youarenotthewalrus:

Reading Idoru and there was a scene set in basically VRChat where one of the characters had an anime girl avatar, and on the one hand that’s pretty prescient, but on the other hand Gibson treats the anime girl avatar as something almost as strange and exotic as the VR itself and it is super weird and off-putting. And like, a big part of that is because he insists on referring to the avi as a “saucer-eyed nymph-figure” (and I want to emphasize the nymph part–he uses that word to describe her five times in three pages) with “manga-doe lashes” (sic), but it’s also just… the way that this avatar is treated as something strange and novel in and of itself, the way that words like anime and manga are italicized, treated as exotic foreign words rather than commonplace loans. It’s a sort of uncanny valley effect–an accurate prediction of the future, mundane to the inhabitants of the future, presented like it is freakish and bizarre, because to the author and his audience back in the past, it is–even across as small a gap as a quarter of a century.