THE LAST HOPE in Japan
自分はにコンセプチュアルなものが好きだし、明白にコンセプチュアルなものを作っていきたいと思うけど、もしかしたらコンセプチュアルすぎるものは世の中には受け入れられないのかもしれない しかしコンセプチュアルであることで何がマイナスなのかわからない 萌え要素が減衰したりするのだろうか
Since I find solace in writing, I will dash off my blogs for web servers and google crawlers.
Today I'd like to talk about one major question in Japanese anime/manga/light-novel stories: Why otakus prefer stories in school days?
As you know, we have already had some working hypothesis for this question. Let me list the major "theories".
- The reason is most otakus are just teenagers,
- The reason is "high-school days" is last experience in common,
- The reason is it's a some kind of revenge of geeks not to be popular with girls in school days,
and so on.
These all opinions are persuasive and actually can explain why the otakus love it, however, I believe the other reason is a real driver for partiality toward the fictitious school-days.
Now I will cite a conversation in "Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya", which is one of the most popular anime/light-novel work in last ten years, before detailed explanation.
"Do you ever get the feeling you're just a small nail on this Earth?" She continued, "I have, and I'll never forget it."
… "When I was in sixth grade, I went with my family to see a baseball game … I was given a shock, since everywhere I looked there were people all around.
… I had thought the whole nation had gathered upon this spot then. So I asked my dad how many people were at the stadium. My dad said as it was full that day, maybe around fifty thousand? "
… There were so many people here, yet they were only a tiny fraction of the whole nation.
… "Before that, I had always felt myself to be special. I was happy with my family, and I felt I was with the world's most interesting people in my class. Yet from that time on, I realized things weren't like that. The experiences I had in school that I thought were the happiest things in the world, turned out to exist in every school. For the whole nation, this was nothing special. When I discovered that, the whole world around me lost its color. ... "I found it extremely boring when I realized all these things are all part of a person's ordinary life. I believe that since there're so many people in this world, there has to be someone who's living an extraordinary, exciting life. But why isn't that person me? "
It indicates the real reason why Japanese including otaku loves stories in school-days.
(to be continue)
