The Death of the Tsundere
December 2, 2023 8:39 AM Subscribe
“The tsundere is a well-known anime trope, that many people still love to this day. But something happened to it since its inception, and I want to talk about that.” [19:05]
Cf., The Language of New Media by Lev Manovich and Otaku Japan's Database Animals [PDF] by Hiroki Azuma, translated by Jonathan E. Abel and Shion Kono.
Cf., The Language of New Media by Lev Manovich and Otaku Japan's Database Animals [PDF] by Hiroki Azuma, translated by Jonathan E. Abel and Shion Kono.
V. mad that senpai made a video about me
posted by Going To Maine at 9:54 AM on December 2, 2023 [10 favorites]
posted by Going To Maine at 9:54 AM on December 2, 2023 [10 favorites]
Databasification is when you darmok and jalad all the things.
posted by AlSweigart at 10:46 AM on December 2, 2023 [17 favorites]
posted by AlSweigart at 10:46 AM on December 2, 2023 [17 favorites]
Somewhere in _Shadow Dancing in the USA_ (1986), Ventura wrote about a future of flickering images of sex and violence. Looks like he was on to something.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 10:46 AM on December 2, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 10:46 AM on December 2, 2023 [1 favorite]
i'm going to do that thing where one takes issue with a very early hyperbolic statement:
FTFV, emphasis mine:
> these so-called "-dere" archetypes are all over the place in anime, so much so that i think it might actually be impossible to watch anything in the medium without stumbling into at least one of them
if all you watch is the popular shows designed for mass-appeal to developing teenagers then maybe, yes. tropes are tropes because they are work, and lazy writers are lazy.
it's a big tent. not all of anime is on that "notice me sempai [sic]" bullshit
he probably makes some better points later in the video but not sure when i'll get to that, my time is limited and i have good shows to watch
posted by glonous keming at 11:48 AM on December 2, 2023 [4 favorites]
FTFV, emphasis mine:
> these so-called "-dere" archetypes are all over the place in anime, so much so that i think it might actually be impossible to watch anything in the medium without stumbling into at least one of them
if all you watch is the popular shows designed for mass-appeal to developing teenagers then maybe, yes. tropes are tropes because they are work, and lazy writers are lazy.
it's a big tent. not all of anime is on that "notice me sempai [sic]" bullshit
he probably makes some better points later in the video but not sure when i'll get to that, my time is limited and i have good shows to watch
posted by glonous keming at 11:48 AM on December 2, 2023 [4 favorites]
That was significantly better than I expected. That's a really well argued video, and dovetails with things I've been thinking about for years.
Way back in 2006, film critic Mark Kermode talked about the "death of the art of narrative cinema", which he initially blamed on computer games (a causal link he's later said he was wrong about). Here's the core of Kermode's article:
I think "databasification" is a really good way to think about it. The viewer is encouraged to develop their pattern recognition towards sorting various events and characters into categories within a database, to see the parts and not the whole. Of course, most everyone understands artworks both as a collection of parts and as a whole, but a lot of popular narrative art seems to be focused on the parts rather than the whole.
posted by Kattullus at 12:27 PM on December 2, 2023 [6 favorites]
Way back in 2006, film critic Mark Kermode talked about the "death of the art of narrative cinema", which he initially blamed on computer games (a causal link he's later said he was wrong about). Here's the core of Kermode's article:
While popular movies were once dominated by ripe melodramas (All that Heaven Allows, Written on the Wind) and so-called 'women's pictures' (Now, Voyager, Stella Dallas, Mildred Pierce) which offered masterclasses in the art of storytelling, today's boy-friendly blockbusters often boast nothing more than a collection of spectacular interludes assembled in the manner of a catalogue rather than a chronicle. Even kids' movies have fallen foul of this decline. The biggest movie of the season is Ice Age: The Meltdown, a collection of slapstick animated episodes which not even the kindest critic could accuse of having anything vaguely resembling a story.I was looking at TV Tropes earlier today (for a computer game, incidentally), which I hadn't done in many, many years, and there was something really odd about seeing a work of art reduced to a list of tropes. Equally odd was clicking on the page for a trope and seeing very, very different event in wildly disparate works of art forced into the Procrustean Bed of a single trope. And I was thinking about what kind of reader, viewer or player saw art that way.
I think "databasification" is a really good way to think about it. The viewer is encouraged to develop their pattern recognition towards sorting various events and characters into categories within a database, to see the parts and not the whole. Of course, most everyone understands artworks both as a collection of parts and as a whole, but a lot of popular narrative art seems to be focused on the parts rather than the whole.
posted by Kattullus at 12:27 PM on December 2, 2023 [6 favorites]
Of course, most everyone understands artworks both as a collection of parts and as a whole, but a lot of popular narrative art seems to be focused on the parts rather than the whole.
*shrug* Wholes are made of parts. You can't have a whole without parts. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that I find parts much more interesting than wholes, because a whole is a fait accompli, whereas parts have potential. If I only care about the whole, and not about the parts, I might as well just read a summary of whatever it is and save myself some time.
posted by Faint of Butt at 12:48 PM on December 2, 2023
*shrug* Wholes are made of parts. You can't have a whole without parts. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that I find parts much more interesting than wholes, because a whole is a fait accompli, whereas parts have potential. If I only care about the whole, and not about the parts, I might as well just read a summary of whatever it is and save myself some time.
posted by Faint of Butt at 12:48 PM on December 2, 2023
It's not like I'm commenting on this post for you.
posted by betweenthebars at 4:17 PM on December 2, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by betweenthebars at 4:17 PM on December 2, 2023 [3 favorites]
Does this all mean that I'm not missing anything by limiting my TV viewing to episodes of Taskmaster, which are designed to consist of a series of disconnected, meaningless tasks?
posted by clawsoon at 4:43 PM on December 2, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by clawsoon at 4:43 PM on December 2, 2023 [4 favorites]
dere, said the tsun , and went and told the maid
dere said the maid and went and told the cow
Dere dere said the cow, I didn’t really mean it…
posted by clew at 7:06 PM on December 2, 2023
dere said the maid and went and told the cow
Dere dere said the cow, I didn’t really mean it…
posted by clew at 7:06 PM on December 2, 2023
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But does the creator know that?
posted by fiercekitten at 9:48 AM on December 2, 2023