Waifu who wants none of you VS waifu who wants your flesh
Back with another comparison between some toxic fixer-uppers of the 2020s: Nicole of Class of ’09 fame, and Mita of MiSide fame. I haven’t played Class of ’09 yet, but I’ve seen tons of gameplay of it as well as fan content (like the “anime” which begins with the American resource for the Life Crisis Hotline) to get the gist of how it goes, so hopefully this week’s post won’t come across as me talking with ass.
If you don’t deal with your demons, they will deal with you
Late anime director Satoshi Kon created and directed the 2004 anime series Paranoia Agent. In 2020, Toonami picked up the series for broadcast for my viewing pleasure. It follows a timid character designer known as Tsukiko Sagi who gains fame from a pink dog mascot known as Maromi. Under pressure from higher-ups to imitate and essentially mass produce her prior success, she finds herself knocked unconscious by a mysterious boy on golden skates wielding a crooked gold bat. The detectives on the scene, Keiichi Ikari and Mitsuhiro Maniwa, don’t fully buy the story until another victim shows up and after that come more and more victims of the attacks. Every victim has essentially the same description of the perp: young buy with inline skates, a crooked bat, and a baseball cap. There’s two names for the kid in sub and dub: the sub refers to him as Golden Bat; and the dub refers to him as Lil’ Slugger. The dub name for the “antagonist” might be some holdover from times past, but I prefer Golden Bat because it’s one of the most identifiable objects on the antagonist’s person.
From a plot standpoint, Kon’s creation is a mystery thriller with some psychological horror blended into this cocktail. You don’t know who the antagonist is beyond the victim’s descriptions so that nails down the mystery. He’s a serial assaulter who attacks without warning, which adds to the thriller elements. And the psychological horror element has to do with the nature of the attacks. Post-assault all of the characters can consistently describe what was going on when they were attacked and what the assailant looked like or was wielding, but prior to that just about every one of them has some sort of mental health condition that makes them somewhat unreliable. That, or they’re some kind of opportunist with an ulterior motive or they’re hiding a deep, dark secret that they’d rather bring with them to the grave than make peace with.
Down to the wire, the 11th hour and 2025 is drawing to a close and I have time for the last in this wrap up trio before I get to things I was aware of this year but didn’t or couldn’t cover. Some of these will be games that released this year, others will be old enough to legally drink in the U.S. Looking back on it, I played more games than I watched anime and the problem with anime I’ve had is one of the same ones I’ve had with television, standard or otherwise. The commitment to a series is more than a game that can last between 4 and 400 hours, not to mention as much as I loathe the binge watching method, one benefit it has is that I can clear out my watchlist sooner, but the drawback I see is not being able to fully absorb a show, nuances and all.
For the games I’ve played this year:
Grand Theft Auto III (2001)
God of War (2005)
Silent Hill f (2025)
Mafia: The Old Country (2025)
Call of Duty: World at War (2008), Black Ops (2010), Black Ops II (2012)
Ghost of Tsushima (2020)
Max Payne (2001), Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne (2003), Max Payne 3 (2012)
Spec Ops: The Line (2012)
This is neither an exhaustive nor ranked in order list. Just ones that I spent a lot of time on this year and yes, for those who know, Max Payne is up there again. It’s my favorite series after all. Actually, looking at this list, I have reverence for games as old as myself, beginning with:
One of the few Rockstar products nearly banned in the U.S.
Banning and heavily scrutinizing entertainment products has been a time-honored tradition ever since Mortal Kombat, Night Trap, and Doom were released in the early 1990s. Violence, gore, and in Night Trap’s case, violence against women. All of these follow on a legacy of learning too late that being devil may care about the contents of an entertainment product can lead to controversy and public outcry. Not all of these can be accurately predicted, but if I didn’t do my research on Jaws or Gremlins before taking my kids there, I’d really have only myself to blame if the kids have nightmares.
Never mind the boat, you’re gonna need to explain to the misses why Timmy doesn’t like sharks all of a sudden before sleeping on the couch tonight.
The draft for the triple comparison between Max Payne 3, Sleeping Dogs, and Spec Ops: The Line has been finished, but before I publish that I first wanted to get my thoughts on the last of these three out of the way. Spec Ops: The Line, a 2012 third-person shooter whose stated-mission purpose was to examine the era of the “modern military shooter,” and knock it down a peg. Unfortunately for it in that regard, the message was very ignored as Call of Duty and surprise return Medal of Honor had both had their releases around the same time. Black Ops II on November 13 and Warfighter on October 5. When did Spec Ops release? June 26 that year. It was released at a time when these types of games were all the rage, wearing the skin of a similar game while also lambasting the Bush administration for the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. By my estimate, it was successful at only one of those, but only because so many other media outlets talked about it as it was happening. For a laugh though, take a gander at this:
Forgive me for using Google Translate for the title
Advanced weebs reading this are all too familiar with the Yandere trope, also known as “If I’m not the only woman you know, I will do things that will put me on a watchlist in multiple countries~!”
“You mean… you weren’t already…?” wondered the Wonder Bread male MC before he gets assaulted and threatened with snu snu.
What I’m about to bring you is a video game series that is completely out of season and extraordinary mainly because of the team that developed it: The Suffering and its sequel Ties That Bind.
Yeah, I wasn’t kidding about it being a Midway game.
Yonks ago, I mentioned an upcoming post that was initially meant to be just another double bill, but it occurred to me that there was a third series that I felt was appropriate to lump in with the other two. These are the three anime that I watched all through college:
Shimoneta: A Boring World Where the Concept of Dirty Jokes Doesn’t Exist
High School DxD, and;
Monster Musume
And we’ll go through them one-by-one. The titles of each should be a giveaway but just in case: each of these series contains sexually suggestive themes, language and imagery. Reader discretion is advised.
Shimoneta (2015):
Another anime to get its start in the world of early 2010s light novels, Shimoneta’s concept is exactly as it says on the tin. All language of a sexually suggestive or provocative nature is illegal and if uttered, the speaker(s) is/are arrested by the Decency Squad, a specialized morality police unit whose purpose is to track down and subdue anyone who dares utter such obscene words.
How do they know people are saying s[poop]t, f[moans]k, and ass? By the collars around their necks. They’re designed (read: programmed) to monitor different trigger words, I suspect, by way of detecting the movements of the mouth when certain words are spoken, sort of like how most YouTubers, TikTokers, etc. have to censor/monitor their own speech to keep from the Demon of Demonitization at bay. (Side note: f[plastic wrap]k the algorithm for doing that to our favorite creators.)
One such character is the protagonist, Tanukichi Okuma. He’s a brand new student to Tokioka Academy and a witness to the indecency of another character he meets later: Blue Snow, real name Ayame Kajou. Ayame takes the alias of Blue Snow whilst on a crusade to dismantle the shackles of this dystopian system of policing speech by way of challenging the response time of the Decency Squad. Under normal circumstances, suggestive language is how you get slapped on the dick (or in Ayame’s case, the tits), but she evades that by dialing a number on her cellphone that deactivates the collar on her neck for three minutes a day, letting her unleash a bevy of inappropriate sayings.
Based on her appearance here, Ayame adopts a Clark Kent persona when around others only to don a mask (a pair of panties, yes, really) when it’s time for her 180 seconds of lewd infamy.
The series isn’t just a man vs society conflict at play, there’s an actual antagonist in the series and she starts off as innocent and pure until the following happens to her:
Channe: Khánh Senseii Anime Kiss
The birth of the villainess of this series. Anna Nishikinomiya begins the series as the class president of Tokioka, but after a mishap in one of the episodes, Okuma plants a kiss on her by accident. If she had any knowledge of even romance, she’d probably have a normal reaction, but this unleashes metaphorical and literal floodgates. She conflates love with lust and 85% of the scenes that she’s in is a display of female-on-male sexual assault/rape. I’m not kidding.
Obviously, it’s played for laughs in the series and there’s a lot to be said about societal discourse surrounding male victims and their female perpetrators (a discussion I’m not qualified to talk about on a blog based on entertainment, but would have no problem entertaining in mixed company), but without getting too dark and focusing mainly on the central theme of the series, Shimoneta is a display of the consequences of policing morality and human behavior. If you’ve been on the internet for quite some time, you may recall an era when cancel culture went haywire and a small fraction of forum posters chastised trolls online to hell and back for a few racy comments here and there. Not that it was unwarranted, the internet around the time of the GamerGate controversy was an interesting time to be on the internet, but interspersed with genuine policing were impromptu witch hunts conflating ignorance with curiosity, and this went beyond just suggestive or provocative commentary, lest we forget the cultural appropriation vs appreciation argument that was prevalent at the time. Though these days, the conversation has moved towards intentionally ignoring sex organs, due to a variety of factors that have massively influenced the internet. Sorry, digressing.
In Shimoneta’s case, it proves how difficult at the least; Sisyphean at the most such a task of policing even speech can be. Not to mention a shortfall that accompanies the series from start to finish about how to go about this. You’ll notice that speech patterns themselves are the main crime, not the physical aspect itself. Now, there would still be procreation which this world would likely allow for survival’s sake, but another conversation can be had about how conspiracy to commit is addressed more seriously than an actual crime in this world.
This blog from 2018 has more to say about Anna herself and with a finer brush than the broadstrokes I employed here.
Having said all that, I still recommend this anime for anyone wanting a closer look at an example of how bad overpolicing behavior can get or if you just wanna see the most athletic Japanese school girl in the world hunt down the object of her “affection.” Beware her homemade cookies, IYKYK. Now onto:
High School DxD (2012-2018)
My personal favorite for being R-rated and uncensored, the light novel ran from 2008 to 2018, ending around the same time as the anime’s fourth season. Whereas Shimoneta’s content is light on explicit nudity and fan service, High School DxD throws the censorship to the wind. Back during the Funimation days, the English dub played up both the nudity and the jiggle physics. From threatening to get naked to actually getting naked; I like the progression so far.
In High School DxD, Kuoh Academy recently transitions into a co-ed school for the new schoolyear. A few male students enroll, likely taking advantage of the 8 to 1 ratio of girls to boys in the hopes of scoring big before Kuoh fully integrates. One of these boys is a massive pervert and otaku named Issei Hyoudo. He initially fits the bill of a stereotypical otaku in all but appearance. Body pillows, an alarm clock with different anime girl archetypes waking him up every morning, an extensive hentai and porn collection shared with his two other friends, and a MIGHTY NEED to get some titty.
It just so happens that one particular set of breasts happens to belong to this devilishly gorgeous redhead, Rias Gremory. More than just a sight for sore eyes, Lady Rias is a fierce fighter and one to defend those she cherishes to her dying breath. Outside of battle, she’s a kindhearted young woman, compassionate, and reliable. She’s the head of Kuoh’s occult club, thinly masking her connection to the paranormal as a devil herself and making great use of the common tropes associated with angels and demons/devils: angels are depicted as bone ugly to ward off evil while demons are depicted as drop dead gorgeous to tempt mankind into following their id. In an ironic twist, the series depicts devils as more heroic than the beings they fight against.
As much as I make that sound like an engagement wearing the clothes of praise, there’s an actual plot behind the plot here. It takes a lot of cues and tropes from the Christian bible with the concept of angels, devils, and fallen angels. Following the devils, their depiction seems more sympathetic in the series as the factions do have a fair share of shady and unscrupulous characters. The overall plot plays up the biblical angle with the fan service going into overdrive, so Rias, Issei, and the Occult club are all (knights) in service of Satan, or in this case, in service of one of those appointed as a satan. To quote Anton Szandor LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan, “if you’re gonna be a sinner, be the best sinner on the block,” and it seems that Issei is guaranteed to live up to those ideals.
The juxtaposition of magical action and theological babble with T and A and convenient panty shots is what kept me going until about halfway through the fourth season. When it comes to censorship, normally I’m an opponent depending on the company I’m with. Throwing out f[crunch]ks, s[footsteps]ts, damns, asses, and other such forbidden words in a room full of bureaucrats allergic to the sun makes you seem immature compared to a gathering of mobsters, gangsters, or even servicemembers, all things considered. I censor swearing and nudity here for presentability and professionalism, but seeing as I’m writing about a trio of anime that joke or outright show you uncensored boobs, if it wasn’t for the presentation, this whole blog would have no reins. Before we move on to the third and final series I want to talk about, let this ending convince you to watch High School DxD if the above hasn’t already:
Channel: SE NPAI
And last but certainly not least:
Monster Musume (2015):
A harem series like High School DxD but appealing to even more fetishes while also putting the protagonist in a tricky situation like Shimoneta, though with a different context. The plot of this horny adjacent series is that monster girls of various mythical origins are enrolled in a program not dissimilar from foreign exchange student programs in real life and one of the people who is accidented/voluntold into the program is regular human person No. 4986 Kimihito Kurusu.
One of the coordinators, Agent Smith, mistakenly sends a lamia (snake girl) Miia to his house to take care of her under the the circumstances that they refrain from conflict or copulation. Easy rules for Kurusu to follow considering the consequences, but as the series goes on and more and more monster girls share a roof with the man, his physical restraints are put to the test seeing as these women are physically capable of bending him like straw. More than once, he’s been grievously injured through accidents as none of the girls are even remotely aware of their gap in human endurance and their own strength.
Basically, it’s the equivalent of swapping Kratos, a character of pure strength and raw anger with Lester the Unlikely from his titular game. Kurusu exists in a world where monster girls damage him even without the promise or threat of snu snu, and yet, he’s not that kind of guy to engage in his temptations. Using Okuma and Issei as a scale of unfortunate to pervy, Kurusu is definitely closer to Okuma, yet we can put in a different category for him specifically seeing as how he doesn’t exactly live to fulfill is silly desires. He’s a blank slate of sorts that the viewer may put themselves in the shoes of.
Monster Musume has the makings of a horror show without the horror. It’s a harem romcom slice of life with horror elements featuring a protagonist who simply wants to live the most normal life allowed by this society, but is forced to share not only this world, but his dwelling with a harem of monster girls he’s forbidden from touching intimately because the agent that f[piano]ked him is functionally identical to Aqua from KonoSuba.
Don’t let the Matrix reference fool you, she’s not as efficient as those clones. But she does look good in a suit.
Another thing worth mentioning is that while the other two series in this post began as light novels, Monster Musume is a manga first, with a spin off light novel series that also got an anime adaptation: Monster Girl Doctor.
Take these three as my recommendations for when you think there’s too much wholesomeness to go around and not enough lewdness. There’s the possibility of getting muscled by the thirstiest girl in the world whilst on a crusade to curtail censorship; a harem of lovely ladies whose tits shake even when still; and a harem of lovely mythical monster ladies who’d each be wife material all their own if it wasn’t for the rules.
Whatever pirate site you watch your anime on (don’t worry, your secret is safe with me), give these all a watch if you haven’t done so already. And if you’ve seen them, see them again! Do it!!
I put this off for a week so I could do some more research on both, by which I mean reading the Wikipedia page for one and advancing in the manga for the other. Haibane Renmei is but a short 1-cour anime series from 2002. I found out about it from the same article that introduced me to House of Five Leaves a few years ago (along with another one), and without delving into details, a friend of mine challenged me to recommend him some anime he’s never heard of. Well, he didn’t challenge me per se, but I took it as such and I figured I might as well put another brick in this anime wall I chose to build. No, it still ain’t finished.
Japanese for Charcoal Feather Federation, Haibane Renmei starts with a young girl experiencing a very vivid dream about falling from the sky. This being the only memory she has, the theme of the series is that the Haibane–angel-like beings–are named after the dream they had. Shortly after that, their wings grow from their back and they’re given halos to wear above their heads.
It was based on an unfinished manuscript by the same mind responsible for the surprisingly well-aged Serial Experiments Lain, which when it comes to trying to label it, makes it difficult, at least for me. There’s anime that are adapted from manga, which is the most common adaptation style; anime that are adapted from light novels, which is probably the second most common adaptation style; sometimes anime are home grown originals (a.k.a. anime originals), proof that the studios animating them can make something special from thin air; and sometimes anime are adapted from novels:
It’s definitely irregular for a rough draft to get a green light for an adaptation, but it’s not like it’s unheard of. Stranger things have happened in media.
Part of my research for Haibane Renmei involved looking over this blog post from 2017. The writer explains that the cult-classic series has been the topic of such fierce debate over the meaning of the series, not helped by Yoshitoshi Abe’s notoriously enigmatic writing style. As a mystery series, this can be viewed as a double entendre both due to the cryptic writing and because the only source available lies with the writer and short of booking a flight to Japan to ask him directly, I highly doubt he’s ready to share the raw words with a wider audience so the anime adaptation had to make do.
That said, this isn’t the type of Scooby-Doo, CSI, Columbo type mystery series where you’re given a puzzle to solve. It leaves a lot open to interpretation and according to that post I linked above, a lot of it tends to be incorrect. From a writer’s perspective, there’s a fine line between treating the audience like they’re five years old and throwing them out of a plane and expecting them to catch the parachute on the way down.
Is this me being too harsh? Perhaps, but the creative world is pretty cutthroat in a manner of speaking. We criticize ourselves in a much harsher tone than any other critic, yet both the critic and the artist are given a near equal amount of outside exposure so doesn’t that mean we’re both talented groups of people?
Something, something pot calls the kettle black…
I like to think of it as an art house project. I believe the late 90s to late 2000s was the era of moe and this series does something different from most shows of the era. It was the equivalent of taking an extended museum tour and filling out a survey at the end before being released to the gift shop. It’s for thinkers; the door is open enough for observers to take a peek but is neither too wide nor too narrow. If it were too wide, important stuff goes missing, but if it were too narrow then you wouldn’t be able to see the contents very well. It sits neatly in the middle and once you’re done with the series you can walk away with your own interpretations of what you think the series is about. Here’s a link to the playlist. Enjoy it while it lasts:
Channel: Jesse M
From a series you probably never heard of before now to a series you still probably haven’t heard of unless you eat anime memes like black beans: Mysterious Disappearances.
Before I elaborate on this series, I want to get this out of the way right now: giant boobs.
Alright, we’re done with that. Well, I’m done with that aspect. Explaining the fanservice in this series will honestly get redundant especially since both the anime and the manga do that in spades. The first chapter especially ends with an uncensored shower scene (spoiler alert).
As for the rest of the series, Mysterious Disappearances is a blending together of urban legend and centuries-old Japanese folktales. The name doesn’t do the series enough justice. Looking to legends and myths for inspiration, Mysterious Disappearances has it all in droves. The first episode actually drops hints from an old urban legend about the fictional haunted Kisaragi Station. Akidearest explains it further in this video below:
Channel: akidearest
Basically, a few years ago, a Japanese vocaloid YouTuber’s videos spread by way of the recommendation system and the one thing that stood out was that their username and videos were mostly untitled, making use of zero width non-joiners or “invisible characters” read only by the computer. Anyway, the video referenced an old urban legend/creepypasta that only existed at the time on Japanese forums, namely 2chan in 2004. The urban legend in question was Kisaragi Station and was about a woman who noticed the train continued on for longer than usual. She gets off at the namesake station which was left unmapped and catalogs all of her interactions and findings at the phantom station, even wandering the tunnels until she was eventually picked up by a mysterious man who quickly dropped his helpful demeanor once she took the bait. Forums posters eagerly awaited for updates that never came after that.
This was one of several references to Japanese urban legend in the anime. Many more follow as the series progresses. Unlike The Society of Gray Feathers, Dangerous and Disturbing Puzzles has more exposition baked into it. Both the manga and the anime explore the phenomena as they happen. Part of the appeal for me is the urban legend side of things. Fictional or not, these ghost stories tend to be somewhat credible even if they don’t match beat for beat. They’re the fun little stories about things that go bump in the night. The supernatural element keeps me engaged, much like when I was first introduced to The Adventures of Shigeo Kageyama: Boy ESPer.
The protagonist is the big breasted woman we saw earlier, Sumireko Ogawa, a novelist working in a bookstore. Aided by her coworker Ren Adashino and his sister Oto, the trio investigate and confront the sources of the mysteries personally, unraveling their secrets along the way.
One of the main plot devices is a droplifted book picked up by the bookstore owner himself and gifted to Ogawa on her birthday. The anonymous writer catalogued ancient poems from the real-life Manyoshu, a collection of anonymously written Japanese poems going all the way back to the Nara period (circa 750s C.E.). If read aloud, the poems act as a spell cast on the reader themselves provided certain conditions are met. The “spell” can be broken by way of reading the poem backwards, but as shown in the series, when Ogawa does so, she’s able to control the effects of the poems on herself at will.
Other important plot devices are the siblings themselves and the signs that only they can see: yellow diamonds with exclamation points in the middle. They appear whenever a supernatural event has occurred. Once the event has been solved, the siblings are shown to use anything recovered from their findings as payment for tickets back to their own home through–you’ll never guess–Kisaragi station! It all comes together! There’s a lot more to this, though I haven’t gotten that far yet and the manga is still ongoing so it’ll be years before we see where the author, Nujima, is taking this series.
What is certain though is that for those who like creepypasta fanservice and closeup shot style fanservice are going to be intrigued by the blend here. It seems quite ridiculous to highlight Ogawa’s body as the connecting element when Ogawa herself is the protagonist, but the series finds a way to make it work. Rather than fall into the age-old trap of “damsel in distress,” Ogawa being the adult amongst the children here gives her more of a leg up as the woman in charge here. You could argue that she’s technically the mother figure based on this description, but the counterargument to that is that while the three do work together, they’re not inseparable.
Scenes exist with all of them together or just one of them alone or with other minor characters. All of them are well-written with their own goals and desires and none of them feels as though they’re held up by the other. That it’s mainly psychological horror is another plus for me. Honestly, I would’ve been turned off by anything horror as a kid, but now that I’m an adult and I’ve watched a few of the classic horror movies before they were ruined by their own franchising (Friday the 13th, Halloween, Scream, etc.), I realized that there’s still better ways to horror and thriller and Mysterious Disappearances is a better example of that.
All 12 episodes are available on Crunchyroll, but if you don’t feel like watching 12 of the same old advertisements, then you already know what I’m gonna say.
Because I’m behind schedule, I doubt I can guarantee a full review of Undead Unluck season 1 by the 30th, not to mention another topic lined up was pushed back due to the research I did for these two series in this post, so instead I’ll try to get back on track either the 29th (tomorrow) or sometime during the 4th of July weekend. The next topic I have concerns a manga that never got off the ground. Here’s a sneak-peek:
Opinions on Entertainment 