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Why Is Anime Obsessed With Power Lines? (atlasobscura.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Why are there so many shots of power lines in Japanese anime cartoons? The Tumblr Power Lines in Anime is dedicated to appreciating the truly lovely and surprisingly ubiquitous depictions of mundane power lines that appear in a large number of Japanese animation series. The blog is run by Tumblr user whitequark, who first started to notice the trend while watching a romantic comedy anime. Anime series can cover any number of genres, including sports, high fantasy, office life, and, of course, science fiction, but no matter what it's about, it seems that if the story is set on modern-day Earth, it will contain some amazingly detailed images of power lines, telephone poles, and other wired infrastructure. While a number of anime series (and cartoons in general), opt for a style of hyper-detailed backgrounds before which relatively simpler characters can interact, power lines stand out for the detail and complexity required to illustrate them.
Back in the documentary "Crumb", on underground commix icon Robert Crumb, R.C. demonstrated how he took a lot of photos and drew scenes from them rather from memory, because it's easy to mentally tune-out a lot of very big, annoying things about modern life: billboards, power lines, transformers. He didn't want to miss them when he drew, so he took photos to force himself to acknowledge them with photos.
Sure enough, once he pointed it out, I realized that was one of the things that made his work both very solid/real and also very gritty. When there's no panels with large swaths of empty, blue sky, it really forces you to acknowledge everything we've put in the way.
In anime, it could be similarly an attempt at heightened awareness/realism, or a form of social commentary, or a subtle nod that the characters are in the Ugly Real World and not the Sparking Virtual Reality or Romantic Past.
You need only look at Tokyo (capital of Japan) to see the mess of power lines that exist in real life.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
I would think power lines are a good sign of the time the story is based. Where it is to represent the present.
The near future normally would be wireless urban setting.
The past 100 years or so, we wouldn't have power-lines, as most lights were still gas in an urban environment.
Out of all other things, they can be drown without much animation.
Also power lines don't date quickly. So a scene with with them will look as reliant for 2017 as it would for 1967 so such shows wont date as quickly.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Supposedly, their power transmission system is based on some sort of high-energy plasma being piped throughout the ship, and every piece of technology they have can be made more or less effective by simply funneling more power into it, even if you have to steal that power from things like lighting or life support. (For example, the computer calculates more quickly, shields become firmer, sensors extend their range and resolution, etc.)
So -- bearing in mind that "pipe more high-energy plasma from one part of the ship to a completely unrelated part" is default behavior in any crisis -- that in mind, it's amazing things don't blow up constantly.
As someone who watches a lot of anime i think this is an interesting question and i am interested in the article. But i still don't understand why it was posted on Slashdot.
But hey, as long as we're asking questions about weird anime stuff, why is it that in high school anime the classrooms are always oriented so that the windows are on the left? (From the students' perspective.) From what i understand this is generally the way real classrooms in Japan are, but that doesn't answer the more fundamental question.
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While this seems like it can be completely explained by "obvious fanservice," there's actually some interesting history here as well. I don't remember full details (never mind a link:P) but it amounts to panties being a much larger fetish among Japanese men than we (as westerners) would expect, due to the history of how panties were introduced to the country.
Basically, because the Japanese were fairly immodest by western standards -- mixed bathing and all that good stuff -- when we started introducing our values into their country we brought with us both (western-style) modesty -- ie: hide your reproductive bits -- and also panties at around the same time. So the Japanese went through a period where you could go to the bath and see fully naked women basically whenever you wanted, but panties were kept hidden and therefore became the forbidden land while in the west, panties were introduced primarily to be an extra barrier against a woman exposing her naughty bits accidentally.
Of course these days mixed bathing is pretty rare (though not completely gone) and girls in Japan tend to be just as self-conscious of their nakedness as we are, but the history still bears its mark both in art and even in life (that's a large part of why used panties vending machines were a thing until the Japanese government had to specifically ban them.. I mean sure some westerners have a fetish for dirty underwear but nobody here would ever dream of setting up a vending machine to sell such things -- the market simply isn't large enough or concentrated enough to bother.)
Another "interesting" thing to watch is the length of girls' stockings. Take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... if you want to get an idea of how much time and energy the Japanese put into what we would consider relatively benign crap, simply because of the way they meshed western modesty and other western ideals into their culture over the past few centuries.