The Thing: pop culture

The key with being known for something is to focus on that one thing and do it well. For my main fandom Gekkan Shoujo Nozaki-kun, it was the comedy. For almost all the sports anime I’ve ever seen, it was all the hot athletes.

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Sunday, June 28, 2015

Posted by The Thing - 7:52 PM

pop culture the fan life

Hooked

His name is Jeremy Wade – extreme angler and marine biologist. He also happens to be the host of River Monsters, surprisingly the biggest show in Animal Planet history. The premise: A crazy English guy travels all over the world to catch crazy freshwater fish.

“Crazy freshwater fish,” however, can mean anything from a huge bull shark, a seven-foot-long alligator that can cut you with its scales, a sawfish with a mouth that looks like (well) a saw, and on one memorable occasion, a 400 pound stingray so heavy it snapped Jeremy’s heavy-duty fiberglass fishing rod right in half –and made him lose a tendon in his upper arm.

If you’re not there for the fish, you’re there for the sheer crazy in nearly every episode. The very first episode had Jeremy dumping himself into a piranha-infested river to prove that they wouldn’t attack him. Later in the same episode, he put some piranhas in a swimming pool, starved them, and then climbed in. Just to be sure, of course.

Since that first crazy stunt, Jeremy Wade has jumped into rivers with his predators of the week, removed carnivorous salamanders from their underwater lairs, chased after giant catfish by following them into hella strong currents, poked a crocodile’s tail while diving, and stuck a bloodsucking lamprey onto his neck for kicks (he did this last stunt again on an interview with Conan O’Brien. No, really).

Oh, and we can’t forget that time that Jeremy got rammed in the chest by a hundred-pound arapaima. Or that time the show’s sound guy got struck by lightning and survived. Or that time that their plane crashed into a jungle with a camera still rolling.

Following Jeremy’s adventures is like watching a horrifyingly educational detective drama – someone (or multiple someones) is attacked by something in a river, the incident pops up in somewhere in the news, and he packs up to investigate what could have done it. He tries to catch it too, but there have been heartbreaking misses (see: Death Ray and Killer Torpedo) before the successful catch.

And if this is a drama, then it’s one that’s almost always somewhere exciting. River Monsters has checked out Chernobyl’s irradiated waters, caught a shaman woman summoning spirits in Mongolia, and followed a South American tribe known to catch electric eels with their bare hands.
Jeremy’s even gone looking for the Loch Ness Monster – and may have actually found it, though it looks nothing like the scaly green thing we like to think it is.

The wild side isn’t a place we tend to visit, in this day and age – some of us will never go to Africa, and a surprising number probably won’t even ride a jeepney! Living wild for a lot of us is living in the concrete jungle called Metro Manila: sometimes we forget that the world we live in is a lot bigger than we think – wild in a more literal way.

There’s a world out there to explore, and what a wonder television is, that we can watch an old guy wrestling with man-sized fish in that wild world in the name of science, all in the comfort of our own homes.

How could you not get hooked on that?

Article by PaCho
Art by Jao
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PaCho is the nickname of a full-time fangirl who wants an infinite amount of money with which to travel the world and buy merchandise. This girl is currently amassing the skills to achieve these goals, and collecting stories and perspectives along the way (to consequently be the best that no one ever was) at a university. She will smile in satisfaction at the fall of the patriarchy and Western domination of international affairs. She is only half-joking about this (which means that she's completely serious).

Jao San Pedro is a 16-year-old aesthetically driven visual artist, fashion student, & french fry enthusiast from Manila. He started his visual folio in summer 2015 known as "Cool Girl (The Label)" ~ironic~. In his time of idle, he enjoys listening to alternative/indie music often psychedelic or acoustic & binge watching tv series such as "Girls", "HIMYM" and the like. View his label at http://cargocollective.com/coolgirl & his tweets @jaosanpedro.

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Thursday, June 25, 2015

Posted by The Thing - 6:18 AM

pop culture the fan life

Hai(na)kyuu, utak-ku!

When you find a fandom, it's the stuff of romance novels. Your heart palpitates, your emotions are heightened, and the world seems better because of its existence.

For some, it seems a bit silly to be so passionate about something fictional. It's one thing to be in love with an actor playing a character, and it's another to be in love with ones that exist in an intangible universe.

Anime isn't everyone's cup of tea. Indeed, some question its status as an art form considering its notoriety for sexualizing 2D characters, completely illogical occurrences, and out-of-this-world physics. Not to mention its somewhat alarming tendency to convince people that such laws could be applied to reality i.e. those who think life is a shoujo manga, obnoxiously believing themselves to be Japanese just by indulging in its pop culture, if not wishing hentai proportions were real.

(Note: I've been both a perpetrator and a victim of this phenomenon which I dub "weeb vision")

Despite all that, there are those anime and manga that can speak to anyone through its universal message. Stories of real love, undying determination, overcoming struggles, and the thrill of life.

My passion for Japanese pop culture had experienced a decline upon entering college, since I had to focus on adjusting to many things. My love for art remained constant, but this minor lack of indulgence led to slow but steady depression of sorts.

Then recently, I was introduced to the anime Haikyuu!! by PaCho, our lovely managing editor, and it hit me right in the kokoro. It centers around a young man named Shoyou Hinata and his dream to become the next "Small Giant" in the Volleyball Nationals. Normally, I wouldn't be interested in such since I'm not into sports, but after marathoning all 25 intense episodes and subsequently catching up to the latest chapter, I realized I hadn't felt such intense feelings since my last devoted fandom, Hetalia.

We marathoned the entire series for 12 hours from 3 p.m. to 3 a.m. A few days after, I found myself reading from chapter 70 (which is where the finale stopped) all the way to chapter 159. This spanned from around 6 p.m. to 8 a.m. the following day only because I was interrupted several times, then attempted to go to sleep but realized it was futile.

That night I silently screamed for the teams' heart-attack inducing saves, punctuated by the mangaka's choice of storyboarding, and moments of friendship and camaraderie had me cheering and jumping and kicking and tearing.

Now, I find myself experiencing a sense of fulfillment that I haven't felt in a long time. I now realize the void that I had, and feel it filled with an inexplicable warmth brought only by finding something you truly care about.

Many speak of the cliché of missing a piece of oneself and finding it in somebody else. For me and many others, it's finding it in something like a song, or a piece of art, or a story. Anime is strange, yes. Even I am consistently confused by the seemingly endless antics that it spouts, but I am equally amazed as well as entertained. I love it. I am in love with it.

This is my love, revived.

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Editor's Note: This article is the first in our Fan Life series, where we invite readers to send in 500-word essays about the things that blow them away. If you'd like to fangirl (or fanboy) over something that connects to the theme of the month, send it to thethingonline@gmail.com with the subject: THE FAN LIFE. Thanks! ♥

Article by Nikki S.
Art by Elle
Fan logo by Alexie
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Nikki is a girl that sometimes feels like a boy, and is also an all-around art enthusiast and a linguist that likes the mysterious sounds words make. She likes wearing round spectacles of any sort, playing with her makeup when she’s bored, and envisioning outfits for various kinds of occasions. She has a style diary here and maintains a twitter that experiences extreme lows and highs of activity.

Elle is a 17-year-old aspiring doctor who somehow found herself at art school. She loves rap music and bunnies. She still hasn't grown out of her otaku stage (which started all the way back in elementary school, thank you very much).

Alexie is a multimedia student that lives in a fort of pillows surrounded by markers and human livers. Sometimes, she likes to draw portraits with poor traits, and other times, faces with feces. Unknown to most people, Alexie has developed the power of invisibility - but it only works when no one's looking.

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Saturday, May 23, 2015

Posted by The Thing - 7:35 PM

pop culture

Childhood, Revisited: Re-watching Disney

Nabokov once said that the best reader is a re-reader; I believe the same concept applies to movies. We all re-watch our favorites, and each re-watch adds a new dimension to our appreciation of them. We spot little details that we missed the first time around, details that enrich the comedy or pathos of whatever we’re watching. Each re-watch, while tied to all the previous re-watches, is a different experience, informed by different contexts and beliefs. Who you were when you were seven isn’t necessarily the same person you are now; thus, a film you loved when you were seven won’t necessarily move the emotional needle if you re-watch it now. The ones that still do are the ones that become our favorites.

The first movie I remember having watched as a child was Toy Story 2. It was on Disney Channel during one of the many slow summer days that make up childhood, and – because I was never much for the outdoors – I decided to sit tight and enjoy it. By some quirk of syndication, I actually watched TS2 before the first Toy Story, which is why the former will always be the movie I remember when someone mentions the series.

I was young then, and not a particularly detail-oriented viewer. I loved the action scenes and found every other scene boring. Children are prone to that, after all. When the film kicked off with the frantic attempt to rescue Woody from the yard sale, my seven-year-old heart pounded. When Prospector pulls his heel turn and stops Woody from leaving, I gasped. And when the toys finally made it home after jumping out of an airplane, I cheered. They were all very basic, very positive emotions, which is why I normally think of Toy Story 2 as a very basic, very positive movie, with nowhere near the amount of gravitas and “ahrt”-ness the other two films had.

Re-watching it these days as a nineteen-year-old, I can finally appreciate the film’s understated nuance. Part of it comes with being older. Emotions get more complex, and contexts get richer. We’ve lived through a few more years since those young summers spent looping through Cartoon Network, Disney Channel, and Nickelodeon. Those are the years we bring to each new viewing, and those are the years that inform our appreciation of them.

Take everyone’s favorite – or least favorite, depending on how one feels about ugly-crying into a Kleenex – scene in the movie: Jessie’s “When She Loved Me” musical flashback. When you’re younger, the scene doesn’t hit you as much. I mean, you understand that Jessie’s hurting, but it’s not a hurt most seven-year-olds can process. For me, it was difficult to fully empathize with Jessie, because I hadn’t yet understood what it meant to be left behind by someone you cared for – someone you thought would always care for you. I didn’t get loss at the time, but now, I understand it more. Re-watching the scene, I teared up a bit. Seven-year-old me would have never done that; seven-year-old me would have forwarded to the scene where Buzz and his friends fight Zurg in the elevator, because it was much more exciting.

It begs an interesting question: can I really say I’ve seen the same movie, if I reacted to it in vastly different ways? Technically, it is, but each re-watch isn’t simply a replication of the previous one. The experience of watching a movie isn’t entirely dependent on the movie being watched; the consumer is just as important as the art. One has to consider that circumstances change, because circumstances change all the time. Circumstances are the other half of the movie-watching experience – and of all experiences, really – which is why we can never really recapture those that came before. We can only breathe new life into old things through remembering them and returning to them, but they will never be the same.

And that is no bad thing.

Article by Deany Cheng
Art by Elle
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Elle is a 17-year old aspiring doctor who somehow found herself at art school. She loves rap music and bunnies. She still hasn't grown out of her otaku stage (which started all the way back in elementary school, thank you very much).

Deany is a Management Engineering student and an aspiring writer. He isn't a real person yet, but he's doing his best. He enjoys good movies, cheesy pop music, and math. You can find him on Twitter (@DeanyNotDeeny) or at a theater near you.

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