It’s difficult for me to talk about the space opera side of Macross Frontier. It just is, like clouds or sunlight. It is right, it is in place, and it buoys me — though, of course, the sun doesn’t just come round once a week. I actually watched this episode a few days ago, but I want to talk about it, rather than what I’m actually doing right now (which looks to be powering through Shakugan no Shana II, actually.

By the way — does anyone know what’s up with the missing episode of Spice and Wolf?

Anyway. Macross Frontier is made of poly-awesome fibers. But you already know that, you don’t suck. If you do suck? I don’t care.

The show continues apace, basically. Ranka is finally moving up in the world, and Alto is, uh, pretty much the same as always. Oh, and Sheryl’s sick, or something. This latest episode is almost entirely character stuff, which is just fine with me. Actually, the asides they take pains to include about the actual plot, the space, alien, war stuff (remember that?) are a little jarring; I appreciate them, but in the past few episodes we’ve been seeing so much about the characters that it feels almost superfluous.

Not that giant bio-mech aliens are ever superfluous.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned yet that I watched about half of Steamboy a few weeks ago, and I have yet to finish it. I will, but this does not bode well for my opinion on the thing.

Yes, I know I’m very random right now, hush.

I think it’s the point in the night where I’m forced to let you peek behind the great and wonderful wizard’s curtain: I don’t have a whole lot to actually say right now about Macross Frontier. I just wanted an excuse to use that wonderful, horribly embarrassing screencap of Alto. The topic I’ve been thinking about lately is the demarcation between anime fans and people who aren’t.

I don’t mean a border, though perhaps I should have used a different word if I didn’t want to suggest it. I honestly don’t believe there’s actually much of anything separating anime fans, otaku if you will, from other people. I have often said, in tones of sadness and pity, that some random person walking by will never know who in the hell [pick your anime lead of choice, I think the time I'm remembering I used Vash the Stampede as an example] is. People who wall themselves off from an entire venue miss a lot. I probably miss some good stuff because I pretty much won’t watch American romantic comedies. My girlfriend, in dire straits with her computer a few months ago, watched both Bridget Jones’ Diary movies back to back for comfort, and I liked them a decent amount. I probably would have never watched them otherwise.

Actually, let me retract part of that. I don’t categorically refuse to watch American romantic comedies, they just have to hint at something that will entertain me, and the typical “boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl again” arc doesn’t interest me too much. Unless the girl is an elf or something (I’m looking at you, Record of Lodoss War).

The thing I’m getting at in my own, awkward way is this: some people think there’s a difference. I have never thought there was. I have recently seen a little evidence to contradict my own opinion.

Where to start? Okay. My girlfriend and I have been going back and forth, foisting our favorite entertainments off on each other. She’s the reason I’m going to read Stephen King’s Dark Tower books, at least the first two. She’s finally going to try her hand at The Lord of the Rings (or try again, as is more accurate) because of me. In between her showing me movies I showed her The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. As my girlfriend’s pretty intelligent and into methods of storytelling, I showed her the episodes in the original air order. The arrangement didn’t bother her too much, though she didn’t think the first episode was all that funny.

I am assuming most of you enjoyed Haruhi. I know OGT enjoyed it, but wasn’t a huge fan. What I mean is that maybe you didn’t think the fake movie was funny either. I did. The fact that someone animated bad acting and film shooting is a joke to me, and it makes everything that happens in that twenty-some minute space funnier. I once did a project where some friends and I sat in our desks and read from scripts while a powerpoint full of pictures of ourselves, posed to match the scenes, scrolled by. No one in the class got the joke, ongoing, that we could have just done it in the classroom with no computer.

Moving on. My girlfriend enjoyed Haruhi most of the way through, but upon finishing the last episode was irritated and her opinion of the whole show fell. If you need a quick refresher, it’s the episode where Haruhi and Kyon go into closed space together, Kyon finally figures out that Haruhi’s into him, they kiss, and everything’s cool.

My girlfriend says she dislikes Kyon, that he never changes throughout the show.

Now, I don’t ascribe to the creative writing class axiom that a story must chart a character’s change — I think stories function just as well sometimes when they focus on how a character doesn’t change. I’m thinking of Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster stories, as well as several of Terry Pratchett’s protagonists (like Rincewind and Carrot Ironfounderson). But I think Kyon does change. In fact, most of the characters change, with the possible exception of Mikuru — if you use her future self as one of the poles, then she does as well (unless you believe, as Koizumi does, that she’s faking the super-sweet act because Kyon likes that sort of thing). Yuki becomes slightly more human, finding a hobby and coming to like Kyon. Koizumi seems like the best example of a character who doesn’t change, but I think he opens up a little — he definitely shows how much he likes Kyon more as the months go by. Haruhi and Kyon each mellow in their respective ways: Haruhi becomes (believe it or not) less demanding, while Kyon becomes better able to deal with things outside his expectations.

This essay (if you can call it that) isn’t about defending my position, though. Not specifically, though I guess it does it in a roundabout way. My point, long time in coming, is that I can’t see how my girlfriend, who reads and watches complex things all the time, doesn’t see what I see in a show as relatively simple as Haruhi. One possibility is that it’s an anime. She doesn’t watch any on her own, despite being a fan of both fantasy and science-fiction. The prevalence of those two genres in anime — easier to get ahold of than on American tv — is what drew me to the whole world of Japanese cartoons in the first place. She claims that she’s not familiar with the way anime works, that it doesn’t make sense to her. That confuses me. Anime has never struck me as having a different way of working — it does different things than American media sometimes, but I felt it worked in the same way as a tv show or movie from anywhere else might. I am, perhaps, wrong.

I certainly know there are types, standards, clichés, and other things that are different. While we might be able to think of American analogues to the Genki Girl, very few people who don’t watch anime would think of her as a “trope.” Yet there’s her page on the tv tropes wiki. But, in the same way, it seems like knowing it’s a trope isn’t required to get the jokes she’s the butt of. A few meta shows, like Excel Saga, Pani Poni Dash, and Sayonara Zetsubou-Sensei do that sort of thing, but America has its own parody shows and the like — such as Chappelle’s Show — wherein you have to get the reference to get the joke. But
(hopefully) the specific isn’t the cornerstone of the general in those examples.

I will readily admit that I am a bit ignorant when it comes to motion picture analysis. Plot, story, so on, those I can deal with about as well as in a book, but things like animation, cinematography, they befuddle me. I’m getting better, and I’m much better at looking at the technical bits of anime than I am of live-action films, even concerning genres. I watched Hot Fuzz with commentary last night, and I was astounded at all the references to movies the director, Edgar Wright, made, both in the movie and the commentary itself. I had no idea what half the movies were, and hadn’t seen most of the others (Lethal Weapon and Die Hard, yes, but Point Blank? Chinatown?) Along with that, he talked about the visual clues throughout the movie. I don’t suffer from genre blindness — I often know what’s going to happen because of the curve of the story that I see, but I often don’t pick up on deliberately-placed clues in movies like that. I just seem to miss that kind of knack. Is the same thing going on with my girlfriend and anime? Could it?

With those strange, melancholic words, I must leave you. But, to reward you for plugging away at my ramblings, here’s a present:

Because what’s better than that expression on his face? Nothing, that’s what.