I’ve been loving the latest arc of Re: Zero. No, not that Rem episode (too much crying) or the epic battles of lolis, butlers and wolves vs. flying whales. What I’ve loved the most is seeing Subaru’s descent into despair and madness.

Hatred and Revenge

The best anime are able to elicit strong emotions in the viewer. And boy has Re: Zero. To see Subaru broken over and over again, tortured and forced to watch his friends die. Or to be killed by his friends. Or both. It’s made me more pissed than I’ve felt watching anime for a long time.

And the people who made me the most angry weren’t the ones who actually killed him. I can’t really get mad at the whale— it’s a whale— or at the witch’s cult— they’re fucking nuts. It’s the people who washed their hands of the whole matter, who should have helped Subaru when he asked them for help but chose not to. Especially Green, Purple and friends. Episode 16, where he went and visited all of them, was my favorite.

Subaru may have forgiven them now and made friends, but I sure as hell haven’t. He knows who his real friends are now.

And let me be honest: I want to see them all suffer. I know that Subaru felt the same way.

This arc reminds me of one of my favorite psalms, number 137: Continue reading Thoughts on Re: Zero →

No, I was not a cute loli shrine maiden. Yes, I did spend most of my time talking to a bear. His name was Teddy. We even went to the bathroom together. (So sorry about that time I dropped you in the toilet, Teddy…)

Community

Kuma Miko has made me realize something that’s missing from most anime. A community. Here is the entire social circle of your typical school anime main character:

• A couple of classmates.
• One or two teachers.
• Four or five clubmates.
• The immediate family (often limited to a single imouto, the parents are mysteriously absent).
• The immediate next-door neighbors (but not the family two doors down).

And that’s it. Do anime characters never get out? For comparison, here’s a subset of the people I interacted with regularly in high school: Continue reading Reliving my Childhood with Kuma Miko →

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 →

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.