Here's an idea.
"Avatar the Last Airbender" and "The Legend of Korra"
are anime.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
If you were to check my DVR, you would see four things--
"Adventure Time," "Regular Show," and "The Legend
of Korra," and "How I Met Your Mother,"
which my girlfriend records, and I pretend to hate
but secretly think is genius.
Sshh.
Don't tell her.
Anyway, in 2005, Nickelodeon began
airing "Avatar the Last Airbender,"
a story about a world where magic is as common as war
and where a great figure, the Avatar,
has the singular ability to unite both magical and national
forces.
Only the Avatar can master all four types
of elementally themed magic called bending.
There's only one Avatar at a time,
and a new one is born as soon as the old one
dies, which is pretty brutal.
And means, as a rule, they experience a kind
of coming of age hero's journey with magic
and super cool hybrid animals.
Which is exactly what we saw happen
with Ang, the avatar from the first series, and Korra
the protagonist of the currently ongoing series,
"The Legend of Korra," henceforth collectively
referred to as the avatars.
What is perhaps most striking about the avatars at first
is their style, both visual and tonal.
It's for kids but also not really.
There are serious themes, political messages,
complex relationships, including one very controversial love
triangle.
All packaged up in an animated TV show rated Y7.
So, you know, for kids.
But that doesn't mean that the show's complexity suffers
at all.
For instance, there are four nations,
and they all have their own attitude, history, and look.
Show creator, Bryan Konietzko, has listed plenty of influences
on the show's style-- Asian cinema, Chinese, Indian,
and Korean culture, Harry Potter, Eastern philosophy,
and maybe most importantly, Anime.
Specifically, "Cowboy Bebop," "Fooly Cooly,"
Miyazaki, though I did recently learn that the famed director
might not necessarily consider his films anime strictly
speaking.
The fact that anime is listed amongst those influences
makes perfect sense.
Many people's first reactions, including
my own upon seeing the avatars is oh, is this anime?
And what they usually mean is, is this animated TV
show made in Japan?
And in so asking, they're also stubbing their toe
on an interesting conundrum.
Because as far as the West is concerned-- and more
on that later-- the avatars are definitely not anime.
When we say anime, we mean "Akira,"
"Evangelion," "Samurai Champloo," "Naruto,"
"Trigun," et cetera.
And sure, in a visual comparison,
there is a difference between the avatars and these things,
though sometimes not a significant one,
a point made very handily by Chris O'Brien
over "The Escapist" a couple years ago.
Link in the doobleedoo.
But strictly speaking, it's not the subject, tone, or style
that makes or breaks animeitude in the West,
it's that the avatars aren't made
in Japan, which is especially interesting given
that in Japan the word anime is used
to reference any animated work, regardless of nationality.
So while the avatars aren't animes here,
it stands to reason that they are
in Japan, along with "The Simpsons" and "Boondocks"
and "Archer," and you get the point.
These things might be foreign anime or Western anime,
but anime nonetheless.
But the avatars, I think, are a much more interesting case
given, all things considered, their resemblance
to what many of us would call authentic anime.
Meaning, if the avatars were exactly the same
but made in Japan, would they unequivocally
be called anime in the West?
It's that thin line accounting for genre solidity
that's really interesting.
There's one between champagne and sparkling wine, Tennessee
whiskey vs. Bourbon, pizza versus Papa John's, anime
versus cartoon versus animated TV show.
For all intents and purposes, these things are the things
that they technically are not.
Real talk though, I actually love Papa John's.
And it's that technically that's really neat,
like by the anime standards we were just discussing,
"Torkaizer" is not an anime, because it
was made in the Middle East.
But look at it.
It's an anime.
The question, I think, is then what
is gained by excluding works that
meet major stylistic criteria from a genre.
Are we maintaining the usefulness of the word anime,
having it mean a very specific thing?
There is a usefulness in having anime communicate a quality
or set of qualities, but is a disservice
done when it starts excluding things
that admirers of the form might otherwise appreciate,
regardless of its "authenticity," which is just,
oh, so many quote fingers.
Authenticity.
So complicated.
Or speaking of which, maybe it's about protecting the sanctity
or quality of the genre itself.
In classic that's-not-punk-rock fashion,
does saying the avatars are not anime somehow maintain
an artistic integrity within the genre?
Are avatar denier's protecting their own cultural turf
from nubes, or maybe as animated works continue their path
to legitimacy in the West, this will become a non-question.
And we will eventually adopt to the Japanese usage.
Can you imagine "Family Guy" and anime, "Adventure Time" anime,
"Bob's Burgers" anime.
What do you guys think?
What does the genre designation anime mean?
And is it changing?
Does avatar have anything to do with it?
Let us know in the comments, and subscribe out of pity, because
of how bad you feel that I have a cold.
(SINGING) Ra la la la la la la.
Ah ha ha ha ha.
Remember, this week we're going to be responding to comments
from two videos-- "Surveillance and Reality TV" and "Trolls,"
and we're going to do it in that order.
MythicAlexThinks and Benjamin Chi
have pointed out my mispronunciation of jyfe.
Thank you.
JanetCilene points out that another example
of a kind of media which might transgress some privacy
boundaries is vlogging.
And, yeah, I think the tension between those two things
is that in reality TV it seems to me that it's a lot of like,
I can't believe these people are like this.
Whereas in vlogging, its someone welcoming you into their life,
I guess.
But, yeah, I wonder which one is a more "constructed"
experience, if that's even a fair thing to ask.
June Bendich and Joe [INAUDIBLE] both ask whether or not
if you claim that reality TV is changing
people's ideas about privacy, do you then also
have to agree that violent video games make people violent
and other kinds of media affect people in different ways?
I think there's a lot to this question.
There's questions about the general audience
in both of those things, the cultural pervasiveness of all
of them.
But, yeah, this is a really great
and, I think, very complicated question to ask.
Bill Bird says that it's not reality TV that
affects our ideas about surveillance
but rather our preexisting ideas about surveillance
make reality TV seem normal.
And this makes me think about Josh Harris's project that
was documented in that movie "We Live in Public,"
which if you haven't seen it, it's awesome.
As a kind of like older-- oh, "older," you know like, what?
30 years?
Example of something where, for art sake,
people were forced to live under surveillance."
And, yeah, it was edgy but kind of seemed timely
and expected and maybe normal.
I don't know.
HatPerson provides us some insight
into actually being on a reality TV show, which he was.
So I'll just leave this.
You should just read this, because it's
interesting and a little scary towards the end.
To minimarcus, I have absolutely no idea what my IQ is,
and I forget my SAT score, but it was not good.
I remember being very upset.
And that's-- I mean, I'm terrible at taking tests
and also those numbers don't really tell you how smart
anyone is.
Like I know people with very high IQs
who are, in certain situations, not the smartest people
and people who did worse on their SAT
than if they were to just fill in random boxes, who
are some of the smartest people that I know.
So smartness is a whole lot of stuff.
And just as a point of clarification
and maybe pride, Matthieu Rheaume,
who is responding to minimarcus, I wish I had a team of writers.
That would be awesome.
It's just me.
And while I totally agree with Shin Garugamesh,
I can't shake the feeling that they are just
trying to hurt my feelings.
And it is on that note that we transition to trolls.
So instead of responding to specific comments,
I'm just going to talk for a second,
and we're just going to throw some comments down
at the bottom that illustrate what
I think were the largest and most frequently made
comments and responses.
One of the most common responses was
people saying that I unfairly lumped trolls and harassers
together into one group of people.
However, I think for a lot of people,
their experience of the internet is that trolls, to them,
are only harassers.
That they might not even know this other group of people
exists, or they don't see a distinction between them.
They see all of these people as there to harass them,
which is exactly why I became uncomfortable saying that there
is a good side to trolling, because to a lot of people,
trolls just are people who threaten and harass them.
Knowing and being able to make a distinction
between funny waste-your-time troll and death-threats troll
is itself a kind of privilege.
Which really makes me wonder what
percentage of the group of people saying that there
is a clear difference between funny waste-your-time troll
and death-threats trolls are straight white guys like me.
I mean, I did it, and then I tried really hard to see it
from another perspective.
And it was scary.
And finally to everybody saying that trolling makes you
a better, stronger, or smarter person,
I think this is the position that the episode started out
in that I revised, because it becomes very complicated
to say that when you realize that trolling is not
the exact same thing for every person who experiences it.
And furthermore, to everybody who
thinks that someone becomes a stronger or better person
because they know how to deal with rape or death threats,
I don't know what world you live in, but it's nothing like mine.
What?
This week's episode was brought to
by the hard work of these very reasonable people.
You will notice there is only one writer.
We have an IRC, a Facebook and a subreddit.
Links in the description.
And the Tweet of the Week comes from Thomas Hatter,
who asks whether or not it's OK that he had an epiphany
while playing an RPG.
I say, you can have epiphanies while reading novels,
maybe while watching YouTube shows.
Why not an RPG?
Seems fine to me.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
And of course, we have to switch out a record.
I know I said we weren't going to be doing any more record
swaps of things that were already on the wall.
But in observance of Pete Seeger's recent passing,
I would feel much better about keeping him on the wall.
So we're going to give him a place, a little bit
more visibility.
Again, we'll eventually replace Johnny Cash, but welcome
Pete Seeger, America's balladeer.