As he walked along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus answered, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.”
— John 9 1:3

I wrote about this briefly in last week’s Penguindrum post: Kanba, Himari and Shouma believe they deserve to be punished for their parents’ sins. Himari deserves to get sick and die. It’s a punishment which she earned through the accident of birth. Before, I only mentioned how this idea is nothing new. People have been bigots for over two thousand years. Can’t say I’m surprised.

Roghek wrote a response today to my comments, elaborating on the biblical treatment of inheritance of the parent’s sins.  It helped me to get my own thoughts in order, and made me realize what I had wanted to say before.

The thing is, I made this idea of blaming the children sound like it’s a problem of the past. People in biblical times were jerks who blamed children for being blind. Penguindrum is just a work of fiction: no one would blame Himari in real life. Right?

Continue reading Blaming the Victim →

Well, exponentially greater possibilities, at least.

One of the great things about yuri (or yaoi, or, even better, bisexual characters) is that the number of possible shippings increases exponentially more with the number of characters. Let’s look at why yuri is awesome and learn a bit of graph theory while we’re at it!

First of all, how do we define a “shipping”? Generally, the term refers to a single couple: for example, I have been shipping Ringo and Shouma in Mawaru Penguindrum. However, people can ship multiple couples in a single show: for our purposes, we’ll refer to this set of pairings as a single shipping. To simplify things, we’ll assume that every character is matched to a single partner. So no threesomes or harem end.

Love Graphs

To count how many possible pairings a show has, we’re going to construct a “love graph.” Let’s start with the basics: what is a graph? The graph G = (V, E) is a set of vertices V and a set of edges E. An edge links two vertices in the graph. So in the love graph, each character is a vertex, and edges represent possible romantic links. So (a subgraph of) the love graph for Kimikiss would look like this:

We have the love triangle surrounding Kazuki, Kouichi’s love triangle, and Eiji as Kouichi’s rival for Mai. Note that the graph is bipartite: we can divide the vertices into two sets, such that all edges in the graph cross from one set to the other, simply by picking a set of boys and a set of girls. The pairings in Kimikiss are all straight.

The number of possible shippings, then, is the number of matchings on the love graph. A matching is simply a set of edges which share no common vertex— a set of couples where nobody is two-timing.

Of course, the pairings shown on the above graph are only the ones that the show itself encourages. What if we think that Sakino and Sanada make the perfect couple? Nothing wrong with that (except that Sanada is an asshole for choosing Mai and deserves to die alone and unloved). So the graph we would consider for Kimikiss in counting the number of possible shippings has edges between every pair of characters of the opposite sex. If we permit bisexual pairings, then the love graph becomes complete: there is an edge from every character to every other character in the graph.

Harems

Your typical harem has a single male character of consequence, and n females who are interested in him. How would this love graph look?

It would also be bipartite: the male character is linked to every female character, and there are no links between the female characters. If the graph has n females, then, the love graph has n possible matchings, and there are n possible shippings. Note that no perfect matching exists in the harem love graph: n-1 females must die alone and unloved. This is their lot, and we shall shed no tears for them.

Heterosexual Romance

Now let’s consider shows like Kimikiss and ef, where we have a similar number of males and females. Assume there are n characters, with an equal number of males and females. In this case, a perfect matching exists: to simplify things, we’ll count only the number of perfect matchings, where every character is part of a couple. Once again, the love graph is bipartite, with two fully interconnected vertex sets of size . There are  such pairings. (To see this, we have females to match the first male to, females to match the second male to, etc. )

Yuri / Yaoi / Bisexual

Next, consider a yuri / yaoi / bisexual show such as Yuruyuri or Simoun, with a cast of n characters, any two of which are a potential item. Now our love graph is complete: every character can form a couple with every other character. Once again, we’ll count the number of perfect matchings. Assuming n is even (which it must be for a perfect matching to exist) we can determine that the number of perfect matchings is using a similar argument to last time.

Conclusions

To summarize:

So, the number of characters being equal, a show where the genders are evenly distributed has times as many perfect (well, for one gender) matchings as a standard harem . And yuri shows have

times as many possible perfect matchings as a heterosexual show.

So there we have it. Yuri is awesome, a realm of exponentially greater possibilities. Q.E.D.

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Before yesterday, I had never watched or read a single work by Leiji Matsumoto. Inspired by Animekritik‘s obsession with all things Leiji, I decided that this needed to be corrected. So far, I’ve watched the first five episodes of Space Battleship Yamato, and wanted to share my impressions.

Detailed, Diverse Ships

One of the first things I noticed in Space Battleship Yamato is the amazing diversity of ships and vehicles of all kinds, lovingly crafted in intricate detail, and chock full of dials, gauges and levers. These vehicles aren’t particularly original: take the titular battleship Yamato, which is a WWII era battleship literally plucked from its graveyard and dropped into outer space. The origins of the other ships are equally apparent: we have fighters, stealth bombers, transport planes, missiles, submarines and UFOs. But with their new setting and embellishments, the ships are all entrancing.

Even the non-combat vehicles are fascinating: we have cars that fly through tubes, vans, and short distance fliers which land on skis.

Plus, we have an awesome robot that can split into parts and is a convincing liar.

This raises an interesting question: Space Battleship Yamato was made almost 37 years ago, in 1974. And yet, the first five episodes had a more diverse assortment of vehicles than any show that’s come out in the past five years. What happened? Why are all ships the same now? Now all we seem to get are minor variations on the same Gundamesque humanoid mecha. I know some people follow mecha designs and even build models of them, but I honestly cannot see too much of a difference between different mecha.

Reminders of the Past

Despite being set in the future, Yamato conveys a strong sense of nostalgia. Part of this is that it actually was made a long time ago and the animation shows its age, but it also comes from the WWII era combat set in space. As one example, take the opening battle. It resembles an 18th century naval engagement, with the two opposing forces lining up and exchanging broadsides. It is a throwback to a day where warfare was straightforward and “honorable.”

We also have an encroaching extinction of humanity from nuclear fallout, and the titular Yamato, with part of the second episode even dedicated to telling the WWII battleship’s history. The show does seem poised to take a critical look at the sense of military pride and honor which led the Yamato to its final journey and helped pave the way to the war in the Pacific in the first place. For example, look at the farewell parade and the brother’s pointless death.

In my opinion, WWII has to be one of the most interesting eras in Japanese history. And yet it’s also the least explored in anime, perhaps due to a lingering sense of collective shame and desire to look the other way. The only recent shows I can think of that took place in this era are Senkou no Night Raid and Natsu no Arashi.

Spectacular Scoring

The music is great. As in, Simoun-level greatness. It fits together with the action, and the creators seem to have actually put a lot of effort into it. At the risk of sounding like a grumpy old man, anime nowadays do not seem to put much effort into the music at all, and it often ends up being some crappy J-pop. Of course, there are exceptions.

Imaginative Setting

Yamato’s is a universe of intergalactic proportions. We’ve only been to three planets so far, but each of them has been fascinating in a completely unique way. We have the Earth, which has been destroyed by radiation and is left barren. Then there’s a brief stopover in Mars, which is covered with snow. We also have Jupiter, which has a floating island in the sea of methane which is home to an awesome looking alien base.

Sheer Epicness

Space Battleship Yamato makes the conflict of Gurren Lagan seem petty. Humanity is going to become extinct in a year due to nuclear contamination, and the Yamato has one year to travel 148000 light years to retrieve the aptly named Cosmo Cleaner D which can save the planet. After each episode, a countdown shows how many days remain until the extinction of humanity.

Then there’s the fact that every time the Yamato warps, a slight error on the order of milliseconds on the part of the pilot will result not only in the destruction of the Yamato, but in the destruction of the entire universe. No pressure.

Conclusion

So far, I’m very impressed with Space Battleship Yamato and can see what all the fuss is about. I’m looking forward to continuing watching the show, and hopefully some other works by Leiji Matsumoto as well.