The accursed year of 2020 was a lot of things to people and only a few of those things were good. I recall searching for something to occupy my time while trapped in the dungeon and going back to that Looper article, I thought about looking for a review for a certain anime I’d definitely not heard of prior to reading it: House of Five Leaves, known in Japanese as Sarai-ya Goyou. Created by Natsume Ono.
Set during the Edo period, it’s about a samurai warrior named Akitsu Masanosuke who very much has the skills of a seasoned warrior, but his timid demeanor loses him a client. The perfect samurai is meant to be intimidating, tough, and unflinching and this guy is shy, unassuming, and nervous. Sort of like Season 1 Mob.
Masanosuke doesn’t really meet the expectations or idea of a warrior even for the time period, which is the point of the series. It takes all the tropes associated with most samurai media and flips them on their head while also grounding the Edo period into reality. One could reasonably put two and two together based on what they know about the Tokugawa period and the Sakoku policy that a class of people defined by war in a time where there aren’t any wars anymore makes for a band of money-hungry and utterly reckless scoundrels… for the most part.
In reality, most samurai were just as diabolically malicious as the enemies they claimed to defeat in combat. Just like medieval knights, both of these warriors have a lot of stories real and mythical surrounding them.
This doesn’t reflect either class as a whole as lots of knights and samurai did have human decency and protect the weak as servants of the people, but being of nobility in Europe and Japan respectively, it meant that there was a lot of power shared by a diverse group of people of different thoughts and intentions. Focusing on Japan, some samurai were excellent and deserving of their position, others were fine with just the bare minimum of simply being there and the rest were heinously dangerous criminals abusing their positions for personal gain. Yeah, there’s no shortage of all three of these the world over; it’s the same old song no matter where you go. And I like that. It reminds you that there’s a difference between being something and being able to do something on a moral level.
So House of Five Leaves is generally about a nervous man who’s too gentle to throw the first punch, or in this case, swing the blade first. Plot wise, he finds himself in with the wrong crowd. Part of the downside of being gentle is not having the spine to put your foot down, which is how Masanosuke finds himself embedded with a group of criminals, functionally early inductees of what we now know as the Yakuza.
It’s hard to say when and how the Yakuza started, but based on my description of the Edo period making for restless ronin eager for battle some theories suggest that this is the most likely case for how the Yakuza morphed over centuries to become recognized as an organized crime group in Japan. For Masanosuke, these criminals specialize in theft and call themselves the Five Leaves. Their enigmatic leader, Yaichi, offers him the position of bodyguard which he reluctantly agrees to.
Again, he has the skills of a samurai, but doesn’t have the intimidation reflective of most other warriors in the Edo period. A worse person would jump at the offer and use whatever excuse there is to cut anyone in two. That said, there’s more to the series than just Masanosuke’s navigating this group of thieves and savages he just said yes to out of desperation.
Yaichi is one of the more interesting characters in the story. He keeps his personal history very close to his chest, playing things off as though he’s simply living life to the fullest. Other members of his gang or known associates who have some kind of connection to him or the gang share their own stories. An ex-thief named Matsukichi works as a beauty ornament manufacturer by day and a spymaster by night, contributing to the beauty of the women while also listening in on the Five Leaves’ potential targets. A tavern owner named Umezo who walked in the same sandals as the others but requested retirement from that lifestyle for safety’s sake, which was granted surprisingly enough. If you know a thing or two about organized crime groups, cults, secret societies, etc., they rarely let you go without a type of debt to pay…
…but in this case (slight spoiler), the loss of his skills weren’t gonna change how the gang operated. He also had a young family to put ahead of himself. Finally, there’s a geisha named Otake who was made to work off a large debt by way of entertainment (as was the standard practice/purpose of a geisha at the time) until Yaichi intervened financially.
Only a 1-cour anime series, it takes you into their eyes and what they go up against. The struggles, the nuances, the desires expressed; this was the anime that inspired my first accursed blog back in 2021… before it cha-cha slid off a cliff. I don’t want to link to that blog anymore; I’m trying to put it behind me, but it keeps coming back and I don’t even think it was a good showcase of my writing. But at least it inspired me to start this one which I’m more proud of.
Back to Five Leaf Clover Gang: my search for a review and recommendation on YouTube led to a playlist with all the episodes on it. People are really getting around YouTube’s copyright strike hammer to get some classics onto the platform like Azumanga Daioh and Lucky☆Star. There exists one spoiler free review on YouTube from over nine years ago following the trends that I’ve been going with so far with anime, awesome reception s[DIO wrryyyy]t sales.
Channel: AnimeEveryday
Keep in mind that this isn’t an action-heavy series, at least the anime isn’t. Don’t go in expecting Masanosuke to swing a sword all the time, because he’s not that kind of guy. He wasn’t written to be that kind of guy and I think it’s an advantage the series has over its contemporaries and progenitors. I like to think of it as the kind of anime that explores the issues people face daily, even if it’s set in the Edo period and if you choose to give it a watch as well, you think so too. The link is up above. Happy watching!
I’m not making up that statement by the way, I did find this anime through a meme. This one specifically:
Channel: Vinicius Costa
I highly doubt that a single meme motivated everyone who saw it to dig deeper into what the anime was about, especially since on My Anime List it’s quite low in popularity for a ’90s anime, but reviews on both MAL, and even on Amazon for the novelization going as far back as 2000 give it high praise, so the conclusion to draw from this observation is that the series is yet another cult classic series.
Created by Kosuke Fujishima and running from 1986 to 1992, You’re Under Arrest, also known as Taiho Shichauzo in Japanese, is essentially a buddy cop manga. Like Gunsmith Cats, the series has a pair of tomboy protagonists with a rotating cast, but unlike Gunsmith Cats, it has more than the manga and an OVA to its name. Actually, the Wikipedia page lists three TV seasons, multiple OVAs, a movie and even a video game. One essentially wins a popularity contest at the time of release and then some while the other sees renewed interest after decades of sitting on a shelf with a family of dust bunnies. Maybe this is an indictment on the cultures of the targeted audiences–the western audience championing the lampooning of a government agency (even though they’re not that bad in the series) whereas the Japanese audience loves and adores the portrayal of the police in the series because it rings somewhat true of Japanese police behavior IRL.
It could be something else I haven’t looked at, but for all intents and purposes, You’re Under Arrest had a lot more going for it so if Fujishima had any doubts of success, those doubts must’ve been dashed when it came time for the anime release. Released in 1996, season 1 of the series starts off with an introduction to our two leads, Natsumi Tsujimoto and her partner against crime, Miyuki Kobayakawa. Other characters include but are not limited to Ken Nakajima, Yoriko Nikaido, and interestingly a trans character Aoi Futaba.
As a buddy cop series, it sorta fits the bill of what could be seen in shows like Brooklyn Nine-Nine. It doesn’t take itself too seriously and shows the more relatable human elements between the cast members. Uniformed or not, there will never not be an organization of people being weird or spontaneous on an off day. Talk to veterans about the stupid things they’ve done in service during their time off and you’ll be cracking like an egg from all the jokes and off-color humor.
Credit: 22 January 2016; Uriarte, Maximilian; Terminal Lance Comics
For plot, most of the time the characters are either goofing off or just performing their duties as police officers. It’s framed as the sort of episodic anime series that you can kick your feet up to, though it’s not light on the action either. The policing part of the job in You’re Under Arrest is a mix of the standard issuing of tickets, tracking down minor law violations and whatnot to tracking down and arresting criminals, aiding the elderly and defenseless, and overall being a pillar of the community. And spending enough time on the internet may open you up to some snarky comments about policing in most western countries, but that’s getting off topic.
Unless you are that type of person, it’s an unoffensive series that has a lot of heart, humor, and complexity to it. The characters are fun and energetic, and (slight spoiler) for those who have feelings for each other, there comes the question of whether this is a conflict of interest. Are the risks worth it to be with each other and whatnot.
This video also says much of the same about the series:
Channel: Anime Top Scholar
While viewing the series, one thing I noticed was the meticulous attention to detail, especially for a hand-drawn ’90s anime. Little to no details are left out from objects or people reflected in windows, to water effects during rain or storms even to the response of the gauges in the vehicles. Fujishima and the people at Studio Deen did well on their research for the series. There are some minor errors as expected–no one is perfect–but it’s not too much of a distracting unless you’re a certain type of person.
Users on MAL gave it an overall score of 7.6 out of 10. Normally, I stray away from a numbers system not so much out of principle or preference, but largely because to a certain degree I understand the argument that a numbers rating system trivializes or undermines the whole review. Spending all that time to write a long- if not well-thought out opinion piece on a certain piece of entertainment, brought to its knees by a scale. Not changing my rule, but for the most part, I’d bump it up to a solid 8 out of 10.
The full series is available on YouTube, as someone was based enough to share it for the rest of us without concern for monetization. Trying my best not to jinx it, but if you search it up on YouTube one day and the playlist is absent, you already know what to do.
My discovery of this series was quite an interesting one. I couldn’t remember where I first heard of it, but after watching more of it I realized I’d seen bits and pieces of it in WatchMojo.com’s anime top 10 lists. So not as blind as advertised.
Still, all I remembered from it was the name of the series and on a whim, I found that someone was pirating it for their viewing pleasure on YouTube. In the time between when I saw the first two episodes and completed Army basic training, I found that the channel had been taken down, though as of writing, there’s still a video of all 12 episodes in a 4+ hour marathon, so if you wanna game the system without risking malware Trojan horsing into your devices, have a looksee. Otherwise, go in with a shield and beware the spam on your hard drive.
I talked briefly about Btooom! at the end of December when I wanted to speedrun the topics I had on my mind at the time before I stepped off to new adventures, but I didn’t have enough time to properly explore my thoughts on the series, especially since it only has 12 episodes to boast compared to similar series like SAO that have franchises and can simultaneously earn the praise of some and the ire of others. So let’s give Btooom! some love it should have by now.
As of writing I’m only six episodes deep into Btooom! which I’d say is good enough to fully write about what I’ve witnessed thus far. From what I remember of the first two episodes I watched in December, as a Seinen series, it’s not the type of series to highlight the good in everyone. It knows its characters are bastards and scoundrels in some shape or form. The protagonists are definitely antiheroes. We’ve got three of them: Sakamoto, Himiko, and Taira. Each of them have at least something to balance out their negative qualities.
Sakamoto was a 20-something NEET with no passion or future in anything more productive than just lazing in front of the screen and keeping his high scores. This part is understandable since not everyone is required to behave like the heroes and crusaders they might be raised to believe, but what makes Sakamoto quite s[fart noises]t is that he’s that kind of toxic gamer. Abusive to his mother, refuses to find a stable job or training and move out of the house, no affection even for his stepdad (honestly this fits a lot of toxic gamer tropes that even I myself fell into as a teen at one point), and really hot-tempered. All those jokesters and mouth-breathers who argued that video games caused violence probably would’ve been onto something if Btooom! was used as an example.
Himiko’s the second character we see in the anime and her flaw was being a bit two-faced. Prior to being sent to the island to play the game IRL, she and some school friends were going to be the groupies for some musicians, but when the band mass molested them, she was the only one to book it and leave her friends to their fate. Now they don’t want anything to do with her seeing as she abandoned them when they needed help, but it wouldn’t be long before, in their eyes, she’d get a taste of her own medicine. I talked before about the molestation scene and I don’t want to elaborate further on that aspect as it was harrowing to watch only once, but to catch you up to speed: the one decent person who helped her got rejected, physically assaults and rapes her, she pulls out a bomb and explodes him to the seventh circle of hell.
You might begin to cheer her on for defending herself, but down the road she appears to be killing men left and right as a trauma response. And I think that’s one of Btooom!’s highlights. Trauma in western media tends to be hit or miss with more strike outs than home runs to speak of, which would be why so few of them handle it very well and with the maturity the subject matter demands.
I heard this show handles trauma pretty well. I haven’t seen it myself yet. I might…
For Himiko as a rape survivor, the reactions sound valid but get less and less rational as the series goes on, which may be the point. She narrowly dodges an assault, is the victim of one, and is motivated to never, ever be the victim of such an act again, even if it means a series of pre-emptive strikes that could easily be mistaken for Unabomber attacks, especially considering this series.
Finally, there was Taira, a middle-aged convenience store manager who meant well to his friends and family, but according to himself, was a great bastard to his subordinates. Allegedly, he’s the type of guy you’d talk about in order to not be like him. The example of what toxicity at work looks like, so to speak.
Now that I think about it, the series felt like the Saw franchise but anime and with bombs instead of overelaborate traps. Also, few people are genuine do-gooders in the series. The characters are either believable or wickedly f[power tool noises]d in the head. Each of these characters are ripped from their familiar surroundings and dropped into a real-life version of the Btooom! video game, only it’s more like The Most Dangerous Game with more evidence left behind for a forensics team to analyze.
The game Btooom! is pretty much a battle royale, deathmatch style video game similar to Call of Duty’s or Halo’s multiplayers, though more Halo style since everyone is kitted up in sci-fi looking armor and in place of guns and small arms, it’s all bombs of different types, from incapacitation to full-on lethality, and seeing the types of characters running around in only six episodes thus far, a lawless, free-for-all for keeps is exactly what would attract more than a handful of psychopaths who just felt like killing. Some of the nobodies who get gunned down in Black Lagoon would feel right at home in a series like this.
Sounds like an exciting watch, right? Well, I and whoever ran that now-deleted channel and whoever is still uploading clips of the anime to this day all thought so, but at only 12 episodes with the manga lasting far longer than that, I’d at least want to know why the anime died off while a similar yet comparatively lighthearted series like Sword Art Online became an overnight global success. Well, I came across one video that pretty much explains the reason behind Btooom!’s faults and failures.
Channel: thisvthattv
In short, the series was a sufferer of a vintage anime bugbear where the anime releases before the manga is even halfway done. For the most part, up to two or three chapters of a manga can make one episode while depending on the style, that’s one or more volumes making a full arc, and it looks like there wasn’t enough time given between the first episode and the release of the 9th volume in January of 2013, which sounds like time constraints or nonexistent timetables made a mess of things anime-wise.
The manga at least finished all the way up until 2018 with creator Junya Inoue’s assistant Hiroki Ito releasing a spinoff series called Btooom! U-18 the same year as the manga’s conclusions. Yes, plural. There’s a light ending and a dark ending; U-18 follows the former. But even with an interesting premise, the biggest culprit is that the manga was never financially successful, almost forever doomed to cult status. This fate followed the home releases of the anime with only a few collectors having it on Blu-Ray and DVD in Japan at least. Japanese publishers notoriously ignore foreign data and market share so there’s no way to know for certain if they know that the show had an audience overseas. My best guess for why this is for a lot of studios at least is that they agree to let western studios and voice actors dub it over and immediately call it a day. That, or they go straight to work either on the rest of the series or something else until another season is announced.
Speaking of which, a second season was promised under the condition that the tie-in online mobile game stay within the top 5 in Japan for a set amount of time. In 2016, the mobile game developer Asobimo developed a mobile game based on the series as a bit of a glorified promotion and also as an early pioneer in the battle royale genre which in turn was based on the manga which itself was based on the series that gave the genre its name.
Holy Christopher Nolan, Batman. We’re discovering fractal layers left and right!
So all of these conditions needed to be met before an animator could get to work on a second season of the show, but alas it wasn’t meant to be. The success of the game was short-lived and it lost its high marks and status after a month and change. It wasn’t even in the top 100 in Japan anymore and I don’t think Asobimo was doing much to help promote or maintain it. It’s last updates were in the Spring of 2017 and it lost support two years later. A second season is a long shot, and a well-done second season is aiming at a gas station sign from five miles away. With only one arrow.
It can be done, we’ve seen more unlikelier series come back for a second season even years later…
…but assuming that of every series is like assuming every coffeehouse makes joe the same way, like they follow an industry standard. It just doesn’t work that way. Maybe we’ll get more Btooom!, maybe we won’t. My crystal ball is looking kinda gray, but if there’s a silver lining, it’s this. It’s finished. The manga’s done, so an extended continuation is in no way off the table if the cards are played well and the season is properly formatted. I just hope it doesn’t go the way of Rising of the Shield Hero season 2 or The Promised Neverland’s season 2.
You’d be surprised what a spontaneous Google search can reveal. It’d been yonks since but I remember stumbling upon an anime adaptation of a manga that unfortunately flew under the radar for reasons I’ll share later. Known in English as Wave, Listen to Me! and in Japanese as Nami yo Kiitekure!, the manga tells of a Sapporo-based restaurant worker who finds herself as the newest voice of a late night radio show by proxy. A drunken rambling to an ex-TV executive gets her into this world and she doesn’t even realize what had happened until she and her peers recognized her voice coming out of the radio in the restaurant she works at. Talk about stumbling face first into fortune, right?
Well, fortune isn’t exactly how she sees it and legally no lawyer would unless a negotiation and settlement would be reached. Reasonable people call this a discussion, we here in the real world call this the high road most copyright strikers on YouTube refuse to take.
All things considered, this is the kind of series that lives up to its stated mission goal. Although I’m not a wave, I certainly am listening. (See what I did there?) The protagonist, Minare Koda, found herself in this world thanks in no small part to Mr. Al Cohol. For me, I found my way into blogging purely out of desperation for employment of some kind. I had just graduated from community college and I didn’t want the degree to just sit there and look nice, though now I know that this is a fate that befalls many arts degrees.
A majority of the focus in the series is on the radio, the station, the show Minare works on, etc. but it doesn’t focus on the inner workings of running a radio show or performing in one. It’s not like Akane-banashi where the story introduces the reader to the history and culture behind rakugo performances. And honestly, it’s not like it really needs to. If the pandemic was proof of anything, it doesn’t take a lot to just grab some equipment and start podcasting. Some of the people who gained popularity through the medium have been doing it for years or decades by then. They just got more listeners because of the lockdowns.
Rather, Wave, Listen to Me! reminds me of a couple of other series I happened to stumble upon from that old article a few years ago: House of Five Leaves and Ristorante Paradiso both written by Natsume Ono, both of which I’ve seen, and one of which I tried talking about on my first blog, but will likely devote time to again once I get to rewatching them both.
The connecting element between the three Seinen series is that it’s not about the practice, it’s about the people engaged in the practice. Wave, Listen to Me! takes care to dive into the people’s personal lives and show you what goes on in their lives outside of work. Pretty much how a slice of life should be. Describing the rest of the cast, well, do you remember when you were a kid you saw all the adults engaged in admittedly mundane activities, but it looked like they had everything sorted out? Then when you became an adult you realized everyone was essentially bulls[bull noises]ng the entire way and no one had anything sorted out? That’s what it felt like watching Wave, Listen to Me! except me being 25 (around the same age as Minare in the series) I had gotten smart to this around the time I was in college.
Minare is given a lot of responsibilities in the restaurant, not all of them relating to waitstaff, but that and coupled with her personal woes may or may not be the reason she drowns herself at the bottom of a beer glass weekly. She’s such a mess that her downstairs neighbor brings her back up to her apartment on his back. Her boss and coworkers aren’t all that much better either. The ex-TV exec, Kanetsugu Matoh, recorded her without her consent and even though it works out in both of their favors, an even worse person could easily have a lot of fun with that. Hell, her boss at the restaurant is one such example, and this could be a minor indictment on the series itself. For starters, this character gropes the bums of men whenever he takes pictures with male celebrities who come to dine. Do with that information what you will.
Now, all of that is interesting on its own, but what about the diminished attention this series has? Why haven’t I heard about it until now or before? Normally, with unsung and unknown series, that’s a matter of debate unless outright stated by the creator themselves on the status of the series and in the case of the anime adaptation, it was like a bunch of other short term anime series: an advertisement for the manga. But I think I have a few theories on why Wave, Listen to Me! slid through the cracks.
One part of it may have to do with the release schedule: April 2020, so exactly four years ago (my, how time flies). The year of the pandemic, the riots, and what amounts to an almost-pocalypse in retrospect.
Barely a week in and people were crying about a potential war! It’s just a dark joke now.
I don’t know about the rest of the world, but the month before Wave, Listen to Me! debuted, the U.S. went into a lockdown and news of lifts kept getting pushed back every three weeks with TV moving out of studios and podcasts dropping from the sky left and right to pass the time until a vaccine could be mobilized. As for Japan, a more health-conscious country, guidelines were stricter and generally everyone was encouraged to maintain safety and even move their work home with them, hence why a look at 2020’s anime repertoire doesn’t look as stacked as what preceded or succeeded it since. Loads of projects were canceled or postponed until the pandemic was declared reduced or over.
That said, I believe that even if there wasn’t a pandemic that year, the marketing would’ve done a lot to make or break the reception of the series. Don’t get me wrong, this is a great series. But a bad or badly received trailer can straight up assassinate interest in a show, as explained in this video about demos:
Channel: Extra Credits/History
There’s also this trailer for the 2018 TV series Titans:
Channel: Rotten Tomatoes TV
In both of these examples, Spec Ops: The Line and Titans were both given positive reviews post-release, but the initial reception based on their respective marketing led to a lot of people counting their chickens before they began to hatch.
For Wave, Listen to Me!, good marketing could help promote it at the time. No clue if it would have the longevity to still be talked about even now if this were the case, but we’ve seen stranger things happen. To quote a smooth-talking, galactic smuggler:
YouTube recommendations are still a thing, albeit biweekly for now. And for this week, I bring you Mrs. Eats.
One of a handful of Japanese YouTubers whose content is in both Japanese and English, Mrs. Eats likes to show people the ground perspective of life in Japan, at times in a comedic way with her husband. Additionally, her videos uncover several misconceptions many people, especially foreigners, may have about Japanese culture, lifestyle, or even entertainment. Sounds like it’s up your alley? See the link above.
A while ago before stepping off for my new adventures in the Army, I mentioned briefly that I had a blog on Google’s Blogger that ran continuously from February to August of 2021 until a break due to that first attempt at Army life. The summary I made in that little speedrun was that it was crap and should be forgotten at all costs, but in a show of reverse psychology, it’s got me going back to it if only for the sake of this post, and then it’ll be forgotten forever more like the Macarena from the 1990s.
Channel: LosDelRioVEVO
Feeling your age yet, gramps? Well, move aside, we’re peers now.
The origins of the blog were born from a time of both desperation and interest. I had graduated during the emotionally charged year of 2020, a.k.a. the Second Long Hot Summer (after 1967’s many race riots), a.k.a. The Pandemic/COVID-19 Era, a.k.a.; I’ll stop with the references now, I don’t wanna remember that year either.
I may have mentioned it before, but during that year right after I graduated from college and some change during the protests or riots depending on who you were talking to, I decided to phone up an Army National Guard recruiter. Here’s one of the first problems I ran into here: the waiting. Being in the Army now, I understand the concept of “Hurry Up and Wait,” but a civilian attempting to understand the concept with no other point of reference would be left watching and waiting for something amazing to happen.
For reasons that make sense only to recruiters and journalists who focus on the military, the reason for the wait time — at least for recruiting — has to deal with bureaucracy. A bunch of moving parts are considered before a candidate is moved onto the next step, and yes this does include fitness and health. Decades ago, you could be very physically fit with the body of the next super-soldier but unable to join because you had asthma at five. The standards have been reduced since at least 2004 in that specific case, but asthma and other life-altering maladies do require a waiver… which was what kept me from signing the paper and shipping out the same day.
My medical history was far from perfect, but then again, so were a lot of people going into support roles in the Army. Also, before this, there were loads of (now outdated, but still relevant) statistics on obesity rates in the U.S., so how different was I from the average potential recruit?
Still, I was determined to at least try for the Guard that year, but with all that was going on, including my city refusing to let anyone go outside save for emergencies, and there was no chance in hell I was gonna get into the National Guard that year. I didn’t even have faith in my pulmonary functions test until my doctor rang me up and said it was positive.
And I was ecstatic! The one malady that kept me down all my life had been defeated! But by this point I was so disappointed in the recruiting that I tried looking at getting a work in my college major: writing and literature. Impossible? Or just very difficult? Well, up until that point I was so tunnel-visioned that when it came to writing, my original goal of getting published blinded me to other possibilities, both in becoming a published author and wherever else writers could flex their skills.
The difference between traditional or even self-publishing was the barrier to entry. More experienced writers can give me different stories based on their own experience, but being a poor kid with a lot of dreams, the route of manuscript to editor to agent to publisher was more a matter of money than time. I could definitely wait on this; it took me ten years to get the damn thing published. Side note: if you’re wondering why I didn’t like waiting for the recruiter, but had more patience for the manuscript it was because I was more involved with the manuscript considering I was writing it while the National Guard recruiter was more a luck of the draw. I was dying to beat the odds on this one. Part of the reason I wanted to go NG before throwing all my chips in active was to use the cash there to fund this hobby and eventually use the benefits for a VA home loan. Biased opinion or not, I firmly believe a two-bedroom, one bathroom apartment is not where a family should be raised.
That excursion with the NG recruiter lasted from August to November of 2020. Between the last correspondence with the guy and the beginning of the first blog, I contemplated learning new skills with the Job Corps, but I blew them off for a bunch of personal reasons, the biggest one being my immediate area. The nicest way I can put it is that there are swaths of the Bronx that remind me of these important lessons from The Boondocks.
Channel: BOKC headhuncho901_
Parodical or not, where I grew up, very few people turned into responsible adults. There were only three things a black or Hispanic (or in my case, both) kid could see in their future: basketball, rap, or drug dealing, a secret fourth outcome, all of these combined. And I wanted more options. The Army would mean saying goodbye to my family to potentially defend the nation from terrorists and/or near-peer adversaries, but I just saw an excuse to see more of the world that I was missing. Remember, poor kid who wants to see the world, but won’t be able to without money for bus, plane, or train tickets.
Writing, on the other hand, was a much slower process that would have me hone my skills for better results, but there’d still be pitfalls all the same. And I’d be ready for what those could look like. That said, more research and patience to know what to expect and possible steps would’ve helped me plenty. Writing is a passion of mine, as these past blogs show. The bull crap I grew up seeing was really tired and really overdone with all these new people showing up in sports and music. Allow me to be the boomer and say that the classics beat these new folks any day.
Tear me off this hill all you want, I’ll never recant this statement!
So yeah, I was concerned about potentially sharing a workspace and probably a dormitory with a bunch of kids who essentially thought the same, spoke the same, and all that. I went to school with people like that; some diversity of thought would be a huge breath of fresh air at least.
I still had my friends from before, but we were all drifting apart over time. Hell, my best friend is a father now, which essentially makes me an uncle. Writing wouldn’t net me any new friends, but it would put some money in my bank account so that I could travel and make friends the old fashioned way.
Or so I thought. Just like this blog, the old one was supposed to be primarily entertainment, but with a larger focus on anime and video games. Somewhere along the way, my time on YouTube bled into the blog posts and s[horse neighing]t went wild. Going off the rails and everything. I’ve been careful to keep my political opinions to myself, but on that other one, it was like watching someone go mad with cabin fever. And this was 2021. We had the vaccine by that point. Maybe the maturity wasn’t there yet. I was only 22 then and at least in this blog, I put some kind of research into my topics instead of just bashing my head on the keyboard like a somehow more inept Invader Zim.
A few months later, I went all in on active duty. I’d spent the last year of high school till that point convincing my mom that the military was a smart decision for me personally, but she had her reasons for imploring me to explore different options, not all of them related to my health. I graduated high school in 2016 at the age of 17. In the U.S. at least, if you’re out of school by 17 and you want to join the military, you need parental consent and my mom was in zero rush to see me in a military uniform at that point. We were also still seeing active combat deployments to Afghanistan and potentially becoming a statistic was completely off the table for her. So it was off to community college for me.
Fast-forward to 2021, and we’re set to leave Afghanistan and transition into a peace-time Army and my mother finally tells me that if I want to I can go active duty Army, so I did. The time between talking with the recruiter literally down the street from me and shipping out was about 3.5 months, enough time for me to scramble my incoherent thoughts in a piss poor blog. I’ve linked to that blog right before I shipped out in January for basic training, but to save you all the trouble, it’s right here again.
Once again, I’d like y’all to be nice. The first attempt is almost always the worst attempt. It’s not like Einstein was born with a brain that big and heavy. Then I started this blog in 2023 after being told by another recruiter that based on my previous performance at Fort Jackson, I wouldn’t have another chance in the Army. But again, my tunnel vision, or rather my determination, kept me from quitting just yet. I’d keep looking for ways to beat the odds.
It still took some doing and a year of mostly sitting at the computer and occasionally jogging wasn’t worth anything. Literally. My folks were wondering why I wouldn’t get even a retail job and my excuse was that even though experience is different from anecdotes, too many retail worker horror stories kept me from taking that plunge. I was desperate for work too, but not that desperate.
A third recruiter bailed on me, leading me to find a remote one on Reddit (beating the odds once again), and in between then and now 2023 was just me filling up this blog with better though still imperfect content. I know I said that I’d like that first blog to be forgotten for good, but as an archive of how I used to think and feel about XYZ, it’s good to have something to remind me of how not to do something. Yay!
I know it’s a month divisible by 2, but this time I wanna try something different. No recommendation this time, but next time I want to see if I can make biweekly recommendations at least until June to get everything back on track. My notes from before still have old dates written on them and they’re pretty much invalid. Once that’s cleared up, then I’m good to give you another YouTuber to eye. Gonna step out into the wider world next time.
I had been in Army basic training from January ’til the ides of March, so I didn’t learn of Akira Toriyama’s passing until a couple weeks after it had happened. Of course, everybody would’ve gotten their honors and tributes out to the late author by then so my words are coming later than normal, but I’d still like to remember and recount some of his work.
My introduction to his magnum opus was similar to a lot of kids in the early 2000s. There wasn’t a distinction between anime and regular cartoons back then, so anime fans young and old accepted them with open arms as more cartoons to watch every Saturday morning, further bolstered by programming blocks like 4KidsTV. Seeing a golden legacy ahead of them, many notable programming blocks acquired the rights to air anime in the west. No doubt you or someone you know remembers the ham-fisted attempts at censorship or cultural adjustments because “no westerner has ever heard of rice balls,” or “think of the kids when depicting cigarettes.”
Obviously, Dragon Ball was no different when it came to censorship. Swearing (however slight) was edited out, scenes were edited or cut, and numerous references from the original Japanese were lost in translation due to how tough it was back then to research a lot of the cultural and historical references considering Dragon Ball’s source material is the Chinese classic Journey to the West. This video can better explain the history of censorship in the Dragon Ball franchise.
Credit: Nerdstalgic
Nevertheless, Dragon Ball or more popularly it’s better known successor Dragon Ball Z gained the lion’s share of the fame in the west, albeit with a much wider reception in Latin America. Once Toriyama’s crazy diamond got an English dub, there was nowhere else to go but up.
My DBZ collection of media was a bit more miniscule compared to my Naruto diet, but it was still fairly noticeable. A few puzzle and DS games, the console fighting games, memes and image macros, fan-made projects featuring some of the characters or the whole cast; an entire production company based in Texas has Toriyama to thank for their success, and they started as a series of parodies.
In 2008, Team Four Star blessed us with an abridged parodical take on Dragon Ball Z, movies included. Covering the original major sagas, they rewrote and jokingly recontextualized all of DBZ over the course of a decade on YouTube and on their own website.
Other programming blocks like Toonami, have also owed their success to Toriyama’s star franchise. They began with re-runs back in the summer of 1998, but even so, the English cast never left the project. For decades now, VAs like Sean Schemmel, Christopher Sabat, and Kyle Hebert have gotten their recognition from the English dub and have since lent their talents to other anime ever since. I think it’s safe to say that Dragon Ball has been the connecting element to a lot of media worldwide. You could trip on a Dragon Ball reference and it doesn’t even need to be animated.
Credit: iiAFX
But Toriyama was more than just the creator of a manga inspired by Chinese literature. Away from his studio, he worked on other series like Dr. Slump and video games like Dragon Quest and Chrono Trigger. His distinctive art style has even been emulated by his fans over the years. Sites that are hubs for artists, classical and digital alike, are guaranteed to have some attempt at drawing at least one character. Even professional artists and other mangaka have redrawn entire scenes or individual characters, either while working with Toriyama or to honor him in his lifetime. Some of these other mangaka grew up watching or reading his work too.
What makes Toriyama’s passing especially sad is that, like Kentaro Miura before him, he also left behind unfinished work. Miura never finished Berserk after two decades plus and it felt as if even though Goku’s original story had concluded so long ago, there was a lot of fun to have with the Z fighters, especially with all the video games, references, and spin-offs that have come out ever since. The direction of the Dragon Ball Super manga and the newest installment in the franchise, DAIMA, are likely going to be put on hold for a while until an announcement is made.
Whatever the case, Dragon Ball fans, numerous anime fans, artists and many more have paid their tributes to a prolific and influential artist since his passing. This post is one of them having found out so late and being away from technology during training. And on that note, the block that was made famous for airing and helping perpetuate the Dragon Ball series also made a tribute complete with a marathon in his honor.
Since I started writing this blog in January, I expected and prepared for real life to momentarily take me away from the blog for a time. We’re approaching that milestone. Originally, I had attempted to sign up for a volunteer program with AmeriCorps in the Southwest. Moments before clearing the hurdle, however, technical issues held me back and I’d missed the June deadline. This wouldn’t be the first time real life interfered with this weekly blog and I doubt it’ll be the last. Life is like that sometimes; you can lead a horse to water.
This time around, I’d pursued a different endeavor, one that lasted from the latter half of the summer until now. I’d mentioned in blogs before that I had little experience in the Army. To elaborate on that journey, it had been a long time coming. I wanted to join ever since I graduated high school in 2016, even in a reserve capacity which my mom would’ve expected me to do at the time. I was 17 when I graduated and if I wanted to move forward I’d need parental approval. We were also still seeing deployments to Afghanistan at the time and the potential of me going on such a deployment mostly torpedoed any argument I had at joining before I was 18. Not even a list of non-combat deployments would be able to sway her. Like most people, they hear “Army” and immediately think “infantry, cannons, tanks, helicopters.”
Don’t get me wrong, that’s all cool. But from what I’ve seen and read about from films to movies to video games like Call of Duty, the cool guy stuff tends to be limited to combat branches like Infantry, Artillery, Cavalry, etc. For specific missions like those of modern Call of Duty and Battlefield games, if you pay close attention you’ll notice that the units mentioned are Special Forces groups. Delta Force, SEAL Teams, Marine Spec Ops, Air Force Pararescue; units whose training alone demands extra mental fortitude and fitness that I’ve known all my life was impossible for me to achieve. Which was why when I looked for specialties on the goarmy.com website, I looked at support specialties.
Specifically, the Signal Corps where soldiers in this field potentially work on or with networking, telecommunications, satellites, computers, and anything else that kept technical and electrical systems up and running. Nevertheless, my mom thought I should try college first, but I never stopped eyeing the Army. In case you’re curious why the Army specifically, the Marines took everything a bit too seriously, my family in general has an influx of ex-sailors, and the Air Force practices camouflage a little too well. Not to mention the Army recruiting office was right down the street from my home. It was easier to find the Army guys than anyone else.
My first attempt was in 2020, deep into the pandemic. My original goal was to serve close to home (National Guard), and make use of VA home loans to nab a house and a car. That’s still part of my goals, though I’ve had more time to do research on what that looks like. I don’t crap cash so something new is off the table for me. I’d been looking at cars known for their reliability and durability than their ability to show me what I look like in the light.
Never mind the fact that the pandemic made everything difficult, I was determined and sure enough I’d gotten to the recruiter. After a few snags, we were getting to what I’d discover would be the first round of paperwork. The recruiter and I discussed my health in private. Growing up, I had asthma trouble and it would’ve kept me indoors. Conversely, I liked going out and running around as a kid, so asthma attacks were so rare, I can only ever point to one in my life and it’s far before the U.S. military’s cut off of age seven. Didn’t stop doctors from prescribing medicines unnecessarily as a safety precaution. By the time I was turning 22, the asthma was so diminished I didn’t really need anything.
I took a pulmonary function test soon after and I was certain I had failed it, but the doctor who referred me told me I’d pass and if I still wanted to, I could go forward with the National Guard. After all, the most I’d done with them was take the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery or ASVAB, a series of tests that determine your strengths and weaknesses. No disrespect to the National Guard, but COVID slowed a lot of things to a crawl, recruitment being one of them. It worked out for me though, I’d waited long enough to get vaccinated in Spring 2021 and by then I was talking to an active duty recruiter.
We talked about my health again, but surprisingly, the asthma wasn’t as strong a focus this time around. I wear glasses and the recruiters saw fit to put in a vision waiver because of a lazy eye. This pushed my ship out date to two months that year and I was gone by the evening of August 9. My preparation for basic training was subpar as seen by my amazing ability to run at the speed of a continental drift. I was also nursing a leg injury and going back and forth to the docs there to get told to do some stupid band exercises wasn’t helping. They did give me pills to eat after each meal, but I don’t like the idea of popping to keep up the pace, not to mention one of them came with a blood thinning side effect.
So in my infinite wisdom, I thought it’d be easier to leave and come back. Well, that would be all wrong. I spent all of 2022 and the first half of 2023 trying to get back into the Army. And the real kicker was that the last IRL recruiter I talked to was the one to get me in the first time two years ago. Fortunately, there’s r/Army on reddit, not administered by the Army themselves, but administered by individuals who are or did serve in the Army. I’m not sure if the Army themselves approved it’s creation, but I’m not discounting it since every business has a social media page of some kind these days.
One of the soldiers I’d been messaging is an active duty recruiter who has a record of helping people enlist even from out of their home state. Now this isn’t exactly a one-off. It’s 100% possible to get aid from a recruiter in, say, Tennessee, even though you live in Wisconsin. On the Army’s side, every recruiter can go through an applicant’s paperwork and help push it forward, especially if the entrant suspects that a recruiter isn’t following through on their duties.
Like last time, it was a series of electronically signing papers and using the power of lucky charms, crossed fingers, and the hands of time to get my waiver approved. By October of this year, I was given the greenlight from my recruiter and the sun started shining brighter that day.
The next hard part was getting a recruiter in my immediate area to taxi me to the processing station to choose my military occupational specialty or MOS. Three games of musical phones later, we get a date for the second week of November and I sign for an MOS that would potentially see me working on telecommunications with a secret security clearance. The important thing to know about secret and top secret security clearances is that they allow those with access to sensitive information. It can’t be shared, reproduced, or tampered with without appropriate authorization. Doing so brings forth dire consequences. If you don’t f[horse noises]k around, you won’t find out. No one wants to share the same fate as Airman 1st Class Jack Teixeira.
No one can stress hard enough how crucial it is that you follow this like a mantra. No one would dare show the likeness of the prophet Muhammad, and no one should do anything with sensitive information that they’re not supposed to.
As of writing this, my ship out date is January 2. I’ll swear in and ship out that day. Last time I was at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. I might go there again to train, but other entrants in a similar MOS as me are slated to train at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. It might be related to the weather since I was at Jackson in the summer and it’s currently winter, but I’ll know for certain on the day of.
Doing the math, the timeline should have me in training from January 2 to around the second or third week of March, then to train specifically for my MOS, it’s 19 weeks so I should be done with that by July. This means that this blog will be dark until I can find a way to access it in the summer and depending on my first duty station, I’ll either have the free time to continue this though with less frequency, or not at all.
I have a lot of stuff I’d still like to talk about and I want to try to speed through them here before it goes dark proper. I plan on fully elaborating on these at some point, but I can’t say when or if I’ll get that chance. So here’s a brief on three projected topics I won’t get to discuss further.
My First Blog Should Be Forgotten
This blog is actually my second. The first I launched on blogger in February 2021 and ran until my ship out date in August that year, plus another two or so posts in October and December. It was originally supposed to be animanga focused and serve as a launch pad for a side gig on Fiverr.
I wasn’t all that lucky however and it became more of a hobby where I can improve my writing without feeling locked to the commitment of a novel. As time went on, I involved several of my political views which don’t have a place in an entertainment-focused blog and looking back I don’t like how I worded a lot of things. I’d like for it to fade into obscurity but bringing it here will yield the curious. For those of you who’d like to skim through the muck, I’ll leave a link below so you can see what 22-year-old me thought was a stellar blog. Please be nice.
As a viewer of the Trash Taste podcast, I’m aware of how clear the hosts are on certain genres. Joey Bizinger can’t stand most isekai anime while Gigguk wolves them down like Mars bars. If I could use them as a scale, I’d be a couple notches Gigguk-ward. I’ll watch a few isekai, but it’s not a genre I’ll make a beeline for. Sometimes I investigate things on a whim and that’s how I managed to find all 12 episodes of the Btooom! anime on YouTube, concealed and unlisted so the algorithm has to work hard to find and delete it.
It might not call itself isekai, but to me it fits the criteria, though I’m using The Rising of the Shield Hero, KonoSuba, and Re:Zero as my measuring sticks. The protagonist is a NEET named Ryota Sakamoto who excels in an online video game where instead of guns, players fight each other with different types of explosives.
As of writing, I’m only two episodes deep into this 1-cour anime, so my assessment of it as an isekai anime may not be completely accurate. It has one hallmark of an isekai that of seen so far, though instead of the lone NEET heading to a fantasy world, multiple people are present from the real world. Then again, Sword Art Online did something similar and both received their anime adaptations in 2012. The Btooom! anime only ran for 12 episodes while SAO became a franchise in and of itself.
In only two episodes of Btoom!, it appears to be a darker series. My memories of SAO are hazy as I haven’t seen it in years, but I remember the golden rule being that death in-game means actual death for the player. In the first two episodes that I saw of Btooom!, Sakamoto lived up to the reputation of most incels while in the next episode, the girl, Himiko, was sexually assaulted by fat nerd. Junya Inoue wasn’t pulling any punches with the writing it seems. As much as I want to write about this anime, I haven’t seen enough of it to throw my hat into the ring, nor have I any memories of SAO to make a good enough comparison.
However much free time I’ll get in Advanced Individual Training will determine if I can use what’s left to play catch-ups with either series, but at least there’ll be enough time for me to absorb what I’m gonna see soon.
That Manga about Robert Johnson
Of the YouTubers I’ve discovered, one called NFKRZ — real name Roman — released a video sometime last month or so about how he took Chinese and practiced enough of it to become fluent. Under the comments of that video, some made a joke about globalization. As hilarious as the next YouTube comment, but a more serious and more interesting case of globalization to me is less on someone learning a notoriously difficult language and more on the manga artist who decided to illustrate the life of early 20th century blues musician Robert Johnson.
There’s a manga for everyone.
I stumbled upon the manga whilst reading a Looper article on unsung and underrated manga and the manga in question takes the name of one of the musician’s posthumous albums: Me and the Devil Blues. Like Btooom!, I’m also early in this series, but from what I’ve read so far it appears to be an apocryphal retelling of how a black man from Mississippi became a legendary blues musician and pioneer. I say apocryphal because the focal point seems to be a legend.
When Johnson was growing up (mid 1910s to late 1920s), adherence to religion, especially in Mississippi — a Bible belt state — was societally enforced as opposed to legislatively enforced. No matter your color or creed, you were assumed or expected to be a churchgoer, even if you didn’t give a damn about what the preacher had to say. Somehow, someway, the Bible made its way into ordinary people’s lives and in the case of the manga, it’s marketed as a devil’s contract/monkey’s paw sort of deal. You get talent in exchange for your mortal soul [evil laughter].
I hesitate to call the rest of it a spoiler. You can’t really spoil history, but I want to implore readers to check out the manga. It’s only five volumes, so you can knock it out in a few days or a week at most. It’s available for reading on MangaDex. I have no idea where to find physical copies, but if you do and you want to read more about one of the 20th century’s earliest blues pioneers and 27 club inductees, I can’t recommend it enough. I’d certainly love to read more of it myself and give a more expansive opinion. Akira Hiramoto’s manga deserves it, so does this sadly forgotten musician.
Those are three of the topics I had lined up for 2024. They all will soon get their own more in depth blog posts in the future, ideally in the summer, but this is subject to change. My job in the Army will take precedence over this blog for 2024, but I’m glad I could get something off the ground this year and with a small but growing following of readers. Glad to have had some people checking out this… admittedly poorly named blog site. Fingers crossed 2024 doesn’t keep me too far away from this.
Part of what the Boruto fandom has been asking for for a few months now has been a flashback of sorts to some training between Boruto and Sasuke during the timeskip. If it’s an arc they’re looking for, it remains to be seen if that’ll be honored, but the closest we’ve got is the opening pages of chapter 5, released a few hours ago. Last time on Two Blue Vortex, Boruto displayed his prowess as the third ever shinobi in history to learn and use the Flying Raijin Technique.
Using the technique, he traveled to the Ten Tails’ dimension, but discovered that it was gone from its restraints and he and Code were surrounded by four intelligent claw grime humanoids. Boruto expected to twist Code’s arm into a truce, but the deceitful Ohtsutsuki hopeful nearly left him to die. Guided by a mechanical summoning toad, Boruto escaped to safety and towards a few familiar faces: one long thought defeated and one in a coma.
This month’s chapter began with a quick flashback. Sasuke initially doubted his memory, repeating that he was doing this for Sarada, not for Boruto, but by the time Boruto had finished his training, he was beginning to imitate the Uchiha patriarch in attire and even hair.
He always did say he wanted to be like Sasuke, even if these straits were forced upon him.
Since debuting in August of 2023, Boruto’s timeskip seems to have delivered on its new threats. The Chekhov’s gun is getting used so often, it might be time to clean the barrel. In this instance, Code’s claw grimes have another sequence to them. The previous four chapters show that whenever they bite someone, the victim of the bite turns into a tree. In chronological order, we’ve had four victims of a claw grime’s bite:
Bug
Sasuke
Unnamed Leaf Shinobi
Moegi
Not only that, a claw grime replica is created in their stead. They inherit the appearance of the host, but maintain the original desires of the Ohtsutsuki, which is to consume enough chakra to bear a fruit-bearing tree, just as it was revealed in the Fourth Shinobi War all those years ago. Good grief, Madara’s influence and meddling still scar the shinobi world after all this time. In this case, the sentient trees have expressed desirable targets of their own:
The unnamed Leaf Jounin clone wants to devour Naruto.
Moegi’s clone wants to hunt Konohamaru.
Sasuke’s clone wants to make a beeline for Sarada.
and the clone of Bug wants to target Eida herself.
Meanwhile, Sumire and Amado discuss Boruto’s return and response to Code’s attack on the Leaf. Amado explains that the Karma acts as a storehouse for one’s DNA and since he’s trying to revive his daughter, Akebi, he needs a Karma seal with her memories to revive her as he remembers. Prior to the Shinjutsu event pre-timeskip, Kawaki would’ve been the only person of interest since Amado remembers implanting that DNA in his Karma.
If it was Kawaki who fled the village after scarring Boruto, and practically orphaning him and Himawari, I could imagine Shikamaru as Hokage dispatching ANBU shinobi teams to track him down if not designating a special unit of the ANBU to handle that, similar to the Hidden Mist’s Tracker Ninja. But post-Shinjutsu event, this doesn’t happen. False memories or not, Amado can tell that he was the one who modified Kawaki’s body as shown in the flashbacks across Boruto Part I, but has no definitive way to prove it. And let’s be real, this is the same universe where the whole village conflated their annoyance with Naruto with their hatred at the Nine Tailed Fox, almost no one being able to tell that he looked just like the Fourth Hokage. I made the connection when he was featured in Ultimate Ninja 3, and that game came out when I was 9 years old. Back then, it was a theory not yet proved fact in the manga.
Thankfully for Amado’s endeavors, Kawaki doesn’t pose any flight risk, so he’s got his target right where he wants him. But as a “son” of a former Hokage, the Leaf government won’t make it easy. Kawaki’s and Boruto’s roles are switched, but Amado’s prior employment in Kara makes him far from trustworthy, especially in Shikamaru’s eyes. And Kawaki’s attitude and history with the scientist pretty much leave that move off the table for Amado. He’ll probably have to get to him when he’s incapacitated. How he’ll get to that point also remains to be seen, but as a scientist, he’s patient enough to observe the results with all the data on hand. Amado’s patience is matched with a Bodhisattva — you think another minute will faze him?
The chapter closes off with Sumire and Sarada discussing what Sumire learned from Amado and a heartfelt reunion between the young Uchiha and the exile.
From what I’ve gathered this chapter, the claw grimes are more dangerous than Code himself. Forgive me for power-scaling, but the grimes are a cut above Code, and the divine trees created from their victims might turn out worse when they get their chance to shine. I do have a flowchart of sorts to showcase the direction of the claw grimes: Claw grime bites human -> human turns into tree -> divine tree clone emerges -> divine tree clone hungers for chakra… and I have to leave it as such until the next chapter launches in January, though for reasons I’ll explain on New Year’s Eve, that may not be feasible for me.
Until then I leave you with some questions for thought: What happens if a divine tree bites a specific person? A Jinchuriki? Someone with vast chakra reserves like Kisame? What else do they inherit from their hosts? And since the divine tree clones aren’t loyal to Code, what happens if they get to him or someone like Eida, who has a Senrigan and access to Shinjutsu? Time will tell, but I hope I’ll be able take notes and write about it all by then.
Before I close off, here’s some wholesome from the latest Two Blue Vortex chapter for the holidays.
I chose the topics for the year many months ago. In the case of visual novels, I didn’t think I’d have a lot to say about them, but when I got one for free this summer on Steam, it initially got me thinking about how I feel about them… for a bit. Then I stopped largely due to my play style. I do get absorbed in video game narratives — I felt compelled by MK: Shaolin Monks enough to try to fix the narrative like a weekly anime a la Dragon Ball — but my play style successfully blends dialogue with button pressing. Mortal Kombat, God of War, Call of Duty, the Naruto games, Midnight Club, Need for Speed; indicting myself here, the action is the selling point.
But I still decided to give that free VN a chance, specifically this one:
The goal of Find Love or Die Trying is to romance one of the five girls on a televised game show not dissimilar from The Bachelor/ette. If you fail to get even one of them to fall for you, you die. So specifically it’s a dating sim game. I recall tuning into DashieGames in the latter part of high school when he was playing that one dating sim puzzle match game HuniePop, where that game’s goal is to score with all the girls.
I know what visual novels are, and there’s a chance you’ve come across some yourself or even their most famous anime adaptations (Fate, Clannad, Danganronpa, etc.), and I was about to say that they’re not for me, but that’s just not true. I just forgot because I have way more memories of being very involved in other video games not limited to the ones listed above. The truth is more that I’m a bit torn on VNs somewhat. I’ve run into several in my childhood, especially on the practically defunct Stickpage, and while not VNs themselves, the Choose Your Own Adventure template of Telltale Games’ video game adaptations of popular properties as well as Don’t Nod Entertainment’s Life is Strange series served as something of an introduction to VNs or something close to a VN.
I still have my copies of Minecraft: Story Mode Seasons 1 and 2, I’ve watched gameplay of Life is Strange 1, Before the Storm, and 2, along with criticisms of each (for more information on LiS, see GCN, Dumbsville, or uricksaladbar on YouTube for more details), and if you’re familiar with games like these you might see the path I’m walking down here. Diet VNs or not, these tended to have more player involvement than something like Doki Doki Literature Club or literally Highschool Romance. Clearly, I’ve got a preference for one type of game over the other, but it’s not like I won’t give a VN the time of day. I did stick around Find Love long enough to reach at least one ending, and a few years ago I watched an old playthrough of The Anime Man playing Highschool Romance; I watched all the endings on his channel. This is what it looks like.
So why are VNs toward the middle of my tier list? Is the limited involvement that it comes with, prioritizing the reading and storytelling over the action? I doubt it… if that were the case I probably wouldn’t have seen the Telltale Games through to the end or bothered watching that Anime Man gameplay of it. I think it’s effort necessary to get through a VN. Don’t get me wrong, I think VNs can tell great stories with the right kind of writing, setup, and characters. The 4chan sponsored VN Katawa Shoujo about romancing girls with disabilities is said to be one such example of amazing storytelling, but I think part of what keeps me from exploring more further has to do with length.
This may sound weird for me since I’ve stuck around some long running anime and have several novels in my possession right now as well as a published novel out available for purchase, but part of the difference between a physical book or a graphic novel or even a webcomic would probably be the visible page count. With the exception of Choose Your Own Adventure, few books or other such media have branching paths. Sometimes what I do when looking at a book in Barnes and Noble or any other bookstore or even with books I own, I count the pages of the chapters. I don’t always have the time to just read for fun and in those instances I count how many pages a chapter has and whether there’s page breaks for me to stop on just in case I need to put it down and divert my attention elsewhere. They’ve become to me what most mobile games are for someone on public transit.
Visual novels on the other hand feel more deceptive. Because so many have branching paths and multiple choices affecting the narrative, a single run could theoretically take moments of your life away, especially if you plan on going back to unlock different endings. This might come from the side of me that wants to experience a lot of things at different moments or it might be something else, but seeing how long some VNs can be can get pretty daunting. I could do it, but seeing the progress bar move at the speed of sleep might motivate me to try another look for speedrun to watch on YouTube or try one myself to juxtapose.
More popular VNs like Fate also notoriously ridiculous launching points. Gigguk took the piss out of this a few years ago with his video on getting into Fate, but it touches on another problem with some VNs: starting point.
Channel: Gigguk
To be fair, I’ve heard from Fate fans that the memes of where to start getting into Fate take it overboard at times, and I like to believe there’s some truth to that, but other times VNs can run on for very long and seemingly have no clear path to walk on. From the outside looking in, they can look like they’re all over the place narratively. I don’t always like taking notes when I’m reading, but a labyrinthine writing style can make that look like a National Guard deployment to an approaching disaster.
I’ve called my own levels of patience into question before, but it looks like I draw the line at really long VNs, though more of a dotted line than a solid one. I could see myself getting into more VNs if I knew where to look for more, and ideally none that are years long or seconds short. The Highschool Romance dating sim gives me an idea and I may go back to Find Love in the future (especially since I started a second run and didn’t finish), but until then I’m probably gonna keep VNs towards the middle of my personal list. I recognize the appeal and I could see myself getting absorbed in them one day, but it’ll take a while for that to happen. For an in-depth look at what a visual novel is and what most of them consist of, see this video from Get in the Robot for more details:
Channel: Get in the Robot
This week’s channel recommendation is Company Man.
Company Man is a channel dedicated to exploring the businesses and markets that have since become household names in the U.S. and abroad. Restaurant chains, pizzerias, candy companies, grocers, and numerous others. Often in my writing, I’ll make obscure references to famous products or companies and whatnot and I like that Company Man offers a lot of insight on the history and success or sometimes failures of many of the brands we grew up with or heard about. It may not sound as ecstatic or exciting, but I think it’s interesting to explore these different brands.
As both a history buff and a weeb, I like to think that history can work well even in graphic novel form. I’d bring proof, but so many political cartoons and, as mentioned before, graphic novels, have come out that the proof is everywhere you look. Here’s one of my favorite examples:
For the topic of this post (and something more lighthearted), I bring to you the manga series Golden Kamuy.
Created by Satoru Noda, Golden Kamuy is about a former Imperial Japanese soldier and Russo-Japanese war veteran named Saichi Sugimoto. After his military contract expires, Sugimoto hears from an ex-convict about a complicated story involving a legendary convict who hid a large stash of gold from the Ainu people of northern Japan, Hokkaido, and the Kuril Islands. When he was caught, he tattooed a map onto nearly 40 other convicts, each of whom is a specialist in his own right. After this, the prisoners were set to be relocated to another prison in the north of Japan, but the guards were ambushed and the convicts went into hiding. Sugimoto doesn’t buy into the story at first, but when the ex-con reveals that he’s one of the dozens tattooed by the legendary convict, he reveals the tattooist as “Noppera-bo.”
So far, we’ve got some interesting and familiar hooks, don’t we? A retired soldier searching for treasure, interactions with indigenous people groups, a changing political landscape, and slight spoilers for later, competing groups with similar interests. Almost sounds like a western… A story that fantastical would normally disappear into legend until you meet undeniable proof of its existence, but before we delve deeper into that, I want to discuss the historical background on which the manga is based.
Very briefly oversimplifying, Russo-Japanese relations in the early 20th century, the Russian and Japanese empires, both had conflicting interests in East Asia: for Russia, they wanted warm water ports and more land for the Trans-Siberian railway, and for Japan, they wanted to maintain political influence over East Asia, particularly Korea–but so did Russia. War broke out due to these conflicts and Russia maintaining a military presence in Manchuria when the original promise was for them to demobilize.
By 1905, the Theodore Roosevelt administration brokered a peace between the two powers that saw Japan as the victor, gaining the southern half of Sakhalin Island, political influence on the Korean peninsula, while Russia had to abandon its railway plans and its warm water port in Asia, the former of these later becoming Japan’s Southern Manchuria Railway which connected to that warm water port of Port Arthur.
Golden Kamuy is set in the aftermath of this. The fighting is long done away with, but the outside influences do have an impact on the characters. Keep in mind that decades before Japan went to blows with Russia, it was busy organizing itself into a modern country, and its first step was the reorganization of domestic territory into the modern day prefectures, all the while convincing the last of the samurai and feudal lords to surrender their holdings. Many did, but there were still a few holdouts, the most famous of them was the Vice Commander of the Shinsengumi, a hastily organized group of swordsmen with samurai sponsorship: Hijikata Toshizo.
This was all done during the Meiji Restoration of the 1860s. Although Golden Kamuy is decades after that, select characters with strong memories of the pre-Meiji days do still hang around. It’s also worth keeping in mind that the manga takes several liberties with history and some characters’ roles in specific events. Since I bring him up, Hijikata does appear in the manga, and is a part of a few flashback panels, but in the manga he appears as an old man and political prisoner since the Shinsengumi opposed the Meiji government. In real life, Hijikata Toshizo was shot dead on horseback while commanding troops in a major theatre of the Boshin War.
For the rest of the population of Japan, the Japanese government and media these days tend to promote an image of a homogenous populace, but reality is far different than what you’d believe. I briefly brought them up earlier, but the Ainu people are another central piece to the manga. The prisoner called “Noppera-bo” or “No Face” was the one who buried their gold in a hidden location and it takes the help of numerous Ainu peoples to help locate it. The Ainu people typically includes the indigenous groups found often in northern Japan and Hokkaido as mentioned before, but there are similar related groups elsewhere, on Sakhalin and in Russian Manchuria. These include but are not limited to the Uilta/Oroks, the Nivkh, the Nanai, and many more. One of these characters whom Sugimoto meets in Golden Kamuy is a little girl named Asirpa.
Asirpa serves as the audience’s window to an ethnic group that Japan has at best ignored and at worst disrespected. In history, the Yamato people of Japan gradually fought with them even into the Tokugawa Shogunate where they were forcefully relocated to Tohoku and Hokkaido. During the Meiji government in 1899, non-Japanese who were subjects of Japan (including the then-recently added Taiwan and soon to be added Korea) were forced to adopt Japanese names and use those publicly. True to this, even Asirpa has a Japanese name that would have to be used on official documents, as explained in her associated wiki page.
Nevertheless, love and appreciation for Ainu culture is evident and expressed in the Ainu characters, especially Asirpa when she explains language, naming customs, rituals, folk beliefs and several others. The name given to that convict who tattooed the map onto his fellow prisoners, Noppera-bo, is a reference to a Japanese spirit or “yokai.” The yokai come in a wide range of forms and depending on the legend, some are harmless or vicious. The Noppera-bo is described as a harmless yokai that takes the form of a human, only they have no face. Sorta like this:
Though as explained before, it normally takes the shape of a faceless human.
Regarding Ainu customs, the most famous aspect of the series among fans is the cuisine. It’s a common joke to refer to the series as a cooking show, which isn’t exactly inaccurate. Playing dodge bullet with loads of contentious groups is a key point of the series, but when there’s enough Arisaka rifle rounds flying for one scene, the next one transitions to Noda’s briefest possible tutorial on Ainu cooking, like so.
Channel: Crunchyroll Collection
It may seem insignificant plot-wise considering where the story takes our main leads, but funny enough, there’s a healthy hosting of food scenes throughout the series. Noda explained that much of his experience comes from growing up in Hokkaido as an ethnic Japanese. The conceptualization and characterization of the Ainu in particular comes both from his own experiences, which he admitted were limited and from research, which there’s a lot of.
The characters as a whole are all varied more so in personality than in ethnic group, though there’s a couple of the latter such as the Matagi, or traditional winter hunters also in Tohoku, or even people with varied accents and dialects, notably Satsuma dialect.
Although Japan also promotes a singular dialect of Standard Japanese, there’s a variety of accents in the archipelago. Like the U.S. or U.K., there’s often different words for many of the same thing like soda, pop, or coke in many U.S. regions or what lunch in dinner are called in different parts of the U.K.
Personality wise, the characters all differ in what they want the Ainu gold for. Sugimoto made a promise with a wartime and childhood friend that he’d look after his wife who moved to the United States who was at risk of going blind. A mutinous faction of soldiers, led by 1st Lieutenant Tokushiro Tsurumi, a vengeful intelligence officer, wants the gold to fund a separatist state in Hokkaido to spite the Meiji government. Asirpa was influenced by her father and another Ainu character to also use the gold to separate the Ainu from Japan but for different reasons, and some characters never reveal the truth of their intentions with the gold.
For the most part, the characters are in some way based on real life characters from history. Some are obvious like Hijikata Toshizo living for another 40 years in this universe, and others require some more research to determine their inspirations. My favorite has to be the character Yoshitake Shiraishi who was based on the similarly named prisoner and escape artist, Yoshie Shiratori. Like his inspiration, Shiraishi is described as a master escape artist, finding creative and innovative ways to get out of a jam from contorting his joints to making false keys and using lockpicks. You’d probably need a rotating body of prison guards to keep him in place.
Between Shiraishi and Tsurumi, these characters are both unique and not unique. Their quirks make them stand out from regular background characters, but there’s a bunch of characters who match that description anyone. Sugimoto, for example, gained fame during the war as the Immortal Sugimoto and has thus carried this nomme de guerre in the civilian world. Tsurumi and select soldiers within his unit — 27th Infantry Regiment, 7th Infantry Division — are all quirky as well. One might describe it as a circus of sorts. And this is a similar case concerning the prisoners who carry the map on their bodies.
Just about everyone is a specialist in some singular skill or trade. This may make them one-trick ponies by themselves, but there’s a lot of moments where they get to shine independently or in mixed company. Asirpa, for one, may initially seem like a monolithic standard-bearer for the Ainu, especially since she’s introduced with an old and negative stereotype of indigenous people groups from westerns, but both her and the rest of the Ainu presented don’t seem to adhere fully to these misconceptions.
Similar to the Amerindians in the Americas, the Ainu and other people groups in North Asia would’ve spent their lives directly or indirectly interacting with non-indigenous folks, fighting, trading, working, befriending them among other things. They would’ve been exposed to foreign customs and technology sooner or later, hence why during the Manifest Destiny era of the U.S., bands and tribes of American Indians would have fought back with the same rifles that were being used on them. Off the battlefield, cooking and craftsmanship have also caught up with the times, so old depictions of indigenous folk as backwards and removed are just that: they’re old and quite inaccurate.
My introduction to the series came from some old Funimation ads in 2018. At the same time as my anime speedrun during college, bouncing between Crunchyroll, Funimation, and the now defunct VRV, the ads for then-recently adapted Golden Kamuy were showing and initially, I wasn’t that interested. Most people weren’t either. No matter how high the marks, the average viewer would’ve been looking for “time well spent.” This conflicts with the overall negative opinion of CG in anime and with most of the ads depicting Sugimoto’s battle with a CGI bear, prospective audiences were initially turned off.
Then I started watching in 2019 and continued to do so during the pandemic. My opinions on CG have been somewhat influenced by those expressed online, but in all honesty, if it looks good and it means the animators don’t have to crunch to get an episode out, then it can work well for an anime production, and I feel it does here. I honestly didn’t realize the bear was CG until a few frames in. Just goes to show how rare and at times apprehensive studios can be about integrating this technology into a production.
The manga concluded in April 2022, but the anime recently wrapped up it’s fourth season in June after taking a hiatus out of respect for a treasured cast member’s passing in November 2022. A fifth season is currently in development, though as of writing there’s no release date. This is ample time to go through the anime and then continue in the manga or start the manga and compare/contrast the anime. Whatever works best for you.
It’s a month divisible by 2, and the last of the year so as a final sendoff, December’s first YouTube recommendation gets to the heart of a topic I have in store for next week: Cynical Historian.
The Cynical Historian is a YouTube channel that covers the history of the American Southwest primarily, and other topics in history secondarily. Started in March 2013, by former Army cavalry scout and noted historian Joseph Hall-Patton, the Cynical Historian has himself produced lessons and dissertations on his specialty in the American Southwest, namely violence and conflict, sometimes touching on the historicity of the local American Indian groups and figures active during the era. He runs a tight ship on his YouTube channel and has little tolerance for bigotry, hatred, or conspiracy theories of any kind.
One series he does that I recommend above all else is his Based on a True Story series that compares and contrasts historical moments and their silver screen depictions. Since the most recent video he did was in the lead up to the theatrical release of Ridley Scott’s Napoleon film, I suspect that a Based on a True Story video on the little corporal is somewhere in the pipeline, but without clairvoyance, I can’t say more. Be sure to check him out when you find the time.
Before I sign off proper, I had another video lined up emphasizing the surprising significance of food in Golden Kamuy, but couldn’t put it anywhere above, so I’ll link it down here.
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