Aahhhh. So this is one of those occasions when coming at something from a different culture, without much knowledge of the conventions of the culture whose work you're shamelessly glomming onto, gives it a set of effects that the text totally supports, from your frame of reference, but may well be completely accidental from the point of view of the people who produced the work. Which is one of the things I love about encountering work from cultures I don't know (or cities I don't know, or art from traditions I don't know, or whatever) -- they can intersect with one's own cultural conditioning in interesting, unexpected kinds of ways.
Or at least, interesting and unexpected to me. Enough so that I spend a lot of time torn between having angst over the disrespect of responding to work from other cultures without bothering to learn anything about the tradition to which they belong, and how they might be understood by their intended audience, or having angst over losing the naive and home-culture-bound response to them I have if I don't learn anything about where they came from or why. Which, now that I think about it, may be the very illustration of a First World Problem.
All of which is to say, yeah, I probably had much less than the average issue with the shota because I know nothing about it as a genre. It made it relatively simple to be all, 'Oh, please. He's not 13. He's just drawn that way.'
whots-his-face, Alois, whatever -- is what Ciel would've been had he been written by, y'know, the usual groupthink animation committee process.
Hah! And this also explains something that I've been clueless about: namely, where the people who love Alois and talk about how much better a character he is are coming from. Not that anyone has to justify her taste, obviously, but there's been a kind of sub-current to the discussions I've seen that seemed to imply a set of aesthetic ideas and standards I had no conception of, that weren't being explained because everyone but me knew them already. I couldn't quite figure out why more childish and more insane was better, except that it was probably some sort of id thing. Knowing that it is something of a genre convention suddenly makes those discussions make a lot more sense.
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Date: 1 Sep 2011 03:25 am (UTC)Or at least, interesting and unexpected to me. Enough so that I spend a lot of time torn between having angst over the disrespect of responding to work from other cultures without bothering to learn anything about the tradition to which they belong, and how they might be understood by their intended audience, or having angst over losing the naive and home-culture-bound response to them I have if I don't learn anything about where they came from or why. Which, now that I think about it, may be the very illustration of a First World Problem.
All of which is to say, yeah, I probably had much less than the average issue with the shota because I know nothing about it as a genre. It made it relatively simple to be all, 'Oh, please. He's not 13. He's just drawn that way.'
whots-his-face, Alois, whatever -- is what Ciel would've been had he been written by, y'know, the usual groupthink animation committee process.
Hah! And this also explains something that I've been clueless about: namely, where the people who love Alois and talk about how much better a character he is are coming from. Not that anyone has to justify her taste, obviously, but there's been a kind of sub-current to the discussions I've seen that seemed to imply a set of aesthetic ideas and standards I had no conception of, that weren't being explained because everyone but me knew them already. I couldn't quite figure out why more childish and more insane was better, except that it was probably some sort of id thing. Knowing that it is something of a genre convention suddenly makes those discussions make a lot more sense.