The Worst Kind of Newsworthiness

To see news this morning of a fatal fire at the main office of Kyoto Animation in Japan was a hard blow. That it was showing up not just in an online headline list but also near the top of the radio newscast I tune into on the road to work seemed to say the studio was “newsworthy,” but in a way a lot less pleasant than most instances of “anime getting in the news.” My mind flitted in different directions and lighted on John Lennon getting shot, even as I could think of differences between then and now too. What matters more than effects on mere “fans,” anyway (I can acknowledge a touch of nuance to how I’ve reacted to some of their works I have seen, although that could be a matter of me missing subtle points rather than the shape of that work), are the lives ended; that would have mattered just as much with any other small office building set on fire anywhere.