Tag Archives: Cool Things

Cool Things: Balance and Ruin

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Video games are considered a lot of things these days but an art form is rarely one of them. That’s too bad, since there are several aspects of them that require very careful craftsmanship to be done right and it’s the mastery of craft under difficult conditions to communicate our thoughts that creates great art. One of the aspects of video games that’s seen the most forceful realization of this principle is the creation of music for them.

In the early days, when Nintendo was making the first installments of it’s well known Mario and Zelda franchises the technology available could only really create a single tone at a time. To create music that would really inspire the sense of adventure and fun that went with those early games the composers probably spent days writing simple, powerful melodies one note at a time that would go on to define a generation. Don’t believe me? Listen to the theme from Mario 1-1.

Now find a person between the age of fifteen and forty. Whistle the first three notes of that tune and at least two thirds of those people will not only join you by the third note but go on to complete the entire tune. The music was that strong, that memorable, that good.

Now Mario is a cultural touchstone, his face is almost synonymous with video games and it’s no surprise that his tunes would be well known, too. There are plenty of other examples of video game music as art, rather than just part of commercialized escapism. The influence just isn’t as widely felt.

One of the key things that sets great art apart is that it inspires. By this standard some people might argue that video game music falls short. They will suggest that the music behind a mindless diversion can’t possibly serve to inspire others to create. To these people I offer one small glimpse of just how far down the rabbit hole goes.

The name is Balance and Ruin.

It’s a seventy four track album of music assembled by the OverClocked Remix community and inspired by Final Fantasy Six.

OC Remix is a community devoted to exploring video game music as an art form and most of their work are remixes, reimaginings of old music through new technology or stylistic choices. Several people in the OC Remix community have gone on to work as professional musicians. Their tributes to game music is more than derivative – in fact, a panel of community judges must approve each piece of music not only for artistic and musical quality but originality – and it shows a creativity that is always impressive and sometimes breathtaking.

It’s very, very hard to adequately describe music with text and explaining how all those tunes fit in to the massive, multilayered story that makes up FF6 is way beyond the scope of a single post. So I’ve decided to let the music speak for itself, since the OC Remix community has made their work available for free. I’ve picked three tracks from Balance and Ruin that show how the music has really inspired the creation of solid art.

First, Ascension of a Madman, based on the anthem of the game’s villain.

You can just feel the insanity bursting out, right? Here’s something a little more upbeat to help settle down those brainwaves. Don’t ask why it’s called Train Suplex. It would take too long to explain.

So those two tracks are peppy and fairly fast paced. But one of the most famous, most artistic moments in FF6 is the opera sequence. You understand what I mean if you’ve played it and if you haven’t, well, my explaining it won’t help you. So I’ll let Jillian Aversa try it for me. Seriously, if you can listen to this and not hear art you have no soul and should spend more time getting that fixed and less time talking about what is or is not art.

If you’re interested in finding and listening to the whole album the OC Remix community page for it is here: http://ocremix.org/album/46/final-fantasy-vi-balance-and-ruin

Cool Things: William Shakespeare’s Star Wars

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That immortal bard, Shakespeare, is possibly one of the single best known playwrights in the world. So what would it be like if he had tried his hand at writing science fiction? That’s the question Ian Doescher seeks to answer with his William Shakespeare’s Star Wars trilogy. Verily, A New Hope, The Empire Striketh Back and The Jedi Doth Return are three gleeful, tongue in cheek romps through the twin mythos of Shakespeare and Lucas, blending thoughtful soliloquies with starfighter action in a weird but fun reminder that there really are no new stories, just new takes on them.

This trilogy has plenty to love, from the irreverent twisting of old soliloquies to new circumstances to hilarious illustrations of how the play might be staged, these books are love letters to both sets of source material and a reminder that we love stories best when we enjoy them. Doescher does a great job both painting the movie characters and scenes we know so well while letting the format of Elizabethan theater give further insight into characters that the franchise, due to it’s early limits, explored in other media or the eventual prequels.

You can do a lot with these texts. Obviously, you can just read them, and believe me that’s a lot of fun. But you can also get together with a dozen friends or so and have a hilarious night doing a dramatic reading of them. I did this about a month ago and it was incredible fun. In this way you, like the people of most times up until a hundred years ago, can make your own entertainment and participate in the process, things modern entertainment rarely allows for.

You might even explore staging these shows, although between the difficulties of staging, costuming and finding a large enough cast, to say nothing of the legal challenges inherent in messing with someone else’s IP (especially one as big as Star Wars) make this a daunting prospect..

But most of all these scripts are interesting for what they say about the stories themselves. The timelessness of the characters far surpass the language or the medium used to convey them to us. That’s one of the reasons great art has such enduring qualities, why people are motivated to try and marry such diverse concepts as Shakespeare and Star Wars in the first place.

A careful reading of these texts, especially in comparison with the movies that inspired them, say a lot about the structure of story and relatable characters. Just try not to do it while you’re eating unless you want to spray food all over your kitchen table.

It’s a real hazard, believe me.

Whatever you do, should you choose to peruse these strange yet familiar texts, enjoy yourself. Even the best of these kind are but shadows, after all…

Cool Things: Maximum Overdrive

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Try to imagine, if you would, what would happen if you had a pair of Klingons who had been raised their whole life by Vikings in the tradition of Nordic myth and then learned to speak English and play the electric guitar. Time travel would obviously be involved and I’m not sure it wasn’t a part of what created Dragonforce, one of England’s more recent rock exports to the world at large. At the very least it would certainly explain a lot.

Dragonforce, for those of you not familiar with the band, is a British power metal group, formed near the end of the last millennium and founded on the guitar sounds created by their two lead players, Herman Li and Sam Totman. These two men have one goal in life, namely to play the guitar as fast as is humanly possible. They are very, very good at it. In fact, they may very well be the best in the world.

That said, Dragonforce’s early discography has some notable weaknesses. It’s been said that they basically only play two songs, a power ballad and a sort of upbeat power metal. It’s hard to argue with that – a lot of their songs on their early albums are very similar and most of the rest border on identical. Listening to their sophomore album, Sonic Firestorm, is a lot like listening to a single, hour long track. On the other hand, that album has some if their defining songs on it and the music is good, it just sometimes feels like it’s overstaying its welcome. And for a band noted for routinely cranking out tracks six to eight minutes long a focus on epic scope is kind of to be expected.

The lyrics on those albums are not anything impressive. It’s laced with fantasy imagery and largely focuses on bloody conflict and overcoming it by courage and determination. While having the grit to face such dire challenges is an important thing to strive for and the musical style Dragonforce embraces certainly goes along with such themes, there’s nothing else there on those early albums. It’s pure escapism.

This technically brings us to The Power Within (2012), Dragonforce’s second most recent album, where the band began to show more variation both lyrically and musically. However this post is mostly about Maximum Overdrive (2014), which came out about a month ago and most of what I’ve got to say applies to both albums so let’s skip to the present.

First, Maximum Overdrive has about five different musical aesthetics, four if you remove their cover of “Ring of Fire” by Johnny Cash. This gives the album a little more musical diversity than earlier albums, which is definitely welcome. Now it’s not to say that Totman and Li’s fascination with fast guitar playing is bad. Quite the contrary, that’s the band’s claim to fame and something you really can’t get anywhere else. But a little variation in how it’s delivered is good.

Second, the band’s lyrical depth has been growing. If you get the Special Edition album off of Amazon it comes with a total of fifteen tracks, three of which are stark departures from the usual lyrical themes. “City of Gold” focuses on a young girl who’s left home to try and make it in Hollywood only to find herself homeless instead. “Extraction Zone” examines the difficulties of video game addiction and what might drive a person to it (a theme already explored some in “Give Me the Night” on The Power Within although that song is about drug addiction.) Finally, “You’re Not Alone” is a powerful song about recovering from grief after the death of a loved one.

Quite a difference from old songs that were basically The Ring of Nibelung set to electric guitar (not there’s anything wrong with that.) All the songs still offer a perspective about overcoming extreme difficulty to gain great reward, which goes nicely with Dragonforce’s musical style, and it is nice to hear that the band thinks that’s as much a part of the real world as it is the myths and legends the band clearly loves so much.

Dragonforce is not a musical experience for everyone. But it is a must for fans of excellent guitar technique and inspiring music.

Cool Things: Prince of Foxes

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Prince of Foxes is a work of historical fiction by Samuel Shellabarger set in the long ago days of Italy during the era of the free cities, specifically during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, as the power of Cesare Borgia was at it’s zenith. As the name implies, the book centers on a character who prizes himself on cunning and subtlety – although the relative value of those things is left more for the reader to decide on his own.

The plot revolves around Andrea Orsini, a young noble and chevalier (or knight) in the service of Cesare Borgia, who’s working his way up the ranks of Borgia’s court and has just been assigned his first political mission (as opposed to a combat mission.) Andre faces a lot of problems along the way – he’s lying about who he is, he’s fallen in love with a married woman and he winds up dueling one of the most proficient chevaliers of his era on something of a fool’s errand. And then there might be the little part where he adds to his problems by deciding to betray one of the most powerful men in the land for the sake of outdated notions of love and honor…

At the very heart of the conflict is the growing and competing notions of honor and self interest Andre holds. On the one hand, Andre prides himself on being very modern and quietly sneers at the values of honor and chivalry that so many of the foreign knights espouse. That’s not without cause – Northern Italy was one of the richest parts of Europe at the time and wouldn’t be eclipsed until it’s poor avenues of trade to the American continents gave the advantage to England and the Dutch, and they got there in part by shedding feudal ways of living often upheld by notions of honor and duty. But they were also ways that Borgia would take them back to.

On the other hand, the Lord Varano, an old soldier who has lived by the code of honesty and respect for all people, is the embodiment of the Italian free city. He serves his people as much as they serve him and he lives chivalry rather than preaching it. He has married Camilla, Andrea’s love interest, for her protection and not out of romance or a desire for heirs. Varano respects his people’s rights because that is the honorable thing to do in his mind, providing a picture of honor and chivalry that upholds something worthwhile rather than something cynical and self-serving, like Borgia and the serfdom he’s seeking to go back towards. Neither honor or cynicism are ideals, it turns out, but rather tools to uphold either freedom or slavery – and it’s these Andre has to choose between.

Although Andrea has been promised Varano’s city and wife by Borgia, if only Andrea will help take them by treachery and murder, ultimately Borgia doesn’t view Andre as his equal as the old man and his wife do. In no long period of time Andre will have to decide where his loyalties lie and each choice comes with unpleasant consequences.

This story has pretty much everything you might like from a good piece of historical fiction. A wealth of real, historical figures, a backdrop of events of great consequence – although little discussed now, Italy of this time period was a testing ground for democratic principles like citizen’s rights – and most important of all, fictional characters that blend seamlessly into the historical narrative. It also grapples with questions of what it means to be a man, to lead people and where the place of God and honor (or societal pressures if you want to be technical) fit in it all.

While the plot moves pretty slowly by modern standards that is fairly reasonable for a book over seventy years old and not all tales of intrigue hinge on how fast events move. Prince of Foxes is one that prefers to entrap readers by how much pressure it puts on. The story is chock full of characters, real and imagined, noteworthy for their cunning. There’s at least three different agendas at work most of the time and gambits pile up pretty high by the end. At the same time, at least one protagonist gets through most of the book totally ignorant of all the machinations and if you can’t follow them all either you won’t be any worse off.

If what you want is a good story with memorable characters who do a little scheming and a little standing on principle, this is one of the best books I can recommend. On the other hand if all you want is a good yarn well told this is… still one of the better options out there.

And if you want a hero without fear and above reproach, it’s got that too.

So go read it! It’s worth your time.

Cool Things: The Lego Movie

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Confession time: I was fully prepared to hate this movie.

This is mainly due to my viewing the trailer and assuming that, as is so often the case, I’d seen the best parts of the movie. It turns out that not only is this not the case, it’s so far from the truth as to be kind of laughable. The biggest misconception the trailer gives is that this is a movie about Legos. It is not.

The Lego Movie is a film about people playing with Legos. This makes all the difference.

I have fond memories of playing with Legos when I was young (and when I was not so young and I anticipate doing it some more when my niece gets older) so I remember the fun of mashing all the pieces together and making something cool. Essentially, that’s what The Lego Movie is all about.

Yes, it’s true that the movie leans on a lot (too many, in my opinion) of stupid pop-culture references that won’t make sense to much of anyone in five years. But even if you took all those away you would have a solid and meaningful movie  that works on two levels.

The first level is the story of Emmett. Emmett is a Lego construction worker who lives in a world of Legos. Every day he gets up, pulls out his instruction book and does exactly what’s expected of him. He goes through the same routine, builds the buildings, listens to the proscribed music and works for the totalitarian government of Lord Business – we’ve been here before, right? There’s really no need to rehash the plot, you’ve seen it at least a dozen times.

What sets Emmett’s half of the story apart are a couple of things. First, Emmett is (mostly) humble. He’s told he’s “the special” but has a hard time seeing it, since most of the people he’s working with are so much more experienced and skillful than he is (and let’s face it, one of those people is Batman.) But more than that, what’s impressive is Emmett’s ability to work with the Master Builders.

These are the heroes of the Lego world, people who can take the parts around them and build new and amazing things out of them. Emmer’s told he must be one but he can’t figure out how to do what they do. Ironically it will turn out to be Emmett’s ability to get the other Master Builders to work together in spite of their quirks and follow the directions no matter how much they dislike the limits on their creativity that is his greatest strength.

Ultimately we find that it’s not creativity or a lack thereof that’s making things difficult for people in Lego Land. You see there’s more to it than just a case of an overbearing would-be dictator. There’s also the Man Upstairs – which is to say, the people who are playing with the Legos. The Lego Movie is also about a man and his son, both of whom love Legos.

Unfortunately, the grown man has come to see Legos as his way to control his life – if things aren’t exactly as he wants them he flips out (we never see this behavior directly but that’s how Lord Business reacts and the two are obviously meant to reflect one another.) His son, on the other hand, clearly admires everything his father is capable of and just wants to join him in the fun, in his own way.

The two stories parallel one another to a conclusion that is both satisfying and, better yet, reflective of real life. Emmett and his human friend don’t triumph over their antagonists, they convince them to have a change of heart. And that is a true victory.

So, much to my surprise the story was awesome. So was seeing all the Lego guys running around doing their Lego things. A brilliant bit of humor comes from the addition of non-Lego things to the Lego world, like Lord Business’ ultimate weapon, the Kraggle (a tube of Krazy Glue that has gunk over a few of the letters) or the sword of Exact Zero (the blade tip of an X-acto knife.)

The various cameos by other franchises like Star Wars or the DC Superheroes don’t really add a whole lot to the movie (other than the Millennium Falcon’s conveniently providing a MacGuffin) but neither do they really harm the story, either. They’re just sort of there and most people will probably be able to live with that. The pop culture throwaway lines are dead weight but they don’t harm the story much.

The biggest strike against the movie is it’s pace – it’s aimed primarily at kids with short attention spans so it jumps from one thing to another at a rate that’s going to be too fast for some people to be fully comfortable with.

The Lego Movie is a CG film that’s aiming to duplicate Legos, so it’s not breaking any ground in the cinematography department, but I will say both the zany action sequences and the building sequences, both of which play out in the same kind of rapid fire real time that you used to see in Lego commercials, are a huge joy to watch. And the movie has a very catchy soundtrack with one song in particular that you, like the Lego people, will probably have to live with all day for at least one day. Whether you enjoy it or not is up to you.

In all, The Lego Movie is a great film for all ages, so long as you won’t have a seizure from the frequently breathless pacing. So go check it out and relive – or discover, or just plunge deeper into – the joy of Legos.

Cool Things: Dominion

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I’ll admit it – I’m a card game fanatic.

Board games are fun but card games have this special appeal. It comes from the mix of available and hidden information, the randomness of the shuffle and the feel of the cardboard. Card games can run the gamut from something that you can play with your typical 52-card, four suited deck to an absurdly complicated, 12,000 plus card monstrosity that’s been growing for the last 20 years. Finding a card game among all those with depth and replayablity that won’t break your brain or your budget can be a real chore.

One game that I’ve found scratches the itch well is Dominion (specifically the Intrigue card set, but either version of the game is good.) The basic purpose of the game is easy – score the most points and you win!

Of course the real trick is in scoring those points. Dominion is what is known as a “deck building” game, a kind of game where everyone starts with the same basic cards but picks new cards to add to their deck every turn. Some cards are used to buy cards, some cards score points, some cards do other special actions. Easy, right?

Well, the real challenge of the game is long term planning. See, the vast majority of cards that score points don’t do anything else – you can’t use them to buy cards (and point cards have to be bought), you can’t do special actions with them, in short they’re dead weight until the end of the game. This means you have to spend time amassing resources to buy points with, and find ways to do it faster than everyone else. Each game is a race to find something that works well, rack up resources with it and then score points fastest.

Adding another layer of complexity is the fact that Dominion offers more cards than you can possibly use in a single game. The basic resource and point cards stay the same but you can change the special action cards every time you play, making the game fresh and different for a long time. And if you finally use every possible combination of special cards in your games you can always pick up additional card sets to keep things changing. While it’s not exactly a collectible card game the basic format makes expanding your game very easy to do.

Dominion is a game with a lot going on. There’s time management, resource management, opportunity management. It can be used to teach critical thinking, long term planning and the significance of opportunity cost. Like the best games, it can teach valuable life skills in a simple and engaging way. Or you can just play to show your friends who’s boss. Either way, win or lose, you’re probably going to have a good time.

Housekeeping just as promised!

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We’re going to use today to look at some of the housekeeping stuff that’s been put off a lot around the ol’ blog. I think this place is pretty cool and hopefully so do you, and there’s a lot coming in the Friday slot for the next month or so that I didn’t want to disrupt. So the update goes here!

First off, the Fiction Index page has been updated! Hooray!

I don’t think I’d touched that since the beginning of the year, possibly late last year, so this was long overdue. It now links to all chapters of Water Fall plus all the short stories published this summer. Hopefully it will stay up to date as we crash into Thunder Clap.  On top of that, all the “Next Chapter” links in Water Fall are now active, something that was not always the case.

You might have noticed that there’s a new page listed at the top as well – On Writing! No, it’s not a complete index to every post I’ve done on Fridays. That would just be way too much. But there are several features I’ve started doing that have grown to the point where I kind of feel they deserve their own complete listing, in case you read one as it goes up and don’t feel like archive diving to find them all. So which features are those, exactly?

Currently there are three – Author’s Obligations, a short series I did about a year ago, and the longer running Genrely Speaking and Writing Men series. Genrely Speaking in particular has gotten to be fairly large. I’ve listed the Genres covered in Genrely Speaking twice. Once in order they were published in, in case you want to read them that way, then again in alphabetical order (it doesn’t really make much difference what order you read them in, except that newer genres sometimes link back to older ones.)

Also, I’ve added (AT) and (CH) after the name of each genre to differentiate between Aesthetic and Characteristic Genres. What does that mean? Well, I’m going to go into detail on that with my next Gernely Speaking post a week from this coming Friday so hopefully you’ll come back then and find out.

In the mean time enjoy the updated features and I’ll see you this Friday to talk more about sliding scales!

Cool Things: Lindsey Stirling

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Okay, enough with the plots and the characters and the cultural tidbits. We’ve had four weeks of Japanese pop culture, how about some American pop culture?

I have just the thing!

Lindsey Sterling is a violinist and performance artist who specializes in an interesting blend of classical violin and electronic synthesizer (and dance). While it’s not for everyone, her music is fun, catchy and brilliant. While Sterling’s violin playing may not be as technically proficient as you might find in a Philharmonic in the big city of your choice it does have the energy and fun of a good fiddler and for many of us that’s more than enough. More than that, the blending of her electronically amplified violin with heavy synthetic beats shows that the instrument still has a lot to contribute to modern music.

Now many people are going to hear a sample of her music and won’t like the synthetic elements. That’s okay. Techno isn’t for everyone and Sterling’s music is much more techno than classical. At the same time, don’t reject it out of hand just because it’s techno. Many excellent piano pieces were originally written for the harpsichord, the piano didn’t exist until later. There’s a constant evolution of instruments available and there’s no reason to deny them a seat at the table simply because they’re new. Just like the violin still deserves a place in modern music so new instruments deserve to be taken out tested and allowed to find their place.

What’s most interesting about Sterling’s music, beyond its fusion of old and new, is that it is original. By that I mean it’s not a new arrangement of classical music or pop music. Sterling’s pieces are largely new pieces written expressly for violin and synthesizer. That’s exciting, because it shows that there is a place for this fusion of old and new instruments outside of the purely derivative. In this sense it’s ground breaking and, in my opinion as a music lover,  that makes it worth attention.

Of course, Sterling has done a lot of covers of all kinds of music. It’s only sensible to pay your respects to the successful while striking out on your own, after all. But on the whole, Lindsey Sterling is a nice new take on techno music that is well worth checking out. As always, though, try before you buy. A good selection of her music can be found on her YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/user/lindseystomp

Cool Things: Ghost in the Shell

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Welcome to our final installment of manga and anime month at Nate Chen Publications. So far we’ve examined a selection of what I would consider “entry level” series. They’re aimed at a younger audience but deep enough and well enough executed to be interesting to many people. Just like Harry Potter was aimed at young people but found widespread acceptance among people of all ages, so with Trigun, Rurouni Kenshin and Azumanga Diaoh.

The Ghost in the Shell franchise is not such a story. The story began with the work of author and illustrator Shirow Masamune. The original manga was published in the 1980s and became an animated movie in the 1990s. That movie is credited with codifying many of the ideas that would ultimately find expression in Hollywood with The Matrix.

While the manga and movie were engaging and interesting the ideas in them are so dense they didn’t really find full expression until a season length animated show was produced. That show was Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. As the title implies, this adaptation was not connected to the movie in any way – except, of course, for theme.

Ghost in the Shell takes place in a world where every part of the human body can be reproduced synthetically. The entire human body can be transformed into a cyborg and memories and personality transferred into an artificial brain. At the same time virtual reality has progressed to the point where it is almost indistinguishable from regular reality. Questions of identity, humanity and the nature of truth run throughout the series. Of course, the plot of the series has as much to with cyberterrorists, corruption and secretive government agencies as human identity.

Events revolve around Public Safety Section 9, which deals with counter-terrorism and particularly cybercrime. Led by Motoko Kusanagi, a retired JSDF Major and total conversion cyborg (meaning body and brain are artificial), Section 9 has to figure out the motives and goals of the hacker known as The Laughing Man. Their work is frustrated by his extreme skill and a number of copycats, and the fact that ol’ chuckles was partly working to uncover corruption in the government. A number of corrupt officials will interfere with Section 9 to avoid exposure.

It’s hard to explain exactly how The Laughing Man ties in with the themes of Ghost in the Shell without spoiling things. But I can say that a lot of time is devoted to the ideas of the Ghost – what defines human identity – and how much our body – or the Shell – defines it. At the same time no one attempts to hand the audience a pat answer, which is always nice.

Now if a story of corruption and the nature of human identity sounds too dark for your tastes be assured that there’s plenty of other things going on here. There’s a subtle romantic subplot between the Major and one of her colleagues, the diverse backgrounds and personalities of Section 9 are played for both laughs and insight and there’s plenty of well rendered action as well. It’s hard to believe the series was animated over ten years ago.

Oh, and there’s Tachikomas. Little blue, crab shaped mecha running AIs with the disposition of cheerful five year olds who are convinced they are RPG characters. The closest thing to dedicated comic relief, even these weird little AIs manage to be interesting characters and active participants in the plot. It’s an impressive achievement.

Serious sci-fi is as rare in anime as it is in any other medium but Ghost in the Shell manages to be serious and, at the same time, accessible and entertaining. That’s an impressive achievement in itself. But it also manages to do it in a context that will make sense to anyone from a modern developed country, not just people from the islands of Japan. And that makes it worth noting here.

Like many series licensed for distribution in America, you can find Ghost in the Shell on Youtube here.

Cool Things: Azumanga Daioh

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So we’ve covered gunslingers in outer space and Meiji era romantic swordsmen, what remains to give a full bodied, even handed overview of manga and anime, this month’s focus here at Nate Chen Publications? Oh, yes, of course.

High school.

Now many Americans have fond memories of their high school days. But in our culture college is probably the more important educational milestone. While fewer people go to college, it is where a lot of people seem to form their first meaningful lifetime relationships outside of their birth families. Roommates, sports teams, fraternity or sorority friends or just people who took the same classes you did, college is where you meet them. Sure, you have some friends from high school who might stick around, if you’re lucky. But for the most part, in America, college is where independence really starts and tends to be our high water mark for growing up.

In Japan, it’s high school. College admission exams are exponentially more difficult there, often consuming most of a student’s free time in their last year of high school so, at least in pop culture, the first two years become a frantic rush to accumulate experiences and meet those people sharing your interests. Then you bond together and set your sites on a life path and work towards it as a group.

This theme is made so much of in Japanese pop culture that I have to conclude it’s what actually happens on at least a semi-regular basis. Otherwise they wouldn’t be able to sell it so frequently. But the way it’s typically presented in Japanese pop culture is probably not the way it really is.

There is one work I’ve ready that has the ring of truth to it, though, and that’s Azumanga Diaoh by Azuma Kiyohiko.

If you’ve read/watched any manga/anime at all you know that the Japanese have a slightly higher tolerance for abnormal elements like superhuman martial arts, mind readers, spiritualists and the like in their entertainment and fusing these elements with high school is a very common approach to story telling. Azumanga Daioh is not that.

High school manga or anime are also considered a great format for stories of all out competition with sports teams or game clubs or even movie making groups doing all in their power to win a major competition before exams crash down and end their high school days. Azumanga Daioh isn’t that either.

Lastly, even in America we recognize the unique romantic atmosphere of high school. There’s cute members of the opposite sex all over the place to be chased, gossiped about and rejected by. The Japanese are just as fine writing high school romances as Americans. But Azumanga Daioh doesn’t waste its time with romance.

Azumanga Daioh is what’s known as a slice-of-life drama. It follows its central characters around as they arrive in high school, get to know each other, do funny, stupid or otherwise entertaining things and eventually graduate.

I know, I know. This sounds boring. Somehow, it isn’t.

I really wish I could explain this manga better. It’s roughly the equivalent to a comic strip, what’s called “4-koma” in Japan. Most of the stories are told in a series of four panels that serve to basically tell a joke. But in each of those jokes a surprising amount of character development goes on.

This is significant since Azumanga Daioh (and slice-of-life in general) is not a sitcom. The genre is driven by its characters and not the situation they are in. What Kiyohiko does is he builds a set of very understandable, deep and relatable characters and then lets us live with them for three years until they graduate (high schools in Japane have a 3 year curriculum spanning 10th to 12th grade, just one of many differences between Japanese education and the U.S.) By the end we really feel like people like Osaka, Chiyo and Sakaki really were our classmates. That’s a particularly impressive achievement if, like me, you were homeschooled…

The Japanese pop culture obsession with high school may not always make sense to Western readers. But it is that very fact that makes Azumanga Daioh a great example of it for people dipping their toes into manga and anime. It seems as if this is what they’re really expecting to get, what they really want out of high school. It’s an idealized take on the formative years of young people, from the perspective of Japanese culture.

Plus it’s consistently funny, occasionally heart touching and not that hard to get a handle on. Maybe saying it’s a story about girls who go to school for three years, become fast friends and graduate to move on to bigger things doesn’t inspire you. But all dreams need foundations. And, in a very real way, that’s what Azumanga Daioh is – a foundation for bigger things.