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...
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.
Idoru came out in ‘96 though, I think it would need to be published a decade earlier to be described as prescient to feature anime girl avatars.
In ‘96 anime in America was like Ninja Scroll, Bubblegum Crisis, Dirty Pair, Sailor Moon, Ranma ½, Tenchi Muyo, Macross, and Urotsukidoji
The Gunsmith Cats OVA came out in English in 1996, Eva was 1998 and Cowboy Bebop was 2000.
It was not obvious that it would expand beyond subculture, let alone that the boys would identify with the girls
I don’t know, I saw boys talking about Oh My Goddess in ‘95 and it seemed pretty clear which way the wind was blowing, although the constraints of irc compelled them to keep the stylistic affectations within the bounds of ASCII ^_^
Oh shit I forgot about Ah! Megamisama
Remember Fruits Basket and KareKano?
Remember Chobits?