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Hinomoto Oniko: Moe Meets Racial Slur

This is one of those times when otaku do something that’s somewhere between impressive and tragically oblivious.

Apparently, as the Internet tells it, there is a racial slur in China targeted at things Japanese written using the following characters: 日本鬼子; it roughly means “Japanese devil.” These characters also exist in Japanese, but don’t come across as meaning quite the same thing; in particular, the character 鬼 is oni, the traditional Japanese ogres we all know and love from Urusei Yatsura and any number of other anime incarnations.

Now, it also happens that in Japanese that looks a bit like a name: Hinomoto Oniko. Which, once you think of it that way, is a pretty badass-sounding name; were it a real name, it would mean something like “Japanese Child of the Oni.” And then you give that to otaku, and you get this:

Oniko Hinomoto

This is just one of dozens (#46, specifically) at the below-linked site; it doesn't give an artist credit.

The page from which this illustration came makes an attempt at aggregating well over a hundred moe-fueled examples—some quite skillful—of interpretations of the person that the name would fit.  #9 is particularly cool, and even includes a subtle tiger-print UY nod.

It’s not entirely clear whether this is a clever subversion of an insult or a comically tragic example of the contextual ignorance that happens when you throw otaku at pretty much anything—rule 34 and the laws of moe work their magic on it.

Either way, it’s pretty funny, and there is some nifty art in the gallery.

[Linguistic footnote: Hinomoto Oniko is the Japanese order; her family name would be the fictional Hinomoto (written with the same characters as "Japan"), and her given name would be the unsurprisingly-fictional "Oniko" ("child of the oni"). The name would also be female, since it ends with the character "ko."]

The Light Novel Quality Boom

I’ve noticed that recently a significant majority of the anime series I’ve enjoyed most are based on light novels—Spice and Wolf, Baccano!, and Toradora, to name a few (the first two of those were both winners of the Dengeki Novel Prize, in fact). Novel-based anime is nothing new—Vampire Hunter D and The Dirty Pair are both based on novels. But, when I look at older stuff, a much larger percentage seems to be based on manga than is the case now. And even if the ratio hasn’t changed, I can say for sure that the proportion of good prose-based anime to bad is markedly better than that of good manga-based anime.

Which, if you think about it, makes a lot of sense; assuming most up-and-coming manga artists write their own material (which seems to be generally if not universally true of Japanese mangaka), someone who is a good artist but mediocre storyteller is a whole lot more likely to get published than someone who’s a good storyteller but mediocre artist. In contrast, if you’re a novelist, the only thing you’ve got to be good at is spinning a yarn.

So, since most anime draws from either manga or novels as source material, the anime that draws from manga is, on average, going to be drawing from a pool with a significant percentage of things that got popular due to what they look like more than their story. Novel-based anime, however, is almost by definition going to be based on something with a worthy story. And, since you’re going to have a team of professional artists working on the anime either way, the novel-based material is going to have the upper hand in everything but a foundation in visual storytelling. Light novels are an additional advantage versus “heavy” novels, in that they tend to be shorter and less intellectual, which is going to translate more readily into a TV format. They also have accompanying illustrations already extant, so there is some visual identity to build off of.

Obviously there are plenty of great manga-based anime series, and novel-based duds (say, Kanokon), but on average it makes sense to me that novel-based anime has the statistical upper hand when it comes to telling a compelling story. Which is why I’m glad to see more and more anime based on light novels—bodes well for the future of the medium, and industry.

In terms of hard numbers, skimming through my personal list of five-star anime, I see four based on manga, six original concepts, and  a whopping eight based on novels of one sort or another. That compares to zero based on novels in the 2-star range. My personal top ten contains two novel adaptations, three manga adaptations, and the remainder are anime originals—less impressive, but still skewed heavily away from manga.

As an aside, what the heck is a “light novel,” anyway? The page count and physical size isn’t significantly different from “heavy” novels, and it’s not that unusual for Japanese novels to have a few illustrations, so I suppose it has more to do with the general style of a series of shorter stories spread across a number of books, as opposed to single, tightly-packed, standalone stories. You could also make the argument that light novels are targeted at a demographic and style usually served by anime and manga, but that’s a little unfair to the medium (not to mention rather meaningless, if you factor in josei and seinen adult-targeted manga—all you’ve ruled out as an audience are old-timers). The genre is probably most closely paralleled by the Borders category “young adult” fiction, though it’s not a perfect match.

If you believe the US publisher of the Boogiepop novels, Boogiepop is what got the light novel trend started back in 1998, and even if not there’s another great series based on novels rather than manga. That date also aligns with the increase in such novels and their anime spinoffs since.

Seikimatsu Occult Gakuin Wrap-up Notes

Well, that was uneven. The series starts out with one of the most spectacular first episodes I’ve ever seen, swerves back and forth between highly-funky comedy/action and relatively straight emotional drama, launches into an over-the-top spectacle of an action-heavy finale out of nowhere, then closes with a full episode of low-key melancholy of the sort that comes of playing around with time travel and trying to avert the apocalypse.

Given the end, I’m now more or less certain that the whole thing is a kind of 12 Monkeys reference, and if the creators were into Terry Gilliam it would also explain a lot about the quirky sense of pacing and humor (also plenty of Sam Raimi Evil Dead/Army of Darkness in there). There weren’t as many movie references as the first episode had me hoping for (really, there wasn’t as much of pretty much everything the first episode had me hoping for), but there were still plenty of amusing nods.

A look at the credits hints at why it’s so scattered—five different scriptwriters, and no less than eleven episode directors, each working with a different animation director and storyboard artist. Only two pairs of episodes had the same team—2 and 8, and 1 and 13. It’s not that unusual to have a number of different teams working on a high-budget series like this, but it couldn’t have helped. Series director Tomohiko Ito, it’s worth noting, also handled the first and last episodes.

The question is whether the whole thing was so funky from minute one that the wildly inconsistent moods and styles work, or if it whets your appetite for something that it fails to deliver on. I’m stuck somewhere in the middle; the weird swings in mood and nearly-random plot twists worked for me well enough, but I sure would have liked to see more of what the show proved it could do under ideal circumstances in the first episode. And, overall, I just wasn’t jumping up and down cheering as much as I felt like I should be—it started so well I really wanted to like it, but on occasion I found myself having to try in the way you just don’t when something is fundamentally awesome, rather than good with flaws.

Of the two people I was watching it with, one really didn’t like where it ended up, while the other thought it was so quirky that it worked; I suppose that just indicates that it’s going to depend a lot on personal taste.

The final episode also rubbed me the wrong way a little.  I’m not big on feedback-loop time travel stories, but I admit that this one was pretty much guaranteed to have something like that pop up at the end—you can’t make a story about time travelers trying to change the future they came from without stepping on some causality principles eventually. Even so, I’m not sure if the rest of the series and the premise had enough of a foundation to allow it to work as pure drama (epic spoon aside—I have to wonder if that was a subtle Tick reference), and the characters seemed a lot less intelligent than they’d been established to be up to that point. I will, however, give credit for following through on the fact that Fumiaki had grown up to be, fundamentally, a nearly-irredeemable loser.

What I mostly ended up wondering, though, was whether the series had been originally planned for two seasons then cut short at one. Given the number of subtle hints at the underlying plot that it dropped, and how leisurely it was through the first nine episodes, it sure felt like it wasn’t anywhere near the conclusion when it comes screaming in out of nowhere in episode eleven. Combined with the number of completely random plot twists, intended sympathy for characters you had barely even seen up until that point (the bodyguard dude), and somewhat rushed conclusion, it sure seemed like there was a dozen episodes missing in there somewhere. Then again, the show was so funky, who knows—maybe they really did plan it that way. If somebody decided Mission E was a good follow-through on Code E, anything is possible.

Final plot comment, I was disappointed with where they took the romantic subtext. While the show did a good enough job with setting up Maya and Fumiaki as having a sort of shared past that eventually lead them together, I was holding out a little hope that—for once—the two leads wouldn’t end up romantically linked in the end. Plus, even for all the hints it dropped that Mikaze wasn’t going to be what she seemed, I did like her cheerful-but-not-ditzy character. There was also nowhere near enough chemistry to explain Maya acting as stupidly as she does in the final episode—she had been clearly established as way too practical for that, which it’d have taken an awful lot of love-blindness to hand-wave past.

One thing that isn’t in any way uneven is the production values—the show looks like it cost a fortune and is gorgeous throughout. Even more so since it doesn’t really try to show off—it’s not wild or stylish, just very, very polished. The music is also great—nearly every episode has a different sort of score, with a huge range and a lot of fun, funky stuff.

Overall I’d recommend it—it ranges from moderately entertaining at its worst to all kinds of fun at its best—but only if you go in ready for the fact that it’s going to be all over the map and it’s going to end oddly.