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Oh I have heard of it. Haven't tried that out yet. Thanks for the link. Do you know http://gen.lib.rus.ec/ ? There are tons of ibooks (mostly academic) you can find there. I've been using it for years.

you know ❣️

bc karl marx

Thanks! Bookmarked.

Yes most of the current isekai shows have a protagonist that achieved nothing in the real world, both because narratively it's easier to make him accept his transferal to a new world, and because it echoes with the people who have similarly lost all hopes about their real life as it is. The older isekai is a completely different genre. They're never about a NEET starting over his life in a new world on an easy mode.

I have watched a few episodes of Outbreak Company and I hated it and I dropped it. The premise of the show is that every girl in the isekai is a complete idiots so the otaku protagonist can be constantly patronising the girls around him, putting up a condescending attitude and teaching them how to be a normal human being. I wouldn't think of it as a parody, but rather as one of the most otaku-pandering harem show. (The whole premise of "otaku culture conquering the heart of the people of isekai" is pandering enough...)

Many people are bothered by earlier episodes which is about Youko being demoralised and Sugimoto getting edgy, but I think it is actually pretty brilliant in its criticism of the Japanese culture and how it has been rigidly producing thoughtless people who do everything just to satisfy the social expectation, and those who are more critical to the system are pushed to the cynical extreme because the whole Japanese ethical culture simply tells you to "read the social atmosphere" and act according to the expectation of others around you, so young people like Sugimoto was left with no ethical ideal at all when she decided the society is fundamentally untrustworthy. That transition from blind conformism to an edgy "death game", "all-against-all" mentality happened to Youko too when she also began to question society.

Sugimoto's arc is a particular great commentary on some neoconservative sentiments within Japanese media, especially with the death game genre (eg. Battle Royale), in which humanity is imagined to be inherently selfish and violent and the only way to protect your friends and yourself is to be skeptical of everyone and to relentlessly kill any one deemed as your enemy. Juuni Kokuki presents this blood-thirsty militant mentality as fundamentally delusional and just as prone to be manipulated as naive goodwill is (just like how nationalists are manipulated to fight wars for the politicians and the rich.) Yet the show never gave you those "it's wrong to kill anyone under any circumstance" bullshit, which happens in so many other anime that only try to pay lip service to pacifism because they want to appear decent. Instead, Youko learnt to be just, rather than to be an egoist or an unconditionally kind person. The later episodes mostly develop on the difficult question of "what does it mean to be a just person".

Youko is particularly relatable to me as someone who has an eastern background. As a kid growing up in Asia we're constantly told to "listen to your parents", "listen to your teacher", "don't let your parents down", etc., which is basically the life of Youko. Unlike many isekai anime nowadays, Juuni Kokuki put you into an isekai not to tell you how great you're, but how fucked up the society has raised you to become. I've made a similar point elsewhere and I guess it might be helpful for the discussion to quote it here:

Hey I saw you've finished Juuni Kokuki, how did you find it?

Sorry for the late reply but thank you so much for the birthday message!

happyy belated birthday

Was reading your convo, and had this thought, some Pepes sharing npc memes & cow fart memes will be the ones to destroy Bernie, in that scenario lol.

When is your birthday, I'll get you a hentai with pink guy.

Yeah, that's precisely the problem with liberal democracy: people think politics is about delegating a politician who will accomplish things for them so that they do not have to do more politics themselves. And when they come to see that relying on politicians are not going to work, they can't think of any other way else to do politics, so they give up on politics altogether. Even unions today follow this paradigm. There are union leaders who do institutionalised, procedural politics all the time and there are workers who never get involved nor feel they should. When you have institutionalised division of labour like that in politics, de-politicisation is the only thing to be expected.

Yeah when I was in high school I didn't like SoL show either. Nowadays I'm more or less immune to "real stories" because most of them have very similar dramatic structure with a limited range of character archetypes that go through a predictable direction of growth. It's especially so in anime.

I'm feeling ambivalent about the movement around Bernie Sanders because on one side I feel it's necessary in US to have something that create a movement to gravitate the political energy of the Left, even if it's just some centre-left social democrat, because the mainstream is not talking about any form of socialism at all. Of course ideally it should be the job of some real worker movement, but that doesn't seem to be a realistic thing to be expected in the US. But on the other hand, it's also dangerous for the Left to get itself too involved into electoral politics. Because under bourgeois democracy, Bernie Sanders will not be able to reform the system even if he is lucky enough to become the president. The Left might loss credit and the entire lump of politic energy that has been gravitated toward Sanders might dissipate once people is disillusioned about him. But I have no idea how we should deal with this situation. Worker movement has been a dead water in my country too. Most activists I know are either liberal or centre-left. Many of them are being co-opted by right-wing movement because they are the loudest people both on the street and on the internet. It's very frustrating.

Yes. the SoL genre as we know it only came into being around the mid-90s with the manga Yokohama Shopping Trip (1994, OVA adaptation in 1998), and then gradually we get to Aria (2002), Hidamari Sketch (2004) and then a post-K-ON explosion of the genre at the beginning of 2010, right after the 2008 economic crisis. Before mid-90s, "fluffy moe SoL" is kind of a non-existence. The Japanese economy is growing rapidly during the 70s and the 80s and almost every anime show that targets adult audience is high energy, fast-paced, either very violent, very sexual or very dramatic. The 1998 OVA of Yokohama Shopping Trip really was like coming out of nowhere, surrounded by all those high-energy, sexualised cute fighting girls in the OVA market. It's also not a coincident that YST sets in a ruinous future world where human civilisation is in a slow, peaceful process of declining into non-existence, and the show is embracing this kind of post-apocalyptic inactivity, tranquillity, boredom, lack of ambition, and the complete freedom from answering the neoliberal demand of constant activity, of maximising the utility of your time to "improve yourself" to compete in the job market, of constantly having to worry about the next day and the next year. (YST really shares a lot of profound similarities with the recent show Girls' Last Tour. I wonder why nobody seems to talk about that.) Similar thing happens to Japanese movies, novels and indie music from 1990s onwards. So a massive change of cultural landscape in Japan had taken place in the 90s and 2000s. There is a strong emphasis on the slow, on the savouring of the mundane, on shoukakou (小確幸, "small but certain happiness") in those art media, which really only came to catch people's attention after the burst of the economic bubble which would lead the Japanese society into a 30 years long ongoing stagnation.

I share with you the feeling about nostalgia too. K-ON especially hit me with a strong sense of nostalgia, of mono no aware ("the beautiful period of life has gone forever".) It didn't do that on me when I first watched it in 2009 when I was still a freshman in college, at the prime of my youth. But I'm almost constantly feeling nostalgic nowadays, and that's perhaps why I've been now watching more anime than ever. Also loneliness and the feeling of alienation seem to have become an inescapable fact of my life too. Have you heard of vaporwave? This youtube video does a really good job in analysing the 80s nostalgia that has recently becomes predominate in internet phenomena like vaporwave: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSvUqhZcbVg
I think my own nostalgia has a lot to do with the fact that I can't picture myself having a satisfying, meaningful life in future, so my subconscious directs me to look for meaning in the past. I'm particularly excited when I read things about the revolutionary history of the 1910s, 20s and the 60s. Life seems to have meaningful goals back then when people were collectively trying to create a future for themselves. It seems that back then life wasn't just about working on a job that you despise because you have to pay for your rent for the next month...
Btw his channel is full of genuinely good philosophical stuff too.

I use to have a painter friend with whom from time to time I would go to the galleries in London, and he would comment on things like why the painter of this particular painting used this particular material with this particular technique here, what was s/he trying to convey with that particular artistic decision. Back then I used to enjoy looking at painting in a more immediate way, focusing on the raw feeling the painting arouse in me. But I found the way he looks at painting very interesting, so I picked up his way of seeing a work of art from the standpoint of an active creator, on top of the standpoint of a consumer/spectator. That's one of way I watch anime now too. I constant ask myself questions like why the creator of the show build the character in this way, why this visual composition, why this background music at this moment, etc. I probably wouldn't have enjoyed Revue Starlight as much as I did if I didn't analyse it as I was watching it. I'm still finding new experience on my 20th or 30th rewatch of some of the sequences in the show because there's a lot of very subtle visual-audio design in the show that works on your subconsciousness, and it's very fulfilling to see them consciously and experience them at full intensity. Sometime it also helps me to have better understanding of myself when I have a better understanding of what I like and dislike. I occasionally do some writing and photography myself so it goes very naturally for me.

What is the interesting thing about Marxism is that there's a surprising amount of Marxist thinkers who take art and literature very very seriously (even though one may suppose it's something belongs to the superstructure.) Marx and Engels themselves talked about Balzac at length.The Chinese communist party was literally born out of a cultural-literary movement of the 1920s. Mao himself took literature very seriously. Culture was seen as a revolutionary weapon. It's much difficult now to have something like that now because pop culture has replaced high culture as the central phenomenon, but I think it's not impossible for us to engage with pop culture in the intense way as people engaged with Dostoevsky and Kafka. For example I have always been thinking that the rise of iyashikei and slice of life anime has a lot to do with the burst of Japan bubble economy in mid-1990s, which created the neoliberal state of hyper-competition, over-working, job insecurity, lost of sense of purpose/direction, and loneliness. The absence of masculinity, definite goal and competitiveness in most SoL show is precisely the reaction to the grim reality many young adult experience. Understanding why we at this particular point of history, would find in SoL show some sort of consolation we need, is understanding our situation in capitalism. And that self-understand would encourage people to work for a change: you see a utopian vision in K-ON, you see what's wrong with capitalism. But there is just not enough Marxists out there trying to use pop culture to help people understand their misery. A lot of liberal agenda in pop culture in the West, but most of them are superficial and they almost always avoid a direct criticism of capitalism.

Sorry I digress a lot. It's my bad habit to be absorbed in my own thought. Goblin Slayer: it's really the shit I don't understand how it got so popular in the first place. I'm not even talking about how it sexualises rape scene. The quality of the animation is just very very bad for an action show. It's so obviously mediocre even by the standard of a corny, edgy, mindless blood-spilling action show. I guess it's only popular among teenagers who's new to anime but I might be wrong about that.

I haven't seen Koi Kaze. Will give it a try at some point. Oh Kodomo no Jikan, I'm ambivalent on this one because it does have real drama and some depth as you said, but there's also another side of it which makes me wonder which really comes in priority for the show. Like, the original manga and the OVAs the sexual appeal take a more obviously central place, so it makes me think whether or not the whole drama is a convoluted excuse for create a fictional girl who acts like that to provide some guilt-free sexual satisfaction to the audience. (To clarify a bit, I'm having questions about the sincerity of the show rather than sexual morality. I don't really buy into the Western Christian puritan ideal but it's another long story.) But all in all it's a pretty unique show and it had me engaged for most of the time. But I didn't give it a higher score partly because of it's mediocre art.