Letters

After some thought, I've decided to close the book on the back-and-forth "bash the fans"/"defend the fans" discussion. Not that I don't appreciate your emails. I do, honest! (And I apologize for not replying individually to all of them.) But I think the topic is starting to get a bit old as far as this column is concerned. However, there is one last letter on this topic I simply have to print.

Earlier last year I had the opportunity to apply for a Japanese exchange program. I did so and was accepted. I was thrilled. Not only would I get to go to the country I'd been learning about for the past three years, but I would go with 20 like-minded people!

We had an orientation in June. I and one other guy were the first people there. We quickly discovered we had similar tastes in Anime and music and got to talking. Twenty minutes later, we were interrupted by someone who wanted to know if we were talking about Sailor Moon (we were actually talking about Utena). I told her we weren't but that both of us had seen it. She promptly started talking about how much she liked Sailor Moon. After she made a comment about how that was all she'd seen, the person sitting to my right snorted and said quite clearly, "Great, another Toonami Dork."

This person was, unfortunately, not the only anime purist of the obnoxious sort in our group. By the time we left for Japan, our friendly little group had split into three groups: the purists, the non-purists and those who had really no clue as to what the other two groups were talking about. This wouldn't have been so bad, if it wasn't for the fact that most of these so-called "purists" hadn't seen any dubs other than the ones on Toonami, and refused to watch dubs. They would respond with comments like "they're all the same Americanized crap."

Now, I'm no fan of the heavy editing done for TV, and I do prefer some subs over the dub (Nadesico, for example). So I figured, heck, lets talk to them about subs. As it turned out, most of that group had seen only fansubs of Sailor Moon, save one or two that had seen fansubs of Dragonball Z, and one person who had seen a few of the Tenchi OAVs subbed. That was it. *I* had seen more subbed anime than these self-pronounced "purists".

If you're wondering why I made such an effort at conversation as I sat next to them on the plane, thirteen hours on a 747 makes you desperate for *any* distraction.

After we arrived, things got... well, less friendly. For some reason, there were three tables in the dining room we used for post-arrival orientation, and each group quickly claimed a table. I sat with the non- purists. (BTW, I say "non-purists" because most of us weren't dub fanatics, but rather anime fanatics. In other words, we liked both formats.) The purists continued to make remarks like "subtitled is the only way to watch *real* anime in America, and "watching subtitled anime is the best way to learn Japanese". Curiously, few of the purists had taken Japanese classes while most of the non-purists had. One person even said "Commercial subs are an insidious attempt by the companies to get us to buy dubs. That's why I only buy fansubs."

After the post-arrival group activities and the floating school trip, I gladly swapped my window seat by the purists for an aisle seat by some of my friends (and promptly got stuck in front of a 7 year old with ADHD, but that's another story).

(name and email address withheld by request)

And ladies and gentlemen, if that doesn't break your heart, nothing will.

Let's move on...

You mentioned Yoko Kanno's incredible Escaflowne score. Now for all I know, every track you love was written by her, but Esca's music was written by Kanno and Hajime Mizoguchi. Poor man keeps on not getting credited. Some of my favorite tracks are by him.

'Tis all, Mariela Marisama@aol.com

I checked my CDs. She's right. Waddaya know.

A message on the anticipation of the televised Escaflowne, received before the news broke about the editing:

The waiting for Escaflowne to be on Fox (as well as to show up on DVD) is driving me NUTS as well. Not just because of the waiting itself, but for how some fans have been talking (mostly whining, actually) about it. The people who are disappointed about Escaflowne's delay on DVD (or the fact the Escaflowne movie may only be bought subbed on DVD) aren't that bad... But when they start on Escaflowne being dubbed or the edits that may have to be made when it's aired on Fox, it is NOT pleasant at all. A number of EscaMLers already have an opinion of the Escaflowne dub too, since they've heard it, even without seeing the dub sample shown by AnimeVillage at cons. You see, during March of this year, Escaflowne dubbed in English was aired in the Philippines (a dub by Ocean Studios, I think, who does the dubbing for Viz as well). Some Filipino MLers made wav files of the said dub and it spread through the ML. Some of the said wav files at http://www.geocities.com/jenchan76/escavoices.html

The purist side of some MLers have just kept popping up since then. It's as if the existence/broadcast of a dubbed/edited version of Esca will bring forth an army of guymelefs to raid their houses and destroy all their subbed copies of Esca (fansub or legal sub). If not that, they start ranting about how Escaflowne will give the wrong impression about anime (they vow to not let it go through the Pokeurmom---I mean Pokemon path) or about how violently some parents may react to the violence that was in the unedited version if they ever get their hands on it. The admins (I happen to be one of them) and even some regular MLers (http://www.egroups.com/message/escaflowne/3846) have tried to lessen the paranoia but nothing has worked. And thus my love-hate relationship with Escaflowne fandom exists.

Regarding the "dominance" of the Escaflowne Compendium, the main reason why it is dominant is that: (1) It is one of the earliest, if not the first, Escaflowne page on the web, (2) Egan Loo (Compendium maintainer) is fluent in Japanese, and (3) the Compendium _is_ the source for official information in English regarding Escaflowne. It's near-impossible to come up with that much information on your own unless the site's been around for a while, you're fluent in Japanese, or can give out official information. (Funny story from this year's AX: some guy overheard Egan and I talking about Escaflowne and matters regarding a possible EscaMLer meeting and just asked us "Is Escaflowne _really_ that good?" We just stared at him until one of us told him that we were totally the wrong people to ask...)

~Kourin~ ed@cowboybebop.net http://www.geocities.com/kourin

You said you'd review artist sites on your page ten months ago. Dude! What's taking you so long? I'm just kidding. ^_^; I know there are a lot of topics to cover and only one can be done per month. Still, I thought it be a good idea to redo my suggestions seeing how a lot of stuff has changed in a year. ^^;

You probably know the Online Comic Artist Directory has moved to http://ocad.syste.ms/ There's also a good comic listing at http://www.bigpanda.net/, though it lists all types of comics, not limited to manga-style.

TINAMI has moved to its own domain at http://www.tinami.com/ and appears to be going through a massive upgrade right now. Now the listings have ratings on how realistic the art looks, male-female character ratios, average age of the characters featured, and other such details. It's pretty neat. Will always be a Japanese language-only site though.

The Anime Artist Headquarters died a while back, for reasons that are mainly the fault of the retard who's typing you this message. ^^;;;; A few attempts were made to resurrect it but the person in charge of hosting the site (by my decision @_@) kept deleting the accounts without notification. All the data got lost completely in the end.

The Anime Art Academy has moved to http://hammer.prohosting.com/~aaacad/

The Impromanga is now located at http://impromanga.org/. Doji is still located at http://tang.simplenet.com/doji/, but I think it'll move eventually what with the change in Simplenet's service n' all. Both have pretty interesting self-inclusion comics featured now. ^o^

I think radiocomix.com should also be mentioned as they're a pretty creator-friendly company.

That's about it. I could swear a couple more resources for artists and artist info have popped up since I last wrote you, but... hmmm ^^;

Now... I know this is a reaaaaaaalllllly late reply to what you said before, but... Megumi Hayashibara as Kikushima!? PAH! No one could possibly do a better job than Satomi-chan did. ^o^ Satomi IS Kikishima.

Just had to say that. =)

Lesnick resu-niku@studio-zoe.com

http://studio-zoe.com/wendy/

Actually, all I did was ask for feedback on how to go about reviewing artist's sites. I still haven't decided one way or the other. DSL may give me the courage to try it one of these months, though.

Josh Tanski, whose site was highlighted, wrote me a letter. (That's actually sheer coincidence, if you can believe it...)

You mentioned in your Last Exit column that you want a way of telling how fast an Image gallery loads. I just wanted to let you know that there is a tiny 38K download for Internet Explorer whose features include the option of being able to bring up information on the number of images on the pages, the individual and total file sizes, and it even estimates download time for 14.4, 28.8, and 56K modem speeds. You should be able to get it by picking Windows Update under the Tools menu using IE5. I hope that helps.

--
Josh Tanski
jdt9688@rit.edu
http://www.rit.edu/~jdt9688/im/

It would if I were using IE. I'm a Netscape man. Don't like IE's interface or size. However, given that I've tried the pre-release of Netscape 6 and it doesn't look promising, I may be in the hunt for a good third-party browser soon.

Since you imply that you need new (non)rant material, how about how Napster and other file sharing programs are changing anime? You briefly mentioned DVD piracy, but how to reconcile this following argument?

You can pay $35 plus for a Japanese import album that, in most cases, you CAN'T preview, or return to the store (particularly with small online merchants). Or you can hunt and peck through various anime pages with diminishing returns for CD info. Or just cut to the chase and do a search for said anime music on Napster, Gnutella, etc.?

Personally, while I do understand that artists should be paid for their work, I don't enjoy coughing up $35-$40 for a non-bootleg CD that turns out to be an all-Japanese drama CD (who hasn't done this before?).

Some of my fellow anime nuts and I have commiserated over that issue for the last several months, with no conclusive answer, natch. A cute little paradox, ja?

-Ragabash orfiel@hotmail.com

I'm all in favor of using tools like Napster to sample music prior to purchase. I'm against using it as an alternative to obtaining the real thing. That's my stance in a nutshell.

A site review from the author of the recent Portuguese Last Exit Picks column:

Let me start this off by stating that I'm a very big fan of the Newtype magazine.

I found the link through Anipike, since they had a very large advertisement at the index, and, needless to say, I was very excited about the possibilities this site had. For one thing, we could have gotten first-hand information, interviews, images, editorials, and other interesting material for a geek like me.

But the website sucks. Sorry, having like, ONE paragraph and ONE image on each of the four anime they "reviewed" does not make for a good online magazine. The grammar mistakes are forgivable, seeing as how they're not native English speakers, but I expected better from them.

For one thing, the little shockwave animations with the editor saying something stupid are annoying. No one really cares what completely un-funny comment he has, unless it's somewhat relevant or has a point. The material is terrible (it's more like a one-sentence summary than a review), the images are small and illegible, and the page design is primary to say the least.

I opened Newtype and Ex at the same time and was convinced Ex is a hundred times better.

Obviously, Newtype has no experience in making web magazines, hence they should not try unless they bring in experienced personnel. I'd much rather see them release a magazine in English with the quality content their own magazine has than read this load of crap they dare call a webzine.

I'd like to believe that the site will someday evolve into something better, but because there was nothing about them being "under construction" or "just getting started", I'm forced to face the reality that... that's what it is, and it's not very good.

And that was my little rant for the day.

-- Daniel keiichi@routevenus.com