“(8) There was evidence: Kaguya is pale. Girls in anime tend to be pale. Girls in anime that are supposedly Japanese, the viewer presumes, do not really look Japanese. Pale skin, an empirical paradigm, is indicative of this.”

Now I may be misreading you here, but you seem to imply that pale skin means that the person in question is not really Japanese…
I might beg to differ here; in a lot of Asian cultures pale skin and long hair are usually signifiers of classical beauty – this standard has admittedly eroded somewhat in the modern day, but a quick perusal of say, stuff like the Tale of Genji reveals that usually pretty people were described as both pale with long and silky here.
Kaguya’s various mix of icons then, suggest if anything more about her character – she’s the classical japanese beauty (a look that is, of course, befitting of an empress). Not sure if you picked up on it either, but the name Kaguya refers specifically to a Japanese folktale princess as well.

Anyway, the point is that in deconstructing the whole symbology behind character, I think we have to be careful about particular cultural biases – while some tropes I’m sure can be cross-cultural, the target audience at the end of the day is still Japanese – there are certain references i’m sure that have greater salience. Of course, I guess this only applies if you buy into the whole idea that author intention means something, but that’s another debate…

Well, for most of us, it is going to mean whatever we feel upon questioning, or until another party yields a more satisfactory explanation. Still, it is derived from human by humans, and though it that is a given, the context and environment are already bounded upon implementation….

… we can’t escape being/perceiving human.

I am not sure why you are forced to represent a video with an image… I would watch all 25 videos if the subject interested me. Images can capture time quite well, but it depends on who is doing the capturing and what do you mean by “capturing time”.

doe: I feel your disappointment is due to the fact that this post is really, nearly inextricably linked to the third and first post. If you hadn’t read the first, it would probably help greatly. Sorry, perhaps, for making assumptions though.

In layman’s terms, here’s a powerpoint-esque rundown of the post:

(1) images cannot capture time, the difficulty of talking about these without being too tl;dr or coming out of our lazy shells.

(2) syntagms and paradigms are fractal; syntagms are paradigms depending on your frame of reference.

(3) I tried to reduce signs to empirical paradigms, things irreducible like color (what else could you distill out of it?), size, “mass”, etc. This contributes to the developing of the character structure – how the “character”, while being a singular representation, is actually constructed out of a hierarchy of many signs (paradigms) which eventually compose the larger structure (syntagm). If this is not clear or too boring I can’t help much more than telling yourself you got trolled.

(4) I juxtaposed to Kallens, identifying various signs.

(5) This row of signs was the methodological problem. Nayuki’s hand is a complete sign, but it is supposed to be only an empty signifier. Thus the problem here is that, when you see Nayuki’s hand, you think about Kanon 2006 (the signified) when, really, we’re supposed to be thinking about Kallen and Code Geass. Basically, don’t decode Nayuki’s hand as a complete sign, but as an empty, floating signifier which assumes the meaning (signified) of Kallen and Code Geass.

(6) Next I tried to “deconstruct” the image of Kallen with glasses. I was tempted to use Barthesian terms like “first order” (since that’s the kind of stuff in which I’ve been mentally inculcated) but the point is was that “first” denotes hierarchy – the very hierarchy of the syntagm. But just because character structures are hierarchical does not mean the “second” paradigm acts as a proxy or patrol for the first and third. If you alter the third paradigm, the most basic one, its meaning directly alters the entire meaning, it jumps past the second paradigm and straight into the first, that is the entire syntagm. [reiterate toll booth metaphor]

(7) skin color, the empirical paradigm I was using, is always a relevant subject. This part was not just about singular character structure but about recurring paradigms within cast structures (which I’ll talk about in a later post). I always contradict myself and explicitly state exceptions (to circumvent essentialism and absolutism) to avoid trolls from picking apart logic but that backfires at times.

(8) There was evidence: Kaguya is pale. Girls in anime tend to be pale. Girls in anime that are supposedly Japanese, the viewer presumes, do not really look Japanese. Pale skin, an empirical paradigm, is indicative of this.

(9) The last teasing out of the Kallen doujin served to reiterate the syntagm theme. Then there was the conclusion.

If 1300 words is a big ass wall’o'text (with plenty of distracting pretty pictures) I once again pity the state of readership. And then there is the catch 22 of tl;dr vs. incoherence. You never win. I’d guess there was quite a bit of structure in here, but talking purely of blogging/semiotic methodology wouldn’t be appropriate for an anime blog, and just since talking only about anime is a little boring (since I have this weird effect of making anime boring). Essentially, as you put it, this is a post about “gee isn’t this neat”. I wouldn’t write about it if I didn’t think so myself in the first place.

If you’re going to talk about Structure and Methodology, you should do so using Structure and Methodology. State something, it’s purpose, your evidence, instead of gibbering on to make a big ass wall’o'text that quite frankly, seemed to me as if it wasn’t very well planned out.

ghost: I guess there’s going to be at least 6 posts on the subject, there is quite a lot to talk about concerning “the character”. In the first post that rigid “appearance > personality > ideology” model is pretty bad in some respects, so I’d hopefully tease out the problems in the third post, which is proving quite difficult. I had been working on that one for a week, then decided it wasn’t working so wrote up this one in a day.

Geass, being contemporary, is perhaps more subject to the idiosyncrasies of high-budget(?) anime, therefore it has to rely on certain tropes and semiotic conveniences to get the message across quickly and effectively, much to the dismay of any sense of extreme “depth”. There’s a lot more competition out there these days, so to an extent I can’t blame guys that want to put food on the table.

BK: Mmhmmm…