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Jason Thompson's House of 1000 Manga - Special Guest Edition: Chobits


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Shay Guy



Joined: 03 Jul 2009
Posts: 2093
PostPosted: Thu Nov 17, 2011 6:01 pm Reply with quote
Anymouse wrote:
Quote:
Ultimately it chooses to have its cheesecake and eat it too, raising a host of challenging questions only to leave them unanswered so as not to spoil the romance.
And that is what ultimately makes this series less than a lasting one. It is necessary to confront modern sexuality head on, not skirt around the issues.




To answer most of the questions brought up in Shaenon's review, I'd need more solid definitions for most of the following terms:

  1. Romance
  2. Love
  3. "Falling in" love
  4. Health (mental and emotional)
  5. Purity
  6. Innocence
  7. Soul
  8. Perfection
  9. "Supposed to" (for Hideki's question in one of the review's sample pages, "What am I supposed to think about her?")
  10. "Just for"

And I mean beyond "Oh, you know what I mean." I'm not always sure the people who say that know what they mean, considering how many arguments end up as definition disputes. (Granted, the ideal -- being able to extend everything from a reasonably small set of axioms, as in math -- is almost certainly unattainable, not least because of the commonness of circular definitions. I was annoyed, but not surprised, when I looked in my dictionary some time ago and found that the definitions for "obligation" and "duty" referred to each other.)

I do want to thank Shaenon for one thing -- having only seen the anime's first six episodes and read almost none of the manga, I'd wondered just why Chii's switch was where it was, considering the significance I'd read it later takes on. I still don't know if this is supported by the manga, but it sounds like whoever made her may have done it on purpose, to keep whoever formed an emotional attachment from "sullying" her or the relationship that would have formed.


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Shaenon



Joined: 17 Sep 2010
Posts: 18
PostPosted: Thu Nov 17, 2011 6:36 pm Reply with quote

Is it me or did CLAMP forgot about the other forms of sexual intercourse (didn't know if it can be written here.)


I remember this being a very popular subject of fan conversation when Chobits first came out.
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Parsifal24





PostPosted: Thu Nov 17, 2011 6:48 pm Reply with quote
I've never liked the criticism of Chobits because Chi and Hedikei's relationship ends up being non sexual and that some how that makes it dificnt or not "real" it almost comes off as if the physical aspect is what really matters not the emotional connection.
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Shaenon



Joined: 17 Sep 2010
Posts: 18
PostPosted: Thu Nov 17, 2011 6:54 pm Reply with quote
I do want to thank Shaenon for one thing -- having only seen the anime's first six episodes and read almost none of the manga, I'd wondered just why Chii's switch was where it was, considering the significance it later takes on. I still don't know if this is supported by the manga, but it sounds like whoever made her may have done it on purpose, to keep whoever formed an emotional attachment from "sullying" her or the relationship that would have formed.

Okay, everything after this point is GINORMOUS CHOBITS SPOILERS:

spoiler[In the manga, it's explicitly stated that Chi's creator/father placed the switch where it is to test her "someone just for me": if a guy agrees to refrain from sex with her to preserve her personality, it proves that his love is pure, and that humans are capable of deep emotional relationships with persocoms.

In fact, Chi has been programmed so that if she doesn't find such a man, she will hack into all the persocoms in the world and prevent them from developing complex personalities, thus ending human/persocom relationships for good. (Although humans can still have sex with their persocoms, I guess.)

This, of course, brings up any number of creepy follow-up questions. Is agreeing to refrain from sex really the key sign of a mature relationship? Isn't it pretty crummy to force Chi to remain a virgin for the rest of her life so her "father" can prove some larger sociological point? What kind of father-daughter relationship is this? (Answer: a weird incest-y one, but that's a whole other subplot.) And what's up with equating sex with loss of selfhood?]


Like I said, I could write an entire thesis on Chobits. I didn't even get around to discussing the artwork, which is gorgeous (some of CLAMP's best) but walks the same narrow line between innocence and carnality.
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ptolemy18
Manga Reviewer/Creator/Taster


Joined: 07 May 2005
Posts: 357
Location: San Francisco
PostPosted: Thu Nov 17, 2011 7:17 pm Reply with quote
Lord Geo wrote:
bemused Bohemian wrote:
I want to compliment you on this column. It was a great insightful read. I've always been fascinated with Chobits as anime and the manga form for many of the reasons you cited and what previous posters have suggested over the years.

Normally I read your manga explanations in bits of time: glossing over the article in general then returning every other day when time and/or opportunity permit. But this time it was a straight, engrossing read and I thoroughly enjoyed every moment of it. Kudos to you, sir, for an excellent cerebral experience.


You do know that Jason didn't write this one, right? It was Shaennon Garrity, who has done other House of 1000 Manga pieces. That's whay it's called a "Special Guest Edition", because Jason didn't write it.

But, yes, Shaennon did do an excellent job here.


Shaenon has been helping out with House of 1000 Manga lately because I've been working on sending my Dream-Quest graphic novel to the printers. Thanks again, Shaenon! And thanks for the spoilerrific indepth analysis in the comments. ; )
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Anymouse



Joined: 18 May 2007
Posts: 685
PostPosted: Thu Nov 17, 2011 8:33 pm Reply with quote
Shay Guy wrote:

To answer most of the questions brought up in Shaenon's review, I'd need more solid definitions for most of the following terms:

  1. Romance
  2. Love
  3. "Falling in" love
  4. Health (mental and emotional)
  5. Purity
  6. Innocence
  7. Soul
  8. Perfection
  9. "Supposed to" (for Hideki's question in one of the review's sample pages, "What am I supposed to think about her?")
  10. "Just for"

And I mean beyond "Oh, you know what I mean."
You need to intuit reality Platonicly. Which is to say, we have to use the Socratic method for several minute to several hours. Since we are on an Anime forum we frequently bypass that step.
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ArthurFrDent



Joined: 05 Aug 2008
Posts: 466
PostPosted: Thu Nov 17, 2011 8:38 pm Reply with quote
Anymouse wrote:
Quote:
Ultimately it chooses to have its cheesecake and eat it too, raising a host of challenging questions only to leave them unanswered so as not to spoil the romance.
And that is what ultimately makes this series less than a lasting one. It is necessary to confront modern sexuality head on, not skirt around the issues.

I think part of the reason why a plastic girlfriend could be so appealing is because modern human relationships are already incredibly artificial.


In this, I always got the impression that the lack of closure was in keeping with tendency to hint at something, or to make things about longing and beauty, rather than about gratification. Seems that is found often in Japanese works.

How beautiful is the notion that Hideki embraces such longing, and Chii may as well, from that perspective? The only way to be together is more ideal, then.

Seems also quite a tradition to not answer the big questions, since they don't seem to have an answer. We see a number of vignettes in the various forms of the series where different people approach relationships in different ways, but one of the things that has always struck me is how much these storylines are a moe covering to a hard science fiction question... and by extension, a futurist question. Is it possible that humans will stop wanting to be with other humans?

Once this question is asked then you would follow on with, why/is it OK/what happens next etc. Is projecting love onto another OK, if that other cannot reciprocate. Will there be a time when the reciprocation is possible. Is [in the story] it this time?

I found the questions about why "people" need each other that this story raises are quite interesting. I don't think it has much to do with how "artificial" human relationships currently are. The question there is "as opposed to what?" As opposed to when women were considered a commodity and property? As opposed to the law of the jungle? From that perspective our entire civilization is artificial. Because we cobble a relationship framework together out of our overlarge brains.

I think the questions raised by Chobits are different takes on questions that have been raised by the idea of other sentient forms of life for a long time. Asimov raised them too with a different tangent involved. Over and over again we will raise them, until we actually have full androids before us. Then the questions are no longer a theory, but a physical requirement.

The time may be closer than you think, and based on Japan's interest in robots and AI. it may well be hashed out quite a bit there first. Maybe not between a moe girl and a pure guy, but maybe by an elderly Alzheimer's patient and their medi-robo.

I'm not saying that this is some kind of classic in that sense, even though I obviously like the story and it's questions. Even the loneliness of the empty city story. But let's not pretend that people don't go home at night to a pet, simply because they can't stand the thought of an empty house. Is it wrong to have a pet for that reason? Will it be wrong to have a robot for that reason?
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M7AS Pilot



Joined: 15 Feb 2010
Posts: 29
Location: USA, Maryland
PostPosted: Thu Nov 17, 2011 8:52 pm Reply with quote
The article by Deppey that was referenced is way off. I remember reading Chobits as a teenage guy and loving the complex and potentially odd relationship dynamics, sex or not. It was the exploration of the concept of 'innocent love' that made Chobits great. Smile
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JacobC
ANN Contributor


Joined: 15 Jan 2008
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Location: SoCal
PostPosted: Thu Nov 17, 2011 8:59 pm Reply with quote
Awesome article, Shaennon. ^O^ \m/

I read the manga a loooooong time ago, and remembered being kinda uncomfortable with the happy ending it presented, it's cool reading such a thoughtful analysis on why that might be.

That being said, I saw the anime adaptation much more recently and have rewatched it a few times. The "aimed at males, no really" thing smacks of a lot of truth considering that I've never gotten my female otaku friends to watch it with me, but easily convinced two non-anime fan boyfriends to watch it (not at the same time, ha ha,) and they both *really* liked it. Anime hyper

But outside of that, the column also refreshed me on the key differences between the two versions. Three in particular that just about radically change the thematic feel of the whole story:

spoiler[
1) In the manga, Chii begins to activate a program that would make persocoms unable to connect emotionally to their owners, after not being able to find "somebody to love" herself, basically. In the anime, it was the OPPOSITE. Chii only activated her hidden program after Hideki devoted himself to her and it made all the persocoms "human" in a very Pinocchio-ish scene where they all soften and get deeper, complex eyes and some obvious emotional differences. (Dita blushes, Chii cries, Yuzuki instantly becomes less servant-like, etc.) BS fantasy? Maybe, but it changes a lot thematically as well, making the series a positive statement on the potentials of A.I. instead of an (intentionally or not) negative statement on humanity.

2) The sexlessness of the manga is removed. The entire scene where Freya makes it clear that touching the button will erase Chii's personality was written out in favor of a focus on the fact that Chii could never have children and wouldn't age like Hideki would. They don't come right out and say "So you guys can totally DO IT" or anything tacky like that, but it's obvious comparing the scenes where the writing changed that they wanted to de-emphasize or remove the button plot point. The anime seems to imply more that once the button is pushed, Chii comes to life and after that it's more a symbol of chastity or something. Again, FAR less realistic but also: more palatable thematically.

3) Really mild difference here, but I seem to remember far more appearances of male persocoms in the anime, although just as in the manga, none were named characters apart from Zima. Still, the effort to put a heapton more male persocoms in the background and crowd shots implies an effort to lessen the focus on male fantasy alone and the whole moe phenomenon and make it more a simple love story (or complicated, if you prefer.)
]


I had a debate with someone on Twitter about these differences with an interesting outcome.

She was a big fan of CLAMP, but didn't like Chobits at all. If she HAD to indulge it, she preferred the manga.

I'm reeeeeeally not a fan of CLAMP, can barely stand some of the stuff they've penned, but Chobits is one of my personal favorites, and I do consider it one of the best things they ever created. Still, I prefer the anime adaptation to the original all the same.

The opposite reactions seem to be tied *to* the differences in theme. The CLAMP fan argued that the manga was preferable both because it was more realistic/harsh and the disturbing message allowed her to view the characters as pathetic and unlikable, a false happy ending. She couldn't stand the characters, so this was the more attractive option.

I really *wanted* to sympathize with the characters, but couldn't in the quite frankly creepy manga happy-ending. The anime happy ending, while employing a lot more fantasy BS, also altered the overall message to a degree that I could feel good about the characters' choices and what the story was ultimately trying to say. So I leaned more to the Disney fairytale version despite my normal preference for harsh realism.

Interesting what extremely tiny changes to an otherwise faithful adaptation can change, I guess. It's pretty wild. Anime dazed
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GWOtaku



Joined: 19 Jul 2003
Posts: 678
PostPosted: Thu Nov 17, 2011 10:24 pm Reply with quote
Okay, first of all, I want to say up front that this column was excellent. I doubt I'll ever read a more objective and thoughtful analysis of this manga. As one that saw a little of the Chobits anime and then dropped it and never looked back, I come away feeling thoroughly informed. Thank you for that.

That said, I have to say that after what I've learned here, my reaction to what this manga has to offer can only be described as pure disgust. This passage sums up why:

Quote:
But the appeal of a relationship with a persocom has little to do with love: it's just so much easier than a human relationship. The first page of the Tokyopop translation lays it out: “Beautiful, obedient…fully functional. They're perfection.” The relationship between a man and his persocom is described as one of “power” and “responsibility” versus “dependence” and “trust.” In other words, it's the ultra-traditional ideal of a male/female relationship. The persocoms are perfect women, stripped clean of everything that makes real women less than perfect servants to men—that is, one might say, everything that makes women human.


In my view, this is utterly damning.

What does this say to me? First, that it's the coward's way out. Hideki leads a comfortable and simple life. As the column says, ultimately Hideki has "...regressed to Chi's level". A state of being that is "innocent" for those that want to be charitable and "childlike" to the rest. Hideki's a proverbial denizen of Never Never Land, spared from growing up not by magical pixie dust but by this construct that needs and demands nothing from him unless we're counting basic care. The Miyazaki critique of moe types wanting girls "as pets" resonates powerfully.

Secondly, this setup remains awfully sexist even with sex removed from the equation and even if one decides to be very charitable and overlook fanservice that's paradoxically presented. In the end, Chi is a possession. She is a passive blank slate. The message I get is that she's supposed to be appealing for the extent to which she might be inhuman. This idea from Hideki that Chi's heart "...beats inside of me"? Another way to put it is she is what he wants her to be. Real or not, who knows, there is no way to know...but with her, he can project this fantasy. And that's enough. Only his feelings truly matter. That sounds an awful lot like a one-sided relationship. And if I understand this right, Chi never really second guesses the idea of being Hideki's companion after she's activated.

Thirdly, the chaste relationship as presented here is problematic. We have this "discomfort with sex" in this comic that hypocritically offers fanservice as a hook to keep males reading. Now, as near as I can tell there seems to be value in the way it prioritizes emotion and caring over sex as a cheap thrill. But it goes so far with this that the concept of sex as an expression and fulfillment of love apparently isn't entertained, and it certainly isn't embraced since the story suggests that the human/persocom relationship is as valid as a genuine human connection.

Finally, to look at the big picture of this thing and what it's suggesting to us, I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that there's an anti-human subtext going on here. The world of Chobits is a world where human women are spurned for machines--programmable machines. And to listen to this column, remember, Hideki choosing to be with Chi is a choice to have a partner that he doesn't have to engage with on a human level. By extension, that means that there's aspects of his humanity that he's overlooking. Is that healthy? Is it natural to not acknowledge--or worse, reject--a part of oneself like that?

Perhaps worst of all, as said, CLAMP opts to gloss over these matters and the extremely real (and almost certain, I think) possibility that whatever the Hideki/Chi relationship is, it can't be identified as "true love." The pairing may be adorable, sure, and I certainly know that CLAMP is great at doing cute. But appealing window dressing is still window dressing. A shallow diversion.

In sum, I'm genuinely unsettled by all of this. If Chobits sums up what the moe phenomenon is, then as I understand it it's a severe critique of it and an argument for why it deserves rejection and hopefully an eventual demise. I imagine that with this CLAMP sought to get me to recheck my premises about love, but for me it's "thought-provoking" in the sense that I wonder what drove so many people in the manga's setting to their sorry state. In Hideki I see not a man of an open mind and an open heart, but a man who casually took the path of least resistance and embraced an infantile existence.


Last edited by GWOtaku on Fri May 31, 2013 9:47 am; edited 1 time in total
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Anymouse



Joined: 18 May 2007
Posts: 685
PostPosted: Thu Nov 17, 2011 11:49 pm Reply with quote
I think we shouldn't ignore the fact that this attitude is in many ways simply an extension of modernization and technological advancement. One can today enjoy a comfortable existence comforted by GalGames and Playboy magazine. With a Chobit, we have simply extended that a bit farther. It really isn't anymore sinful than a Playboy, just a lot more three dimensional. In many respect the relationship depicted here is closer to the fascination with girl pop singers, who are portrayed as eternally young and virginal. The good thing we can say is that nobody is getting hurt, except for all the Hidekis out there imprisoned by their own fantasies and some of the young women employed to stimulate them perhaps. Sadly, no one is really living either.
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Shay Guy



Joined: 03 Jul 2009
Posts: 2093
PostPosted: Fri Nov 18, 2011 12:01 am Reply with quote
Shaenon wrote:
spoiler[In the manga, it's explicitly stated that Chi's creator/father placed the switch where it is to test her "someone just for me": if a guy agrees to refrain from sex with her to preserve her personality, it proves that his love is pure]


OK, first problem here. spoiler[I listed "purity" and "love" for a reason, and they're especially problematic together. I don't think "pure love" actually means anything. There are a bunch of implicit artificial divisions there that don't seem to make a lot of sense. Note that it's a concept that a lot of otaku have been known to advocate, which is one reason I don't think the stereotypical otaku mindset has much to stand on.]

Shaenon wrote:
spoiler[and that humans are capable of deep emotional relationships with persocoms.]


This shouldn't even be in question. spoiler[If my life has taught me anything about people, it's that they're weird and complicated and that there are so many of them that you can find one who has almost any conceivable mindset or psychological makeup. Of course people can form "deep emotional relationships" with androids -- they've been known to do so with inanimate objects. A whole level in Portal was based around that concept. If an alicorn can love an abacus, surely a human can love something that walks and talks and looks like a pretty girl.] In a broader sense, existential and universal quantifiers just aren't much use in psychology, and this is about an existential claim. A particular human being able to do something says only that there exists at least one human who can do it.

Shaenon wrote:
spoiler[In fact, Chi has been programmed so that if she doesn't find such a man, she will hack into all the persocoms in the world and prevent them from developing complex personalities, thus ending human/persocom relationships for good. (Although humans can still have sex with their persocoms, I guess.)]


spoiler[How much time is she given? There are three and a half billion male humans to check, more if you add lesbians (though fewer if you exclude children). We haven't found a counterexample to the Collatz conjecture despite checking quintillions of numbers, but that doesn't mean there isn't one.

Oh, and if "prevent[ing] [persocoms] from developing complex personalities" is on the plate, that implies that they do sometimes. If there were any doubt that people could connect to them emotionally, this would've removed it. People make friends online that they've never met. If they can do that, the only question remaining is how much of a difference knowing the other person is an android would make. Given how adaptable people are, I'd say "not much."]


Shaenon wrote:
spoiler[This, of course, brings up any number of creepy follow-up questions.]


No kidding.

Shaenon wrote:
spoiler[Is agreeing to refrain from sex really the key sign of a mature relationship?]


I think there's a legit question somewhere in here.

spoiler[Let's say it's been established that people have sexual relationships with persocoms, but for whatever reason, it's not clear how much else there is to these relationships, and every human-persocom relationship that might be a more developed one is a sexual relationship. (This precludes the notion of, say, a persocom nanny.) So someone concludes that the only way to tell if there is anything that could develop from anything other than a desire from sex is to perform the ultimate test: a relationship where the human knows that sex is off the table unless he wants to wipe the persocom's mind.

This still has a couple of problems. For one thing, this is pretty close to the question posed by When Harry Met Sally..., about whether two straight people of opposite sex and similar age can be friends without sex getting involved. But among the relevant Japanese demographic, the important question seems to be the opposite: Can love coexist with sex at all? A lot of them -- ironically, due to a trend that Chobits is part of -- seem to think the answer is no. See: "2D complex" and my note on B Gata H Kei below.]


Shaenon wrote:
spoiler[Isn't it pretty crummy to force Chi to remain a virgin for the rest of her life so her "father" can prove some larger sociological point?]


Oh, I dunno. That depends on spoiler[whether persocoms have sex drives at all. I'm sure you could program an android to be asexual.]

Shaenon wrote:
spoiler[What kind of father-daughter relationship is this? (Answer: a weird incest-y one, but that's a whole other subplot.)]


Not sure they're really so separate. When I read CLAMP manga, possibly my most common question is "Just what is Ohkawa asserting/assuming here?" Frankly, I suspect some of the answers are provably false claims.

Anymouse wrote:
You need to intuit reality Platonicly.


Sorry, I'm not too clear on just what Platonism means in this context. Embarassed

ArthurFrDent wrote:
How beautiful is the notion that Hideki embraces such longing, and Chii may as well, from that perspective? The only way to be together is more ideal, then.


Uh, what?

GWOtaku wrote:
Secondly, this setup remains awfully sexist even with sex removed from the equation and even if one decides to be very charitable and overlook fanservice that's paradoxically presented. In the end, Chi is a possession. She is a passive blank slate. The message I get is that she's supposed to be appealing for the extent to which she might be inhuman. This idea from Hideki that Chi's heart "...beats inside of me"? Another way to put it is she is what he wants her to be. Real or not, who knows, there is no way to know...but with her, he can project this fantasy. And that's enough. Only his feelings truly matter. That sounds an awful lot like a one-sided relationship. And if I understand this right, Chi never really second guesses the idea of being Hideki's companion after she's activated.


Putting it another way, theirs is not a relationship between equals and cannot be if Chi doesn't have real agency of her own and doesn't mentally progress beyond childhood. It might not be possible even if she does. Hideki practically raises her; their relationship starts there and is rooted there. It's like Jacob/Renesmee; what kind of person falls in love with someone whose diapers they've changed?

GWOtaku wrote:
Thirdly, the chaste relationship as presented here is problematic. We have this "discomfort with sex" in this comic that hypocritically offers fanservice as a hook to keep males reading. Now, as near as I can tell there seems to be value in the way it prioritizes emotion and caring over sex as a cheap thrill. But it goes so far with this that the concept of sex as an expression and fulfillment of love apparently isn't entertained, and it certainly isn't embraced since the story suggests that the human/persocom relationship is as valid as a genuine human connection.


One reason I like B Gata H Kei is its frank affirmation that yes, teenagers do have sex drives, and then asking just how that reality affects romance. Or at least slapstick 4koma romance.

GWOtaku wrote:
Finally, to look at the big picture of this thing and what it's suggesting to us, I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that there's an anti-human subtext going on here.


Wow, two opportunities to reference Twilight criticism in one post. "I am not anti-female, I am anti-human."

GWOtaku wrote:
Perhaps worst of all, as said, CLAMP opts to gloss over these matters and the extremely real (and almost certain, I think) possibility that whatever the Hideki/Chi relationship is, it can't be identified as "true love."


See previous link. I put "love" on my list, but "true love" might have deserved its own entry. Declarations that something is "true love" almost universally fall under the bare assertion fallacy unless (as in The Tatami Galaxy) it's shown to be genuinely fulfilling in a way that previously shown relationships weren't (and that's more likely to call it "real" than "true"). The only treatment of the concept of "true love" I really like is The Princess Bride, where it more or less gives you superpowers.
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Charred Knight



Joined: 29 Sep 2008
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PostPosted: Fri Nov 18, 2011 12:17 am Reply with quote
Well I think it's kind of hard to say what CLAMP was going for, for example GWOtaku saw it as an anti-human message, while another guy I was talking to saw it as a destruction of the idea of having the perfect girlfriend. Sure you can personalize your persocom but your not in a real relationship.

In other words is Hideki right or wrong? I don't think CLAMP has ever stated what their intentions where for the manga.
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ConanSan



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PostPosted: Fri Nov 18, 2011 1:40 am Reply with quote
I argue that is somewhat the point. If the series had gone out right ether way it would probably be dismissed without much of a second thought.
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vashfanatic



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PostPosted: Fri Nov 18, 2011 3:55 am Reply with quote
Is the language of "pure" love from the manga itself? Or is it an interpretation of the kind of pure/impure thinking that this line of argument tends to rely on in America? If it's the former, well, as in the "purity pledge" philosophy of some American groups, it's an ideal that betrays a very negative attitude towards sex as something"impure" or "dirty," a description that by extension is then generally applied to people who have sex. Hence, "keep yourself pure" implies that anyone who doesn't follow your ethical code* is "impure."

I wasn't really aware of whether this concept exactly existed in Japan. True, Buddhism does have a concept of sexuality being a vice and impurity, but given that most Buddhist clergy now marry and celibacy never really applied to laypeople to begin with... admittedly I haven't lived here long, but I've yet to hear anything about an abstinence movement in Japan.

And while moe advocates may sometimes argue that their love is "pure," that generally doesn't keep it from being sexualized. Most works or franchises that rely on a lot of moe either have pornographic elements or pornographic fanworks to supplement them. While its true that virginity is a big chunk of moe (as the guys discuss in Genshiken, the main reason Saki can't be moe is because she's sexually active), eventually deflowering said virgin is frequently part of the point. That Chobits completely forgoes this element is... interesting.

Anyway, I haven't read it. I'm just talking about general ideas here, throwing things out for discussion. I almost want to read it just to see whatever Unfortunate Implications it might have.


*Mind you, I am not bashing that ethical code here. There is a lot to be said for encouraging young people to focus on emotional aspects of relationships rather than just sex and delaying sex until they are mature enough to make good decisions about it. I just wish that groups that promoted this ethic didn't rely so much on "purity" and "virginity" plus shame and misinformation.
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