2016-12-16
Safety first, or the oddity of bike lights in recent anime
I'm a cyclist, so I'm attuned to little nuances and oddities of how bikes are shown in shows. The one I've been noticing recently is how it seems to have become common, maybe even universal, to show road bikes with bicycle lights on their handlebars. This comes up quite visibly in Long Riders!, where any number of road bikes clearly show them, but it's not the only recent case I remember. Regalia - The Three Sacred Stars had a scene with a road bike in the background, and it too had been carefully depicted with a light.
(Road bikes are the go-fast kind with drop handlebars.)
There's two reasons that this is odd to me. First, road bikes are stereotypically minimal; the people who ride them don't have much truck with things like fenders in case of rain or ways to carry much on the bike. The second is simply that it's extra work for the animators and CG modelers (in the case of Long Riders!); more stuff on a bike is more stuff to draw and more time. Yet the shows still put lights on. I can only assume that having lights on your handlebars on road bikes is so prevalent in Japan that either it would look wrong to not have them or the animators just 'know' that that's part of how you depict bikes.
(I read the blog of someone who does a bunch of cycling in Japan, along with photography, and normally I'd check it to see if his photos of real world Japanese cyclists and their bikes shows them with headlights. Unfortunately his blog seems to be unavailable right now.)
In doing some research I discovered that Japan not only has a legal requirement for front lights (possibly only 'after dark', possibly in general) but that apparently it's actively enforced by the police (cf, and, and). If it's only an after-dark legal requirement, that doesn't entirely explain things, because many cyclists only plan on riding in daylight. Having good lights on during the day is starting to become more common in North America, on the grounds that it makes you more visible to cars and modern bike lights are pretty small and convenient (they're not inexpensive, but people who buy expensive road bikes generally don't worry about that). Maybe daytime lights have taken root in Japan more thoroughly than they have over here.
(In North America you're often doing well if people riding at night have lights and have them on. Even if it's a legal requirement, it's often not actively enforced; the police are too busy with other things.)
As a side note, I've been skimming bits of Long Riders! for reasons beyond the scope of this entry, and it was interesting to discover that the part of the second episode where one character takes her regular bike on the train all packed up in a giant bag is apparently an actual requirement for taking your bike on trains (from the bottom of this), not just politeness and so on.
(This is another of my 12 days of anime posts.)
2016-12-15
How Flip Flappers is using a world-building technique from science fiction
Science Fiction has an information problem. When you set a story in the modern era, your audience already knows a great deal about the setting and how things work; they already have a good picture of what the world looks like. But when you set your story in space, or on an alien planet, or in the future, the audience starts out knowing very little about the setting and so you have a lot of information to communicate to them; you have to create the world for them. Even if you keep the amount to a minimum, you're going to need to feed them some information just so they understand what's important to your story, to at least sketch out the world around the characters and the dialog.
When science fiction was a young genre, back in the 1930s and 1940s and 1950s, authors lacked good ways of dealing with this problem and the result often wasn't pretty. But as time went on, SF as a genre developed a bunch of techniques for giving out information to the audience. The evolution of these techniques is part of why old SF stories can now feel clumsy and clunky; what was once the only way of feeding information to the audience is now the way that's only used by people who can't write better (or who don't understand how SF does it).
One of those tools is a trick that gets called 'incluing' (a term coined by Jo Walton, see also). In incluing, you put things into the story that don't fit into the normal world; these are the clues, little pieces of information that the audience will assemble in their heads to build a picture of your SF world. You don't necessarily do anything overt to draw attention to your clues, you just scatter them casually, in passing, through the story. They're just there, waiting for your audience to hit them and have their eyebrows go up. Incluing can work in any medium but is in some ways easier in visual media because it's easier to put things in the background; you don't have to mention the two suns, just have them in the sky. Want to communicate 'alternate world'? Have a bunch of dirigibles floating around in the background of a scene (yes, it's a cliche).
(Jo Walton describes this better and at more length in her article SF reading protocols, which is well worth reading in general.)
If this sounds a lot like how Flip Flappers has operated over its length so far, well, that's not an accident. Flip Flappers is actively using incluing and has been from the start. It has consistently thrown out of place bits and pieces at us in passing as part of its world building and has counted on us, the audience, to assemble the clues and work out their meaning and their place in the world over time. This is a brave thing to do, because it requires the audience to trust that the weird things mean something and are worth paying attention to, and to be blunt a lot of shows have betrayed that trust over the years by including weirdness that turned out to mean nothing and was just there to look cool. But Flip Flappers is willing to bet we'll trust it and the results are spectacular. It doesn't have to pause to explain things; instead it steadily builds up a world one piece at a time, expanding our understanding step by step. And in the process it can promote a character from the background to an important focus.
(This is different from using repeated motifs and symbolism, which Flip Flappers also does, in that we are supposed to actively notice the clues whereas the repeated motifs simply sit in the background, mostly below our awareness. The clues for incluing are explicitly out of place, or they wouldn't work.)
Most anime shows don't do this, for various reasons; the usual ways of explaining a show's world are much more overt, either visually or in the story itself (and sometimes both, of course). Flip Flappers is a rare show that is quite a SF anime not so much in its setting but in how it tells its story (although Flip Flappers' setting of course also includes SF elements).
(Looking back, much science fiction anime doesn't really use incluing very much. I have theories on why, but that'll have to be another entry.)
I suspect that Flip Flappers' significant use of incluing is one factor in some very polarized reactions to it. If you do trust the show, as I do, it is doing great work to subtly illuminate its world and explain things. If you don't trust the show, it is throwing pointlessly weird stuff at you and obtusely refusing to explain itself. We're both watching the same show and seeing the same things, but we interpret them differently.