"YOUR BLOG IS A LIE!!!!!"

So declares the subject line of an email I just received from someone who, according to her own testimony, probably has better things to be doing:

i came here thru google becuz my husbands ring is stuck on his finger and this was supposedly to tell me how to remove it BUT IT DOES NOT.  His finger really hurts and now i have wasted TIME reading your website that i should have been reading others.  you need to tell people that this is ALL LIES becuz what if they have to cut his finger off HOW WOULD YOU FEEL THEN!!!!!!!!

Like you maybe have something more important to be doing than writing an email?  I'm just saying.

Comments

[tomemos]

So you couldn't be persuaded to replace the Ephraim Chambers quote at the top of the page with the words "This is ALL LIES"?

[nutellaontoast]

You know, she was kind of rude about it, but I've been meaning to tell you the same thing myself.

[JaneDoe]

She's very rude, but it's awesome your blog comes up in a Google search for stuck rings!

And I sincerely hope the finger didn't lose more circulation while she was sending you this very funny email.

Hopefully, he has a support system apart from his wife, but still I would love to see you reply to the charges of LIES, LIES, LIES, ALL LIES!

[anonymous]

Damnit, I spent the better part of an hour writing a comment for the anime/manga post only to find out that comments are apparently locked on older posts. So I'm just posting this here, so nyah

SEK: "While the Barnes and Noble in Southern California may have a wall of manga, the same can't be said in, say, Wisconsin."

Either you know something's special about Wisconsin or you haven't been to a lot of Barnes & Nobles in flyover states. I know from recent experience that Nebraska, Indiana, Oklahoma, and Arkansas are all places where it's easy to find lots of manga. I doubt there's a B&N in the country that doesn't have a separate section for the stuff.

And you can find Naruto/Bleach (and Vampire Knight/Fruits Basket) at a lot of Walmarts nowadays. Sure, it's probably easier to find the Nausicaa manga in California, but pretty much everybody has the most popular books and then a whole lot of random Viz/Tokyopop releases (or Yen Press these days, I guess). Manga's still a big business. It's easily twice the size of whatever non-manga comics selection the bookstore has at someplace like B&N. (My local B&N has seven bookcases for manga, less than two for the rest of comics. And then there's more manga down in the kids section, Tokyo Mew Mew and the like.) And it's not like epic apocalypses are the majority of manga; it's largely ninjas and fanservice.

On the topic of the post: I agree with everyone else that you're not drawing on a representative sample here. There are lots of animes/mangas that don't end so much as stop.

Azumanga Daioh has already been mentioned, but the same is true of pretty much any comedy series. The tone for an anime/manga funnybook is generally pretty consistent throughout. Nothing of import ever happens in Galaxy Angel.

A 4koma book isn't likely to have much in the way of plot arcs to begin with, so there's no reason for it to suddenly have a climax at the end. No season of Hidamari Sketch or K-on! has had a significant ending so far, and I doubt they ever will. Lucky Star just ends with a goofy dance number. Doujin Work just adapts enough of the comic to fill a 12-episode cour and then it's over. All of these books are still ongoing, but I doubt there's going to be any dei ex machinae when their creator gets tired of them.

Harem books/shows are the same way -- the climax is usually just "the protagonist chooses a girl", if the last episode/volume is different at all. The only reason I knew the Ichigo 100% anime was over was that the last episode didn't have a "Next Episode" teaser at the end -- literally nothing had been resolved that'd been set up in the show. And the OVAs that followed it did nothing to help with that (they just added more fanservice and shoehorned in more characters from the original manga). Ranma 1/2 ends with Ranma and Akane once again not getting married after Ranma saves Akane once again; the book could've easily stopped before the Phoenix Saga began, or could've continued on for another umpteen years. And doujinshi for romance serieses usually don't have to pull any strings to make their stories fit in with the rest of the show; you can just have more things happen after the end, or anywhere in the middle. The plotting is just nowhere near as tight as it is in something like a Miyazaki film; they're character-driven to a point where it really doesn't much matter if anything happens. All of the events are incidental.

Now, you probably can find a good number of books/shows that end with big nonsensical things and then saccharine denouements. This is because a lot of anime/manga are not very well written. If you know your series is about to end, but don't see a natural way to resolve things (since you've just been writing stuff without having any clue how long you're going to be published, or just because you didn't plan things out very well), then almost by definition you're going to end up with some sort of deus ex machina tying up loose ends. And then you slap on a happy ending because people like those, and to dull the taste of the stupid deus ex machina resolution.

This sort of logic also holds good for a lot of adaptations (of visual novels especially): the adaptation omits a lot of what makes the original ending make sense, but they keep the original ending because it's what people want to see animated. So you end up with things happening that don't make sense in the last few episodes. And then they all live happily ever after, because the adaptation exists because people like the characters and want to see them in motion, they don't want things to end on a down note.

And then there are fanservice manga that don't even pretend to have more of a plot than "here is an excuse to get the characters' clothes off in every issue" and just end when they're suddenly canceled for another fanservice series.

And all the sports books that end with the team narrowly losing the championship, but learning valuable lessons along the way.

And all the light novel adaptations which just follow the novel plot jot-for-jot and don't end at all because the series is still ongoing and they're hoping to make another season out of it, or at least some OVAs (like Suzumiya Haruhi or Zero no Tsukaima or Shakugan no Shana or Bakemonogatari).

etc. etc.

There's a whole universe of manga-and-anime-that-people-won't-recommend-to-a-literature-professor out there. You're missing out on veritable oceans of derivative, puerile schlock! But this comment is being written anonymously (and the email address is a Lucky Star reference), so I have no such shame: If you want to seriously understand anime/manga as a whole, you need to read a lot of stuff you're going to absolutely loathe. Because that's a giant chunk of the market. "Love Hina" ran for twelve volumes, but "Negima!" is still going strong after 32.

[anonymous]

Damnit. Didn't notice that the URL field did not stay empty when I moved from one post to another. Oh well, genuine anonymity is for cowards (and attentive people).

[JohnR]

Don't take it too hard - it's not _all_ lies (although that may be more by accident than by design). Anyway, her last, anguished, question pleads for a response, so I'll take it upon myself to say "I'd feel fine - it's no skin off my nose." It's just too bad that this comforting thought will never reach her. On the one hand, I wonder if her husband ever got his ring off (so that he could meet other, perhaps more interesting women? We can only speculate), but on the other hand, I don't really care.