This post will be just a bit more paper-centered than the last posts, ergo the post’s title.
Basically, the layout of this first draft I turned in was
- Introduce mugiwara (a.k.a MG [my personal referential term] or Luffy’s Straw Hat)
- Discuss MG ontology as created by culture
- Discuss MG ontology as creates culture
- Connection betwen points 3 & 4; Closure
While I felt very happy at the delivery and formation of my sentences, specially around the middle of the paper, I felt I needed to garner more insightful ideas. My ideas weren’t superficial, but I think they could’ve connected much farther.
I just watched a little bit of a video discussing the famous French novelist Marcel Proust and his life’s work (Sources at the bottom of post). I liked his ideas of being able to do with writing what his father (a great physician and scientist who helped create a cure for many ills of those times) with medicine. I’m still trying to figure out where to go with my writing, but that is a nice goal to have. With my essay, I know I’d like to have taken my ideas farther by connection more with Japan’s history, and the history of manga in general, consumer culture for manga-inspired items, and also working on my abilities to analogize to create not fluff, but a kind of “ahh” moment for my readers. Ideology isn’t alway easy to get across. Oh, and technology!
I know I could discuss further how big industry has made great efforts to prevail and has much risen in Japan, so much so that it’s reconstructing manners of living for many citizens. I think One Piece may have some criticisms (actually, it probably has many criticisms) of modern Japanese culture, and that this may somehow be related back to the straw hat.
Also, there is the idea of inheritance. Luffy gets the hat from Shanks, Shanks from Gol D. Roger. Why inheritance? It seems that physical items are overwhelmingly part of the arsenal for many action-hero like characters (for most super heroes, we can consider these to be their costumes or their alter ego outfits). The item here doesn’t change much though; but the USER does. This suggests something is stable. Even amongst the instability of the world of One Piece (and, possibly by extension, the real world), something stays at the center, and, moreover, if we were to remove this, total imbalance might be inevitable. The hat does have spherical features, the sphere somewhere in time suggesting perfection, harmony, “full circle”.
These are two points I’d like to more go into for my Cultural Artifact essay, though I still have to tackle the piece about consumer culture of MG merch, and the related ideas there (something like Professor Mason’s work on Thomas Kinkade); at this point though, I’m dry. I’ll have to return or write up a new post once I have something really profound…
Anyhow, thanks!
Video on Marcel Proust: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mLdo4uMJUU