Feminism and Subculture; Doctor Who

Ch. 1 was a long gushing on Gundam. The gist was that Gundam succeeded where other anime series had not, simply by having a wide variety of different women, so that you could hold up any one of them as a good example of what it was to be a woman, rather than having just one ideal type of womanhood. (The author compared this to Space Battleship Yamato in this regard, and... it's pretty easy to tell what Leiji Matsumoto's ideal type of womanhood is).

Ch. 2 is "women warriors," Sailor Moon and Sukeban Deka (which I have not read).

Two points, not to say that I agree with them, but I'll throw them out there because they made me go "huh.":

Despite the sheer impracticality of the costumes, there's something feminist about the sailor senshi fighting in miniskirts. Their femininity isn't a liability, isn't a burden, isn't a weapon but also isn't something that can be turned against them. They don't have to cross-dress, becoming honorary men, to be effective as fighters. Their femininity is their strength.

Because manga style is fairly iconic and abstract, it doesn't impose ideals of beauty in the same way that other media might. (This is the part that made me say "Yeah, uh, right.") Most manga artists basically just draw one kind of face... and if they want to say, "hey, this is a beautiful face," they have to use glowing light or cherry blossoms or the other characters' reactions. And that leaves more room for the reader to construct her own standards of beauty.

(I can sooort of buy this. I'm sure that girls with eyes the size of dinner plates would not be attractive to even the most hardened otaku, and I'm sure Minami Ozaki doesn't have a standard of beauty that requires that people be nine or ten feet tall, which is what they work out to if you're counting heads. And the author uses some panels of Sukeban Deka to make a pretty convincing case for that manga. But I'm not convinced that the same applies to other manga besides Sukeban Deka).

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Watching Doctor Who, I was kind of annoyed at the Cybermen and the Daleks being basically the same bad guy. Or bad guy horde. But then it struck me that that's been a theme running through the series; individuals good, conglomerates (governments, corporations, big media, daleks) bad. It's not a coincidence that the Doctor is the only remaining individual of his species. And that is why the good guys never win with sheer physical force; no matter how much ass you can kick, there's always someone who's going to kick more ass than you, if they get all their buddies together. What gigantic organizations lack is cleverness, humanity, and agility; and those are the only ways to slip under the weaknesses of big, clumsy organizations.

You could go so far as to say that Star Trek and Star Wars are how a world superpower responds to the Cold War, and Doctor Who is how a country that isn't a world superpower responds to the Cold War. But you wouldn't have nearly enough evidence to say that.

Because it is Christmas, and because I require new home stuff, and because I bought a new computer..

Van requires many expensive repairs. Front brakes are shot. Oil leaked from multiple locations, ruining the radiator pump. At some point I just started nodding grimly and not listening, since my knowledge of cars is basically limited to "this pedal for go, this pedal for stop."

Oh well. Here's to finding out the brakes are shot before they stop working and kill you.