
This is my first attempt at proper anime/manga analysis, so I hope that it made for decent reading. Any criticisms are welcome as I would like to continuing improving my writing.
just read this post. it’s a fascinating read for a lot of reasons.
the main one that sticks out to me is the methodological differences: there’s a lot of butlerian psychoanalysis, historical contexts of the concept of fetish, a focus on the anime as opposed to the manga,a distinction between the content and “fanservice”, and a more nuanced take on the superstructure and how onimai functions in it through a discussion of gazes.
on the other hand, i take a more introspective (read: inspired by autoethnographic) approach: it is self-critique based on how i understand onimai, dismiss queer theory foundations despite using some ideas from it, disguise my academic pretensions, subsume everything fetishistic into the jokey construction of “the perverted stuff”, and overview things i find interesting as opposed to thorough exploration. i suspect the “informal essay” claim might have to do with the fact i am just discussing my journey. it is somewhat inevitable any critique of the essay needs to be a bit mean toward me because i am writing about myself; i did dismiss a foundational text after all and therefore opening myself to other critique!
first: the background to writing the onimai piss jokes post. while the writer here takes meta-psychoanalytical critique as an avenue for a deeper understanding of onimai, i take a personal road inspired by my readings in anthropological critique. in my head, i was thinking of Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger and cultural histories of hygiene related to diseases. in these texts, dirt is analyzed as a social construction that divides the clean from the dirty, the sacred from the profane. the best summary of my thoughts come from the historically inaccurate giorgio agamben who i read much, much later after the onimai piss post: reclaim the profane! the profane is our normal! return the sacred to the profane! woo!!!
this is my rhetorical strategy when i conceived “the perverted stuff” to discuss onimai as a personal queer text. the article here criticizes how i reduce everything to “fanservice”, and this is indeed correct. i don’t see the point in distinguishing “profound sex comedy” from “debased sex comedy”. rather, i take a modified reader-response theory approach: to use an analogy, if “the perverted stuff” is more like the essence/thing-in-itself, how we read it is what we get out of it. the interpretation is the meaning. the piss joke, the medium, is the message.
such an approach results in making me (the critic/analyzer) a subject. you have to read how i read the piss jokes. my reading is the subject matter. this is how i always approach my style of criticism: my assumption is that the object (that is, my cohost posts) people are looking at is not onimai but how i read onimai.
and therefore, i think criticism is the most vulnerable autobiography of our predilections. here i am, presenting my own thoughts as a work deserving contemplation. i don’t treat my writing as “supplementary reading materials” that enrich a deeper understanding on the object, it is me exploring the mediation between my philosophy, my societal contexts, and the object and what i took out of it and publishing it as a work worthy of analysis.
so my intervention is to argue that the perverted stuff is worthy of contemplation because our readings of it are going to be the real object of study. this is why i list a series of characteristics and ideas not because i am lazy (okay, there’s a bit of that) but because i want readers to be provoked with a sense of wonder and start thinking alongside me. this is partially why i refused to carry on with the age regression talk (i don’t quite understand the fetish): i want people to start thinking how age affects gender, not provide my own thoughts on it.
indeed, the onimai piss jokes post and its sequel to be published (on a scribblehub original fiction) are more like descriptions of how i look at fiction and think alongside them. i want to encourage that and not make people dismiss “fanservice”. the invisible hands of wolfgang iser, italo calvino, umberto eco, pierre bayard, and robert pippin inside the post are worth elucidating now: i find the act of reading to be the most important activity. whether we read advertising, finnegans wake, or onimai, it is how we think about how we read that is most important.
to put it simply: i find out the aesthetical experience of seeing worth analyzing. i treat it as a sociological critique. i am saying, “hey, how i read is worthy of reading too!”
this is why i dismiss the foundational queer theory but still incorporate some ideas of performance (truth be told, i think i am more influenced by the theater theories of brecht, artaud, and others but i never brought them up so whatever). while i find queer theory to be interesting, i don’t find them useful to me and i have to be blunt about it. i avoid gaze discussions due to their baggage (though i’m sure many people have picked up that i have adopted some observations on a queer gaze, especially in my recent post on jane schoenbrun movies). the most useful book for me is queer art of failure and even then i see some limitations in creating new and interesting thoughts.
there are definitely issues that you’ve raised with this approach. i don’t historicize queer theory since i don’t give it proper due; i am more interested in how my thoughts are historicized and socially mediated. it deeply assumes that my thoughts are profound. i don’t present a theory of the mind or society, at least in the onimai post. i wasn’t joking about how the real title would have preliminary remarks!
so the writer’s post is an excellent essay for people interested in onimai and the craft of criticism.
all that said, i must return to the fanservice criticism and this presents the main difference between our approaches. the value judgments are interesting to me because it depicts a difference in how we perform as authors and critics: i have a normative argument that makes me see everything as normal, not sacred nor profane — just normal — while the author constructs categories between them. there’s nothing wrong, even if i disagree. but i would say this, not my dismissal of butler, to be the most important distinction. the difference in how we read the existence of fanservice is the main thrust of this article. it reveals our priorities and where we fundamentally cannot agree on, even if our conclusions are honestly quite similar.
i found this an insightful critique because of our methodological differences. i’ll let the jury decide on our articles, but this was fun to read. love the breast section especially and i appreciate the critique on the pathological descriptions of male otaku. this is the kind of stuff i’ve been waiting for and i’m glad you didn’t make it a twitter thread lol.
I hadn’t considered that you were yourself mimicking those sorts of ethnographic writings with your post, and it makes sense when you explain it and why you go against academic accounts on queer theory. Same with your remark on making yourself the subject. That kind of gonzo method is more emotionally honest to oneself, and it comes with the added bonus that you don’t need to bog yourself down with all the historical “prerequisites” that arguably have nothing to do with your lived experience.
If I’m being completely honest, I sort of strawmaned you a bit so I could give myself the excuse to write this as I did. I hope you’ll forgive me for that. As you said, although our methodologies differ, I’m more or less taking your conclusions and running with them. Part of this is because I am a cis man myself, so I don’t think I can really employ the same self reflection you are using to talk about queerness. At least, I wouldn’t feel comfortable doing so. It’s better for me to use the words of other authors and thinkers to build a more hands-off case that way I can posit ideas without discounting those personal experiences. My method of response is pretty asymmetrical in that way, so apologies again for positioning your informal post into a larger argument you never intended or asked to be apart of.
In that sense, yeah, I’m more or less taking Onimai and, to some extent, queer studies as a whole, as an object of study in this post. This runs the risk of exoticizing who or what I’m studying (the proverbial gaze always rearing its ugly head lol) which I’d like to avoid if possible. I’m a very lazy person myself, but I tend to not trust my own words and rely on these sorts of academic frameworks to present a more “total” picture of the subject. Of course, it’s a moving picture and will therefore never be “total,” but that’s just how my brain works, hence my liking of Butler’s brand of poststructuralism. But like I said at the start, this kind of “everything is discourse” approach doesn’t benefit everyone, but I hope I’ve made the case that it can be fun. (I also highly recommend that dissertation I cited by Sandra Hampson about Fetishism for this reason, because it explores how “fetish” as a term inherently creates these subject/object distinctions that we should be trying to overcome. It’s just a really interesting paper all around.)
To that point, I’m in full agreement with your fanservice as normal perspective. I just didn’t want to take that stance as an a priori since Mahiro as a character constantly questions what is or isn’t normative based on her preconceived notions of perversion. Likewise, Onimai, in my experience at least, gets disregarded by a lot of people who assume it is purely problematic male perversion motivating its themes. For that reason I like that your blog didn’t feel the need to try and prove its value as a queer work. In a way, I’m kind of working backwards in order to re-reach your conclusions with the hopes of enriching the specifics, though it’s possible my words only stratified those differences more than I intended.
I’m also in full agreement on your point about aesthetical experience. The Apollonian/Dionysian dialectic is completely false. Feeling is thinking and vice versa, no matter what anyone else tells you. I actually love that you mention Brecht and Artaud because I adore those 20th century phenomenological approaches to art like happenings, Dadaism, actionism, and surrealism. I’d like to try those methods out more myself, but whenever I read my free-form work back I get this controlling need to “fix” it to be closed as it can. To put it in meme terms, I’m afraid of being wrong on the Internet lol. That’s why this essay happened. I was originally just going to match your informal style and tweet a brief thread, but then I read it back and thought I knew jack shit about anything lol.
I have my own self criticisms for this essay and my writing, so I am invested in how other people perceive my arguments on the whole. So thank you for taking the time to read it and for posting such a thoughtful response, and also for being so positive about it elsewhere. I had a big, dumb, giddy smile on my face all morning when I saw my notifications. Although I would never ask that this become “supplemental material” for Onimai, I do hope that inspires more people write about it.
Really enjoyed this as a companion piece to Kastel/@highimpactsex's (do @s work on Cohost?? I don't use this darn platform enough) earlier piece. I've yet to watch the Onimai anime but having read a good chunk of the manga I can't help but keep thinking about it.
As someone somewhere on the spectrum of MtF (currently identifying as genderfluid or more simply as nonbinary when I don't feel like explaining what that means other than wishy washy), I really resonate with Onimai as this dual work of gender as fetish and as self-exploration. This part in particular stood out to me:
...in just about every case in which my friends transitioned from male to female, they expressed confusion over their sexual orientation as a result of interpreting their desire to be feminine as stemming from predatory male libido. What actions and behaviors they otherwise would have considered normative for their gender identity were externally viewed as fetishistic by way of their biological sex.
I would like to elaborate more but my brain keeps shutting down (my fault for reading this and returning to reply to it again while dead tired) so I just wanna say this was a wonderful read! Maybe I will have more thoughts in the future.
I actually have no idea if @s work. I’ve only had this account for about a month so I’m still figuring it out, though using an @ in the blog itself linked to the account so maybeeeee???
Thank you for leaving such a sincere comment. Tired or otherwise, I’m glad this post resonated with you and that you shared your thoughts. That more than anything makes me feel justified in writing this.
If you have more thoughts later, please feel free to share! I hope to actually read through the Onimai manga soon, so I’m also curious how much my reading will change when comparing it with the anime. Thank you again~