All posts by draggle

I Finally Found a Visual Novel that’s Better than Mushoku Tensei

Video Games

It’s me, draggle, here with my latest excuse for failing miserably at anime blogging.

As you all could probably guess, I like anime. Like many in our circles, I also enjoy Japanese RPGS and manga. But I think light novels are dumb. And I don’t even care enough about figures or cosplay to bother insulting them. And visual novels… my god. What an atrocity. A crime against humanity?

I’ve tried to enjoy visual novels. Probably my first gentle introduction was Utawarerumono. Yes, it’s kind of an SRPG / visual novel hybrid so maybe it doesn’t count. That’s probably the only reason I managed to finish it. It certainly didn’t help my opinion of visual novels that I didn’t realize it was 18+ (I only downloaded it because I had enjoyed the anime without really researching it at all) and my roommate walked in right as the first sex scene started and my computer crashed. Awkward. Continue reading I Finally Found a Visual Novel that’s Better than Mushoku Tensei →

GATE is Terrible Imperialist Propaganda

Discussion,

gate_elf

We’re about at the point of GATE where I stopped reading the manga— the stupid elf girl arc. God I hate her. This show has the most pathetic understanding of human psychology imaginable— her dad is eaten by a dragon, she decides her dad is still alive and he’s actually a foreigner of a different race who speaks a different language, and the only way to convince her her father is dead is to make her kill the dragon herself with a rocket launcher. Ok. For sure, most anime have all this stupid shit about memory loss but none take it to this level. Continue reading GATE is Terrible Imperialist Propaganda →

Thoughts on Panties

Discussion,

I was having trouble sleeping, and I was thinking about panties.

Why are anime and manga so obsessed with underwear? In America we don’t have that kind of fascination. (Or at least… not such a public fascination?) Underwear is seen as gross and dirty. It’s just one step removed from poop.

I was reading this book a few months ago, “The Book of Youkai” by Michael Foster. Great book. One of the majors themes of the book is that youkai appear in “in-between” places, like the twilight or early morning, or the bank of a river. One of the quotes I remember most described Hanako-san, the ghost girl who haunts the toilet on the third floor of the school:

…A toilet— with its hole leading to somewhere else— can be thought of as a kind of portal to another world.

It’s kind of the same thing with panties. They’re a portal to another world.

Perhaps that explains part of the fascination.

We see a number of cases where youkai inhabit panties as well— like the chapter of Youkai Shoujo I just read which made me think about this in the first place, or Sora no Otoshimono.

It’s also well known that by placing a pair of panties on one’s head, one can transform into a hero. Again, their key function is retained as a portal to another world.

I feel pretty confident I’m going to wake up tomorrow and feel really dumb for writing this. Oh well.