Tag: high school

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

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That… could’ve been shorter

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

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

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

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

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

Japanese name: Hitomi-chan wa Hito Mishiri

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chorisuke Natsumi seems to have a type.

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

Music and Tea with Cute Girls

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Or Cute Girls Doing Cute Things Cutely

Animanga came to the western Anglophone world in the early 1960s with Osamu Tezuka’s magnum opus Astro Boy, and about 20 years later came Dragon Ball and its more famous successor Dragon Ball Z, both penned by Akira Toriyama. Since then, the floodgates have introduced not only more anime to follow, but also different ways in which one defines a certain era.

If you’re a weeb/otaku like myself, you can probably point to pivotal series of each decade. Dragon Ball in the 1980s; Ghost in the Shell, Yu Yu Hakusho, and Cowboy Bebop of the ’90s; Clannad, Azumanga Daioh, Lucky Star, and K-On! across the 2000s; Sword Art Online, Attack on Titan, Date A Live, Kill la Kill and Is it Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? of the 2010s; and finally this decade, we’ve had Keep Your Hands off Eizouken, Oshi no Ko, Bocchi the Rock, Jujutsu Kaisen and several more slated for release this decade.

Basically what I’m saying is that different anime define a decade. The 2000s in anime was defined by the moeblob, where many animanga series ascribed to a cutesy art-style and theme. Not just in character design, the characters themselves did things “cutely” too. Or rather, they did normal things in a cute way. They didn’t fight monsters or go on fantastical journeys or acquire magic relics. Often they attended their daily lives which overwhelmingly revolved around high school. Joining the moe trifecta of Azumanga Daioh and Lucky Star comes K-On! A series about an extracurricular club centered around light music.

It starts in a nonspecific part of Japan (since the mangaka Kakifly is from Kyoto, I’m gonna imagine it’s somewhere in Kansai), four high school girls become a part of an after school music club in order to save it from disbandment. The four main leads are Yui Hirasawa, the ditsiest, silliest guitarist in the series; Mio Akiyama, the lead guitarist afflicted with stage fright; Ritsu Tainaka, the loudest girl even without a drum kit; and Tsumugi “Mugi” Kotobuki, the rich and physically strong one on keyboard.

For a series dedicated to light music, the actual musicmaking takes a backseat to the girls simply goofing off after school. There is musicmaking but a given estimate would put it at somewhere near 35 to 40% of the actual screentime, across both seasons. Not to mention, this is still a series that debuted in the 2000s, so music players like the iPod and digital song downloading wouldn’t be as popular and prominent as opposed to cassette tapes, Walkmans and the like. Even then, keep in mind, these then-new devices wouldn’t look like anything what we have nowadays. Touchscreens and smart devices have come a long way.

From what I’ve seen though, analog tech is one of the few ways the series shows its age and that’s merely 16 years old, in line with the corresponding ages of the characters at the beginning. Come the second season, they gain a fifth member, the pigtailed rhythm guitarist, Azusa “Azunyan” Nakano, who takes her role as guitarist more seriously than Yui or even Ritsu does with her drums. You’ll notice that at this point in this post, I haven’t mentioned plot and this ties in with including the likes of Lucky Star and AzuDaioh in that all three have the same basic plot: f[guitar riff]k and all.

Gigguk, at the time, was less forgiving of the anime as a whole, with most episodes in some manner boiling down to goofing off with a cup of tea, something that didn’t really jive with him, which may be in some way related to his musical past.

In contrast, Gigguk’s good buddy Joey “The Anime Man” Bizinger favors K-On! over Bocchi the Rock, and that’s an opinion I hold though not for the same reasons as Joey. I don’t doubt the existence of people that stiflingly shy; part of it has to do with everyone praising it at the first hurdle. Perhaps for Gigguk, there’s more realism to Bocchi than K-On! and I can’t do much with either man’s opinions on the show.

For what it’s worth, he did warm up to it after a few years have passed though not by much. For me, ignoring outside influences and the layman’s opinion on one or the other, I haven’t seen Bocchi yet and I don’t think I will, at least not this year. I had trouble wading through the first episode of WataMote, but at least Bocchi’s not a sleep-deprived femcel.

For me, this puts Tomoko one flight of stairs lower than Bocchi, at least in the beginning. I’m not really one for cringe humor.

On its own, K-On! gives me the impression that it’s not trying to take itself seriously in the slightest. It’s not exactly a comedy like AzuDaioh or Lucky Star and fortunately for it, the jokes aren’t subject to translation mishaps like the former. I humbly accept it as a show about high school friends goofing off outside their club activities and their studies.

Is this why I like it? Well, call it a palate cleanser from all the one-piece finding, dragon-ball hunting, Hokage-aspiring, soul-reaping action of most Shonen series. I don’t always want action, sometimes I just wanna kick back, grab a drink of my choosing, and watch people somewhat like me just screw around. If this isn’t a convincing argument to at least check out some of the first season, consider the uncommon music scenes. Adding music or musical anything as a genre type to a series means adding some original scores and music to the series beyond the opening and ending music, both of which are impressive in their own right. Select scenes in the anime dazzle with the change in lighting and art aesthetic giving it an animated music video feel which is not necessarily the same as an AMV, though it does set itself up for that. I did some quick googling and there are some AMVs with K-On! as the main animation piece, and the series has produced some original songs, so it’s not the most devoid of music, but it could’ve benefitted from a few more scenes at the end of a few episodes.

You can still enjoy the series for being all warm and fuzzy but for those of you who want a series dedicated to musicmaking, my recommendation there goes into Beat & Motion. It’s coupled with a look in animation so it feels more like an AMV-centric manga.

No word yet on whether it’s been slated for an anime, but if it is, yes please. I want more.

Azumanga Daioh: A Classic

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Tsukurimashou

Calling back to a recent post, I once again searched for anime to watch on a whim and with how easy it is to pirate and upload on YouTube (for a time at least), my search led me to another series that needs no introduction: Azumanga Daioh.

A four-panel manga series running from 1999 to 2002, Kiyohiko Azuma’s famous series is about a group of girls navigating their high school and personal lives, with occasional peeks into the lives of two of their teachers. Its anime adaptation follows the manga nearly beat for beat in the sense that every episode is split into different segments. Four-panel manga all have the same layout and are most commonly found in comedy manga series like Azumanga, and are not limited only to Japan. Western comics also have the formula down pat if you’ve ever read the comic strips in newspapers.

As far as plot is concerned, Azumanga is a slice of life series under the “Cute Girls Doing Cute Things” umbrella, a legacy of its era in the moe blob of the 90s going into the 2000s. From start to finish, the manga panels have the star characters and their friends doing really uninteresting stuff, but often in a comedic way. The anime is the same, and having seen it from start to finish the anime translates the humor quite well to the small screen.

Channel: DarkDecietNarcissu

But it still requires a working knowledge of Japanese culture and comedy to understand why it’s like this. Going in blind may not leave as much of an impression compared to going in with this knowledge. The cultural barrier was still standing strong in 2002, and a problem one can see at least with the dub is an old bugbear that only exists when trying to view older anime dubbed in English: poor translations.

One of the strongest concerns in the dub vs sub debate online is whether the translators/localizers, etc. can correctly interpret the scenes and localize them for western audiences without doing away with the original context and humor. Numerous examples of poor translations in the early days exist, but one that makes the rounds regularly online is the Pokémon scene where Brock shares his onigiri rice balls.

By now, everyone has seen onigiri. When it comes to cultural boundaries breaking apart, food also plays a role in that–not just language or history. The faulty dubbing issue isn’t as persistent as it was back in the day, but the concern still exists for many anime fans in the form of internet/video game slang showing up in the subtitles. Personally, I see why this specifically can ruffle some feathers since more and more people watch anime these days and may not always be the same people browsing social media regularly.

From my perspective, Azumanga has a few of these issues here and there, but they didn’t stop me from watching it all the way to the end. As a matter of fact, this series and Azuma’s other series, Yotsuba to!, are a pair of internet darlings. The off-color humor in both series is a source of numerous memes and no-context compilations of the funniest moments from the Azumanga anime due to the style of surreal comedy employed.

Channel: Brolita

Humor like this can show the author’s attention to detail, especially when a seemingly unimportant gag or detail returns in a later episode or two.

Of course, the series isn’t just a barrel of laughs from start to finish. The characters all share intimate moments between each other and in their own personal lives. The character, Yomi, for example is featured in the opening weighing herself, highlighting an insecurity that gets light in the series. Chiyo, being the youngest character, has big shoes to fill with being gifted enough to attend high school at the age of 10. Osaka, real name Ayumu Kasuga, is the outsider, the awkward round peg outnumbered by a bunch of square holes. Her nickname is based on her home city of Osaka and the general perception non-Osakans have of the locals in that prefecture, sorta like how in the U.S. everyone has perceptions of everyone else based on what state they’re from.

Little moments like these help to flesh the characters out and with a small cast to work with, Azuma wasn’t as bogged down trying to give everyone the time of day. This doesn’t necessarily mean that smaller casts are better, but that it takes real care to ensure everyone in a work of fiction is given a piece of the pie. It isn’t always perfect and it doesn’t always need to be as long as all loose ends are tied up. Thankfully, the details in the series are all easy to keep track of through easy-to-remember clauses: one likes animals and tries to pet a finnicky alley cat; one is extra hyper and loaded with energy; one is prone to zoning out at random; one is a sports fanatic; and the list goes on.

Azumanga Daioh is the type of series that one can sit down and relax and have a few laughs while watching these girls go through high school. Its last episode is a neat and tidy conclusion that offers thanks to the viewers as a final goodbye, though I see myself going back for little things in the show.

If the playlist was still available in the English dub I’d provide a link but sadly, the channel that had all 26 episodes dubbed has been removed as of writing this. There still exists the subbed versions on YouTube and the good old-fashioned eyepatch wearing, peg legged, hook hand approach to viewing this series.

With any luck I’ll finally get done with the Undead Unluck anime and provide my thoughts. I’ll do what I can to have it out before the end of the month.

What I Like About History

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History – it’s the story of us. – The Cynical Historian

Fitting that I started this with a quote from a YouTube recommendation I gave out last week. So I did have this planned for yesterday, but postponed it due to dental work, and as of writing this post-oral surgical care by way of a saltwater rinse and ice.

Feeling better now than I did last night, I’d like to get to a topic I’ve come to love: history. I didn’t really come to appreciate the subject until high school and most of it came down to a succession of teachers who otherwise did their jobs well, but failed to make it appealing to me. I liken it to one of the many memes to have come from the Megamind movie: the difference between a villain and a supervillain is in the presentation.

Credit: LindeRock, DeviantArt

You know the saying a great salesman can sell ice to a snowman? Or any of the other ones along those lines? I like to think that’s applicable to teaching. A good teacher can make the worst student give a damn about math and science and watch them pass with flying colors. And as previously stated, a conga line of boring and ineffective teachers failed to get me to care. Then when I was in the 10th grade, I had a teacher who was beloved by everyone in his class. He counted as one of the few who could bring entertainment to an otherwise dull subject.

This was about 9 to 10 years ago during the 2013-14 school year, so my memory of everything I learned in school from that time is naturally hazy. But there were a few standout lessons from that class. Being a global history class, the world wars did show up, but like in real life, the Second World War in history class kicked it up a notch. Stop me if this sounds familiar, but when it came to the D-Day and Normandy landings, did your teacher ever show you this scene from Saving Private Ryan?

Channel: MovieClip

One of the most iconic and effective scenes in cinematic history, if it’s realistic enough to trigger PTSD in even the youngest veterans in 1998, it’s realistic enough for a high school history lesson. Funny enough, I believe high school was the second time in all my schooling that I’d seen that scene; the first time being in middle school in the 7th grade.

Another lesson I recall from 10th grade was the life of Nelson Mandela. A South African lawyer and politician, standing against apartheid, getting jailed for life only to be released by President F. W. de Klerk in 1990 and becoming the first black president of South Africa after successful implementation of free and fair elections in 1994, dying at the age of 95.

He also has his name on a widespread false memory phenomenon. Doing some quick research on the Mandela effect by the way, it might have been a crossing of the wires between the numerous “Free Mandela” campaign slogans and his hospitalization while incarcerated, but I don’t think there’s a definitive answer for why it was so widespread until his death.

Still, I and others from that class remember him doing an excellent job and while not straight A’s, I remember doing well enough to advance to the next class. Slightly curious now what was given out in the AP classes. Since leaving high school though, I’ve gradually been getting more and more of my history lessons from YouTube of all places, most notably, Extra Credits and their series, Extra History.

https://www.youtube.com/@extrahistory

I know there’s probably a handful of reasons for why many U.S. history lessons gloss over or outright omit select historical eras like timing or the credits of the teacher/professor, but the deficit of some meaningful history lessons is definitely felt when there’s an entire smorgasbord of history and history adjacent channels on YouTube alone and it’s not even the History Channel anymore.

In the case of Extra History, I remember first watching their debut history topic on the Punic Wars and when I was in college for the Spring 2017 semester, the Seminal Tragedy series helped me write up a report on World War I. My choice for that topic was because of the 100th anniversary of U.S. entry into World War I coming up that year. Interestingly, I did this for an English course, not a History one. It was an exercise in reading and writing comprehension, and I believe I got a decent grade for that.

As for my history journey, again as a subscriber to Extra Credits, now Extra History which was split off from the latter, there was a time in YouTube history where different creators would collaborate on different projects, often two different versions of the same subject on their respective channels. These days, especially in the HistoryTube sphere, they’ve expanded to include multiple history YouTubers covering aspects of the same or similar topics, like Revolutions, the YouTuber’s home state or country, or for special occasions, Holocaust Remembrance.

In one such collaboration, the E.C. crew collaborated with Cody Franklin of AlternateHistoryHub. Right as they wrapped up their series on the Articles of Confederation, Cody barged in at the end to propose a scenario where the U.S. kept the Articles of Confederation on the books.

Channel: AlternateHistoryHub

Following that, this branched out into the discovery of multiple different YouTubers who cover history occasionally or make it their specialty. M. Laser, Oversimplified, The Cynical Historian, Knowing Better, Overly Sarcastic Productions and others. I know that earlier I made it sound like an indictment on the school system that numerous topics in history aren’t covered very well, if at all, but I’ve done the research on why this would be the case and I can see the other side of this debate.

In the U.S., I’ve heard that most schooling is meant to be generalized in the hope that the student will eventually find something that’ll click with them in the formative years. Then again, when I was in school, college and university was looked on and admired with the same praise saved for a famous statue. On the one hand, it may increase the chances of someone becoming passionate enough to make a subject their entire life (or in the worst case scenario, their personality), but it’s not a 100% guarantee. People don’t work that way.

But whatever, these things do happen sooner or later, and as I’ve written about in October, one of my passions became writing and literature, such was the case of both this blog and another one from two years ago. Getting back to history, I do owe gratitude to my high school history teachers for inspiring my deep dive into history as well as the several dozen or so history YouTubers picking up the slack, even when the YouTube algorithm refuses to acknowledge their contributions to the subject. Some of these channels, I’ve recommended before but I do so again for some subjects in which I can say the channel in question is a specialist.

For my take, I often use history in the plots of my novels, whether as a centerpiece for a character or an event that would be in the back of a character’s mind. Other times, I come across a reference to an event in other media or look up the event that inspired X to read up on whether the reference is true for the former or if creative liberties are being taken for the latter, such as the case with the manga, The Elusive Samurai.

Having said that though, I seriously doubt I could ever become a seasoned historian. The research and groundwork of it all doesn’t seem all that appealing or even particularly challenging. Maybe this is me writing from the mindset of a student and there’s a historian reading this who’ll shed some light on the process of writing a dissertation or getting certified to teach history especially on a given subject, but I think I’m satisfied with just tracing the sources back on Wikipedia or Encyclopaedia Britannica.

For this week, I’m recommending the channel TLDR News and its subsidiaries.

https://www.youtube.com/@TLDRnews

TLDR News is described as a network of short form news content channels with the intended aim of taking the world’s headlines and boiling them down into a digestible, easy to understand, video format. Each of the channels is specialized to a region. Since their British, TLDR News is centered on British news cycles concerning politics, economics, and society. The EU variant covers issues facing Europe, the US for the United States, Global for the rest of the world, Daily runs down the top headlines of the day with a segment saved at the end for good news and uplifting stories and finally, this year, they’ve done a relaunch of their business channel covering corporate and business news. The link to their main UK channel is above and from there you can find their other channels as well as their social media links in the about sections of their YouTube channels.

Also, if you’re already subscribed to it, you can find them on the streaming service Nebula.