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A review by tinycl0ud
Beautiful Fighting Girl by Saito Tamaki
4.0
“For the world to be real (リアル), it must be sufficiently electrified by desire. A world not given depth by desire, no matter how exactingly it is drawn, will always be flat and impersonal, like a backdrop in the theatre.” (p.162)
Been a couple of years, but thanks to my resourceful friend I finally got to reread this marvellous book at my leisure instead of rushing through it for an essay. Being translated, of course it’s not the best and the chapters lack unity (on top of the constant deferral of the main argument to the final chapter) but each individual chapter offers ideas that still hold relevance today.
While the main topic appears to be the trope of the beautiful fighting girl, Saito’s actual focus is how this beautiful fighting girl emerges as a “remarkable invention of otaku bricolage” (p.31). He posits that only very specific (and Japanese) conditions are able to produce this “fable of fierce flesh” (Allison), and that instead of viewing these girls as symptomatic of feminist advancement/regression, we should go beyond merely cultural analogising and see the way the otaku’s forms relationships with these images as a natural result of rapid media consumption.
Throughout his book, Saito draws on Lacanian concepts like the Real vs. Symbolic vs. Imaginary to urge us not to mislabel what we do not understand. Given that the Real is impossible to access and thus all our conscious experiences can only happen in the realm of the Imaginary, to say that the otaku are divorced from reality is denigratory and borderline delusional. He writes that what we constitute as “everyday reality” is in fact another Imaginary construct, perhaps mediated somewhat by the Real/ Symbolic, but in no way reflecting either. In doing so, Saito makes a strong attempt at rehabilitating the reputation of the otaku, suggesting that non-otaku who believe they are firmly in reality (and hence not neurotic) are in fact in denial; we are all neurotics and we all live in an imagined reality no matter how “real” or material you think your life is.
p.s. - re: the chapter on Henry Darger’s art, I know many critics found it irrelevant/ out of place, but I found it utterly fascinating!
Been a couple of years, but thanks to my resourceful friend I finally got to reread this marvellous book at my leisure instead of rushing through it for an essay. Being translated, of course it’s not the best and the chapters lack unity (on top of the constant deferral of the main argument to the final chapter) but each individual chapter offers ideas that still hold relevance today.
While the main topic appears to be the trope of the beautiful fighting girl, Saito’s actual focus is how this beautiful fighting girl emerges as a “remarkable invention of otaku bricolage” (p.31). He posits that only very specific (and Japanese) conditions are able to produce this “fable of fierce flesh” (Allison), and that instead of viewing these girls as symptomatic of feminist advancement/regression, we should go beyond merely cultural analogising and see the way the otaku’s forms relationships with these images as a natural result of rapid media consumption.
Throughout his book, Saito draws on Lacanian concepts like the Real vs. Symbolic vs. Imaginary to urge us not to mislabel what we do not understand. Given that the Real is impossible to access and thus all our conscious experiences can only happen in the realm of the Imaginary, to say that the otaku are divorced from reality is denigratory and borderline delusional. He writes that what we constitute as “everyday reality” is in fact another Imaginary construct, perhaps mediated somewhat by the Real/ Symbolic, but in no way reflecting either. In doing so, Saito makes a strong attempt at rehabilitating the reputation of the otaku, suggesting that non-otaku who believe they are firmly in reality (and hence not neurotic) are in fact in denial; we are all neurotics and we all live in an imagined reality no matter how “real” or material you think your life is.
p.s. - re: the chapter on Henry Darger’s art, I know many critics found it irrelevant/ out of place, but I found it utterly fascinating!