This week’s viewing of Hi Score Girl (ハイスコアガール) was my first experience sitting down with purpose and watching an anime series. This isn’t a genre I would probably reach for again for casual viewing, but I LOVED the animation style and I’m glad to have had the experience.

Even though I wasn’t involved in the video game culture of the early 90s, I felt incredibly nostalgic watching this series. Despite the very ‘Japanese’ characteristics and aesthetic of the Hi Score Girl series, I was also struck by the many parallels to English-language cartoons and references to Western history and pop-culture.

Three key ideas emerged this week looking back through my live tweets:

1. Similarity to Western cartoon genre
2. References to American history and culture
3. Strong sense of nostalgia

Cartoons genre

Very mature-aged themes were mentioned in the television show despite…

This week watching Furie (2018), although I could not partake in the community class live tweeting due some Netflix access problems, I had a brilliant time watching the film this week. Bold female leads hooked me immediately, and were a very bold contrast to Love for Sale from week one. Adopting an autoethnographic and self-reflexive lens for the viewing of the film, it was really beneficial reading Christiane Kraft Alsop’s text using this methodology and his explanation. He noted: The concept and method called auto-ethnography is an attempt  at  practicing… self-reflexivity by having a closer  look  at  one’s  own  longings  and  belongings”, going on to explain that perspective can be changed as a consequent when “the  auto-ethnographer  places  the  self within a social context by connecting the personal and the cultural”.

I loved that the film both played into what I was expecting from an action, martial arts movie, but also turned it…

Adopting an auto-ethnographic lens will be a very interesting methodology to use in this subject and for the final project. As a young, Anglo-European woman coming from a middle-class life in South-East Queensland, I understand that my voice is one of the ones more commonly adopted and perpetuated in the media. Reading the text by Ellis et al, they highlighted that this privileged worldview and mindset will impact how I view and interact with certain elements of my research. Hence, it is critical that I acknowledge my cultural background in order to see how this affects my view of other phenomena. The notion of autoethnographic research being a reflexive process and also a product (rather than simply producing the latter through a more subjective and quantitative method) will be an interesting shift in the way I view research in the coming semester.