Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita – 03
One wonders, shouldn’t there be at least one male in this crowd?
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The main character and her assistant dispatched of the chicken revolution last episode, but society isn’t any better off. We’ve got a guest (recurring, I hope) appearance by Miyuki Sawashiro as Y, the main character’s colleague and self-described “rotten” girl. Her manga/doujinshi/convention scheme made for some great laughs, and Sawashiro’s voicework was spectacular as usual, but what of the social commentary that it really hit us over the head with in episode 1? |
One cynical message to take away is that you can live the dream by exploiting otaku for money (thing is, Y is one herself).
These past 2 episodes have shifted my expectations of Humanity Has Declined somewhat. After episode 1, I thought that we were in for serious science fiction that made pointed critiques of modern society by use of its setting. I mean, that bread was no crazier than what we saw in Kaiba. The 2nd episode showed that it wasn’t afraid to get silly, and this latest episode continues the trend, indicating that silliness might be the show’s primary objective. And that’s just fine if it continues to be as funny as these 2 episodes have been.
I’ve compared this show to Fractale before, a show that is a little less overt about referencing otaku culture. Anime creators do love to be self referential, sometimes to an obnoxious extent. Among all the digitized entertainment media in human history, a trove of boy-love manga is what happens to fall into Y’s lap? But those little details don’t matter after all, and it did produce good material for showing us the sorry state of humanity. Manga isn’t some special form of entertainment, it’s just that entertainment has declined to the extent that manga art blows most people’s minds. Just how far has art fallen to the point that backgrounds in perspective and consistent characters are “Lost Techniques?” It’s quite hilarious that no one has thought to reverse engineer it, though Y does it in this episode, apparently with ease, based on the copycats it spawns.
It would be easy to call this episode a criticism of today’s fujoshi or otaku culture, but that doesn’t seem to be the case at all. The mass of unproductive fujoshi isn’t presented as a cause of humanity’s decline, but rather as a symptom of it. That is, humans aren’t in trouble because of the time they waste on BL; the time they waste on BL is an indicator of the lack of good entertainment media. Y is actually presented positively, as someone who creates happiness for others through her ambition. It’s just that, like geeks often do, she sometimes gets a little too into her craft. Literally, by the looks of the scenes that bookended this episode.
1.3GB floppy disk. That’s retro-futurism.
There are a couple of bits I really like in this episode. One is the talk of long term data storage, which unfortunately doesn’t get discussed much after the 1st half. I’m no expert on the topic or even a hobbyist, but the topic of long-term data storage interests me. As Y said, digital media don’t last very long; for us, digitizing a piece of media and uploading it online may be effectively permanent, but that permanence comes from the redundancy and the constant upgrade cycle of the physical media on which the data resides. But once that maintenance stops and the data remains stagnant, the physical media will degrade, corrupting the data. Hard drives, magnetic tapes, and DVDs will deteriorate in a matter of decades, which is problematic if you want to keep something around for hundreds or even thousands of years.
Ironically, less advanced technologies are better for data longevity. I’m sure many of us have checked out books from the library that are over 100 years old or seen paintings from centuries ago hanging in museums right now on the canvas they were painted on. Go back even further, and you’ve got stone cutouts and cave paintings that last millenia. But old technologies lack the storage density and convenience (read/write latency) of modern media. Transcribing the binary of an H264 encode of a 2 hour movie into book form would be nightmarish work, without even considering the nightmare of extracting said video from what’s written in a book. So today’s archivists have to find a balance between permanence and convenience. The internet offers the best of both worlds when it’s on, but in the worst case scenario, perhaps something like what happened in Humanity Has Declined, we can’t count on it always being on.
If Y ever wanted to start a real intellectual property war, she’s well equipped.
The other bit I like is also mentioned only briefly, when Y is furious that others are copying her idea for a fanzine. The main character is detached as always and just explains that this is how culture spreads. With issues like SOPA, PIPA, and ACTA recently (we here at Metanorn, like many anime blogs, were part of the anti-SOPA/PIPA campaign in January), this rights holders vs. public interest conflict is very fresh in my mind. And the main character’s line hits the nail on the head;
sharing is how culture spreads. The public’s right to culture trumps an individual’s (socially constructed) “right” to exclusivity over his creation. Instead of creating artificial exclusivity, the original creator should use his first mover advantage to create a product that is better than the competitors’. That’s what’s best for society, and that’s what Y does in this episode, with very positive results. Though I’m sure she would have done it differently if she had access to a court system like RIAA or Apple do now.
Even though the show has been happy to explore what is wrong with its society with its 1st 2 episodes, this last episode has it also exploring the little joys that people have as well. And the people like Y who help create them – she may be a poor UN mediator, but she’s an excellent entrepreneur. So maybe this show isn’t just about how Humanity Has Declined but also about how humans continue to persevere and find happiness in this hilariously messed up world. It’s definitely a different show from what I expected, with more hope, more fantasy, and more humor. Those aren’t bad things to have more of.
Merging anime with manga. It’s worked before.
About lvlln
A math/science geek and a self-dubbed cynical optimist. I don't care if it's deep, if it can make me feel something or laugh, it's fine in my book. @lvlln
POWUH: iLurker with 1 comments
That FLCL link made really happy.
Ah, memories… i’d best get back to my long term storage.
POWUH: Meta Resident with 1692 comments
The wall of guns made me think of the playroom in “Tremors.”
POWUH: Meta Team and Spammy Tamer with 7115 comments
I thought it really interesting that a creation of the entertainment industry staked out such a position on ‘infringement’, although that industry tends to be very schizophrenic regarding specifically the ‘copying’ of ideas (When you copy and adapt someone else’s idea, it’s perfectly fine, but when someone else copies and adapts your idea the same amount, it’s an infringement). It was very clear that the other works were thematically identical, but materially different.
I am realizing that I feel I’m still missing something when it comes to the main character’s (and with it, the UN’s) viewpoint. What is she actually trying to do? What is her job supposed to be? What is the point of museum-ing all this old technology? Are they trying to reclaim / rediscover / rebuilt the lost glories of humanity (like some folks in Sora no Woto, for instance)? Or are they trying more for a wind-down of humanity, trying not to corrupt the faeries as they eventually go extinct / devolve? And though the faeries keep getting mentioned, they seem to be more and more of a McGuffin. The MC mentions the trouble if the faeries get a hold of the manga, but that never materializes, even though it does get out of control. Is the final book created by the faeries? Or is it created by the same people that made the FairyCo factory (which I’m fairly convinced is NOT the faeries, but obviously wasn’t the chickens either).
Also, was there a timeline issue I didn’t quite get? Early, the MC says Y’s fall will happen in a week. Was that the printing press being used? Or is it when they get transported to the manga? That seems like an awfully short time for all that consumption. I am thinking it was the first one, when the manga went big.
POWUH: 700-799 and Parkouring Fanboy with 776 comments
I got the sense that Y’s project that no one wanted to work on was to document past human culture and technology. Perhaps with the eventual goal of using it to pull humanity out of its rut, but the archiving has value on its own. The fact that it keeps getting abandoned and dumped to those on the lower rungs shows how corporate bureaucracy keeps this important work from being done.
For the time frame, I thought that the 1 week later was when Y found success with her publication. The delusions of grandeur it instilled in her was the start of her downfall. And given how much the main character was foreshadowing the fairies’ actions were they to find out throughout the episode, I think the manga trap at the end (and beginning) is work by the fairies. Or, as you said, the people behind the fairies, of whom even the main character doesn’t know.
POWUH: Meta Team and Spammy Tamer with 7115 comments
I got the feeling that the Human Monument Project was far more defeatist than that, basically more of a museum that it was “This is how great humanity was, let’s celebrate how much better than us they were.” Which also gets to why the project basically gets pawned off repeatedly to a new person. Maybe all of the people who work on it do the same thing Y does: use the resources of the ‘important’ project to look for things that are personally enriching, and then pawn it off (which helps to further the cynical viewpoint of the show). This also would have the side effect of helping humanity recover, or at least tread water, more than the Human Monument Project would on its own.
It seemed to me that the MC’s grandfather’s tasks are more what you describe: recovering, collecting, cataloging, documenting. Hence things like the wall of guns.
POWUH: Meta Team and The Mad Scientist with 5525 comments
I didn’t like this episode as much as the past two. It’s not bad, but it’s not up to snuff with my standards for Jintai. It has the same silliness, but it seems to be missing the right amount of cynicism to make it work. It just wasn’t as interesting or funny…Maybe because I’m a fujoshi? At the very least, Y is an excellent character – and not just because she’s voiced by Miyuki Sawashiro!
I’ve never actually thought about information storage. W..what’s gonna happen to all our blog posts 1000 years in the future?!?! (Yes, that is certainly my most pressing concern)
POWUH: 700-799 and Parkouring Fanboy with 776 comments
Well, as long as there’s no catastrophic event, I’d predict that data storage will keep getting more redundant and continually transferred to new media, so our blog posts should be fine. As long as Will made the appropriate backups, that is!
POWUH: Meta Resident and Werewolf Chaser with 1270 comments
If future girls are all fujoshies…. Oh Mai Goddo. Lol yeah, where the guys??
BL only?? Where are the shounen mangas… Some1 dig those MO disk out!!
You’d expect they at least store the data into USB flash drives/DVD…. I don remember ppl storing manga into floppy disk lol.