見ないで！恥ずかしい…

Green Green is a fanservice anime, but unlike most fanservice comedies, it’s also a sex comedy. There’s physical comedy like when a dude gets caught trying to sneak into the girls’ locker room that you’d expect to see in a fanservice comedy, but most of the comedy revolves around sex or sex-related grossness. I’m talking stuff like shrinkage, premature ejaculation, fat naked guys thinking that they are seducing anyone and so on.

this scene was as funny as it was unarousing

Despite the fact that I definitely don’t count it as one of the genres that I actually like (although there are still some that I really like), it seems like I watch a lot of harem and fanservice enough. It’s often a cliche that gets used by people that don’t like a particular genre, but genre works really aren’t simply mad libs. It’s just the bad ones that are. If you see enough of them (usually because you’re a fan), you can start to see the variations in the various generic tropes that differentiate the dull and uninspired from the creative ones. Additionally, haters often like to use how generic logic differs from “real-world” logic as a reason why a genre is “bad”, although at the same time connoisseurs or fans will often use times when a genre focuses the generic elements through real-world logic rather than generic logic. Think of something like how in a super robot show like GaoGaiGar, when someone says “BUT THE CHANCE OF SUCCESS IS ONLY 0.00001%!”, generic logic is to say “YOU DON’T NEED PROBABILITY WHEN YOU’VE GOT GUTS!”, while in something like Evangelion that tries to focus it through real-world logic, Shinji’s “It’s hopeless…” is more reasonable.

Continue reading ‘how futari ecchi solves the harem genre’s problems’

E’s Otherwise might be the pinnacle of mediocre anime for me so far. There’s no tension, cohesion, or any real sense of purpose to any of the elements in it. They probably could’ve eliminated most of the characters and I wouldn’t have noticed. They also could’ve eliminated most of the episodes and I wouldn’t have noticed.

this is what they use the psychic powers for in this show for the first like 18 episodes or so: suspending yourself in midair and making cake float to you. FEEL THE ACTION AND THE EXCITEMENT!

Like clockwork, the release of a new Grand Theft Auto game has brought out the fake “outrage” over the fact that ZOMG YOU CAN KILL A PROSTITUTE AFTER HAVING SEX WITH HER! Of course, they always leave out that the fact that it’s because you can kill just about anything in the game. This is not just a facet of the freedom of the gameplay; it’s also part of the series’ critique of American culture. I’m also amused by the fact that in San Andreas, the cops often wouldn’t care when you’d gun down blacks.

Additionally, a lot of the coverage of GTA 4, especially here in New York, has been about the virtual New York in the game. I live right next to the real Sprunk sign, for instance. People have uncovered things like the virtual Ikea in GTA 4’s virtual internet. Wow, I just wrote “virtual internet”. I bet Baudrillard’s head just asploded. Anyway, one thing that I only just learned about today is that that virtual internet also has a faux Match.com. That’s right: you can go around Liberty City taking women out on dates. Not “raping women” or “bashing women’s heads in”, but going on dates. Of course, I find not the least bit ironic that nobody in the media seems to have really thought to try doing this as opposed to killing people or driving a semi into a hospital. I’m also kind of disappointed that I haven’t so far seen any posts on gender issues in GTA 4 other than those outraged ones where they actually like, played the game. I say this not because I feel that they’ve gotten the wrong idea about the game (other than the times when people incorrectly state that you’re supposed to do things like kill cops), but because I’d be very interested in what they do with their virtual environment. I’m reminded of a time 5 or 6 years ago when I read a review of Deus Ex at a Christian video game site where the reviewer almost never killed people and went around instead doing things like giving food to homeless people and helping prostitutes.

And by “second” dating sim? Did anyone forget Bully? I’m still highly amused by the fact that one of the first places that I learned that Bully had a dating system was from a gay gaming website, where when given an open-ended game engine, wondered “Can I go around kissing boys?” and lo and behold, they could.

(And speaking of Penny Arcade comics on Grand Theft Auto, when I read this one for the first time back in the day, I laughed so hard that I was kicked out of the library.)

There’s a pair of topics here which kind of dovetail together. The first was Ashley requesting a tag-in on her post on the Open Source Boob Project, while the second was the embarrassment of the weeaboos at the Sakura Matsuri. Specifically, what is it about anime fandom that draws out the worst in fandom?

Continue reading ‘public spaces, social mores, and idiotic fandom’

Probably brought on by Zyl posting about Kotono Mitsuishi, I’d been starting to try to match up individual seiyuu as to whether their appeal is from their roles or from their persona. One of my textbooks used the distinction here between someone like Robert De Niro and someone like Arnold Schwarzenegger.

First, I want to make clear that this distinction doesn’t valorize one kind of appeal over another (like that the role side is “better” because it emphasizes skill and talent blah blah blah). Secondly, I think part of the difficulty for me when I think about seiyuu, I always feel like I’m a couple years behind the time. This is why I’ll see a show like Kimi Kiss and get excited because I know and/or like a lot of the cast, seeing how they were all popular like 3-4 years ago.

Personally, I had a lot of trouble thinking about this because I’d seem to come up with people in chunks. Most of these chunks seemed to fall onto the “person” side. That said, part of the problem is that I don’t know who a lot of the new whippersnappers are and what is the source of their popularity. I also had a bit of trouble because of the typecasting that generally goes on with a lot of seiyuu. I think of someone here like Kikuko Inoue, who I’ll always associate with Belldandy even though she’s done all sorts of other roles in things like Sakura Taisen, Gun X Sword, Gatekeepers, and so on.

Me? It seems like I’ve got a pretty even split as to which seiyuu I like. For everyone like Mitsuishi or Mai Nakahara that I associate with their roles, there’ll be someone like Norio Wakamoto or Kana Ueda

Remember F-Cup Cookies? Kyle Ryan of the Onion AV Club was in Japan recently and brought back not only a bunch of them, but also of Oppai Jelly. As I’m sure you could guess, they both taste pretty gross and not only do they almost certainly do nothing for your boobs, but may even have some negative side effects.

Also, be sure to read the comments. They’re half of the reason why I read that site.

Macross F is down a little bit from the first episode. This is mainly because as amusing as scenes of Alto accidentally ripping off Sheryl’s top and her teasing him later by telling him to fap to that, they can’t compare to scenes where a member of a spaceship bridge crew spins around and says “CAPTAIN! THE ENEMY HAS BROKEN THROUGH OUR FINAL DEFENSE LINE!” That all said, I know that I’m not the first one to point this out, but man oh man do I wish that I had Ranka’s backpack:

Additionally, I thought that it was a nice touch that Ranka did not win Miss Macross even though she did sing My Boyfriend Is A Pilot (which I totally sang along to on the train and got looks from strangers because of). I bet Alto could’ve won if he entered. Between him and his shota-y looking kouhai (Luca? I forget), this show has some yaoi potential. No wonder his father was so ashamed of him. That whole buttsecksing-kabuki-actors thing is so 1600.

Also, Shirukii’s animated GIF of Klein in her snarky loli form makes me laugh every time I look at it.

If there’s one thing that always makes me scratch my head, it’s the choices that Gonzo makes when adapting a manga into anime. Obviously, there’s just completely idiotic tranwrecks like Rosario + Vampire where they just turned it into a fanservice fest or how just about the only thing that Romeo x Juliet has to do with the play is that it has characters named “Romeo” and “Juliet”. There’s also times when they’re constrained by the medium. The best example here is how they had to tone down Welcome to the NHK. Now, instead of being obsessed with hardcore loli porn, Sato just loves porn in general. The problem is that instead of making him seem fucked up, he just seems really horny. Similarly, when he and Yamazaki wanted to make a loli eroge in the manga, that made them look like they needed help. But in the anime, he just wants to make a porno. The most likely response if he told someone about that would be for all of his fratty douche bros to high-five him while popping each others’ collars, slathering their heads with hair gel, and hosing each other down with Ax body spray.

oh gonzo and your wacky adapting ways

i didn’t realize until just now that my cameraphone was set to a super low resolution which is why this picture is both grainy and tiny

Oh get your mind out of the gutter. Just because it says “udon noodles with sauce” doesn’t mean that it’s that kind of sauce! This just means that it’s cold udon that’s covered with broth! See! And besides, at Mitsuwa you order by numbers, so you can just say “Number 5″ rather than “I want the big chicken bukkake.”