Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is a psychiatric anxiety disorder most commonly characterized by a subject’s obsessive, distressing, intrusive thoughts and related compulsions (tasks or “rituals”) which attempt to neutralize the obsessions.(taken from Wikipedia).

AAAH the OCD character. A character destined to make every thing in life germ-free and aligned on a desk straight. Or is that what is happening? OCD typically tends to come in a cycle of 4.

1.Obsession:The intrusive thoughts that make everyday life unlivable normally. Thoughts like, “I can’t shake my bosses hand…what his hand touched a toilet seat, or he just masturbated and didnt wash..” Now normal people just seem to grin and bear it if they even have these thoughts at all, but not obsessives.

2.Anxiety:This is where most of an obsessives’ time is spent. Fretting over whether or not you need to wash your hands 10 or 20 times because your girlfriend pet the dog, then rested her hand on yours. The anxiety part of the cycle is inevitable, and it’s in all of us. When one of those annoying little obsessions pops up, it will gnaw at your mind until you do the next step.

3.Compulsion:The compulsion is the act of fulfilling the obsession. In other words, you accidentally touch the garbage can on the way to your car, and you obsess over how dirty it is and your mind is not at rest until you take 2 baths. At which point you have relieved the obsession and moved onto step 4.

4.Relief:D-Do I really need to explain this one?

After they have completed this cycle, OCD-ers continue on normally until it arises again…Which could happen 3 seconds later, or 30 minutes later. So we’ve got this very intrusive disorder which interrupts everything with worry and anxiety, and it’s being portrayed predominately in comedies?

Most characters portrayed in American TV show no desire to get over their OCD, and many view it as a quirky personality trait. Monica from friends has the symptoms and NBC even sold the character as obsessive, but no one ever thought anything of it. Niles from Frasier is always seen wiping things off only for comedic effect.

In Anime we get a very similar workup of the characters.

Take Soul Eater for example. People see the Death the Kid character and think “LOL OCD is funny”, and while he could have OCD he is a contradiction. He frequently worries about symmetry, and yet his hair is unsymmetrical. Whenever another character brings this up, he goes into depression for a little bit and recovers. This is not how an OCD person would act. If I were that worried about symmetry and had such a glaring contradiction, I would just shave it off, but instead the writers choose to be lazy and keep there for a cheap joke.

Take Chiri-chan from Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei. She is obsessed with symmetry as well, but makes sure her hair is always perfect, and until it is she fixes it. She is used for comedic effect, but at least they make her consistent.

Take Chiaki from Nodame Cantabile. When he visits Nodame’s apartment he absolutely cannot control his compulsion to clean her apartment. Again it was done for comedic effect, but here it poses an interesting dichotomy of Chiaki’s perfectionism vs. Nodame’s randomness.

So what are we to do? Shows without quirky characters seem dull, and too many seems to make the show only appeal to crazy people in the first place.

I propose that all characters be made quirkier. People in real life are weird and have quirks, and aren’t at all like tv makes them out to be. We are all a little OCD at times, and a little depressed. No one person hordes any psychological disorder to themselves…I like to think we all share.

edit:thank you for the quick comment kitsune. I originally posted this a while ago, and the first draft version was preachy and depressing. I edited it finally, and just so you know Kit, I did take your advice and go get some help.

pic not related

this WILL be the last name change…unless i get a lawsuit or something from wittgenstein’s grandkids or animu in latin means hog cock or something

new name=new sense of renewed vigor for regularly posting

now if you’ll excuse me there’s an outer limits marathon on till 4

::picks up bag of chips and shoves mouthful in::

So the Moral Anti-realist is a year old on tuesday, and I feel like i’ve been extremely neglectful.

I had the excuse of “I went to college and had no time to bother with it”, but I left that university.It wasn’t for me. Gonna go to another more prestigious university, maybe i’ll have more in common with those people? Maybe I’ll go to a university with one of my friends from high school?

I haven’t decided yet. But now I’ve got tons of free time on my hands and I figured I’d get back to writing about anime again. I’ve only been keeping up with Gintama, and the episodes of Might Gaine released by that one guy that posts them on /m/. I’ve been spending more of time on watching live action american tv and attempting to read through Spinoza’s thoughts on “The Ethics”, and Nietzsche’s thoughts “On the Genealogy of Morals”.

I started writing a post about the ethics of profanity before I left. So i’ll probably finish it in a few days, and go on to post about something related to something.

So these days its all the rage to compare anime to literature, in particular the catcher in the rye to any anime you can think of. Well fuck that! I’m gonna compare it to Curb Your Enthusiasm

Curb Your Enthusiasm is the metafictional tale of Larry David(co-creator of seinfeld), and how fate seems to have it in for him. Larry constantly finds himself in situations that make him seem homophobic, racist, sexist, offensive, pedophilic, and just like a general all around asshole. Of course to the trained Seinfeld dvd wielding powergeek Larry David is a man who has done nothing wrong. He has nothing but pure intentions at heart. He is a man who knows what he wants, but has no idea of the social norms prohibiting him.

The same could be said of Holden Caulfield.

Holden is a manboy who knows what he wants, but has no idea how to bring about the change he desires. He like Larry David, complains and bitches and moans a lot.

For instance at one point Larry begins to fund a new restaurant along with some fellow celebrities, and the chef he hires is bald just like Larry. Until one day Larry sees him wearing a toupee, and being a general over all “phony”. He immediately gets fired by Larry. I believe if it was Holden the same thing would’ve happened.

Holden, as a character is intriguing and fun, as a person…well he’s just an asshole. The youth in me wants to crank The Pillows to 11 and blaze through the misadventures of Holden the anti-hero. The sensible adult in me sees him as a bratty teenage asshole with no aims in life. Take for instance, when he visited his former teacher’s house to sleep over. Holden awoke in the night to his former teacher petting his face, and freaked the fuck out. Assuming, as a child would, that this was a homophobic pedophilic rapefest. This maybe true, but as with occam’s razor it was more likely that it was a simpler event. Perhaps due to him being an older professor with no kids, he was lonely. Larry david being the childish manboy that he is would’ve likely assumed the same thing.

Insert pederastical rape joke

]]> http://berkles.wordpress.com/2008/08/03/curb-your-enthusiasm-holden/feed/ 2 berkles http://berkles.wordpress.com/2008/07/27/update-me-you-whore/ http://berkles.wordpress.com/2008/07/27/update-me-you-whore/#comments Mon, 28 Jul 2008 03:13:11 +0000 berkles http://berkles.wordpress.com/?p=96 ]]>

My piss-poor update schedule is now a comical character flaw

Sooo, what has old berkles been  up to?

Well I’ve been having a life you ingrates! It’s true I’ve been outside seeing movies, going to parties, making new friends.

Last week I went to orientation for college. Which sucked for the most part, except meeting the philosophy department, that was fun. It was basically 2 1/2 days worth of cheerleading camp…except at the end you have to make a down payment on tuition…

Lately I really havent been watching anime at all….Friday night I went over to JLeeson’s house and we watched some towards the terra with buddies ultimoted, and KrinkleKut.

What I have been doing with my time however, is I have been reading all the Green Lantern I can get my grubby little hands on. Regaling myself with tales of space heroes who overcome great fear with pure willpower(TTGL fans take note), is like comic book crack to me. My favorite comic series will always be Gaiman’s The Sandman, but Green Lantern takes a very close second. However since I am running out of new GL to read, I will soon turn to anime once again. I have been watching Monster and Zeta Gundam, with a few eps of Legend of Galactic Heroes thrown in, but then again shark week is coming…

Fairly recently I read a few articles about anime and escapism. Since I’m far from being satisfied with the current state of some of my posts, here’s some quick filler

I see what you did there!

Anime is and always will be an escape for its occidental viewers. I can only speak for America, but western cartoons are primarily aimed strictly at children. America has always had this godawful habit of denying true philosophical ideas, and any maturity (sexual or otherwise) as “difficult” or “unmanly”. So we dumb down our children and teach them that patriotism and blindly feeding off the teat of America go hand in hand. Children are never taught to actively think themselves. They are taught that TV is good and reading esoteric books are bad. Get a job and fund the american economy. Marry a woman and have as many damn kids as you want. Tithe! Pay your taxes! Vote Republican! America has become an obscene joke upon itself.

However, there is a small cadre of believers who attempt to learn and attempt to teach. It’s almost a war between those that preach enlightenment and those that shove patriotic propaganda down our throats. It is through this friction(synthesis) between knowledge(thesis) and stupidity(anti-thesis) we arrive at our escapist nature.

Yeah I threw in a little Hegelian dialectic..for funsies

Hobbies are the escape between this ensuing feud. We try to avoid both learning and being stupid by doing a relatively mindless thing to ourselves that helps release the stress put on us by both sides. Some fish, some become trekkies, and some watch anime. Blame it on the cartoons we watched in our youth, blame it on America idolizing Japan for its technology, something inside some of us just ignore the world we live in and get lost in whatever anime we happen to be watching. The people that fish probably had parents that idealized the outside ie camping, swimming, or exercise. The people that become trekkies probably had absentee parents and took to watching fantastic space adventures to escape from the pressures of school and the pressures of an american government successfully getting them addicted to whatever they can tax heavily.

So we escape. We avoid reality. What’s that you’re thinking? what about slice-of-life shows? No matter how neatly defined how to the letter how perfectly real any given show may be, thats all it is. A show. There’s one thing that separates the real from the realistic….how the thing being viewed is viewed. If I go outside and watch two squirrels humping I am watching and living in the real. If I download a porn with two squirrels humping no matter how realistic, no matter how good the graphics are, it is still only realistic. Not real.

So why bother escaping when you already lead a slice of life life anyways? Because real life is not interesting enough. We feel this constant pressure on us from both sides of intellect and stupidity so we feel the need to get out of our own heads for a while. We may lead a life like in Lucky Star exactly to the letter. But we as humans feel that constant struggle to escape.

This still doesn’t explain mecha series though. Perhaps due to the phallic nature of the weapons and the ships, or the regressed need to exhibit male dominance through oversized gundams.

In the future expect an actual philosophy book review since I am about to finish Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature have been thoroughly mindfucked by it. In the mean time here’s a Hume joke I’m fairly certain only Michael and Daniel will get.

Clearly he didn’t understand the necessary connection betwixt overeating and being overweight.

‘Beauttocks’ is a perfect nickname. I second it Iknight.

Well since this is my first truly mecha-related post, i suppose I should fill you in. I have always feared to tread into the depths of mechadom. I suppose early in my life I watched Gundam Wing and just didn’t like it(not true, at one point I made my mom buy me enough hair gel so that I could slick my hair back like Chang Wufei). My loathing for all things mecha ran deep into my soul. I loved Fumoffu,but had to force myself to watch the first season of Full metal Panic. The action never really appealed to me I suppose. “How much talent is required to let a mecha fight for you” is how I used to think. Cut to me at the star of my senior year(fall 2007),my loathing of mecha had almost made me miss 2 brilliant shows(Gurren Lagann and Code Geass) simply because they involved mecha and I was being contrary to my friends recommendations. I decided to get over my hatred of the mecha genre by watching all of the Gundam franchise in chronological order. So here I am through 4 OVAs and 1 regular season(I am disregarding my previously watched seasons for times sake) and I’ve come to understand the love for the art of the mecha show. Massive humanoids annihilating each other in space with phallic guns and swords. Fighting for whats right or for whats wrong, being an utter badass(Char Aznable) or being utter faggots (anyone in the Zabi family rings a bell). Mecha seems to separate the /m/en from the /b/oys.

Words normally go here, but they would ruin the picture.

Now that the past is out of the way, let’s move onto the now. I’ve just watched Eureka Seven, and am catching up in Code Geass season 2. Which is what this post is about. In the first episode of Code Geass, when Lelouch is at his old chess playing against rich adult ways. He seems to share what Daniel has already posted as a Machiavellian syndrome. while it is true that Lelouch does display the tendencies of a machiavellian megalomaniac the man he faces of against in this particular game of chess displays a much more intriguing philosophy.

Slightly-limited GAR works

In book one of Plato’s republic, therien lies a discussion in the house of the wealthy aristocrat Cephalus(yes lol Syphilis) between Socrates, Cephalus, and a belligerent Sophist named Thrasymachus. In which Thrasymachus argues that “might is right”, and that”justice is in the interest of the stronger”. Interestingly enough 1500 2300 some odd years later these same philosophies are being spouted to show just how evil the main character of an anime actually is. Sure it came from the mouth of Lelouch’s opponent, but it seems to be a way for the creators to remind the audience how in spite of a recent mindwashing “arc”, Lelouch is an evil bastard. Just last season he was saying things just like this, and later in the same episode he says very similar things.

I needed a picture somewhere in this post just to show how much if a pussy Rollo is.

Why would the creators feel the need to maintain Lelouch’s asshole image? At first the episode felt a parallel universe. Lelouch has a brother? He’s a warm cuddly teddybear? It appears they want us to see how Lelouch could have turned out. The slightest little difference completely rewrites who we are.

for anyone that saw Mulan when they were a child and were blown away by that “be a man” song and also watched Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. YOU WILL CRY MANLY TEARS!

A play about a convict murderer in which the narrator is also the dead brother of the woman who is chastising the convict.

Itsubun fairly recently posted about Hiroki Endo’s manga short “Hang”. The post blew me away with its striking conclusions, and then I read the manga and was fairly impressed. What really got my attention was “For Those Of Us Who Don’t Believe In God.”

“Don’t believe” is about a play being put on by a student theater troupe, and while the main theological enquiries come about through the play, the human perspective is well played out in the side stories of the characters. The theater troupe puts on a play written by one of its own, and the play is about a woman confronting the convict who killed her brother just before his execution. The play carries on as one would expect, the sister no longer believes in God or heaven while the convict is portrayed as an intelligent man who knows of his transgressions, but refuses to believe in heaven or hell.

This isn’t very surprising to me, often those who suffer heavy tragedies don’t believe in or care about God, but the way Endo attributes every last fallacy of his characters as products of child abuse or molestation,is a bit disconcerting. Surely if a child is abused he or she won’t grow into a sadist who writes plays about serial killers (the author of the play) or the masochist who continues to return for more beatings (the author’s girlfriend). The rest of Endo’s characters in his other short stories meet similar depressing fates. It reeks of Bokurano’s vantage point of the human condition.

But in the end we experience catharsis as the dead brother asks his sister to no longer hate the convict as the convict will soon be coming to the brother’s side of “nothingness”. This request seems to be Endo reaching through the page/screen and asking us to forgive one another. He shows us our human drama in the form of the side stroies of the cast and crew of the play, and then he tells us to just forget. There is no heaven of hell there is only nothingness after we die. So we can’t waste our time on hating people no longer around.

Humans constantly define their lives by their knowledge or lack thereof of the next stage of life. We are born we live for a while we die. In that short time we die most of us are exposed to some sort of philosophy or religion which attempts to explain what comes next. we duel and we fight as to who is right and who is wrong. Some people need the crutch of religion and some don’t. We as humans are too busy looking forward and trying to settle our cosmic debts before we get to wherever it is we are going, that we can’t just stop and observe the natural beauty that is on the earth regardless of atheist or christian.

Why are so many bloggers obsessed with this stuff?

Hige’s interesting thoughts on convention have got me wondering why I and other anime bloggers even bother?

Anime is a quirky media form. People either love it or hate it, but most of those that hate it are the uninitiated. People grew up on Dragon Ball Z discovered pornography and never looked back as they matured into booze and drugs in college. They go on to lead “happy” life not waving but drowning in debt and depression. This probably has nothing to do with their rejection of anime, but what if it does? Denying ourselves the things that make happy could ruin our lives. This is a bit of a stretch but so is staying up till 2 in the morning waiting for a fansub to come out and maintain my happiness. So we stay up till 2 in the morning to maintain our happiness and some of us choose to blog about the shows in a way to convey wisdom to others. It’s very rigorous for some, and for others its not. I try to post as much as I can but sometimes its just fucking hard.

I’m the guy thats quick to point out the fault in anything. Whenever someone says anything my mind fills with retorts. Which is why its hard for me to blog about stuff. I try to convey my favorites in a positive light, but I eventually degrade into talking about their faults. Thankfully I’ve got this summer to figure out whether or not to continue blogging into college, but thats neither here nor there. The important thing is that new blogs pop up everyday and the blogosphere balances itself out in the end.

I guess there’s no real point to this other than to say that sometimes blogging is hard to come by inspiration wise. I used to take inspiration for granted back when all I did was read the posts, but now I realize its a precious commodity.