The Conception Clearinghouse

[monsterboy]

Still working on this, but the first draft is up! It's an Armitage III fansite where I'm attempting to a) gather together everything of interest about the series that's ever been put online, and a few things that haven't; and b) write, and host, interesting meta.

I've got two meta pieces up already: A Feminist Reading of Armitage III and Under the Skin: Deconstructing Sensuality and Sexuality in Armitage III. I'm particularly proud of the first one, in terms of how it dissects both the failure of Armitage III's "feminist" government and how many this-world activist movements continue to perpetrate oppression and abuse.

Comments

[3rdofjune]

Um, whoa. It's been half a lifetime since I watched Armitage: Poly-Matrix on the Sci-fi Channel; this makes me want to go back and watch with a more careful eye. Love it.

I'd add that the relationship between the humans and the Seconds could be a caricature of, or meta-commentary on, the anime industry itself, with its mostly-male animators sculpting images of beautiful women to be admired by other men. At least that's been the case historically. So Armitage could also represent a challenge to the idea of what an 'anime babe' should be like.

[monsterboy]

:DD Woot! Glad to have sparked some nostalgia. Yeah, that tends to be people's usual reaction to stumbling across Armitage stuff in this day and age: OH MAN I LOVED THAT WHEN I WAS A KID, GOOD TIMES. I'm actually the same: when I put the site together it was after a brief frenzy of rediscovering "oh wow, I used to love this". And it's still good.

Yeah, after reading the interview with Hiroyuki Ochi (also now on the site), I get the feeling you're right. He said he deliberately designed the Seconds to, aesthetically, look like "typical anime women" with their big eyes, and designed the main cast in a more Western style, as a protest against the "anime babe" look: he definitively did not want Armitage herself to be a typical "anime babe". So it's very likely there's some meta-commentary going on there with the way they're treated in the show as well.

[3rdofjune]

Speaking of cyberpunk and nostalgia; I've been catching up on Last Order and it once again gives me so many feels wrt the Battle Angel Alita series. Something that definitely played a part in shaping my views on gender, and in a way, my personal metaphysical views (as in flux as they constantly are).

On a related tangent, I wrote some comments about the Haruhi film and gender roles on my old journal that you might find interesting.