Category: doujinshi

The Year in Manga

TiberiusLeave a comment

What I’ve been reading this year

Right before we get to the crux of this post, I had a second look at my notes and noticed a gap between November 28 and December 12. I forgot to fill that in in time so before we properly wrap it up, next week will be something of an intermission discussing a controversial video game even by RockStar’s standards. Here’s a few vague hints: Jack Thompson tried to have it made illegal, it was banned in several countries, including the US at first, and the real kicker, it’s primarily a stealth game, so you get rewards when you knock skulls around without people noticing. Now for the real focus of this post.

The end of the year is on the horizon and before we close out the Year of Cordis Die, let’s recap some of the manga I’ve been pirating. I’ve talked at length about manga I’ve been pirating and recommending for as long as this blog has been up, some series I’ve recommended and others I haven’t mentioned yet. So for this post, there will be updates on what I’ve been reading this year, coupled with some looks at manga I’ve yet to mention on the blog. Here’s some series I have lined up, unordered:

  1. Dosanko Gyaru wa Namaramenkoi/is Mega Cute/Hokkaido Gals are Super Adorable
  2. Torako, Anmari Kowashicha Dame Da Yo
  3. Shihai Shoujo Kubaru-chan
  4. Redo of Healer (T^T)
  5. Hitomi-chan is Shy Around Strangers

Some of these are familiar to the long-timers, others I haven’t spoken a word of once on this blog, even in passing. Take these as holiday recommendations to get you through the time-honored tradition of repeating yesterday’s Christmas songs until Boxing Day.

    Having finished the anime adaptation last year, along with its stellar opening soundtrack, I wanted to continue into the manga. The last episode of the manga covers chapters 31 to 32.5 and right after that the rest is saved for the next season set to air sometime in the distant future when apes walk upright again after millions of years subservient to the superior human and AI starts thinking about installing an emotions software (and those electric f[dial-up]kos can keep dreaming because I want my clankers to be as unaware of the outside world as possible), so after October 2026 or April 2027.

    Now, animanga taking us away from Tokyo because everyone goes there and letting us see the rest of Japan like Hokkaido in this one and Fukuoka historically in Excel Saga (that series doesn’t tell you explicitly that it’s Fukuoka but the mangaka is from there so who else but him, right?) is a neat little tradition when the lights of the world’s largest metro start to get blinding. We’ve still yet to see a mainstream series go to Shikoku (Matsuyama is right there) and until the prefectures on that island band together and spit out a series for us, we’ve got to make-do with RNGesus Japan edition.

    So what has happened ever since Tsubasa charmed these Minnesota-accented Hokkaidoans with his rich boy Tokyo Prefecture charm? Well, I’m still in the middle of that arc but we finally see Tsubasa’s mother, Renka. Hospitalized from running herself ragged trying to raise the perfect Japanese son, it’s a good thing she’s already bound to a hospital bed because knowing a son of hers is besties with a trio of gyaru-tachi would give her a heart attack. Also, it’s interesting that the grandmother, Kaede, is healthier than her own daughter, but that’s the thing about that RNGesus character, he’s a funny guy. Less of a downer than Buddha, all things considered.

    As it happens, Tsubasa was brought to Hokkaido largely to prove that he can excel even outside his comfort zone and on the friends and family front, he has passed, but Renka being the type of mother who’d disown her child on her deathbed for getting an A and not an A+ while also being captain of the chess club and the like concludes that frolicking with the popular girls has led him astray and will return him to Tokyo no questions asked to return to his former glory as a golden boy.

    Not that one.

    Until Kaede, Hirotaka, and Minami herself show Renka that this level of control over the boy’s future and lifestyle is utterly unnecessary, releasing a weight from his shoulders (sort of) under the condition that she be allowed to witness his growth in real time. I’m still reading the manga online and expect to report back either when the second season is announced or around the same time next year, whichever comes first.

    • What the f[punch]k are you lookin’ at, jackass?!

    Japanese subcultures come and go over the years and the subculture that had its halcyon days in the 1970s through 90s was that of the bancho/yankii, the delinquent of sorts. Numerous characters fit the mold from Jotaro Kujo, who was in his element in 1989; to Taison Maeda, who was conceptualized right in the middle of this era at the same time Stardust Crusaders started serializing; from Eikichi Onizuka, who represented the progenitors as they were growing up even at the time, to Josuke Higashikata, who Hirohiko Araki knew would be seen as dated even by 1999 as gyaru were starting to emerge and become more popular.

    Even now as Japan has crossed over into the cholo era (yes, really), some mangaka and anime dedicate characters to a bygone era because nostalgia for an earlier era is not just a time-honored tradition, but a worldwide phenomenon, if fans of pre-revival Doctor Who are anything to go by.

    !EXTERMINATE!

    And I’m not immune to that myself with how often I look for content from the early 2000s, when immediately following a geopolitical tragedy the decade chose to be edgy and serious and smiling was against the law, but I digress.

    Mangaka Nujima got a kick out of introducing East Asian folklore and horror stories in Mysteries, Maidens, and Mysterious Disappearances, but next to that we were given another series, this time about a shy tomboy who gets moved to a rough and tumble high school where the most ferocious girls challenge her… and get humbled at every step. Even the boss Sukeban girl was utterly embarrassed in the first chapter after having her breasts exposed by accident and she hasn’t been able to forget it.

    The translated name is Torako, Don’t Break Anything, and when you’re built like you were supposed to accompany Arthur, King of the Britons on the quest for the Holy Grail, trying not to break s[porcelain]t gets harder and harder, especially when the school you’re in has it as official policy to be a delinquent. Most of the student body looks like it could take on Jotaro Kujo, not necessarily successfully.

    Protagonist Aiko “Torako” Torasawa transfers to a delinquent school and without consent must dodge attacks from the main delinquent girl group that gradually accepts her as one of their own. This manga being an older work of Nujima’s some of what he put in the East Asia version of Urban Legends can be seen in this one. So are there giant boobs in this one as was the case for Whereabouts Unknown? Yes, and multiple… but this is a short series that ran for 20 chapters in 2016. I couldn’t find any associated wiki pages for this series and MangaDex is not the most reliable regarding this information, so I’m adding a pinch of salt to this timeline.

    This series doesn’t take itself as seriously as the other one so funny fanservice is more prevalent than in the other one. Be mindful though that before we got Sumireko’s Oppai of Truth, we have Torako-chan’s Premium Mediums. Would help if we had a medium with premium mediums, but I so far haven’t seen a manga about a fortune teller lady with an average chest size.

    • Before you think about killing yourself, you wanna be my puppet and fall in love with a random chick?

    The official title translates to Ruling Girl Kubaru-chan and the plot of the manga lives up to that ideal with the main male protagonist submitting himself to his female classmate’s whims not by force but by coercion. Given the state he’s in after the first chapter, the poor boy doesn’t have much of an opportunity to resist; he was already driven to ending it all anyway, so the man feels like has nothing worth living for until Kubaru tries to play him like a chess piece. Which fate do you consider the worst? Well, looking at it, no one is playing with a full deck and everyone has problems. The characters all feel real but just about every chapter has a giant layer of what the f[siren]k attached. Someone should go ask Nujima if he can lend some of those Mysterious Disappearances warning signs to this manga instead; the tone of the manga makes it very unpredictable.

    What makes it interesting is that the mangaka’s forewords are always humorous little comments. For example, the main character could be bracing to be a disgusting rape victim and then the chapter ends and the mangaka’s like, “check out this butterfly I found in my backyard.” Dude, your own MC is about to get molested, the f[alarms]k is this??

    The manga starts with Yuto Kiba about to toss himself off the roof, due in large part to a series of misunderstandings that have made him a bad bedfellow to his classmates. Then spunky, eccentric Kubaru proclaims that she can change his life for the better… after he breaks his arm trying to kill himself.

    Alive if not exactly well he may be, that was just the beginning. I’d spoil some of the chapters here, but I don’t believe even some of what’s been going on in this damn manga. Still ongoing, still on MangaDex, and I might dedicate an individual post to the series in the future (gotta move some stuff around for that). Just got to wait and see.

    • (ಠ_ಠ)

    I… was curious… to see what else the source material had in store and, uh… this is a job for the big book of reaction memes.

    (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻

    There’s two versions of the anime and both of their showings are polite. Why do I say that knowing this screenshot exists in the uncensored version?

    Because the manga holds nothing back. I’m serious, the anime was, for lack of a more appropriate term charitable to its cast with all the raping and blasting going on. Visually, it could’ve been even more shocking and the interview between the Rui Tsukiyo and The Anime Man reveals as much:

    Channel: The Anime Man

    (ノ _ <,, )

    I think, if it’s all the same to you, I’m not so sure if I’d like to explore what women consider edgy and dangerous. For a guy, it’d probably be a reading off of every slur and every offensive gesture in every language and culture; groups like the National Socialist Movement and the Klan would have to reconsider their lives having been outdone by the least racist 4channer. A woman’s fantasies–if the internet isn’t completely full of s[honk]t–are being waited on hand and foot by a smartly dressed bison or wolf or lion by day and being bred like the females of these respective anthropomorphic animals…

    Maybe I’ve been watching too many reactions to Shoe0nhead’s video about a certain dark fantasy romance novel that I refuse to name or allude to. Barely counts as romance (and the author needs to reassess what age millennials are, just saying), and that’s the most I’ll ever touch on the subject for the foreseeable future.

    For the finer details of what the manga entails passed the adapted chapters, well, there’s some changes between what got greenlit and what needed to be changed. So dark themes and imagery alone isn’t a deal-breaker, but explicit use of degrading language and BDSM clothing with emphasis on the SM is, especially when a spare-ess princess orders the servant (read: sex slave) to wear it under penalty of death… or worse: unanesthetized castration, and I’ve got the sneaking suspicion that the Jioral Kingdom is familiar with such a tactic, but I’ve yet to prove it.

    (>_<) (~_~)

    Once again, I’m in strong recommendation towards the gender-reverse isekai and the sexual deviant isekai for the simple fact that these two have a lot of fun with the concept. We here in the west have done sex comedy before and animanga shows that it’s not to be outdone. Ecchi is the proof.

    • For such a tough-looking face, she’s actually just really shy.

    Finally, and for a tonal cleanser, back to high school romcom between a short king and his tall, shy, athletic wife. I haven’t been able to keep up with this series as closely as I used to, but I occasionally check in. With the news that it wrapped up serialization in Spring of this year, my excuse trough has gotten lighter with only work and several more animanga series I have saved in, like, 250 other tabs across all my devices and browsers.

    My muscle memory hasn’t evolved past 2005 Internet Explorer

    From the series’ inception until its conclusion, it’s managed to keep a relatively small fanbase over the years, so it doesn’t attract a lot of newsworthy controversy if at all. On the one hand: great, that means less weirdos barge in and try to change things or “literally me” the characters to death; but on the other hand: dang, how do I know what kind of news is going on with the production of this series? Chorisuke Natsumi doesn’t seem to need the media buzz to get his manga off the ground with social media posts from both fans and himself doing that much of the heavy lifting, but as I said ages ago with the creator of Mysterious Girlfriend X, readily available footage of Natsumi are hard to come by, but at least we know this guy is still alive. He just finished a manga this year.

    Still, Scrutinous Saliva Sucker got a little 12 episode anime and there aren’t any hints that that’s next for Sharkboy‘s Shy Sister. If it happens, neat. If not, alright then; numerous manga don’t get an adaptation for ages if at all with some getting greenlit from the cutting room floor. I don’t have any hard and concrete predictions to make for this, short of what I wrote about in a different post covering it at length. All that’s left to say is that it maintains its cutesy, slice of life, wholesome goodness from start to finish with hints that Hitomi and Yuu become more at the end.

    (^v^)/

    Muscle waifu in wedding attire with friends in attendance, the thing that riles me up the most about the genre is that it ends after the couple ties the knot. Can’t we see Yuu as a dad or Hitomi as a mom? Come on now!!

    But at least there’s something to chew on compared to this:

    And again, ecchi is always stellar, but it can shine even brighter with a strong plot. But that’s true of everything in fiction.

      Gender-Swapped Fantasy Isekai

      Tiberius1 Comment

      Stop me if this sounds familiar

      A man gets reincarnated into a world where traditional gender roles a flipped, in that women are the breadwinners who sexually objectify the opposite sex while men are demure homebodies to be seen and hardly heard from even during intercourse. Quick! Which isekai did I describe!?

      If your answer was several, then great news! You understand how unoriginal the premise has become over the years. It may have had a spark in the beginning but with surprise comes formula comes borderline formulaic. There aren’t many isekai that reverse gender roles, but there’s enough to make it seem as though many follow the exact same story beats. Still, the subject of this post caught my eye, largely because of the premise and because it reinforces a meme I used in a prior post:

      In matters concerning the pleasures of the flesh, women and men are equal. But sometimes people get competitive and develop superiority complexes… for some reason…

      The manga in question is actually adapted from a light novel series, and there’s said to be more in the LNs than the manga considering it’s older, but I haven’t touched the LN yet. Anyway the series in question is Virgin Knight: I Became the Frontier Lord in a World Ruled by Women or in Japanese: Teisou Gyakuten Sekai no Doutei Henkyou Ryoushu Kishi. Another isekai, another title that gives away the premise. But let’s not be harsh–for as s[coconuts]tty as the title may sound, it’s not like it has nothing to show for it.

      And this is just the manga cover

      This is going to be written based on what I read in the manga as well as this Wiki page. The LNs were first written online on Kadokawa’s Kakuyomu site in 2021 and the manga followed two years after that, still there’s not a lot of information on the series on either the Wiki or Wikipedia, nor is there any certainty to the future of the series, seeing as the LNs are only four in number and the manga up to 11 chapters. Very little to take the piss out of, all things considered, especially when a more fleshed out isekai like Re:Zero or the Saga of Tanya the Evil have richer Wiki entries, both on that Wiki linked above, their own associated Wikis and plain old Wikipedia. So this post may be more barebones and subjective than my normal output.

      The basic premise is that Japanese adolescent No. 14,289 gets isekai’d, but the manga skips over the isekai-ing event. Maybe it was Truck-kun again, for which I’m curious why no one put out a hit on him yet. He’s bound to have isekai’d a Yakuza or something; would the family not care that one of their kyodai got f[truck horn]ked up or what?

      The protagonist gets reincarnated into a world where the freedoms enjoyed by men for time immemorial are enjoyed by women this time, faults included. So while we have our own male historical figures to study, this world reverses their gender so expect something like Cristina Colombo instead of Cristoforo, Leonarda da Vinci, Georgia Washington, and numerous others. Per this world’s rules, women are selected to be trained as squires and eventually become knights, but our boy, Lord Faust von Polidoro becomes the exception to this rule. This lone male knight surrounded by female knights still hasn’t gotten with the program that this is where men are lesser creatures, and would thus struggle being in a world where women are as comfortable with their bodies as men historically have been.

      This is how the queen dresses by the way. Just imagine a topless fight between two noblewomen in this world. Oh wait…!

      Eh, there isn’t any conclusive evidence that Austrian noblewomen fenced topless, but it’s a fun campfire story to get people’s imaginations running wild.

      The introductory chapters explain how objectified men are, being sold as sex slaves, highly prized (for the bodies) and highly guarded (for the private use of their bodies), in some cases being passed around between every available woman, especially women in power, so theoretically a Viscountess has a private harem consisting of men who engage in any one of the BDSM subcategories. If she feels like sharing, these sex slaves are passed between this hypothetical viscountess and her entourage, always being used, spent, and emptied only to go through it all the next day… or hour.

      By our standards, what I described is a regular day in the Jioral Kingdom Royal Palace, if not worse for the men.

      For less sexually suggestive themes, if you know a thing about Ancient Greece, specifically Athens, then you know that Athenian society made second-class citizens of their women, with all the men having the influence in the day-to-day operations of the city-state from the politics to the foreign affairs to the military to the voting to the education and numerous other aspects of the way of life. It’s the same in this series as well, of course with women filling that role.

      Writing that last paragraph, I just remembered this trope has a name: Lady Land, and it’s precisely what it sounds like. It’s a bit of a divisive trope for portraying what would happen if women in the west had near or precisely equal rights to men, with critics deriding it as paranoid bollocks. Personally, I’m in the same boat. I’ve lambasted the likes of MeToo and GamerGate as having been hijacked and perverted by radical firebrands and the like, but it’s worth committing to memory that movements like this aren’t as big in membership as the Internet likes to fear-monger over. In the case of the Lady Land trope, I could see someone from the 1890s or around that time organizing a list of why women shouldn’t have these rights, but these days such worries would be overblown and truth be told, sections of the Internet would kill to get that kind of sex slave action, failing to understand that love and lust are two distinct concepts despite the overlap.

      As much as I make it sound like this isn’t worth the read, it’s tropes like these that get me thinking about how women used to be treated in legacy media. Age-old comic tropes getting flipped on their head to offer insight on the other side of the fence. Not saying the same dire straits don’t still affect women today, but to treat it as though there hasn’t been any evolution since at least the late ’60s is both a lie and part of a means to completely flip everything in a more female-centric role but for the worse. The terminally online like to think that patriarchy is the source of all ills and either think things will be different under a matriarchy (they won’t) or, worst case scenario, install some sort of matriarchal dictatorship. Silly conclusions to draw, but I’m a “cooler heads prevail” kind of guy.

      Maybe my time watching British content creators gave me a stiff upper lip, it’s hard to take the Internet seriously when it gets like this at times

      Only about 11 manga chapters, the first few introduce the world, explain how this world’s men are like Ancient Athenian women, i.e. possessing only the right to live and exist (typically as a sperm-filled turkey baster for noblewomen), and introduces the characters. The story follows lone male knight Lord Faust von Polidoro being given the floor to speak by the Queen Lisenlotte who makes Scarlet from Scarlet Maiden look fully clothed by comparison.

      Abnormally thick tooth floss for clothing

      Lisenlotte explains that the first princess Lady Anastasia whose set to inherit the throne is the one who gets the most resources against a uniformed standing army while the second princess Valiere is stuck with glorified conscripts to handle barbarians. Master Chief fighting the Covenant while the Reds and Blues glare at each other in Blood Gulch, or sending units in a Civ game to fight Cleopatra or Gandhi VS sending units to clear out barbarians so you can place a settler. The way this is done doesn’t fly with Polidoro (who’s fighting is own chastity belt in the face of obese boobs), who suggests letting Valiere take more professional soldiers with her during this trial. Queen Lisenlotte concedes and allows the royal coffers to flow equally into both her daughters hands, while still casting favor over Anastasia–primogeniture and all that. But the Lord’s pleas to reconsider undersupplying the youngest daughter gets the queen feeling some type of way. The last man to get her this giddy was her late husband, and presumably she feels something for Polidoro but wouldn’t make a move on him as he’s the spare’s advisor, though she contemplates whether letting him stay as the advisor to the second daughter or giving him to the first. Even as a knight, Lord Polidoro is but a piece of meat to these powerful women. Alternate universe female me would write the same thing.

      Scraping away the prominent gender-flip, the tropes in play are quite typical of any old medieval European fantasy and by extension Euro-fantasy isekai stories that the genre loves to exoticize, like in From Bureaucrat to Villainess or My Next Life as a Villainess or I’ve Raped So Many Women that My Penis is Now Trans— I mean, Redo of Healer. Medieval Europe never appealed to me as much as Medieval Japan did, so I admit that I have a blindspot for this period of history as well as a bias towards East Asia, which has ramped up as of late with my viewership of East Asian media, to the point where my YouTube recommendation feed features Japanese YouTube channels, and I’ve found this comedic gem on Netflix:

      The one time I actually give a damn about musicals

      From what little I know of medieval European absolute monarchies, the politics of the world aren’t even hidden. Navigating internal royal politics is its own chore even for the one in charge, as you want everyone else who shares the power with you as well as those who will soon have that same power after you die are satisfied long enough to keep the realm from falling into disorder. Unwritten rules that rulers take to heart historically and when speedrunning the Age of Discovery in Europa Universalis IV or the Victorian age in the Victoria series. Actually, these concepts were catalogued in Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. In the case where war is inevitable, all precautions need to be taken to guarantee a victory, and not just on the battlefield.

      The rest of the chapters are about Polidoro, Lady Valiere, and the entourage they take in battle with them to fight against the barbarians, with select panels dedicated to the rest of the cast, like Lady Anastasia, the captain of the army, the third in line for the throne, Duchess Astarte, and others. The LNs definitely have more content and I may have a light novel arc in the future, mainly to confirm this but more to the point because some series I like have better LN continuations than they do animanga.

      I’ve heard that the light novels vary from the anime and I want to see if that’s true

      The manga so far ends in the midst of a campaign against the barbarians with more to follow, but AFAIK, the mangaka Michizo is hibernating and short of entering the dragon’s lair to agitate the beast, whenever we get the next full chapter or even update, or god forbid, more information on the series, the best we have are crumbs. It’s completely available on MangaDex and other such pirate manga sites, but beware the AI porn ads on the sidebars. S[ooh!]t’s getting out of control, people. The androids must not win!!

      Trunks and John Connor are our last bastions of freedom

      The Shy Shark-toothed High School Tomboy with Resting Bitch Face

      Tiberius1 Comment

      That… could’ve been shorter

      Stop me if this sounds familiar in, not just animanga, but in media on the whole. A short guy way in over his head takes chances with the taller, at times stoic or stoic-presenting girl. By way of his bumbling charm, he wears her down and she agrees to one date. Turns out shortman is a charmer beyond all and the two are an item. Maybe they have a family and live on a tropical island with a talking turtle.

      Admittedly, she made the first move, but Krillin won out in the end, so why split the hairs that Krillin has now been able to grow out?

      Even if you weren’t thinking about a specific pairing, you may have seen it enough times to consider its frequency in media. I definitely have… if only just now. There’s quite a few of these in the trope that come to mind right now

      • Fix-it Felix and Sgt. Calhoun from Wreck-it Ralph: aside from the villain walking away from villainy, the protagonist finds his way into the arms of a top soldier woman, and by the end of the movie, he’s her groom.
      • Krillin and 18: the very picture above clearly didn’t happen overnight. Being the last one left standing when the remaining Z fighters were pummeled by Gero’s Androids, 18 was the one to proposition Krillin with a kiss on the cheek, when she was strong enough to fold Vegeta like a gyoza while 17 punched Piccolo’s and Tien’s spines out. Why the short bald one of all people? Perhaps Toriyama was feeling merciful on our favorite monk.
      • Mario and Peach: there’s probably better couples from the Nintendo Universe, but going to what’s easy, the Italian plumber working in Brooklyn gets suckered into a strange world where mushrooms are enemies, flowers let you throw fireballs, and a giant firebreathing turtle kidnaps a princess. Doing this for over 40 years (happy anniversary, Mario!!), I doubt they’re the progenitors of the trope, but they’re an early example, or at least Mario is from the Donkey Kong days.

      And now the subject of this week’s post: Hitomi-chan is Shy with Strangers

      Japanese name: Hitomi-chan wa Hito Mishiri

      The plot of this manga is that a second-year high school student, Yuu Usami, is taking a train to school and gets the most menacing glare from a scary looking taller girl. He figures out pretty quickly that that’s just her default face (many such cases), and noticing that he’s wearing the same uniform as her, once Usami gets off the train, the girl follows him. He’s expecting some kind of beat down, but she simply walks over to him, looks him straight in the eye… and asks for directions to the high school, seeing as she’s a new student and first year. She eventually introduces herself as Hitomi Takano.

      Sounds awkward in retrospect, doesn’t it? Cold hard truth, I relate to this very much. I’ve been the shy guy and the introvert involuntarily adopted by the boisterous extroverts who have attention at their beck and call. The shy part is getting someone’s attention, whether they’re with someone or not — and the introvert part is choosing to be in another world than with people on average. Not like it’s hard for me to make friends; I do, but there’s only so much I can take before I feel like I ran from the southernmost part of Chile to the Aleutian Island chain. Those of you who absorb geography like Galactus the Planet Eater know what that means. Those who need that spelled out, over 9800 miles/15,800 kilometers.

      An exaggeration, sure, but it feels like this sometimes. This feature of Hitomi-chan is the most consistent aspect of the whole manga from start to finish, but overtime she gradually opens up. Originally, Hitomi only talked to Yuu, but then she met his sister, some delinquent girls, an American exchange student (because the good old red, white and blue needs to make a presence in animanga somewhere), and even introduces these lot to her older brother and little cousin.

      Seems even growing up with siblings can make you deathly shy, though Hinata Hyuga knows this by heart.

      For that matter, tall girl short guy trope also meets gentle giant(ess) trope seeing as she’s quite harmless. She’s a kind girl who hates resorting to violence, but her height (6’1″/185.4 cm), and her intimidating face at rest would usually be enough to scare someone straight, such as her first introduction to the delinquent girls who later became her best of friends.

      If you’re drawing comparisons between this and Komi Can’t Communicate, I haven’t seen or read that series, but from those who have, they claim that her “shyness” is more selective mutism, and there’s this reddit post that claims, she’s a silent extrovert more so than an introvert, and the premise of the series confirms that long before you read the first chapter. Wants to have a hundred friends, lacks the natural charisma necessary. Fortunately, she at least does things the old fashioned way unlike some others:

      Some artists pair her with Konata Izumi to contrast their personalities as otaku, and I say it works.

      Does the series suffer from any flaws? What series isn’t flawed? Even my beloved Max Payne and High School DxD have flaws and the flaws that accompany Shy Shark-tooth Girl are much of the same ones that accompany My Boss is Beautifully Busty. Based on the trope I started this post with, you can bet your sweet bippy it has romance, and like the other manga, it takes 20 years, a career, a marriage, and a divorce proceeding to gain steam, but is still Mercury-making-a-full-orbit faster than Takeda and Takizawa, Sitting in a Tree. Maybe the former is based on teens generally moving faster than adults for the simple reason that adults have more maturity and have more nuances to wade through before popping the big question of whether r/Animemes is really about anime. And in my life, I’ve seen both. High school romances reenacting the Hindenburg and adult romances advancing at the speed of ZZZZZzzzzz…… ah, whah?! Whozzat?

      Sometimes the reverse or a combination of these, and there’s a chance you have as well. Another mark against the manga may be the idealized, romanticized, unchallenged romance. For the most part, there’s few rough patches that test Hitomi’s and Yuu’s relationship, but examining the manga panels closely shows that it does get tested a fair bit. Not so much in the name of drama, but more so transitioning from casual to romantic dialogue, so to speak. The two acknowledge each other’s feelings and are hilariously led to believed that their dynamic needs to change and fit this arbitrary criteria, when in the real world if this happens, the most that’ll change is that the universe stops standing in the way and lets them hold hands.

      Not that adults can’t be this naive either, sheltered and dense adults will struggle with much of the same things teens do when they first start dating.

      To further compare and contrast Cute Shork with Well-Endowed Superior, one is a 4-panel/yonkoma series set in a professional work environment, the other is a typical high school romance. Both put the male and female leads together and have the balls to continue on even after they finally get what their friends and family have acknowledged for ages. AdoraShark has a slightly larger cast though like Russian demographics, the women outnumber the men. In contrast, the smaller cast of the 4-panel manga has slightly more men than women characters, but is still equal. It’s also suited to maintaining this small cast while Hitomi-chan can and has introduced new characters piecemeal, each newcomer melding well with the established cast.

      Even characters introduced at the beginning are given a chance to come back and get properly fleshed out, like the delinquent girls who were first seen antagonizing Yuu, until returning some 60 chapters later with more meat to chew on.

      Chorisuke Natsumi seems to have a type.

      12 volumes running from September 2018 to May 2025, the entire series is available for reading on MangaDex, being spared the grip of the Copyright Coalition in its most DMCA raid on the site. I haven’t heard news of anything in the way of any adaptation or OVAs as of yet, but like all the other times that’s crossed my radar, you can guarantee that I’ll post an update as news trickles out.

      Hentai!!

      TiberiusLeave a comment

      Where culture thrives

      Doesn’t get any simpler than the title, eh? I’ve gotta confess first that I was so busy all week preparing for Army things to last the next few months (not a deployment or rotation, that would last way longer) that I didn’t even think to look at my topics list until last night and even then I was so tired I didn’t have much prepared until this morning save for this opener. Now that I’m well-rested and caffeinated, I’m going to spend this post talking about my journey into hentai, some of my favorite artists, and some updates; one related to work which may or may not have an impact on future blog posts, and one that covers an event in the city where I’m currently stationed.

      Now, what is hentai? If you’ve been around the internet or can call yourself a veteran weeb, you might have instantly thought of an image involving an anime girl, tentacles, or in some cases, both. By which I mean a tentacle girl.

      And there’s a reason the image of tentacles of have stuck with the genre for decades. For as long as art has been a thing, humanity has been sculpting, painting, and carving images of exaggerated and unrealistic human or humanoid bodies, to include depictions of deities. Travel the world and tell me about all the fertility statues you can find. In recent memory, I’ve stumbled upon a photo of this Indian Yakshini statue.

      Shame the head’s missing, but simply what’s left is enough inspiration for countless artists, even today. Observe:

      Credit: Takemi Kaoru, Original Source

      In the context of hentai and overall Japanese pornographic works (live and drawn), the term “hentai” originally carried to connotations denoting strange or inexplicable behavior, not necessarily erotic or sexual in nature. Over time, the term has been so associated with animated porn that search engines preface that the results are censored or otherwise NSFW. For erotic art in Japan, early sources of erotic works of art can be traced all the way back to the Heian period. Theoretically, a daimyo who had some control of the Taira or Minamoto clans at the time likely had a stash of erotic art. Maybe a samurai clan had a treasure trove up until the Meiji Restoration or priceless art where everyone’s bits are out. Who knows?

      One of the most famous erotic artists in history was one Katsushika Hokusai and his painting “The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife.”

      An early depiction of a woman being sexually pleasured by countless appendages and a fixture that will grace the genre centuries later.

      From these humble beginnings, come manga. The associated wikipedia page clarifies that what you think of as manga today meant something completely different during the Tokugawa period. I’m not talking about animanga series set in the Edo period (a completely different topic that I have no problem exploring in the future), manga at this time wasn’t made up of structured stories like a serialization or even a yonkoma. The pictures were unrelated and predictably more difficult to make, but if it can be put into a book format and follow a kind of plot with boobs, d[foghorn]ks, and p[tiger]y playing some kind of part in it (and not just in a playfully teasing manner) then by all accounts it’s an erotic manga. These days, we know them as doujinshi, the Japanese term for a self-published work that not a lot of people realize is itself a broad term not necessarily exclusive to hentai and not always limited to physical releases. Name your favorite artist on Twitter or Pixiv or Bilibili, they may or may not have dabbled in putting plot to artwork. Here’s a sneak-peek of one of my favorites:

      Source: Tatsunami Youtoku

      After manga came adaptations into the form of animation/anime. Classic examples to some of you veterans may include Bible Black or Sailor and the 7 Ballz or for all you Eva fans reading this, the enigmatic Human Salvation Project (the latter of these I found out about yesterday morning). All classics, but none of them are the oldest examples of animated hentai/porn, neither in Japan or elsewhere. Saberspark has an example of one such animation from the late 1920s. His video is below with more details.

      Channel: Saperspark

      I stand corrected, a link to his video is here with more details. The wikipedia page for the short film is also linked. Six-and-a-half minutes and not too out of place for the Betty Boop-era.

      The true earliest form of animated hentai was an Osamu Tezuka directed film adaptation of the 18th-century Middle Eastern folktale 1001 Arabian Nights. There’s two films with the same name released a decade apart in different countries. The American produced 1001 Arabian Nights released in 1959, and the Japanese produced One Thousand and One Nights released in 1969. I probably shouldn’t be surprised that the father of Astro Boy is behind this one. When your contributions kick a genre or medium into overdrive you have to go multiple different places. Still fascinating to see Tezuka’s name on such a thing.

      Not as famous as the 1972 raunchy animated film Fritz the Cat, but preceding that film by about three years puts more points in that basket to me.

      The more accurate adaptation of the Middle Eastern story isn’t the only one with Tezuka’s name on it as he also helped direct a raunchy retelling of Cleopatra’s life. After that erotic and hentai-like adaptations lay dormant and sparsely touched until the mid-1980s. Considering their laws addressing such material is from the late Meiji era when lines on maps were the most important thing in the world, in Japan’s case all hands on deck would be needed for such endeavors and leaving erotica uncensored was grounds for imprisonment. These days, it still is, which is why so many doujins and even live-action porn, known in Japan as adult videos, are censored even though the intended demographic is 18+… I won’t lie, I was a horny teen once.

      I’m not a lawyer and I can’t argue in favor of either censoring or uncensoring Japanese porn and hentai, but what I do know is that the restrictions in place have inspired many geniuses ever since. An uncensored penis is how the artist gets slapped on theirs with a giant dildo bat not seen since Saints Row, but similarly shaped phalluses are not, which is all an artist needs to simulate pentrative intercourse or self-pleasure without the addition of censor bars, pixels, or more recently the lightsaber effect. The earliest of phallic replacements for the penis was tentacles which brings me back to Hokusai’s famous painting. We began with the likes of an octopus or other cephalopod caressing a naked woman’s body and have not looked back ever since.

      Nowadays, references call back regularly to these early depictions of hentai online with comments showing tentacles in any such manner being some amalgamation of “I’ve seen enough hentai to know how this ends.” The genre wasn’t even done evolving. Where else could you find erotic anime-style scenes? Video games. Specifically, visual novels.

      You might be familiar with early attempts at adult video games and the continuing legacy that I’ve found myself a part of recently, and that’s just speaking of the west where earlier depictions have fallen into controversy even in the wild times of the 1970s and ’80s. The time where the sexual revolution helped boost many names in porn and the video game industry hadn’t found its legs yet. The most infamous examples of adult-themed video games with any such action come in the form of the controversial Custer’s Revenge and X-Man, the latter of which is notorious for the pixely depiction of a Civil War and Indian Wars general George Armstrong Custer taking advantage of a bound, nude Amerindian woman.

      Crazy that it took until Mortal Kombat and Night Trap to create the ESRB. Considering this s[bricks]t exists, it should’ve happened sooner.

      From woodblock ukiyo-e print to manga to moving frames to playable frames, having dumped all that lore on the history of anime pornography on you, before I list my favorites, I must make another confession. My history with hentai is simultaneously a blindspot and a poorly-explored endeavor. Some of my recommendations come from the appropriate subreddits, but I’ve made a habit of saving so many posts and links that it’d take longer to find and paste the links into a browser than it would to view it all. As for what I have seen, Reddit’s not the only place I’ve seen what can be classed as hentai. Pixiv, Danbooru, Gelbooru, and even Twitter allow users to view and/or upload porn in some manner, though Pixiv and Twitter require age verification, Twitter especially recently.

      My introduction to hentai actually came in the form of ecchi series like High School DxD and Shimoneta (both of which I’ve written about already). Shimoneta had a message about censorship hidden in between all the boobage and panty shots while DxD didn’t exactly have that same message and was merely about angels and devils with a side of T ‘n A, which sounds like the worst possible way to describe the Neon Genesis Evangelion franchise.

      Credit: u/thot_patrol117, s/EvangelionMemes

      Try not to look for deeper meaning amongst the Eva memes. It’s not the deep. But the franchise definitely is, if you’re willing to take Hideaki Anno at face value.

      I believe I’ve said it before that DxD and Shimoseka were gateways to pornographic animanga and I hold onto that dearly. They got the ball rolling by proudly showing Rias’ tits and boldly displaying the consequences of a horny (read: predatory in this context) awakening and thus led me to discover more hentai series. I’ve seen many and read many but my personal favorites have to be as follows:

      1. I Want to do Sexy Things with my Tall Younger Cousin
      2. Seika Jogakuin Koutoubu Konin Sao Ojisan; and
      3. Twin Milf

      Admittedly something of a one-shot with an incest angle, the central themes of this plot boil down to a tall girl fetish. The fantasy lies in a shorter male scaling a taller female like summiting Mt. Everest on the journey to her Mt. Everests. See what I did there? It also does away with the cutesy embarassed trope. The two main leads are hardly what I’d call shy, in fact, they both confidently know what they want with hints in the doujin alluding to a history of having done this type of thing. What really reels me in is the tomboy trope of the female lead. Cute and playful, she reminds me of Tomo Aizawa from Tomo-chan is a Girl in some ways. Hardly anything deeper than surface level though so those who wanted some drama may have to look elsewhere.

      Created by Kurosu Gatari, it translates to English as Seika Girls’ Academy Official Sanctioned Gigolo. This one does have a plot to go with the mountains and valleys. A man with a friend in debt agrees to share some of that debt to help the first guy get back on his feet, this means he has to repay the remaining debt and to do so he takes a job as a gigolo for an all girls’ school. The test involving sex with the dean of the school, before passing and being allowed to exercise this blessing on a select number of students. The operative logic behind this move is hands-on stress relief seeing as sex is a great way to relieve stress and burn calories.

      Each of the girls is unique in their own right, one of them having deep-seated daddy issues that don’t arise until she reluctantly uses these gigolo services herself where she gradually evolves from bitch of the school to stern hand. Getting d[monkeys]ked down by the school man-whore softens her up so much that it leads to a personality change. From punishing a tiny infraction to brushing it off like a levelheaded adult, I haven’t crossed that bridge yet but with so many stories corroborating this, a little bit of bumping uglies does seem to go a long way. For the male lead, he’s drawn like an ugly bastard, but is merely just a middle-aged gentleman facing an unusual problem. Debt he can handle, but feeling like a hooker to pay some of it off over time was the last thing he was expecting. What makes his situation more tricky is that he’s married with a daughter no older than the girls he’s getting paid to sexually pleasure, so life at home gets extra awkward when his side job is to mingle with girls like this to make some extra cash. So if you want more drama than the last entry’s “tall girl fantasy,” have at it.

      Created by a master of MILF hentai Tatsunami Youtoku, Twin Milf is exactly as advertised on the tin, identical twin sisters with voluptuous body types. A college student and avid soccer player/fan is neighbors with a thick, busty woman. In one such incident, water leaks down into his apartment where she comes down personally to apologize, only for him to accidentally grope her breasts and realize she put something on very quickly (i.e. no bra). From there, he spills the beans to his best bro who’s stuck with a tsundere girlfriend who doesn’t suffer perverts. Main MC presumably runs into his MILFy neighbor again only she’s more perverted than originally introduced and invites him to f[cannonball]k her in her own car.

      It isn’t until after this he realizes she’s a twin and the rest of the series takes off. Like Kurosu Gatari, Tatsunami has a type and it’s a woman so thick the clapping of her ass cheeks alerts all of Western Australia and part of Jakarta.

      These aren’t exhaustive recommendations as I have more from the same artists and then some so consider this another gateway that I’ll leave open for you to enter.

      Now for those updates: without revealing too much, starting on June 16 and continuing until October, my unit will be travelling periodically back and forth between Fort Bliss in El Paso and a missile range in New Mexico. Thankfully, the first week will only be about three days long since Juneteenth is a federal holiday that I have off, so I can get the next topic out in time. We won’t be there during the weekends to my understanding so until later this year the posts will see a Saturday or Sunday release at the latest. If not, then delays are to be expected.

      For the event happing in El Paso, I’m currently writing this whilst I have a ticket to an anime convention in El Paso lasting June 14 and 15 until the evening hours. I don’t exactly plan to write about my experiences in detail as each one is different, but it will be my first one in a different city, having attended one in Augusta during AIT last June. If I do, it’ll be more spur of the moment than regularly scheduled.