I came to Tamaki Saitou's Beautiful Fighting Girl with the expectation that it would answer the question I have pondered on for a while now: why does anime have so many "combat" girls? I left somewhat disappointed. The unfortunately abbreviated BFG was, if the translator's opening blurb is to be believed, the first in a opening salvo of critical academic writing on the subject of anime, manga and the subculture of otaku, much of it yet to be translated.

This book is unfortunately academic in the worst possible way. The author evidently expects nothing less than enthralment and in the same way a narcissist babbles endlessly into a microphone, he is content to fumble and meander across a hundred and sixty pages. Compounded by dense language - understandable for a high-level text - and vast swathes of superfluous text, a tip for wide eyed, enthusiastic reader: skip the opening prelude if you want to avoid a barrage of vocabulary smackdowns like: "Insofar as their repetition perpetuates a libidinal attachment to a fictional construct". Suffice to say, if you don't have at least a cursory knowledge of the psychiatrist Lacan and his theories, prepare to persevere as I did or at least gird yourself for further research.

Read the rest of this entry