WisCon 37 Anime/Manga Programming Idea-Generation Fest

[laceblade]

Let’s talk about what we would like to see at WisCon 37 for anime/manga programming. Post any thoughts you have, however semi-formed.

People can comment & try to come up with the best panels possible! At WisCon, anyone can suggest panel ideas: People who run the convention, authors, attendees, or people who have never attended WisCon and never will. Thus: Please feel free to join in!

If the comments go in a direction you dislike, or you don't want to participate in the discussion, you can submit your own program idea here.

Programming submissions will close in a couple weeks.

Here's a link to last year's programming generation fest.


WisCon 36 had:
Fairy Tales in Shoujo Anime & Manga (write-up)
Utena: The Revolution Continues (write-up)
Anime & Manga: What I've Read/Watched Since WisCon35 (low-key, everyone was in a circle in one of the sixth-floor rooms)

WisCon 35 had:
Looking Beyond the Gender Binary in Anime and Manga
Fumi Yoshinaga’s Ooku: The Inner Chambers

WisCon 34 had:
Teamwork: How Anime and Manga Fill A Feminist Void In SF/F
The Works of Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli

WisCon 33 had:
Female Power in Shounen Manga (Spontaneous Programming) (write-up)

WisCon 32 had:
Shoujo Bodies (Spontaneous Programming) (write-up)

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Commenting disclaimer: If you're reading this on LiveJournal, I would appreciate it if you could post your comments on the Dreamwidth post, so they're all in one spot. Of course, if you are unable to do so, comment at LJ.

Comments

[laceblade]

This is an idea from last year: I'd still *love* to see a panel about intended audience, specifically about moe - how do you define moe, how is moe perceived by others? Do you pay attention to such classifications? Does the fact that series about young girls are sometimes marketed toward adult men limit your personal enjoyment?

(series examples of sienen moe: K-ON!, Yotsuba&!, Azumanga Daioh, Gunslinger Girls, Victorian Romance Emma, Puella Shoujo Magi Madoka)

This exact phrasing wasn't very popular last year during sign-ups, though. What could make it more interesting?
It seems like a conversation about the "male gaze" vs. actual enjoyment/user consumption would be super interesting for WisCon.

[terajk]

FTR, this panel sounds FABULOUS to me XD.

[likeadeuce]

This is interesting because I wished I'd had someone last year on the "But it's not FOR Girls" panel who could address this -- not necessarily in a moe-specific sense but just the idea of categories trying to define who a text is for, and how often that really applies/ how it translates across culture. So it sounds super interesting to me (though, as a mostly casual manga-anime fan, I didn't even know the word 'moe' so maybe the 'male gaze' phrasing is going to catch the eye of the WisCon voters more. . .)

[oyceter]

Oh, this would be really interesting! I'm especially weirded out because I REALLY like how several of the seinen moe ones have lots of female interaction (AzuDai, Gunslinger Girls), but then it's all for male gaze? Which... ????

And also something about the general lack of older women in anime/manga? I don't know if it's just me. But I feel there are a lot of works with girls interacting with each other but way less with older women.

[laceblade]

Last year's "What have you read/watched since last year's WisCon?" was low-key and I think everyone there enjoyed it (my head-count partway through was 17 people). This could become a standing panel, or perhaps it would be too same-y to have one every year? Do you think it's potentially interesting enough to hold one annually, or would you rather see something more specific?

[terajk]

I would love to see something about disability in anime/manga, but I have NO idea what the focus of discussion would be *is 3/4 of the way finished with a series on disability in Soul Eater and also insert something about Fullmetal Alchemist here*

[likeadeuce]

I love that idea. I proposed an FMA-specific panel last year but it's hard for single-text topics to get enough votes, I guess (nobody liked my Twilight idea either!). A thematic one that covers a lot of different texts has potential, though.

[laceblade]

Hmm, I'm trying to think of examples.
I've only read a few volumes of Soul Eater - do you mean Death the Kid's OCD, or is there something else that happens later on?

I'm reminded of the treatment of mental illness in Sand Chronicles/Sunadokei, although I don't think it's ever specifically called out as such.

Full Moon o Sagashite focuses on a girl whose dream is to be a singer, but she has sarcoma & therefore she can't sing loudly/breathe well. In the first episode, she learns she has one year to live.

FMA has the obvious examples of Ed and Al, but Izumi also suffers from chronic illness, right?

There was that 3-volume manga put out by Dark Horse called "Translucent" about a girl who involuntarily goes invisible, right?


What seems unifying to me is that all of these are examples of "invisible disabilities" with the exception of Ed & Al, who compensate for their physical disabilities in ways that are "cool" (automail that can be reshaped into weapons with alchemy; a metal body that can withstand repetitive combat).
I cannot think of a single example of a character in anime or manga who uses a wheelchair. There are some who use canes, but I think they are all elderly characters & the canes are meant to be an external marker of age.

[gramarye1971]

Library Wars (the series about Japanese libraries that have created a paramilitary organization to fight government-backed censorship) has two characters with disabilities. One is Commander Inamine, an older man who lost his leg in the same battle that killed his wife and uses a wheelchair to get around. The other is a teenage girl named Marie, who developed postlingual deafness in middle school (and the postlingual aspect is a huge plot point, because she's often mistakenly perceived as being both unable to hear and unable to speak). They're both participants in several storylines, and other people's reactions to their disabilities are incorporated into the series' general criticism of censorship.

[julieandrews]

It occurs to me looking over that list that none of the panels have explicitly addressed shounen-ai/BL/yaoi.

[laceblade]

This is a good point, and has a lot of crossover potential with topics that are regularly discussed on panels, I think.

Moto Hagio's Heart of Thomas is about to be released for the first time in the U.S., and it was formative for a lot of BL coming out of Japan today.

Personally, I've read very little BL (with the exception of works by Yoshinaga Fumi), but it could be interesting. Maybe some panelists who are familiar with both slash fandom of Western media sources as well as BL? Or would the addition of discussions of slash fandom be unnecessary? We could talk about how in Western media fandoms, relationships between men are usually "just bros," and other things are left to subtext, sometimes to the point of winking at the viewers (thinking of BBC's Sherlock here). But in anime/manga, there are entire genres/actual textual sources of romantic relationships between men.

The Atlantic just published an article on Wednesday about Heart of Thomas with the subtitle, Moto Hagio's Heart of Thomas series markets a male homosexual love story to women—and it works.. The article is unintentionally hilarious because it seems to have absolutely no awareness of fandom. Direct quote: Gay romance comics for women? What? Why?
A few of the comments call the author's attention to Western fandom.

[julieandrews]

Hrm. It seems to me that anime/manga being a visual medium as much as a textual one that a panel topic that encouraged use of a projector would be cool. Representations of women/girls on covers? Fashion? I dunno.

[lileyo]

I imagine Utena probably gets discussed to death every year, but I'd love to see a panel about depictions of abuse that talks about it. Has it been done?

[laceblade]

Last year, we had a panel specifically about Utena.
Abuse and abuse psychology came up last year specifically in relation to the Black Rose arc. It was not the focus of the panel, though.

I think this could be interesting, although I'd worry about how much interest there would be in another Utena-centric panel a second year in a row. Of course, that could just be me, & if someone suggests it, we'd find out during the part of the programming process when people vote to indicate their interest in all-suggested panels (people get to vote: "Yes, I'd see that;" "Yes, I'd be on that panel;" "Yes, I'd moderate that panel;" or "No, that's uninteresting to me.").

Utena is a popular/known series among the anime/manga fans of WisCon attendees in my experience, for obvious reasons.

[heavenscalyx]

Last year was the first time for an Utena-specific panel, though we talked about it in the Shoujo Bodies panel. I don't know how much it's been discussed in other panels, alas.

[laceblade]

I really enjoyed Andrea Horbinski's recent(ish) post over at TWC's Symposium Blog, Rise Up, Pixelated Young Women of the New Age!

I <3 the entire post, but especially:

A conference about world renewal necessarily invites thoughts about how best to encourage and to sustain social change, and I have to admit that my thoughts about the kinds of isms that haven’t been discussed so far–so far the only ism anyone wants to touch is capitalism–led me to be distinctly uncomfortable at the fact that at least some of the presentations have rehashed the tired old cliche of a bunch of dudes sitting around talking about the messianic potential of (Japanese?) girls, regardless of the conditions of actual girls and women in Japan, Korea, or anywhere else.

...

If there’s one thing that defined the unlamented otaku, it was their idolization, if not outright fetishization, of girl characters in general and the character type that the unrepentant Freudian Saitô Tamaki calls “the battling beauty” in particular. (Similar statements might be made about female media fans and their idolization of white male characters.) The catch, of course, is that a girl can only save us within a story-world that does not (and must not) impinge on the “real” (I use the term advisedly) world outside the story, the world where gender discrimination is a problem for women in virtually every country.

There's also a discussion in the post of "the nichijôkei ("everyday") aesthetic," which links up to part of what I was talking out up above in the comment-thread about moe.
Well, as Joanna Russ noted, things like family and life and love are only trivial because male-dominated society tells us they are, and isn’t that one of the handy-dandy ways to suppress women’s writing, and women’s stories?

Anyway, I think there are about 8 panel topics that could spin-off from this blog post.

[feuervogel]

I wish I could go to WisCon :(

There are some really interesting psychological shows out now: Psycho-pass, where there's this computer that reads your aura and determines whether you're a latent criminal, and it's actually creepy (it's a police procedural, and the main character sort of questions it, and I'm sure after episode 12 (the last one that aired), she's going to Raise A Fuss), and From the New World, which is about high school kids in a post-apocalyptic future Japan where everyone has psychic powers and the priests and ethics committee and teachers decide whether the kids are latent criminals and need to be taken care of before they can go bad.

There's some obvious parallels there.

Also, Mouretsu Space Pirates was really good and more people should watch it, because it's about a high school girl who's a pirate and there are no panty shots and there are CANON LESBIANS and it's got girls standing up for themselves.

[jiawen]

I'd like to see a panel specifically about depictions of trans women (or possibly trans people in general) in anime & manga. Mostly, I'd like a panel about Hourou Musuko and F. Compo. Previous discussions have been about related topics, but not specifically trans people.

[heavenscalyx]

Ooooh.

(Kashimashi Girl Meets Girl, for all that it's played almost entirely for laughs, has some interesting visual commentary. Like the fact that we never once see Our Hero's eyes while he's a boy, but once she's a girl, we see her whole face and her whole attitude changes. As if, as my wife said, the series was saying that she was a girl all along.)

[laceblade]

I know you said specifically about depictions of trans women/trans people - would you want a panel comparing depictions in anime/manga to depictions in Western media sources, or just a focus on anime/manga sources?

Would a description as simple as, "Let's talk about how trans people are represented in anime and manga," suffice?

[oyceter]

++

[meganbmoore]

1. Princess Tutu and narrative nonconformity ("happy ending" relies on the Dark Heroine getting what she wants, not sweet and virtuous heroine getting hers, prince is saved by the characters the narrative said were supposed to have a tragic death, a puppet's rebellion results in a new character who exists outside the actual narrative but who affects it, the prince is the damsel, etc. I had several less obvious ones while driving home, but have now forgotten them.)

2. What genres/intended target audiences make us prefer one format over the other, and when adaptions work better for us one way but not another. (ex: I much prefer girly shoujo as manga to as anime, prefer horror anime to horror manga, will usually like anime based on light novels, but usually not manga based on light novels, but usually don't like light novels based on anime or manga, or manga based on anime)

[laceblade]

1: Narrative nonconformity = yassssssssssss. Would you want this to be just Princess Tutu? I feel like there could be crossover potential with other media, although I can't really think of others that focus on it as much as Tutu.

2: Interesting! I've never considered this based on my own preferences, I don't think.

[taeli]

As the demographic of Wiscon grows and changes, it's quite possible that people there is a subset of congoers who have been going for many years but haven't been exposed to the genre or who have friends in fandom who enjoy it but don't know much about it and want to learn more. Perhaps there are some who want to get into it but don't really know where to jump in. I realize this might be too 101 for most people already in anime and manga fandom, but I would love to see an intro to anime and manga panel. It seems that most of the panels that have been done in the past few years might be too intimidating for people who are open to/curious about the topic but have either little or no experience with terminology or what's good/what fellow feminists would recommend as well as what they might want to be aware or wary of (?) before reading/watching or getting started in anime and manga fandom.

For example, I've seen a few Studio Ghibli films, watched some Bubblegum Crisis, Lain and Neon Genesis but I don't really know what else to watch and even less idea where to start with manga. And there may be others who just want to know what it's all about but don't really have friends in the fandom to get advice and recommendations from. Personally, I'd love to get to know more about some of the terminology and types of anime and manga, reoccurring themes and ideas within the genre, recommendations on good books and shows, where to find them (especially on a tight budget), and other things like that.

Thanks for being open to suggestions. I've been interested in the anime and manga panels the last few years but thought my lack of knowledge might leave me feeling confused and/or overwhelmed.

[laceblade]

I think this would be interesting with a strong moderator. We do regularly have panels about like, Fanfic 101 or etc. A similar one for anime/manga might be useful.

I think that last year, we suggested something like, "I've read Ooku; what else should I read?" but didn't get enough panelists or people interested in attending, I can't remember which.

Would something like the following description be what you're looking for?

Anime & Manga 101
Do you feel like you might like anime & manga, but feel overwhelmed by the hundreds of titles and some of the terminology? Come to this panel prepared with your storytelling likes/dislikes & a few questions, and allow our panelists to give you advice and recommendations.

Just stumbled on this

[orangemike.livejournal.com]

I am mixed blood, and thus am not being culturally appropriative when I use terms like "pow-wow". They are terms that resonate very deeply with my identity.

Re: Just stumbled on this

[laceblade]

Hi Mike,

I'm assuming this comment was meant for the post about the reporter's coverage of WisCon 37.

Thanks for correcting me, and I will link to your comment from that post, so that anyone reading it now can see your statement, too.