I couldn't see this week's ep. on Thursday because I had to get up early to do something at university, and either it started earlier this week or Friday Night with Jonathan Ross ended later, because I managed to miss the fist few minutes of it. What I did see wasn't quite what I expected - although it mentioned manga and animé in passing a few times, it was not as much about otaku as it was just about the concept of moé. It seemed to give off the idea that otaku are, by definition, unattractive bespectacled men who are obsessed with the sweetness of teenage girls and see no reason to ever get a real girlfriend when pseudo-love is so readily available. Although this certainly the current trend with otaku, it is relatively a very recent one, and otaku are defined not as much by what they like but more by their reasons for liking it and by the issue of weather what they like is socially acceptable or not. The issue of weather this was intended to be a serious and damming portrayal of a social cult was thoroughly rebuffed by the explanation that the presenter is also an otaku, and only disguised as a normal person through the use of contact lenses and reconstructive surgery.
If there is anything which is offensive to anyone, it is the unforgivable use of EuroTrash-style overdubs rather than subtitles. This not only lowers the tone of the whole programme but makes it much harder to understand anything that anyone is saying, and utterly impossible to make out any of the original speech. Of less importance, but a bit disorientating for me was the somewhat random way that it probed some obscure aspects and ignored others. For example, how it featured the relatively unknown and upcoming Akihabara48 without mentioning their obvious resemblance to the supergroup Morning Musume. But as before, it managed to point several things I might never have noticed otherwise - I had no idea that moé could be used as an interjection, and while thinking about the programme in the morning afterwards I was suddenly struck by the similarities between the current "otaku pride" movement and the homosexual and feminist movements of the western world in the 1960s. And for me, any injustices were worth sitting through for 2 things: (1) the Mizuno-style animations, of which about half were all new this week and on a whole other level of laugh-out-loud delight; and (2) the appearance, however brief, of that female blogger who dated a male otaku that and referred to him as #49. It could have been just 29 or 39, and all I can remember of her pseudonym is that it beings with an A and was taken from a Gundam character, so for now I'll call her Arisa.
The only reason I've been grumpy enough to write this whole essay on it is that I'm trying in vain to earn forgiveness from myself for not watching it on Thursday as well. It's surprising how quickly hearing & seeing Kiyoshi Hikawa chopped up with animé clips can become the highlight of my week, and I was so excited at seeing Cardcaptor Sakura models and Arisa that I barely noticed anything that was being said. It may have just been a mistranslation, but I seem to remember her talking about him not as her boyfriend, but as her husband - so did she have a wedding dress inspired by a mecha, as mentioned in the interview I read over a year ago? I'd like to see the pictures… But knowing her, she's not the sort of person who would make them public.
