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akinoameSo, between being insanely busy throughout April and then in the last weekend of the month, falling over my siblings' dogs and spraining my wrist thanks Edith and Apollo, this is another birthday without me having a fic.
Not that I didn't try. I just...it's hard to write when your wrist is in pain. Also I learned that typing actually can stretch the hell out of the ligaments and tendons and hurt like fuck AGAIN, so I have a backlog of stuff at work that I need to type up now that I'm feeling a lot better.
In other news, I have been desperately wanting to do just a massive dive into the radical shift in tone between 1967's Ultra Seven and the next series that followed in 1971, Return of Ultraman. I've been wondering for a while if the issue may be the death of creator Eiji Tsuburaya in-between. And yes, this certainly would have an influence on it, new vision and all, but at the same time RoU aired, Kamen Rider premiered, and...
...Okay, so truth be told, outside of the amazing Christmas episode, I still haven't sat down and watched the original Kamen Rider, and I really should now that I can stream it for free. Someone make me a clone so that I can send the clone to work and then I can sit on my butt all day and watch TV.
At the very least, I can say that there is a very specific type of nostalgia that Toei has with Kamen Rider that isn't quite present in modern Ultra with Tsuburaya, but it certainly had been there in previous seasons. See, there is this very specific type of masculinity--a Showa-era masculine ideal--that is prevalent in Toei's Kamen Rider retrospectives, particularly Let's Go Kamen Rider, some degree of Fourze, motherfucking Kamen Rider Taisenthis, quite honestly, is probably my least favorite of all of Kamen Rider, and that includes Kabuto and the time Kabuto kept handing me my ass in Climax Heroes and Super Hero Taisen GP but a more positive version in Kamen Rider 1, which may well be Takeshi Hongo's finest hour and possibly Toshiki Inoue's best writing.
This ideal, which I'll explain in context of the really good example, Kamen Rider 1, is that a man needs to be stoic but passionate, take on all manner of suffering without shedding a single tear, that he is to be compassionate but never give in to his emotions...honestly, "stoic" is 100% what it means. And you can see this too, in a positive light, from Mega Monster Battle, with Boss Hyuga essentially trying to teach Rei how to be a human being--and given Rei's extremely specific situation where he has the emotional development of a toddler and only understands negative emotions, yeah this is helpful for him.
The problem that comes up in 1970s Ultra, some degree of Kamen Rider Fourze, and all of those movies I mentionedespecially you, "Heisei Riders can't accept death" coming from Mr. "I got into this job because the scientist who rescued me from brainwashing was murdered" Kamen Rider #1, Mr. "My two predecessors felt bad that my family and I got killed saving their asses so they made me a cyborg yay" V3, Mr. "Nobody has come up with a decent explanation for how I survived getting Killed Off For Real in 1974" Riderman, and so on.......the problem is that it often is used as "a man should be an emotionally repressed dipshit." So you have the drastic personality change complete with personal pronoun change from "boku" to "ore" in Dan Moroboshi between Seven and Leo, Gentaro Kisaragi somehow failing to understand that it's okay to cry when the girl you have a crush on turns out to be sentient space slime in Movie Wars Megamax, and the overall tone of everything from RoU through Leo.
I just struggle with articulating this issue because I don't feel I have a lot of understanding about what was going on in Japan during that time period. Like...it's clear how much of both Kamen Rider and Ultraman were influenced by the horrors of WWII, particularly the atomic bomb (in KR's case, the final volume of the manga is about Hayato Ichimonji trying to kidnap a Shocker scientist to save a kid from cancer caused by the bomb, and Ultra Seven deals a lot with the fears of the Cold War arms race and a whole fucking episode features a planet getting nuked and the only survivor spreading fallout during its battle with Seven; I honestly think part of the reason Dan ends up so goddamn sick in the finale is because of radiation poisoning). But I don't have as much knowledge of the post-war changes in Japanese society. There's clearly some kind of reaction against an upheaval in gender norms, particularly with women entering the workforce, but I don't have enough knowledge of it to fully articulate what I'm seeing or explain what's throwing me off.
I think at some point, I may have to look for Prof. Igarashi's books on post-war Japan, particularly Japan circa 1972: Masculinity in the Age of Mass Consumption and Metavisuality. I feel like that's the perfect thing to give me that understanding.
Likewise in fandom meta-analysis that I am missing out on, I am intensely curious if the notion of "found family" is as prevalent in Latin American LGBTQ+ peoples as in...well, white LGBTQ+. There's something about the typical fanfic narratives of needing to sever ties with one's birth family due to their failure to accept you as you are that feels somewhat alienating when I think of my own family. True, I'm not as tied to my Latin American heritage, and being ace/aro is not as...well, as alienating, I suppose, as other sexual and gender identities, but I feel like there's this expectation in Latin American families that as a whole, the family is supposed to come together in times of difficulty. So I would love to have more of an understanding of what that means for other LGBTQ+ Latin Americans and if the typical fandom narratives of found family are as off-putting to them as to me.
Not that I didn't try. I just...it's hard to write when your wrist is in pain. Also I learned that typing actually can stretch the hell out of the ligaments and tendons and hurt like fuck AGAIN, so I have a backlog of stuff at work that I need to type up now that I'm feeling a lot better.
In other news, I have been desperately wanting to do just a massive dive into the radical shift in tone between 1967's Ultra Seven and the next series that followed in 1971, Return of Ultraman. I've been wondering for a while if the issue may be the death of creator Eiji Tsuburaya in-between. And yes, this certainly would have an influence on it, new vision and all, but at the same time RoU aired, Kamen Rider premiered, and...
...Okay, so truth be told, outside of the amazing Christmas episode, I still haven't sat down and watched the original Kamen Rider, and I really should now that I can stream it for free. Someone make me a clone so that I can send the clone to work and then I can sit on my butt all day and watch TV.
At the very least, I can say that there is a very specific type of nostalgia that Toei has with Kamen Rider that isn't quite present in modern Ultra with Tsuburaya, but it certainly had been there in previous seasons. See, there is this very specific type of masculinity--a Showa-era masculine ideal--that is prevalent in Toei's Kamen Rider retrospectives, particularly Let's Go Kamen Rider, some degree of Fourze, motherfucking Kamen Rider Taisen
This ideal, which I'll explain in context of the really good example, Kamen Rider 1, is that a man needs to be stoic but passionate, take on all manner of suffering without shedding a single tear, that he is to be compassionate but never give in to his emotions...honestly, "stoic" is 100% what it means. And you can see this too, in a positive light, from Mega Monster Battle, with Boss Hyuga essentially trying to teach Rei how to be a human being--and given Rei's extremely specific situation where he has the emotional development of a toddler and only understands negative emotions, yeah this is helpful for him.
The problem that comes up in 1970s Ultra, some degree of Kamen Rider Fourze, and all of those movies I mentioned
I just struggle with articulating this issue because I don't feel I have a lot of understanding about what was going on in Japan during that time period. Like...it's clear how much of both Kamen Rider and Ultraman were influenced by the horrors of WWII, particularly the atomic bomb (in KR's case, the final volume of the manga is about Hayato Ichimonji trying to kidnap a Shocker scientist to save a kid from cancer caused by the bomb, and Ultra Seven deals a lot with the fears of the Cold War arms race and a whole fucking episode features a planet getting nuked and the only survivor spreading fallout during its battle with Seven; I honestly think part of the reason Dan ends up so goddamn sick in the finale is because of radiation poisoning). But I don't have as much knowledge of the post-war changes in Japanese society. There's clearly some kind of reaction against an upheaval in gender norms, particularly with women entering the workforce, but I don't have enough knowledge of it to fully articulate what I'm seeing or explain what's throwing me off.
I think at some point, I may have to look for Prof. Igarashi's books on post-war Japan, particularly Japan circa 1972: Masculinity in the Age of Mass Consumption and Metavisuality. I feel like that's the perfect thing to give me that understanding.
Likewise in fandom meta-analysis that I am missing out on, I am intensely curious if the notion of "found family" is as prevalent in Latin American LGBTQ+ peoples as in...well, white LGBTQ+. There's something about the typical fanfic narratives of needing to sever ties with one's birth family due to their failure to accept you as you are that feels somewhat alienating when I think of my own family. True, I'm not as tied to my Latin American heritage, and being ace/aro is not as...well, as alienating, I suppose, as other sexual and gender identities, but I feel like there's this expectation in Latin American families that as a whole, the family is supposed to come together in times of difficulty. So I would love to have more of an understanding of what that means for other LGBTQ+ Latin Americans and if the typical fandom narratives of found family are as off-putting to them as to me.