lightning." Life Sexy is M. Bison? ... You know, I could totally see that.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 23, 2015 15:48
|
|
|
Notes on an interview with Ikuhara and Morishima about YKA. It seems the latter was pretty influential on the direction of the work, even if the manga she's doing on her own is very different. Interestingly, it was her idea to have the Court of Yuri as guys - Ikuhara was originally thinking of them being women with male voices.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 23, 2015 17:18
|
|
|
If you want to dig a bit more into the themes and symbolism of the last couple of episodes, here's Nick Creamer and Gabriella Ekens's writeups on Episodes Four (Creamer, Ekens), and Five (Creamer, Ekens).
|
|
#
¿
Feb 4, 2015 14:26
|
|
|
Actually, I'm wondering if Ginko is a criminal because she intervened.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 9, 2015 23:41
|
|
|
New episode means new Ekens and Creamer posts. Anyone finding these useful/interesting? I've kind of been throwing them out there, and I can stop if nobody wants 'em.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 11, 2015 01:55
|
|
|
Cao Ni Ma posted:In an interview its mentioned that they weren't even supposed to be men, just women with mens voices so I'm not really buying that sort of explanation. Just like the bird motif being a common trope for freedom got twisted around in this to mean flock/herd mentality I'm expecting the court to be something completely different from patriarchy. Specially now that their function seems eerily similar to what Lady Kumaria was saying in the story. That was the original idea, but plans change. In the final product, we have the only recurring male characters being a tribunal who judge what is and is not acceptable yuri, and the oneshot male character, Mirun, delegitimising his sister by his very existence. Even if patriarchy wasn't originally a planned theme, I'd say it's one now.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 12, 2015 09:01
|
|
|
They basically can't do a tragic ending with the story and themes they've set up. This show is a critical look at the classic yuri genre and all the baggage it inherited from Class S, which includes the notion that lesbian relationships are inherently transient - either you grow out of them or you're forced apart by death or some other separation. Pretty much the only way they can challenge that is with a happy, stable, and permanent lesbian relationship - otherwise, they're just recycling what they've been trying to criticise.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 17, 2015 01:06
|
|
|
Sakurazuka posted:While this would be nice I have no faith that this show isn't going to go for an ironic tragic end because I guess that's the best way to point out how stupid the classic tragic ends are? On the one hand, that seems like an ideal target for some Ikuhara black comedy, but on the other, there were literal newspaper-run poetry competitions to see who could best mock lesbian suicides in Meiji Japan, so that would be way inappropriate given the thematic subject matter. Basically, yuri and its cultural/genre predecessors have been linked to so much horrible poo poo and so many weird assumptions over the years that it severely narrows the ways you can critique them.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 17, 2015 02:41
|
|
|
It's Ekens and Creamer time again. One important thing to note - 'Kumalia' is a mistranslation. It's actually 'Kumaria' - as in, the Virgin Mary. Now, this has some really obvious tie-ins with Class S and classic yuri, which was often set in Catholic girls' schools. As I mentioned earlier, Class S was one of Meiji Japan's repurposings of Western culture to better serve the rising empire. In this case, it was an adaptation of the literary concept of 'romantic friendship', promoting close, pseudo-romantic ties between girls as training for marriage so they'd become good little baby-factories for the Emperor's armies. Another thing the Meiji Restoration did was allow freedom of religion after hundreds of years of anti-Christian persecution under the Shogunate, resulting in a great big influx of Christians to Japan. The Catholic Church got in on this like Elvis on a pound of bacon, and started opening up schools and orphanages there. Historically, Japanese state education favoured male students, which meant that while the Church merely did OK at setting up boys' schools, it rapidly cornered the market on girls' schools, offering an unprecedented level of funding and education quality. Girls' schools were, of course, where Class S was aimed at, so a majority of Japanese girls went to Western schools where they were taught a system of conduct based on Western literature, all for the purposes of a Japanese patriarchy - the Virgin Mary was a suitably pure, sexless female ideal to ensure that the girls didn't get too carried away with their romantic play-acting before they could be shuffled to baby-making duty. As a result, 'Catholic schoolgirl' rapidly became Japanese shorthand for 'lesbian', and Catholic girls' schools became the iconic setting for Class S and yuri fiction. Perhaps the most famous modern example is Maria-sama ga Miteru, a 1997 light novel series about Catholic schoolgirls not quite being lesbians with each other which led the twenty-first-century Class S revival. Now let's look at how this all applies to YKA. The setting owes a lot to Japanese Christianity. Stormhigh School is an archetypal yuri version of a Catholic girls' school, complete with the modest, pastel-coloured uniforms, Western architecture, and hidden lesbian passion amongst the immaculate flowerbeds. Ginko, meanwhile, went to one of the schools' sister institutions, an orphanage, complete with a very Christian church service. The governing body of all of this is Lady (Ku)Maria, and she ain't a positively-depicted figure. She's a hybrid of the two main symbols of oppression in the show, birds and bears, preaching separation, exclusion, and mutual predation. It was her influence, after all, that started the war in the first place. A really telling line in this episode is that she is 'the one who approves all living things', the supreme judge of the world and arbiter of what is and is not acceptable. Happy, stable lesbian relationships? Yeah, no, ain't happening. The Virgin Mary, who watched over the creation of Class S in Japan, is a tyrannical, unreachable, and unhealthily sexless female ideal. Nope, no subtext here. One thing I'm wondering about - is Yuriika (c'mon, I don't have to spoiler this) a manifestation of Kumaria? She's the head of the Stormhigh system, she's constantly followed around by bird imagery, and she's a bear in disguise. This might have interesting implications for how she's treated as a villain. All of the antagonists so far have had an element of tragedy to them - they're parts of a system so cruel and unfair that even their enthusiastic participation in it won't save them. Yuriika/Kumaria, on the other hand, seems to be at the top of the chain, and that grants her a degree of freedom that the others lack. That leaves three options - she's redeemable, letting the system be salvaged from the inside, she's pure, irredeemable evil, an embodiment of all that's wrong with the world who can only be destroyed or fled from, or she, too, is tied down in some regard. Remember that Mary was a figurehead, a useful tool for Japan's male government to shape the lives of their nation's girls. It may well turn out that she, too, is a tool for someone else, and it wouldn't surprise me if it's the only recurring guys in the show, the Court of Severance. Darth Walrus fucked around with this message at 03:45 on Feb 18, 2015 |
|
#
¿
Feb 18, 2015 02:55
|
|
|
Cao Ni Ma posted:I'm really not going pass judgement on the court/Kumaria (effectively they are the same things, we've even seen how the court seems to have fallen off the more Kumaria we've seen) yet because they aren't really evil unless they do the whole "We only let you climb up the mountain so we could see you could fall from higher" thing so far they've been actively helping the cast despite the apparent restrictions. Kumaria is a fairly obvious antagonistic force. She started the war between bears and humans, getting a shitload of people killed, and calls any interaction between the two sides blasphemy. She turned Ginko from a victim into a victimiser - her orphanage system is designed to turn outcast bears into human-killing soldiers enforcing the divide between the two worlds, and holy poo poo this is not a healthy attitude for a child to have. If she's Yuriika, then she's also spouting Class S propaganda, poisoning Kureha's mind by framing Ginko for her own crimes, and committing statutory rapemurder on her own students for funsies. Also, every character, girl or bear, who devotedly follows her rules ends up dead or in mortal peril. She's not exactly the avatar of an acceptable system, and the only options our protagonists have are to flee or destroy her.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 18, 2015 14:09
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 17, 2024 18:16 |
|
|
I'm starting to get really suspicious about the Promise Kiss, though. It's been shown so far to be the only acceptable form of love approved by the system, and the quests for it so far have not been shown to be especially healthy (particularly Ginko's, where she's trying to possess Kureha without really paying attention to her target's own desires). It's also represented by the star motif, which is also the symbol of the oppressive bear religion and triggered the apocalyptic Day of Severance. The system so far has been so hideously hosed up that I automatically mistrust whatever it's OK with. Do also remember that this is a 2015 show about yuri. It's not just about real-world homosexuality, it's about a genre that continues to cling to obsolete, ossified traditions like Class S (a relic of the 1920s) in a way that prevents it from showing genuine, lasting lesbian romance. That makes an idealistic, 'gently caress the system' ending more likely - it'd be telling yuri writers 'see, you can show girls falling in passionate, sexual love without getting punished for it, and it won't be the end of the world'. Yes, real-world oppression exists, but not every fictional character has to be cursed to unhappiness because of it. Note the very self-conscious, theatrical framing and resolute lack of realism. These are fictional characters in a fictional world, and that gives them a freedom that is severely underexplored.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 18, 2015 15:50
|
|