Asperger’s Anime Blogger: Looking at Lucky Star the Aspie Way

Lucky Star: Exploring the minute details of life from dining habits to studying.

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Lucky Star Episode 2: Lucky Star and the Model Reader

This was my favorite clip from the episode, the imagining of the different dentist services for men and women was quite amusing. The earlier part of the episode was funny too, exploring the ethics and logistics of holiday study, mixed in with some videogaming know-how from the blue haired girl I forget the name of (who oddly enough seems to be the main character, but because most of the four girls look similar apart from pink haired Miyuki with glasses, it’s hard to attach a name to a face).

Lucky Star continues to be amusing, but also a huge postmodern joke on the part of Anime fans who watch way too much of it. Umberto Eco’s theory of open and closed texts makes the joke easier to understand in its own philosophical way (and I bet you thought Lucky Star rots your brain, not so with Eco I say!). Here is what Umberto Eco has to say on the matter, quoted in Gary P. Radford’s On Eco book:

An author can foresee an ‘ideal reader affected by an ideal insomnia’…, able to master different codes and eager to deal with the text as a maze of many issues. But in the last analysis what matters is not the various issues in themselves, but the maze-like structure of the text. You cannot use the text as you want, but only as the text wants you to use it. An open text, however ‘open’ it can be, cannot afford whatever interpretation (Eco, 1979, p. 9).

So if Lucky Star has a “model reader” of otaku as a text, then it is constructed to cater for them. It is a maze of jokes related to all manner of otaku pop culture things, from video games to the rise of manga over literary novels, even a Harry Potter reference got into this second episode of Lucky Star. It clearly has a meaning that can only be decoded by its model reader, the otaku literate viewer.

This may have something to do with why not everybody gets the jokes in Lucky Star, especially newcomers to Anime viewing. What implications this has on my interpretation of Lucky Star remains to be seen, and will be seen as I view more episodes.

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newgeekphilosopher takes on Lucky Star

It’s the show people love to hate. But does it deserve the hate it gets? And what am I talking about anyway?

I’m talking about Lucky Star, of course. This masterpiece of otaku-bait is “slice-of-life”, meaning that it follows the discussions of characters about random things in a way normal people would. Of course, we all know that Lucky Star has characters that are far from normal or completely realistic, but I don’t think griping about the show will solve anything about it.

This post inspired me to look up Lucky Star on Youtube for myself. And boy was I surprised. I was introduced to a world of Anime I did not know, since I usually avoided extremely “moe” shows like this one. But lo-and-behold, eight minutes and forty seconds later I see there’s a charm that is in this show from watching this video:

And I can honestly say it didn’t make me wretch. I have no idea why some otaku find these girls remotely attractive as the objects of their fantasies, because the pink haired one with glasses is the only one who looks anything like a real young woman. And for a show like Lucky Star, it’s easy to judge and snicker at it being unrealistic, but I’ve read, watched, and even written, dialogue that is worse than this show offers. It’s not Shakespeare, but at least it’s not boring. Lucky Star isn’t supposed to be completely about art, it’s entertainment that involves girls talking about everyday things. It’s a slice of life. And I’ll definitely want a second helping.

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