Over the course of Thursday and Friday, I read both volume #2 and #3 of the FLCL light novels by original screenwriter, Enokido Yoji, having read the first volume earlier in the month. I wouldn't go as far as to say that I felt the same when I first saw clips of the show and when I first received a CD in the mail with all six episodes from a friend, but it did make me go back to watch the Hazel video on Friday, and it was, in a way, responsible for me finally watching I Saw the TV Glow on Saturday night. It's not that these two stories are interconnected, that one overlaps with the other, but I think that my choice of reading material and viewing material and the themes of those works probably say something about how I am thinking often of my relationship with media lately.
I don't know if I have ever spoken about FLCL properly here, but, like everyone my age, I love it, it hit hard in the chest when I first saw it, and, alongside Evangelion and Gunbuster, it made me think that the stories that GAINAX were telling, the stories of people like Anno Hideaki and Tsurumaki Kazuya, were stories I wanted to be a part of.
FLCL literally changed the type of stories I felt that many of us were telling at the time it arrived in our lives, and when I look back on the nonsense I was writing when younger, and when I look at the work of people I was friends with, some of whom I am honoured to still be in touch with, it is clear the point at which we each started grappling with FLCL's language in our struggle to incorporate that into a language we had already developed from Western comics and television. FLCL is such a perfect summation of the emotions of youth that it made explicit the things we were reading it comics like Gen13 from Image and Deadenders from Vertigo; in our frustration, this strange cartoon from a country many of us had never been to finally gave us words for our own experiences. I think FLCL continues to have that impact. Maybe not for younger people, but for each of us, when confronted with it anew, it's like suddenly catching the scent of the sea whilst inland.
Enokido's novels make a lot of things about FLCL explicit, as I mentioned before, and maybe these aren't necessarily things that needed to spelt out but, nonetheless, they were things that moved me tremendously to see them laid out on the page like that. The second book, specifically the way it deals with Ninamori's story in episode #3 is maybe my favourite interpretation of events. It's been less than a few days, and I find myself wanting to re-read this "episode" again already. As important as literature has been to informing my idea of myself as a person and as a so-called writer, so has animation. In the end, we are not just the sum of only the respectable mediums of storytelling, but these low-brow, throwaway, disposable mediums shape us also, and one helps inform the other.
I think that's maybe a message in I Saw the TV Glow also, although maybe not the most significant one, I hasten to add, and maybe its frame of reference is a very different though not at all unfamiliar one to me.
A small aside: there's a translated twitter comment on an article about a Brazilian train simulator game, that reads as follows, "Japanese people are very strict when it comes to that kind of stuff. There are many people who will preach stuff even if they’re not the actual rights holders. I've always thought it's best if you don't let Japanese people find out about your "mods" or "homages."" I hated it on first reading. Not only does it shut down conversation completely, as if defer to rights holders is our duty as citizens of the world, but it completely skims over the entire concept of doujin circles in order to look down the nose at non-Japanese fans. Having re-read the comment several times over, I'm willing to concede that maybe that's not what the author is saying but my first reaction remains like the taste of copper in my mouth.
As I get older, as we have more and more anniversaries for stories that meant so much to me—Kadokawa held a celebratory 20th anniversary stream for the Higurashi anime two hours ago at time of writing—I feel more and more that these are things that we have inherited, that they are things that, if not quite belonging to us completely, that we have an equal say in. Just as we retold stories of the Prince of Denmark in dire straits until, eventually, we got Hamlet, so too I think it's very human to iterate on what your told, to say "hey, this story made me feel a certain way, I want to inspire that feeling in others," to paraphrase![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
shadowhenshin.
Maybe I say this kind of thing too often, maybe it seems like I'm fighting for validity when I don't deserve it. Maybe I'm simply overthinking this whole business.
I don't know if I have ever spoken about FLCL properly here, but, like everyone my age, I love it, it hit hard in the chest when I first saw it, and, alongside Evangelion and Gunbuster, it made me think that the stories that GAINAX were telling, the stories of people like Anno Hideaki and Tsurumaki Kazuya, were stories I wanted to be a part of.
FLCL literally changed the type of stories I felt that many of us were telling at the time it arrived in our lives, and when I look back on the nonsense I was writing when younger, and when I look at the work of people I was friends with, some of whom I am honoured to still be in touch with, it is clear the point at which we each started grappling with FLCL's language in our struggle to incorporate that into a language we had already developed from Western comics and television. FLCL is such a perfect summation of the emotions of youth that it made explicit the things we were reading it comics like Gen13 from Image and Deadenders from Vertigo; in our frustration, this strange cartoon from a country many of us had never been to finally gave us words for our own experiences. I think FLCL continues to have that impact. Maybe not for younger people, but for each of us, when confronted with it anew, it's like suddenly catching the scent of the sea whilst inland.
Enokido's novels make a lot of things about FLCL explicit, as I mentioned before, and maybe these aren't necessarily things that needed to spelt out but, nonetheless, they were things that moved me tremendously to see them laid out on the page like that. The second book, specifically the way it deals with Ninamori's story in episode #3 is maybe my favourite interpretation of events. It's been less than a few days, and I find myself wanting to re-read this "episode" again already. As important as literature has been to informing my idea of myself as a person and as a so-called writer, so has animation. In the end, we are not just the sum of only the respectable mediums of storytelling, but these low-brow, throwaway, disposable mediums shape us also, and one helps inform the other.
I think that's maybe a message in I Saw the TV Glow also, although maybe not the most significant one, I hasten to add, and maybe its frame of reference is a very different though not at all unfamiliar one to me.
A small aside: there's a translated twitter comment on an article about a Brazilian train simulator game, that reads as follows, "Japanese people are very strict when it comes to that kind of stuff. There are many people who will preach stuff even if they’re not the actual rights holders. I've always thought it's best if you don't let Japanese people find out about your "mods" or "homages."" I hated it on first reading. Not only does it shut down conversation completely, as if defer to rights holders is our duty as citizens of the world, but it completely skims over the entire concept of doujin circles in order to look down the nose at non-Japanese fans. Having re-read the comment several times over, I'm willing to concede that maybe that's not what the author is saying but my first reaction remains like the taste of copper in my mouth.
As I get older, as we have more and more anniversaries for stories that meant so much to me—Kadokawa held a celebratory 20th anniversary stream for the Higurashi anime two hours ago at time of writing—I feel more and more that these are things that we have inherited, that they are things that, if not quite belonging to us completely, that we have an equal say in. Just as we retold stories of the Prince of Denmark in dire straits until, eventually, we got Hamlet, so too I think it's very human to iterate on what your told, to say "hey, this story made me feel a certain way, I want to inspire that feeling in others," to paraphrase
shadowhenshin.Maybe I say this kind of thing too often, maybe it seems like I'm fighting for validity when I don't deserve it. Maybe I'm simply overthinking this whole business.
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