Revisiting Max Payne

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I rearranged my notes for this, and for once in two years, I’m glad I did

It’s been dog’s years since I rearranged my notes to get to topics I thought would take me longer to complete than normal. Work has had me begging for relief of some kind (more than I can get from a dakimakura or a viewing of my favorite anime):

Unsurprisingly, this is the only SFW version of this I could find.

And outside of The Saga of Lady Rias and Straw Hat Pirate Crusade, I’ve been busy playing a series of games I’ve played before for old time’s sake, and also for some analysis of gameplay and plot details. Additionally, this is going to be a series of posts spanning three weeks, so I’m going to cover the Max Payne series, this week; the 3D era Mortal Kombat games next week, (excluding Shaolin Monks having covered that before); and the HD Mortal Kombat games the week after that. I haven’t gotten through the HD games yet partly because MK9 doesn’t run as well on RPCS3, and it would take a while to grab my PS3 from back home and some of its corresponding games, but this was a quicker and less expensive process. Off topic: American Airlines upsets me greatly.

You may know this as my favorite video game series of all time from this post, but if you’re just joining us, Max Payne holds a special place in my heart. Although it was a culmination of gun-fu cinema that began in the early 1990s, it did wonders to popularize bullet time as a gameplay mechanic helped up by the likes of Hard Boiled and The Matrix. Narratively, the entire series is baked with the type of writing prose that would make The Bard even slightly jealous.

Conjured in a laboratory deep in the recesses of Remedy Entertainment with Sam Lake as its prime director, writer, and face model, the series contains three games all with contemporary settings: Max Payne released in July 2001 set in a brutal winter that may remind some New Yorkers of the city’s worst blizzards; Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne released in October 2003, focusing more on the psychological horror elements; Max Payne 3, doing something completely different by putting it’s titular character in São Paulo, but following some of the same narrative story beats that he’s been through before. So the more things changed, the more they stayed the same… at least on the surface.

This is going to be a spoiler heavy post, but considering I’ve played through the series at least four times before, it goes to show the replayability of the games while also adding in some criticism of the games that I omitted from the first time I wrote about the series.

They were all dead. The final gunshot was an exclamation mark to all that had led to this point. I released my finger from the trigger, and then it was over.

Following a trend that would define select games of the 2000s, Max Payne begins with establishing shot of then-current NYPD-colored vehicles answering to a distress call at the fictional Aesir Plaza. Shots fired/firearm discharges, malicious destruction of public property, numerous charges of manslaughter, and a man who became public enemy number 1 in a New York Minute. Beginning at the end, it works its way back through the narration told in a graphic novel style. NYPD Detective Max Payne in 1998 is offered an accession to the Drug Enforcement Administration by Agent Alex Balder. Max declines and puts away what he promises is his final cigarette for the sake of his infant daughter, Rose’s, health. The offer is still there as Max heads back to his New Jersey home where his family would be.

Unbeknownst to him, his wife, Michelle, and their newborn daughter would be victims of a disgusting drug experiment. The first thing to pop out at Max aside from the dead silence is a tag in the parlor of the house: a V with a syringe running through it like the sword in the Adventure Time logo: the central plot device behind the game, a designer drug known as Valkyr. Next to that, the phone rings and a raspy-voiced woman coldly asks Max to confirm that this is indeed the Payne residence, while he fails to convince her to phone the police. Now that she knows this is Max’s house, she hangs up and leaves him to discover the American Dream being torn to shreds in no time. His loved ones brutally slaughtered by junkies in his own home, Max avenges their deaths there and after the funeral expenses, transfers to the DEA under Balder’s supervision.

Three years of undercover work in the Punchinello family reveal them as the main suppliers of Valkyr by February of 2001. With fellow agent, B.B., Max and Balder are summoned to Roscoe Street Subway Station and are nearly gunned down by the same mobsters in an elaborate robbery through a web of tunnels connecting to a bank where Aesir Corporation bonds are being housed. Max pushes through, though, and stops the in-progress robbery, meeting Balder in the process. Unfortunately for Max, an assassin nails Balder in the head before he’s able to reveal a critical piece of evidence, and to make things worse for Max, with him as the last one to see Agent Balder alive, the NYPD finger him as the prime suspect, so he now has to evade the law while going on his next mission: taking the fight to underboss Jack Lupino himself.

The intricacies and complexities of Mafia hierarchy makes Lupino the second most untouchable man in the underworld, which was what Max expected. Fighting his way through several key figures at a mob-run brothel, Max picks up crucial evidence to clue him in to the wider plot at large. One of these pieces concerns a hooker named Candy Dawn selling sex tapes as blackmail material; the other is the office of Lupino’s lieutenant, Vinnie Gognitti.

An icy rooftop chase leads to Vinnie getting cornered and confessing under duress the location of his boss, who, to put it lightly, has gone mad. “Don’t get high on your own supply” exists for a reason and Lupino is patient zero for why you should never do that. One too many Valkyr injections and the entire Prose Edda sits where his brain should be. Notes collected prior to arriving at his club hint at the frustrations and concerns levied at him at all levels, but Lupino’s lunacy drowned it all out. Taking residence in an occult club, the Ragna Rock, Max explores the gothic revival building in search of the man he believes is responsible for his pain.

You can’t blame Max for pumping Lupino full of lead after their death-defying battle when he squawks at you like this:

Channel: Adddicteddd

Knowing damn well the dangers of Valkyr, Max did to him what law enforcement did to Bonnie and Clyde, the best replica of human Swiss cheese, until hitwoman Mona Sax waltzes in to reveal that Lupino wasn’t even in the right state of mind to try to frame Max for anything, let alone the death of Alex Balder. The real prize lies with the Punchinello family don, Angelo. Lupino was simply a [mad] middleman.

Max can’t refute her claims, but doesn’t. Instead, the only thing he can do is accept it as a lead to the truth. But before he can embark on the warpath to the don’s manor, Mona spikes his drink at the bar. The first of two run-ins with Valkyr puts him into a nightmare he was trying not to acknowledge. He was already living in one, so why put him in another. After that, he’s taken by the mob back to the same brothel he shot up and whacked several times in the head by Francesco “Frankie the Bat” Niagara.

Undefeated and undeterred, Max walks away from the slowest execution to exact revenge on the last of the Punchinello mob, picking up more evidence along the way of the rest of his enemies in the process. Once the Bat is broken in twain, Russian mobster, Vladimir Lem, appears with a deal he can’t refuse. He’s always wanted to say that!

Both men are after Punchinello, and Lem has the means to get him to the don if Max kills a turncoat at the harbor, Boris Dime. Accepting this offer before him, Max manages to anger Punchinello enough to set fire to his own restaurant in an elaborate way to get rid of Max, but the deficit wasn’t worth it when Lem circled back around to pick Max up and drop him off at the manor. Gun-kwon-do ensues and brings Max to the desk of Angelo Punchinello himself.

Crying and begging for a chance to explain himself before the installation of a new ventilation system, the evidence he’s searching for kills him in his own home under the command of the real villain of the game: Aesir Corp. President Nicole Horne. The ruthless, avaricious killer in the midst; the destroyer of Max’s life and livelihood; the one who arguably set the entire series off to begin with. Her lapdogs gun down the mob boss and torture Max with a worse dosage of Valkyr where things get too real for a moment.

Channel: YianKutHexy

The nightmare subsides and he gets his next lead: Cold Steel. A steel mill hiding an abandoned military bunker where the source of Valkyr was found. Stumbling upon Gulf War-era archives, Max makes the same discovery that got his wife and daughter killed three years ago. Following the first of many of Saddam’s Ls, US troops came home with a mysterious illness that today is known only as Gulf War syndrome. Seeing it as a lack of morale, the US government spearheaded a project based on Norse mythology in mid-1991 to invent a drug that would turn our warfighters into war machines.

Four years later, the project was halted due to observations of habit-forming properties and behavior, but being the main benefactor behind the project, Horne was dead set on getting her investment’s worth. Unauthorized, the project was rebooted through dark means and motives. Due to a data leak, Michelle discovered the ongoing project and was thus silenced in order to keep it secret. Horne hoped the junkies, the mob, and the rest of the city would put Max down for her, but proving tougher than a cockroach forced her hand.

Max had seen enough, he had more than enough motive to avenge Michelle and Rose, but there was another loose end to tie up: B.B. Putting the pieces all together, there was a reason he hadn’t seen B.B. since the Roscoe Street Station robbery. Another turncoat, he was also on Horne’s payroll and had been trying to get him killed on her dime. Max realized it late, but better late than never seeing as B.B.’s confirmation as a bent cop had grown irrelevant over the course of the game.

With him gone, Max was contacted by a secret society with deep ties to Horne, the Inner Circle, and its leader, Alfred Woden. The very man Candy Dawn was making sex tapes of for Horne to use as blackmail in revenge and to stop him from pursuing her further.

The amount of influence she had over him as well as the rest of NYC was impossible to measure or imagine, but seeing as she was able to cut the mob itself in on a deal and keep the Inner Circle from going public for years, leveraging their own sins against them, it was a dead ringer for why Max was the only candidate capable of stopping her. Which he does.

Max escapes the attempts on the Inner Circle’s life and heads straight to the Aesir Plaza where the final showdown commences. Numerous obstacles fail to stop Max from getting the revenge he was entitled to, and the fiery send off couldn’t feel any more appropriate, short of hand-delivering Horne to the devil personally.

Channel: KLB TV

His revenge complete, Max willingly surrenders to the NYPD confident that Woden would be a man of his word and bury the charges deep into the hole where his adversaries were sent. But this was merely the beginning of a cacophony of pain.

And we keep driving into the night
It’s a late goodbye, such a late goodbye
And we keep driving into the night, it’s a late goodbye

— Poets of the Fall

After the revenge fantasy of the last game, the conspiracies that were supposed to remain buried reemerged, this time with new faces. The complicated web Max found himself entangled in started to unravel.

This game takes place in medias res, in the aftermath of a mess Max had made for himself, but right before it resolves itself. Woden kept his word and put Max back at his old job, where a new case involving a series of contract killings, reveals an old face once thought dead before: Mona Sax.

The new love interest, she was last seen taking a bullet to the face at the end of the previous game, only for her “corpse” to vanish after a quick exchange of gunfire. She reappears, revealing her connection to the killings, and due to the conflict of interest, Max’s new partner, Valerie Winterson, takes him off the case and apprehends Mona for further questioning. Max is behaving unethically by choosing her over his job, but unbeknownst to him, Valerie herself is another conflict of interest. Being a lover of and enforcer for Vladimir Lem, he and Mona have both started up a feud, one that ties a third series of people Max has faced before: the Punchinellos.

Old enemies return, loyalties are challenged, and the cobweb breaks apart under intense scrutiny. This game, honestly, suffers under the weight of its own conspiracies, but makes up for it in small increments with more weapon variety and the changing of protagonist perspectives from Max to Mona in a couple of chapters. Mona doesn’t play any differently from Max, but is more long distance combat focused almost always seen with a sniper rifle than the armory Max keeps in his pants.

There may be one too many connecting elements in the second game, but the course of events shows its unraveling. No real friends this time around, seeing as you go from gunning after old enemies to helping them help you uncover the series of killings. And it all circles back to Vlad, his bratva connections, Valerie being his personal mole and mistress, and his pursuit of power in the Inner Circle.

Speaking of which, Alfred Woden’s still the leader of the Inner Circle and a sitting US Senator for New York, but a cancer diagnosis is what emboldens Vlad’s hostile takeover this time around, seeing as the old man would be physically unable to challenge Vlad, even personally. Well, thanks to Max’s tenacity in the face of it all, he puts a permanent end to Vladimir Lem once and for all.

Channel: iPhantom3D

The ending credits are supposed to be the original song Late Goodbye by Poets of the Fall, but they’re not included in the linked video. Here’s a separate link.

So I guess I became what they wanted me to be, a killer. Some rent-a-clown with a gun who puts holes in other bad guys. Well that’s what they had paid for, so in the end that’s what they got. Say what you want about Americans but we understand capitalism. You buy yourself a product and you get what you pay for, and these chumps had paid for some angry gringo without the sensibilities to know right from wrong. Here I was about to execute this poor bastard like some dime store angel of death and I realized they were correct, I wouldn’t know right from wrong if one of them was helping the poor and the other was banging my sister…

Cop work is no longer Max’s forte, but even in the final installment, his detective skills come as naturally as a footballer’s natural instincts to kick or block an incoming soccer ball. From playing it Bogart to letting the depression catch up to being done with the world, Max Payne 3 puts our favorite pill-popping, alcoholic in São Paulo, working a private security detail for a quasi-aristocratic entrepreneur family, the Brancos, who are routinely targeted by the local favela hoodlums among other honorable enemies.

Starting at a party for some of SP’s best and brightest, it’s quickly hijacked where Max and new partner, Raul Passos, spring into action to save their boss and his family from impending doom.

Targeted attacks against their boss, Rodrigo, and his trophy wife, Fabiana, were nothing new. The game and the wiki and some marketing material are evidence that they’ve been targeted many times before. This time, it gets worse, and clues in the game point to it being an inside job.

Fabiana was taken by the Comando Sombra gang during a party and the CS send a ransom demanding three million reais for the safe return of Fabiana at a football club after hours. Things go wrong when a rightwing paramilitary known as Crachá Preto ambush the two parties. Max and Passos fight their way out of the football stadium, tooth and nail, but no closer to getting Fabiana back home. In between the leads directing them to Fabiana and the Comando Sombra, the next chapter of the game shows what brought Max to Brazil and why.

It’s shown that Passos found him in a dive bar in Hoboken with the offer of a better paying job that would be a step above simple law enforcement, but the two are ambushed by New Jersey mob brats led by Tony DeMarco. In a crime of passion, Max guns the boy down and has to get through this dollar store posse of Jersey Shore rejects. Away from that, Max hears more about the private security sales pitch but is ambushed by real mobsters in the form of Tony’s father, Anthony Sr.

Back to the present, the impromptu investigation puts them on a boat on the Tiete River where the CS operate a large scale trafficking ring. Fabiana is confirmed to be alive, though suffering under their malice. The two try to close in on the CS and their leader, Serrano, but were outsmarted and outmatched, unable to recover Rodrigo’s wife.

A ruthless favela gang leader, Serrano was marketed as the top boss, but in later game production, and based on the clues, he’s one of several puppets in yet another grand conspiracy, the likes of which would rival any LATAM telenovela. It certainly has the drama of one and was definitely inspired by movies like Tropa de Elite and Cidade de Deus, in case you wanted to see what true police brutality, militarization, and corruption looked like. Incidentally, those two films are the main inspiration for Max Payne 3’s plot.

Back to it, the Crachá Preto make another appearance in this chapter, serving as the distraction to the main event: killing Rodrigo and bombing his office with the survivors inside. Crachá isn’t necessarily responsible for the flames, as their main grudge centers around Max. As for Fabiana’s fate, she was taken by Serrano’s ilk up to Nova Esperança favela, presumably to wring more money out of the remaining Brancos.

Max goes up once again to risk his life for this family he swore to protect, only to fail them once again. Fabiana gets killed shortly before the corrupt 55th Battalion of the Unidade de Forças Especiais conduct a regularly scheduled raid on the favela in search of some fresh meat. The death of the trophy wife reminds Max of another pair of women he failed to protect in the past. Flashback to a late and final goodbye at the Hoboken cemetery before darting off to protecting the rich from the filthy poors, and the mob miss their own opportunity to be rid of Max once and for all, though that wouldn’t matter seeing as how he’d be far and away from the mess to follow.

In the present, Max learns first hand that the brutality and corruption of São Paulo law enforcement firsthand, with the appearance of a PMC and the military discipline of an even more broken junta. Call it a hunch, but I wonder how much of the junta days still haunt Brazil to this day, same with other countries who’ve suffered under such circumstances. In any case, Max is witness once again to the cutthroat gangland violence, as the Brancos lose another son in Marcelo.

Max immediately kills Marcelo’s killer on the spot with his own machete. Fabiana’s sister, Giovanna, is all that remains and Max does succeed in getting her out of Dodge whilst avoiding the Crachá Preto, but is left behind by Passos who picks up Giovanna, pregnant with his child, and helicopters away. Meanwhile, Max is approached by a character we meet earlier in the game, Officer Wilson da Silva, an incorruptible cop and one of a handful in Brazil, all things considered. Da Silva was the one to give Max the names of most of the villains we’ve been introduced to.

He returns to question one of Max’s and Passos’ failures, a job in Panama, ferrying a rich New York divorcée, Daphne Bernstein. Remember when I mentioned that the plot is suggested to be an inside job? Funny enough, it’s not the first instance of one. The Panama job was a set up to get Bernstein and her peers maimed and robbed and use Max as a scapegoat for a botch job, but things go south when Max makes an attempt to be a good man and rescue his client from a rightwing Colombian death squad called the AUP. All in all, Max is only a stone’s throw away from deception.

The mother of all nightmares comes when it’s discovered that the UFE and Crachá Preto have a hand in an organ smuggling operation based out of an abandoned condemned hotel. The corruption runs deep and playing up the themes of corruption and loose ends, Max, for the third time in his life, finds himself at the forefront of a great scandal involving people he’s either supposed to protect or get protection from. This time, it’s wearing a green-yellow-navy blue flag, speaks Portuguese and is the third worst offender of police and military corruption and brutality, as well as being the home of several ratline users after the fall of the Nazi regime.

Serrano, gets a slight redemption, in that Max lets him kill the main surgeon responsible for the organ theft while he deals with the bigger fish, the Crachá Preto leader Álvaro Neves.

The penultimate arc puts him deep in the heart of the 55th Battalion of the UFE, their leaders, Armando Becker and Bachmeyer, and the main benefactor, Victor Branco, the middle child and rightwing politician using tragedy and scandalous donations to fund his struggling mayoral campaign. With Da Silva’s help, the villains behind this wicked plot are put to bed and Max lives out the rest of his retirement as a Brazilian resident of Bahia (or Americana if we wanna get creative), with his voice actor James McCaffrey losing the fight to cancer in December 2023.

James McCaffrey (1958-2023)

All an exciting plot, right? Well, there are criticisms especially of the second and third games to be addressed. Mechanically, an attempt to play the older games on modern hardware runs into problems that will leave Max stuck fighting the physics engine one too many times to count. I’ve gotten stuck on staircases and such trying to get through the first game. As for the second, no such problems, with even the bosses becoming more manageable than simply being tougher to kill in this instance; however, as I’ve said, there seems to be too much intrigue-ception going on. Makes Game of Thrones look like a Roald Dahl storybook due to the complexities–I retreated to the wiki pages to play catch ups.

Two cops in the same department on opposing sides have fugitive/criminal lovers who are getting each other’s way, one attempting to get to the bottom of the Cleaners’ case with the other feigning indifference to let her lover get away and finance his front companies off the corpse of the Mafia, facing an unkillable painkiller addicted cop. Is that a good summary? Do fish piss where they eat?

In my research, I heard that Max Payne 2 was a flop, which contradicts to the praise it gets nowadays with most considering it to be better than the final installment. For what it’s worth, I say that the themes don’t change even if the language does. To defend Max Payne 3, it was a technical marvel, a RockStar Games brainchild featuring many of the minor details and aspects that would bring the following year’s Grand Theft Auto V to its lofty heights for the next decade. Weapons that flow from gameplay to cutscene and vice versa; different exiting messages when you click/press the Exit Game button; some avoidable fire fights; an added focus on bullet camera; an added cover system; and a more realistic arsenal that the player can pick and choose from over the course of the game as opposed to merely picking from an invisible weapon statistic to choose from the numerous weapons you run into in the game. This video linked below shows this in action:

Channel: o Knightz o

2012 in video games was stacked with heavy hitters like Halo 4, Borderlands, Diablo and others overshadowing the game’s release with the previous years’ series still dominating the landscape while the succeeding year’s game release window made for incredible hype, and I was not immune to this. GTA 5 being around the corner and my at-the-time lack of then-current gen hardware meant that I would have to experience the Max Payne series later than normal, but like all those who discovered Avatar: The Last Airbender due to Netflix acquiring the series for streaming in 2020, better late than never. Now we can all enjoy things at our own pace.

If you stuck it out for this long and drawn-out plot summary of a whole series, this is a full-on recommendation of the series as are most of the entries in this blog. Apologies if it was too long or there weren’t enough (or somehow too many) paragraph breaks. For the next series of games to cover, I’m gonna shorten as much as possible.

These days, you can only play these by way of an emulator, but based on my experience, it’s worth the effort and unlike an emulator of a 7th generation console, these all run as smoothly as possible so long as you don’t nitpick too hard.

Did I Really Get Isekai’d with my Mother!?

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How did it come to this?!?!

I’ve made it a point several times that I don’t default to isekai, but I don’t remember clarifying what that means. I make a beeline for shows I find interesting, that some of them are isekai is pure coincidence. I’m not an isekai junkie like Gigguk or an isekai avoider like The Anime Man. I’m in the middle of it, all things considered. Of course, I’ve made it clear that I don’t always find contemporary anime to watch, but the subject of this week’s blog was all the rage when it was airing.

Alternatively titled Okaasan Online, Do You Love Your Mom and Her Two-Hit Multi-Target attacks began life as yet another light novel but from the late 2010s rather than the early 2010s, complete with a manga adaptation as a companion piece running concurrently with the light novel. Shame it was subject to a simple 13-episode series, though this might be par for the course for series that only run for the same length of time as a single US presidential term. The unofficial name for this series is called MILF-sekai and the reasons below explain it better than the cover for the light novel:

The MMORPG parody is strong with this one.

The gist of the story is an ungrateful, angsty teenage boy named Masato Osuki tries to push his clingy mother, Mamako, away. Both of them are suckered into an isekai video game and go on an adventure together, interacting with other characters who have fallen for the same trap. The best joke this series tells is that it plays coy with the incestuous, MILF-y tropes that accompany the genres without exploring them on purpose. The most the anime will do is strip Mamako naked and have her son comedically fall on top of her in the second episode. Damn, I’ve read NTR doujins and felt less cucked there than in this series. That’s pretty much the height of the MILF antics, but the OVA has more to show in that regard.

As far as actual plot goes, Masato’s relatability comes in the form of wishing he were someone else with a doting mother whom he wishes was a different person, at the outset. Then he meets the future members of his party and their mothers and annoying as it may be to have a mom, let alone parents, who embarass you at every turn, it’s better than one with godly expectations or one who can’t help but let their vices enslave them. In the former example, one party member, Medhi, has a mother who’ll chastise her in private for not being perfect like a Cell after losing a competition, leading to feelings of doubt and self-loathing in the poor girl. For the latter example, party member Wise and her own mother, had a frought relationship in real life and used the game as a means to better bond, but when Wise’s mother learned that she could make a harem of men at her beck and call, she made a beeline for that and never went back. At least it beats what this girl was going through:

I’m almost tempted to catalogue some of the worst mother’s in media, but I don’t wanna abandon my faith in humanity just yet.

The show’s ecchi-leaning comedy make it the butt of a few jokes, but it’s not like it doesn’t know what its talking about. It’s different from a thinking man’s anime, but has a lot of the same story beats as one. Between the JRPG satire and the ecchi satire, it tries its best to split them evenly, though lacks in some other areas. I want to blame this on the anime for cramming so much into so little time, but on the whole that does nothing to specify which anime I’m talking about, for this series specifically, that’s an inaccurate and misleading conclusion to draw seeing as the light novel and manga were still running when the anime was airing in 2019, putting it in the category of yet another anime promoting the source material. And as a manga reader, I’d rather explore manga naturally than be given homework. At least not every series does that to me:

I’ll put this one in the timeline somewhere.

So how does Okaasan Online work as a series? Fine… it knocks out the important points like Kazuma at the batting cages, and generally speeds through them in about one or two episodes. But it also doesn’t really explore anything in much detail beyond “here’s a trope, give me my laughs.” Funny enough, the anime doesn’t do this as perfectly as presented. Two characters’ origins with their own mothers are explored, but one such character, Porta, is a one-off. No such relationship status between her and her own mother are revealed in the source material or the anime; she’s simply the little mage that behaves the most like a little sister to Masato and young daughter to Mamako.

Now that I’ve written that, Porta behaves the most like a little puppy or a kitten. The party leader status is shared between mother and son and awkward as it seems to point this out, they’re like the parents to the other three girls even though Masato and Mamako are mother and son. F[Nyan]k, even I couldn’t avoid the incest trope. Again, not explicit or even acted upon in any media, but it’s there.

So, Tiberius, do you recommend it? Eh, I’m indifferent. I watched it all the way through and 20-year-old me felt naughty things thanks in no small part to the visuals. Fast-forward five-and-a-half years later and looking back, it may have served as a gateway to lewder and racier things without meaning to. Basically, what I’m saying is, before, during, and after its run, the series has been outdone. I won’t persuade you to watch it or dissuade you from doing so, just know that while you could sit down and spare some time to give this one a watch, it co-exists with better shows, so don’t expect me to show up at your door at 3AM like this:

Add it to your isekai library if you feel like it.

Unpopular Nerds become Preppy Rebels or Anime Rebel Without a Cause

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A misnomer since it’s a manga as of writing this

Let me know if this sounds familiar, a shy, nerdy girl with a nonexistent social life in middle school redoes herself come high school into a gyaru and becomes the cock of the walk at school with an expanding circle of friends. Quick! What am I describing? A new and circulating manga or an R-rated doujin by Shindo L?

Dark jokes aside, I couldn’t help but draw the comparisons in the first chapter, but delightfully and thankfully, the subject of this manga isn’t about an adolescent girl being coerced into becoming the town bicycle by cliques of parasites. Instead, the manga on the table is a wholesome slice of life appreciation for the gyaru subculture, something I’m intimately familiar with as regular readers may know.

The manga is known as No Gyaru in This Class by Shigure Tokita. I’ve recently wrapped up the eighth chapter and there are currently 20 with many more to follow going forward. Halfway through this brand new manga, there are three central characters: Mirei Nanase, Yushin Mamiya, and Subaru Raisaka. All three were completely different people before the transition to high school — Nanase was a straight A student who put all of her experience points into being the best student in the class at the expense of a social life; Mamiya was in a similar boat; and Raisaka had put all her experience points into sports and fitness.

All three coincidentally chose to remake themselves and get more friends in high school, which puts this manga in the same boat as Komi Can’t Communicate based largely on the main characters’ goals. So far, I haven’t seen either character mention their previous lives in middle school prior to their transformations, though Tokita likes to have fun with the characters in the chapter covers.

I’ve already explained the gyaru subculture, so those who are paying attention may have already spotted the misnomer in the title. The nuances of Japanese popular culture require a reframing of the word “rebel” in this context. It’s not unheard of for Japanese schools to police students’ appearance, even in regard to hair (even though some Japanese have naturally light brown hair), so going purely by this definition, Nanase, Mamiya, and Raisaka are all rebels. In Mamiya’s case in particular, he tried to reimagine himself as a tough guy, but from what I’ve seen and how he’s portrayed in the manga, the tough exterior does nothing to hide his true nature. Nerdy and intellectually gifted he may be, he’s always been a softie, thus inducting him into the Soft-Hearted Brawler trope, though only on a technicality. It’s still early and we’ve yet to see Mamiya throw hands, unlike others who fit this trope.

As for a character who could potentially fit the trope better, Raisaka was previously manufactured like the average anime tomboy complete with the short hair, energy, and fitness levels to match. Comedically, she’s surpassed Usain Bolt when it comes to speed and may just be strong enough to bench press Manhattan Island. If Mugi from K-On! was a different person, she’d probably react like this:

As a gyaru in high school Raisaka is extra taciturn, or she may have already been that way. Either way, the turn around for all three to becoming these flashy new kids on the block is a day-night difference. I’d give to be the one person who recognized either one of them and said, “They’re the last I would ever expect to turn out like that.” High school slice of life may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but I’m enjoying this one quite well. It does well to turn several tropes on their head and the ones that remain in place are executed decently enough to keep scrolling on the screen.

Will this get an adaptation? An OVA? Will it continue on for years? I’ve since retired my Nostradamus powers so I won’t comment on any of that. As far as first impressions of Tokita’s works go, Reddit holds this mangaka in high regard based on other series they’ve done. The fact that one of their manga is being mentioned on this blog at all pretty much guarantees a recommendation, not to fans of their work who would have already started reading once word got around that a new manga was in the works, but to newcomers like myself who want a break from all the heart-pumping, mouth-watering Shonen action. It’s a fun manga about reinventing oneself for their own benefit and getting rewarded with friends and good times. One could argue that the characters are merely lying to themselves and each other for this radical change, but to be fair, no one is really lying about anything and they wouldn’t really need to. Honest characters never have anything to hide or if they do, they do it very poorly. I haven’t gotten to that point in the manga, and while I did say I’m not going to be making bold predictions, I see one of two outcomes: they each reveal what they were in middle school, or they don’t say anything because it doesn’t matter in the long run. There’s really only one way to find out and to that end, Manga Plus, Shonen Jump, and other unconventional manga hosting websites have the series in stock, so you have your pick of the litter, though as with many things, exercise caution.

Middle-Aged Salaryman Becomes Otome Villainess

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Isekai strikes again

Remember when I said that I don’t particularly gun for isekai anime? Well, it’s not because I have strong feelings towards it; it’s quite the opposite. I’m indifferent. A few good isekai will make the rounds and come up on my radar a few months after people finally stop yapping about them… except in this case where I discovered this one due in large part to its upcoming and currently airing anime adaptation that I haven’t been able to access through the usual channels.

Created in March of 2020 (flashbacks), the manga follows middle-aged salaryman and damn near everyone’s Ojiisan, Kenzaburo Tondabayashi, 50something pencil pusher whose reward for the consideration of a young boy’s life is an isekai journey into an otaku blindspot of his that is more of a specialty of his daughter, Hinako: an Otome video game, known as Magical Academy: Love & Beast. For those who don’t know, the Otome genre of visual novels and JRPGs consists of a female protagonist and series of branching story paths that determine the fate of the characters in relation to the MC. More often than not, the MC faces a challenger in the name of the sadistically evil villainess as a competitor for the affections of the same male romance targets.

In recent times, the isekai genre has begun to saturate with a twist on the formula by inserting Truck-kun’s victims into the minds of the listed antagonists. And in the case of My Dad’s in an Otome Game?!, Mr. Tondabayashi is an ultimate fish out of water. Or he is in regard to this specific genre. As luck would have it, Kenzaburo and his wife, Mitsuko, are expert otaku having been adolescents and young adults during the boom of the 80s and 90s. So Hinako’s parents are intimately familiar with some old school anime that have found new life online in memes, not the least of which include this:

There’s a story of a Japanese man who, at his first job in the 90s, spent a significant portion of his paycheck on VHS tapes of Yu Yu Hakusho, Hajime no Ippo, Captain Tsubasa, and Neon Genesis Evangelion. That man now works in a museum where most of his collection was donated. The rest sold well online for a collective hundred thousand yen. I made that all up, but how far outside of reality is that?

As a result of Kenzaburo’s and Mitsuko’s experience in the medium, they practically raised Hinako on the same animanga series that shaped their youths. And like the child of an otaku, she went on to discover her own favorite animanga genres. Something I share personally having grown up on Naruto, Bleach, and Dragon Ball Z, while my mom and uncle were also present for DBZ’s western debut alongside Speed Racer.

You just know a series is influential when the west tries to ape it to mixed results and more than once.

Following the isekai-ing incident, Kenzaburo navigates the game with his limited knowledge unknowingly aided by his family back home. The set up is not dissimilar from tackling a problem with an outdated but still effective solution, sort of like fighting a modern war from the trenches or on horseback. Mounted riflemen!

The fish out of water comedy in this anime is the contrast between Kenzaburo and the in-game villainess he’s currently piloting. A nasty wench named Grace Auvergne, she has a reputation for being as delightful and radiating as nuclear fallout. Toxicity is more than just a System of a Down song and Grace pre-takeover was a textbook mean princess. Berating the help, unrealistic standards, short temper, a cutthroat attitude, and a silver tongue sharp enough to dice your soul like onions on a chopping board.

Post-takeover, Kenzaburo overriding her character has transformed her into a firm but considerate character. She respects her servants equally, lifts their unforgiving standards, lengthens her fuse, and although still confident, she’s not a show-stealing showman. She let’s the game’s protagonist Anna Doll get her time of day, assisting and dare I say playing cheerleader for her.

This is the result of Kenzaburo empathizing as a father, and although I’m currently watching subbed, the comedy has transcended the language barrier. It’s never not funny to watch Grace/Kenzaburo attempt to be an intimidating villain and have his better nature overpower her villainous intent. He’s aware of his role as the primary antagonist, but can’t help but be a gentleman. He simply spent too much of his adult life living well.

Now you may have caught on that I listed Kenzaburo as another of Truck-kun’s victims and he is, but perhaps because he’s built like a brickhouse compared to the popsicle sticks Truck-kun normally runs over, he’s spared death in favor of a coma. So Truck-kun only gets half a point for this. Aside from that, Kenzaburo’s condition is stable physically while mentally he’s extrapolating with incomplete information on a genre he’s not intimately familiar with, but will try his best to play his part. The keyword being try, because the first few episodes do him no favors whatsoever.

As of writing, there’s 8 volumes, 4 of which have been translated online and the anime recently concluded with 12 episodes. Of the available services to watch it for yourself, there’s HiDive, any pirate site for our unscrupulous types, and would you have it: YouTube. For now, anyways. It’s only a matter of time before the Chad uploading them as they air gets the channel terminated for theft.

Channel: WOLF RECAP

Let me use my Made in China Nostradamus powers and say this channel will go under before October 2025. Watch it while its fresh! Or get HiDive; I’m not your boss.

The Bleach Spin-Off that (sorta) Disappeared

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Shame its a one-off

Sometime in 2018, Bleach mangaka Tite Kubo released a one-shot manga known as Burn the Witch, starring two lead female MCs: Ninny Spangcole and Noel Niihashi.

Kubo expanded further and added more chapters in October of 2020, and in March of 2021, it was given a three-episode OVA the length of a movie when combined. On the left in the picture above is Noel Niihashi, a surprisingly well-rounded kuudere and I don’t just mean her uncanny appearance to a capital letter P from the side. Oppai is truth > flat is justice. Don’t let her surname fool you however; though a romanization of an existing Japanese surname, her connection to the land of the rising sun lies in her creator and, in lore, is merely surface level. Like Ninny, she’s a Londoner who’s never even set foot in Japan, but is so in love with the country that if she woke up in Wakayama would have a heart attack seeing the kanji on all the street signs.

Credit: Twitter @9431116

This fanart of her as a Shinigami from Bleach is a great representation of her both in another canon and if she activated her inner weeb past her name. On the right of, there’s Ninny Spangcole, a flat is justice tsundere who tsuns more so than she deres, moonlighting as a singer as her cover. Together, the girls are witches under the organization known as Wing Bind, whose mission is to control flying dragons, hence the name.

Fantastic reading, 10/10. Noel is best girl. I recall keeping track of the upcoming OVA adaptation in the latter half of 2019 and watching it all in full subbed, and as much as I default to dub, I have to come to the defense of subs this time around. Not because I thought the English VAs did terribly or didn’t have a good voice coach, but because of the direction the dub went. On a whim, this came to mind and I decided to look up the dub on YouTube and what made me despair so hard was that the English dub failed to acknowledge the UK as the setting.

I’m not exactly asking for a cigarette-breathed Cockney cocking about, but the manga did such a good job of translating and Britifying the dialogue as shown by the slang. Knickers, mostly, but its the dead giveaway that we’re in London. And sadly the only giveaway as it puts the story in London, but doesn’t do too much with it. A not insignificant portion of it retains its Japanese-ness in the setting and style in some subtle ways. My exposure to contemporary British culture is limited at best, but with some movies like the Three Flavours Cornetto and shows like The Inbetweeners, The IT Crowd, the original The Office and several others, it’ll probably be the closest measuring stick to use to assess the Britishness of a property and in just that department, Burn the Witch is underdeveloped.

I still fully endorse and recommend it be given a read. Even if it’s missing some generic British accents at best to really sell it, it does a good enough job connecting it to Bleach. Yeah, this spinoff is connected to the same property with Noel and Ninny being part of the same Soul Society as Ichigo and crew, just its western branch in London while the eastern branch is in Tokyo.

It’s funny, I initially intended for this to be a rant about the accents in the English dub, but on reflection, it’s not that big a deal. It’s not the first anime to use Americans (majority Texans) to voice non-American characters — you know who you are, Black Butler and JoJo Parts 1 and 2.

I’m kidding, I digress.

As far as recommendations go, consider Burn the Witch as something extra if you’re a Bleach fan, or if it’s been a while since you read/watched Bleach or haven’t touched it at all, then you don’t really need the strongest connection to Bleach to enjoy it. The Soul Society connection is only shown in a single panel/scene anyway. Easy to miss or brush off.

See? Told you she was more than a kuudere, and the fans didn’t even have to touch her like NGE and the Rei Chiquita memes. Also, if you’re still on the fence on the one-shot, this article can give you more insight.

Will there be a continuation or elaboration on this series in the future? Time holds the answer. For now, it’s best to see it as a passion project in the short term. Some one-shots do go on to have more interesting lives and afterlives and my optimistic side sleeps at night dreaming of a world where Burn the Witch continues while my realistic side knows that predicting the future is the most useless thing to do these days. You don’t even have to turn the news on it, the news turns you on… non-sexually, you weirdos.

Who knows? If an old blog post of mine has new relevance thanks to recent events, then the sky’s always been the limit.

Where the F[bells]k are My Balls?!

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Where are they, Summer?

Normally, I’m not one for popular and currently airing anime darlings. You know that by this very blog, but if it wasn’t for Creepy Nuts performing the opening of Dandadan then I probably would’ve given it a wide berth until it died down. Something I’m still trying to do with the likes of Frieren before I let it bless my eyeballs beyond the memes.

Credit: Twitter (x.com@TopGyaru)

I’ll be patiently waiting for a while.

Dandadan comes to us from another disciple of Tatsuki Fujimoto’s, one Yukinobu Tatsu, who like his sensei used his talent to bring us a story about a pair of occult chasers, one nerdy one gyaru and the quest to find the nerd’s testicles.

Don’t bother competing in No Nut November anymore, lads. This boy has won for eternity. But I’m jumping the nutcracker, let’s rewind a bit.

It begins with gyaru and Ken Takakura enjoyer, Momo Ayase, breaking up with a guy after he behaves like a jerk with a load of beef jerky. A final plea is answered with a kick to cheek and before we know it, she drags her depressed ass back to her gyaru friends, Miko and Muko, who do show to have their girl’s back in times like these. In another classroom, aspiring ufologist, coincidentally also named Ken Takakura (though baring zero resemblance to the late actor), reads his space and extraterrestrial magazines in disturbance while other boys pick on him. Typical.

Momo barges in like any other gyaru and equally shows and feigns interest by inspecting his reading material. It shuts the bullies down for the time being, but little Ken goes back to find her, confessing that she’s the first person to ever show even 1% interest in an interest of his. Momo doesn’t really care about aliens, initially claiming they’re not real in favor of ghosts. Ken himself also shows indifference in ghosts and the paranormal. Part of the gag involves the two initially connecting only to fire back at each other with fierce debate over what’s real and what isn’t.

In the first of these gags, we get the plot where they challenge one another to investigate areas of interest notorious for ghost or alien sightings: Ken is challenged to take on the myth of Turbo Granny, based on a real-life yokai of the spirit of an elderly woman said to run 100 km/h. This isn’t the yokai’s first appearance in anime; other references exist, but my favorite comes from season 2 of Mob Psycho 100. In kind, Momo investigates an abandoned building said to be famous for a number of UFO sightings. Both think the other is full of it, and are subsequently proven wrong: Ken gets got by Turbo Granny and Momo is damn near sexually assaulted by the aliens, all of whom are identical and reproduce by harvesting the genitalia of the females of other planets, so Momo’s not the first almost victim of such a thing. Harrowing.

That’s the first episode and it gets even nuttier and squirrel-ier than that, ironic since Ken, from then on dubbed Occult-kun/Okarun to keep the fantasy of the real late Ken Takakura alive, spends the duration of the series finding his nuts hoping they haven’t been taken by wild squirrels. This introduction to the other’s paranormal belief exposes/curses them with supernatural abilities. Momo gains the ability of telekinesis while Okarun gets possessed by the sonic-footed yokai, able to transform into a being with the same powers as the namesake urban legend at the sacrifice of his testicles. The lore differs depending on who’s telling the story, but it consistently shows little variance between tellings. Turbo Granny is said to be the protector of the spirits of young girls who were the victims of malicious crimes. Sort of like if the real life Highway of Tears had a protector deity for all of its victims.

Don’t let this spoiler for the first episode turn you off from the rest of the series or the manga. I’ve said before that I live for the occult and mystery stories like this and Dandadan satisfied that itch for a time. It’s not what I’d call unique, but it’s definitely crazy enough to get a recommendation from me, especially when demons show up halfway through the anime’s run. It’s a supernatural adventure story to retrieve a boy’s d[gong]k and balls. The anime has 12 episodes available for view on Netflix, Hulu, Crunchyroll, and Muse for those of you in Southeast Asia, or your favorite pirate site of your choosing with 18 volumes of the manga continuing the story past that.

Now to live up to this blog’s name and make a declaration: I think Dandadan is a better series than Chainsaw Man. Here’s my explanation:

Characters: the cast of Chainsaw Man are all inherently flawed compared to the cast of Dandadan given that in the former, they’re mostly adults or confused teens. Real-life adults as we know aren’t guaranteed to act their age assuming the adage of “we don’t grow up, we grow old” is true. And CSM is proof of concept. In contrast, Dandadan, though ridiculous, focuses on a bunch of high school kids who I never really expect to be better or know more than the adults, though I’m not really here for that. My viewership comes from the display of supernatural powers and beings f[glitch]ng around on Earth.

Setting: I know CSM is a dark series, but at times I feel it does its job a bit too well in some areas. Denji, through no fault of his own, is an uneducated circumstantial victim. No home, no family or friends that live to see tomorrow, and seemingly no future beyond surviving and finding true love and bonds. A lost puppy who tries no matter how many times he gets kicked to the curb. Meanwhile, damn near every woman he talks to is, for lack of a better term, a hot f[tiger roar]ng mess. Spoilers incoming: Power rarely showers and has the B.O. to prove it; Reze played with Denji’s feelings just to get to his chainsaw heart; the Justice Devil cut down Asa where she awoke with the powers of the War Devil; and Makima, one of the worst offenders so far, groomed and puppeted an absurd number of people. This video explains it more concisely. Dandadan is also quite dark if you think about it, but it has more fun with its premise in an Invader Zim/Johnny the Homicidal Maniac sort of way. There is an existing threat, but consider how embarrassing it would be if an alien race or a ghost or a demon was bested by a 15-year-old. Just about an average episode of Invader Zim, except where Dib gets a W for once.

Plot: Let it be known, dear reader, that CSM debuted in December of 2018. Denji, having no family, wants one as a stepping stone to a normal life, but the world of CSM gets in the way to an absurd degree. Rotten luck or not, forget bad actors being the reason we can’t have nice things — nice things just don’t exist in this world. Dandadan has a similar level of craziness about it, but reading its chapters or watching the anime, there’s no sense of dread or despair. This could be a quirk of Fujimoto’s unpredictable writing in contrast to Tatsu, their storytelling philosophies, the themes in their respective stories or some combination of the lot, but if Dandadan is taking me to an amusement park, Chainsaw Man is burning it down not five minutes after we’re done for the day and went home. Speaking of which…

Art: The grotesqueness of Chainsaw Man is a big give away that the world inside is quite ugly in contrast Dandadan where the world is colorful and quirky and doesn’t take itself as seriously as CSM does. Different philosophies again in the making of the respective manga perhaps, but I don’t feel that Dandadan’s characters are assholes. CSM tends to leave me feeling indifferent with each chapter, increasingly reluctant to wish Denji good luck when there’s no such thing as a guarantee. I used to be able to predict story trajectories, but congratulations, Fujimoto. You’ve done away with the fun of theorizing.

All that said, I still wanna see where Fujimoto is going with Chainsaw Man. Dandadan? I’ve yet to hear news of a second season, and with the manga still running, nothing’s stopping me from picking up where episode 12 ends. Though more to the point, I’m getting tired of anime releasing 12 or 13 episode series. We used to have two-cour series, now we’re lucky if a series’ first season can get more than 10 episodes. I’d rather the Undead Unluck method of 24 episodes like the old days, as long as the animators get to go home.

Revenge of the Shield Bro or Oops, All Lolis

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What Went Right and What Went Wrong

I’ve said before that I don’t make a beeline for Isekai. I don’t love or hate it, I’m just indifferent and for a while I was curious why so damn many anime fell under the Isekai genre as of late, but looking at the goings on in Japan, it wasn’t hard to connect the dots. The same could be applied to much of the rest of East Asia, all things considered. There are still a few Isekai that I enjoy and stop me if these sound familiar: KonoSuba, Overlord, I have plans to watch The Saga of Tanya the Evil, Gate, and probably Re:Zero if more people shut up about it. Technically, I got the gist of what to expect from all of these thanks to the Isekai Quartet parodying all of them.

But it’s no substitute for all of them. Watch the originals or read their source material if you haven’t already.

If we use technicalities, Btooom! counts as the fifth Isekai I’ve ever seen. The Rising of the Shield Hero is one of the earliest I’ve seen at the height of its popularity and according to my watch history archived on Crunchyroll, it was about a month before the pandemic was declared as such. Thank goodness I had something to hold me over until the vaccines were made available. It had a decent starting premise for an adaptation of a light novel from 2013, and wound up living up to its name.

It begins with a college student, Naofumi Iwatani, visiting his local library and thumbing through a magical book that puts him in another world with three other people from alternate versions of Japan. Now that I’ve written that, it took me ’til now to realize that Isekai can be looked at from a multiverse lens than from a reincarnation lens. Anyway, our four noble heroes are awarded four weapons: spear, shield, sword, and bow with shield being the most maligned of the four. For further malice, Naofumi is cursed to team up with what becomes a major antagonist in the series: Princess Malty S Melromarc.

Worse Azula here starts off okay, but after a stay in a motel, she wrongly accused Naofumi of sexual harassment and assault, which burned a hole through the internet at the time due to the ongoing MeToo movement as it was getting hijacked by the worst people we’re forced to share the world with. In a prophetic scene that brings me to the Depp-Heard trial, Naofumi pleaded his innocence, but the kingdom he pledged to serve is a matriarchal society, and using that card to her advantage, she had him stripped of his prestige and ousted, momentarily marked as the Devil of the Shield.

A different series would’ve turned him into Kratos without the family-killing dynamic.

With only a few people to rely on, Naofumi continues on honing his shield skills, and controversially buys a slave. In this world, there’s two types of people: human beings who have the rights and demihumans, blanketly any humanoid with slight anatomical differences, most commonly of the kemonomimi variety, which is applicable to the Thirens of Zenless Zone Zero. This particular slave is a raccoon girl called Raphtalia and I firmly recall the internet falling in love with her for being a reliable companion and most importantly not f[Ore wa!]ng Malty. Even I loved her at one point.

Over the course of the anime, Naofumi occasionally runs into the rest of the dumbasses he was gonna serve the kingdom with, taking snide remarks on the side and dishing them out whilst also proving himself to be more capable in more than just shield tactics. Slave or no, Naofumi taught Raph how to fight as a swordswoman, and act as the offense to his defense. Later, he purchases an egg from which we get a character known as a Filolial named Filo, who can transform between bird and human form; her human form being a loli, which seem to be attracted to him in the same way a planet is attracted to a star. Finally, in the first season, there’s the second princess, the much nicer Melty Melromarc, another loli.

Credit: u/FurySnow47, r/ShieldHero

Guess all the MILFs were taken? Not all of them, though, there is still Queen Melromarc who was conveniently absent until the second half of the first season.

Fortunately, she’s absolutely nothing like her daughter and (spoilers) retries her and her husband, the king, for their harsh treatment and high crimes and misdemeanors on the throne, about to be executed until Naofumi does what most responsible heroes would do and stays their execution in favor of a more humiliating punishment, renaming Malty to “Bitch,” and the king to “Trash.” The first season doesn’t end there, but for loads of people watching, myself included, this was a definite highlight for characters who treated the protagonist like dirt all this time.

Due to the recency bias, an old 3×3 of mine has it included.

This was in August of 2021, one of my earliest Reddit posts. I do still like some of these series, and in the case of Shield Hero, its first season started strong and went demonstrably well. Where does it falter? By most accounts, season 2 is where it starts to fall.

I didn’t watch it due to the reputation it was carrying as it went on and I was too busy looking for employment as well as working with an extremely slow Army recruiter (2022 wasn’t my year (-_-)), but as I understand it, season 1 started strong, season 2 fumbled it but picked it up, and season 3 did better than season 2’s beginning. I don’t think I’ve said it before but I don’t really plan any of my anime watches out. I definitely watch anime, but I don’t set anything in stone; I just follow my whims. I put more planning in the blog topics than I do in my anime “watchlist,” so I won’t say whether I’ll see for myself if Shield Hero S2 is as bad as it says, but more like if I so choose, I’ll have this video linked below to keep in mind:

Channel: LunarEquinox

But my expectations are already nonexistent so aside from all of you dear readers, who else do I need to tell this to?

I enjoyed the first season for what it was at the time. Looking back, if I’m being honest, Naofumi doesn’t have the makings of our modern definition of a hero, he’s written more in line with the old Greco-Roman classical heroes, like Hercules/Heracles or Theseus or basically Kratos from God of War 2005. He’s not the most selfish or intimidating or morally conflicted character, but the cards he’s been dealt and the people he serves makes him question whether he should quit and what good he’d get out of it aside from a good night’s rest for once. Instead, rather than wait on quests to pop out of nowhere, as a white mage of sorts, he doesn’t really need combat to showcase his heroics; when the other heroes leave to claim their rewards, Naofumi stays behind to deliver medicine and sanctuary to the shaken populace, fitting and expected of a shield. See what I did there?

This is probably the first time I’ve felt conflicted recommending a series. Guess we’re transitioning into the S[oink]t That Exists that Makes me Pissed arc, and while it’d be more fitting for a blog meant to present unconventional opinions, I rarely do such a thing. For this series, I don’t recommend you watch as I recommend you experience the series. Season 1 and season 3 are the cleanest they’ll get, but season 2 might be left to the Pick Your Poison method. Can you stomach the reportedly poorly presented first half or would you rather spare your eyes and delve into the light novels? Maybe that’s your approach if you choose to give it a watch. It’s far from the first light novel adaptation I’ve written about, but it’s one with a complicated legacy after 12 or 13 years on the shelves. I don’t recommend going in with a judgmental or comparative mind as thinking about a different series in the viewing of this one may ruin the experience for you. Rather, what you should do is go in as blind as humanly possible and judge it on its own merits. It’s got light novels, manga, and the anime’s 4th season is supposed to release this year. Hopefully, the 4th one doesn’t ruin anything any further… or worse!

BLACK TORCH: Back From the Grave?

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I expect nothing and I’m still surprised…

This came straight from nowhere for a lot of people and right out of a mausoleum for me. I wrote about BLACK TORCH’s lifespan in October 2023 and I faintly recall doing it out of jealousy over a similar manga that debuted the same year it ended.

Just in case it’s clear as mud, I’m not asking for Chainsaw Man to get buried under a keystone shaped burial mound. It earned its place in animanga and I have come around. I am caught up to the manga after all. At the time, I had already accepted that BLACK TORCH had been laid to rest for good, but then I hear through the grapevine that it’s been greenlit for an anime adaptation.

Channel: vizmedia

On the one hand: what the f[guitar riff]k? But on the other hand: It’s not the first time an anime was greenlit from the cutting room floor. Yoshitoshi Abe was able to get Haibane Renmei onto the silver screen; so why can’t Tsuyoshi Takaki?

Now, having written in disappointed praise about BLACK TORCH in the past and snidely remarked at Chainsaw Man’s expense in the process, does this in any way indicate that I’m happy BT was given an anime adaptation? Yes/no. It’s a spark on the stove that caught my eye, but isn’t worth exploring any further until we get more information. So far, we only have the teaser linked above, the article on Crunchyroll which itself is sparsely detailed, whatever the other outlets have to say about the news and the Wikipedia article which reflects the updates.

To find out a little more at the time of writing, I learned that the studio animating it was established in 2021 as a subidiary of another company called HIKE. 100studio, romanized as One Double O, is gonna spearhead the anime adaptation whenever that will be. Based on the teaser, I say that it’s 10% complete. It’ll come out either in the 4th quarter of this year or the 1st or 2nd quarter of 2026 if luck is on our side. As for the studio itself, while can’t speak for anyone else, I just now learned about this studio who apparently produced the series Quality Assurance in
Another World. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

No idea what to make of that, nor even this act of necromancy. But now I have something else to add to my watchlist.

Fat Otaku Today, 10/10 Girl Tomorrow

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Who’s this chick in the mirror? Is that… me?!

You may remember in January when I wrote about my Korean manhwa arc of which a high number of the series put out was pornographic in art. Several series I remember fondly not just for the tits and ass on the page (read: my phone/computer screen), but because of some of the unique premises they played around with. Even some of the very Korean drama-esque stories had something interesting to keep me coming back. Observe:

This one, for instance, called Lady Long Legs, is about a man who pays a debt owed to a businesswoman by becoming her man-servant. There is porn in this one, but slight spoilers, it comes later than you’d think.

Circling back to my post on manhwa, the topic of this post is about a manhwa adaptation I watched in Spring of 2021, a few months out from my first excursion in the Army.

The series is called When I Woke Up, I Became a Bagel Girl and with a title like that, we already have to do a little bit of homework on Korean culture. The term “bagel girl” has nothing to do with bagels, so those of you who were looking out for that, I’m sorry. The best I can do is direct you to the closest bakery or Wawa if you live near one. The term is a play on words of sorts, where bagel girl is a Korean portmanteau of “baby face, glamorous body;” think of it like old cartoons where a smokin’ hot babe is referred to as “babe” or just “dollface.”

The protagonist is a 26-year-old virgin otaku named Bong-gi. No ladies that aren’t plastic or standing in dynamic poses on his shelf, no looks aside from those that cause onions to cry, no hope for the future seeing as he’s in a dead end job, and no confidence unless it’s on a screen in the dead of night. Alright, enough about myself, let’s talk about Bong-gi. Well, a lot of that is true of Bong-gi, so I’m definitely not one to judge. After a s[PS2 bootup]ty day at work, Bong-gi makes a beeline for his PC and games all night, snacking in the process. I mean no hyperbole when I say that’s extremely relatable, at least for me recently.

The next morning, he awakens in his waifu-splashed one-bedroom apartment, clutching his body pillow to answer the door only to discover that there are two large protrusions coming from his chest. He swears on best girl Hestia that he was a man the day before. What happened? Thankfully, he’s also curious or there wouldn’t be a series. An immediate comparison to make for “guy becomes girl” is either Gonna Be the Twintail or Ranma 1/2, but unlike those two series, Bong-gi can’t change gender at will, nor does he have any memory of it happening seeing as it happened in the dead of night while he was fast asleep. It’s also not an action series, but it’s not a pornhwa either, though it does have fun with the genderbend concept.

Just like its concept, the central plot of the series can be considered a bait and switch of sorts. If you went in thinking it was going to be a slice of life, think again. It’s more of a detective series with more beneath the surface than meets the eye. Without spoiling too much of the plot, the entirety of the series is based on this mystery plot with different twists and turns that give it a distinct thriller feel. I’m compelled to compare it to a telenovela or a soap opera.

Now to judge it on non-spoiler-y elements. I read many manga series and watch many anime series, as evidenced by this very blog. Manhwa is still a bit of a blind spot of sorts. As I mentioned above, I had a whole arc dedicated to this medium all through community college, however, but with the animanga scene exploding on its own home turf and abroad, whatever I wanted to watch or read from the Korean side of things has been a struggle. Either there’s not enough of it or it gets buried under a wave of other series from Japan. Tying back to my post on the history of manhwa, local Korean politics may or may not be responsible for this.

The youngest Koreans born under Japanese rule may at best be in their mid-to-late 80s, but the generations following still grew up under a military dictatorship hellbent on warning its citizens of what would happen if they bent the knee to the North in particular and the communists on the whole. As a result, in Korea (and by extension Taiwan), creative minds in both countries have been apprehensive about including anything remotely satirical. Some of the manhwa I’ve read (to include Lady Long Legs) have some reference to a real life Korean concept or even law. I’m a bit ashamed to admit that this was how I learned that the country still has conscription; just goes to show that the true opposite of love isn’t hate, but indifference. There wouldn’t be conscription there if they didn’t care about their wacky neighbor (but to be fair, neighboring the hermit kingdom isn’t easy).

I bring that up once again to highlight why manhwa seems to be getting the spotlight only recently. It could simply be Korean politics overpolicing media as a consequence of Cold War politicking; it could be viewers running out of material during the pandemic and reading whatever’s available; it could be a more subtle form of Korean pop culture spreading, sitting side-by-side with K-dramas, movies, and music; it might be all of these or none of these.

For me, it’s along the lines of adding to my fortress of consumable content. I have so many shows and movies in my watchlist that I barely get through all of them. I can watch a few episodes no problem, but I’m not 19 and my days of watching content ’til 2:30 AM are long behind me. Even if I didn’t have the responsibilities demanded of me by the military, I wouldn’t be able to sit there and browse anime to watch anymore. I’ve done it before, and while I haven’t exactly seen it all, the 24-hour binge is far from ideal or even recommended. I don’t even like 24-hour news cycles; you think I wanna watch the same specific series uninterrupted? For this reason, I adopted a method employed by Adult Swim ten years ago: the Double Shot method. It’s a reference to an old Adult Swim promo from the time.

I can’t find any evidence of it online, but as I recall, the programming block aired two consecutive episodes of a certain show for the hour and continue to the next show in it’s line up. For example, King of the Hill would air Episode 15 at 9 and then Episode 16 later at 9:30. The same for American Dad at 10 and 10:30, then Family Guy or Rick and Morty or China, IL at 11 and 11:30, and so on. So far, it’s a sound method that only fails when I feel lazy. Otherwise, it works. This being the second time, I’ve mentioned manhwa, my crystal ball doesn’t say with certainty whether it’ll come up again this year — I only have the first half of this year filled with blog topics — but it does highly recommend the series. As of writing, it’s available for free on Tubi and there’s generally no pressure to sign up if you haven’t already. As for the manhwa, most manhwa hosting sites are gonna be flooded with pop-up ads on the side for a crappy mobile game or porn site, even if you’re not reading a pornhwa. There’s no shortage of them, but I highly advise you be careful where you choose to read this if that’s more your angle.

Also, this series clues you in to how strict Korean beauty standards can be. Most places tend to be like this, but the cultural shock will give you a headache.

What is Life Without My MMOs? (T^T)

TiberiusLeave a comment

Life is not Daijoubu

On a day ending in Y, I decided to get through another anime in my never-ending fortress: Recovery of an MMO Junkie

Although a manga, it began serialization as a webtoon before getting physical. The story is described as budding romcom between two successful adults, one who abandons the route of salarywoman to become Queen NEET (Not in Education, Employment or Training) and one who is still a gainfully employed salaryman. NEET extraordinaire is female MC, Moriko Morioka, who spends at least 48 hours a day on an MMO called Fruits de Mer. Next to her is the male deuteragonist, Yuta Sakurai, a man in the same position that Moriko left in favor of the NEET life, and more seasoned in FdM than Mori-mori. So much so that he offers to help her learn the game.

The twist here is that both are playing the opposite gender in the game with Mori-mori creating a male character named Hayashi and Yuta creating a female character named Lily. Accurate depiction of gamers thus far, creating eye candy for personal ogling for every 12 hour session.

I couldn’t find any other examples for this. Just know that it’s common, even I do it.

Unbeknownst to the players, however, is their knowledge of each other outside the game. They meet first in passing and then are set to connect over the course of the anime, but in a case of dramatic irony, the viewer is privy to their connection in the game. So while the relationship is developing virtually, reality playing catch-ups to what’s going on elsewhere.

The crux of the series is largely about shutting in from the outside world due to overwhelming circumstances. Life throws so much at people that sometimes disconnecting is a way to recover from the barrage of hits. However, this can easily turn into a double-edged sword if the shut-in/NEET is not careful.

It’s pretty much this meme except the top and bottom images would be separated by a text that reads “[Length of Time] Later” in this specific context. Moriko started off rather well as a salarywoman, but the workload got its own growth spurt and she was unable to keep up the pace. Shackled only to her desires now, she games and goes about her days as she sees fit. As a consequence, her diet is negatively impacted, her sleep “schedule” is interrupted, and I’m pretty sure she touches grass only slightly.

This does touch on a concept that is all too common across East Asia. Most of these nations are culturally collective and most of the societies therein tacitly demand that everyone pulls their weight no matter what. You’re still free to choose the path you walk, but the culture means that whatever path you choose must be committed to absolutely. No slacking, no sticking out; individuality stays home where it belongs. This concept has supporters and critics and writing critically about this, the detriment can at times be twofold. The pace can be too much for some to bear but for those who can stomach it can only take so much, such is the case with Moriko and her choice to become a shut-in.

It’s not unique to East Asia, but it tends to be quite pronounced, especially if the culture reveres the words of its elders extremely highly. Having said that, Moriko’s life as a NEET isn’t the end of the world for her, which sounds like a variation of “I can quit whenever,” but the circumstances that led to her meeting Yuta/Lily do help.

For Yuta, nearly the opposite is true for him. Not a NEET and most likely wouldn’t be one by choice unlike our Queen Moriko. Fruits de Mer is but a hobby that costs a fraction of his earnings, though likely not as much as Mori’s. A socially awkward man using the game to help him communicate, although I call it luck that he met Mori in real life and her character Hayashi in the game, this is a mutually beneficial relationship for them both.

Based on Mori’s past life as an overworked horse, she clearly didn’t have many problems connecting to other people. Yuta, however, does have this difficulty and it shows several times across the series. In FdM, the script is flipped once again, Mori only knew how to brain herself on a bit of crumbling wall in comparison to Yuta who, through experience, learned how to break the wall down with more than just his head.

The series definitely lives up to its name, it falls under the spoiler category all things considered, but knowing the MMO junkie returns to the real world (while occasionally logging into the game) isn’t a turn-off. Matter of fact, the magic is in seeing how the characters develop. I know I mentioned that tuning the outside world can be detrimental, but with the context of this series, it’s both subjective and spontaneous. Each case is unique and whatever gets the person in question to go back to developing healthy relationships varies. There are real-life tragic cases of people dying in seclusion, but there are beautiful tales of people coming back from these dark places.

The series also serves as a connection for those who’ve personally walked down the path of the reclusive hermit. No matter who you are or where you’ve been in life, I wholeheartedly give this a recommendation, especially since it’s bound to connect to a wider audience post-COVID.

Also, Moriko is cute as heck. OBSERVE!

One more thing: this blog post from 2022 offers a more personal story.