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.
A man gets reincarnated into a world where traditional gender roles a flipped, in that women are the breadwinners who sexually objectify the opposite sex while men are demure homebodies to be seen and hardly heard from even during intercourse. Quick! Which isekai did I describe!?
If your answer was several, then great news! You understand how unoriginal the premise has become over the years. It may have had a spark in the beginning but with surprise comes formula comes borderline formulaic. There aren’t many isekai that reverse gender roles, but there’s enough to make it seem as though many follow the exact same story beats. Still, the subject of this post caught my eye, largely because of the premise and because it reinforces a meme I used in a prior post:
In matters concerning the pleasures of the flesh, women and men are equal. But sometimes people get competitive and develop superiority complexes… for some reason…
Multiple times onthis blog, I’ve explained that I don’t make a beeline for the Isekai genre. My tastes are varied and, if I had to look at it objectively, inconsistent. But if it wasn’t me being lazy, it was life reminding me that the big picture exists.
This post had a different title in my notes, but I figure the current title was a much better one than what I originally had. Last week, I wrote about a rape and revenge animanga series where the morally dark gray protagonist renamed his penis Divine Punishment and used it to add more and more women to his sadistic fantasy harem in an effort to take down a morally nonexistent kingdom. This time, I’ve got a manga that follows similar story beats, but the question isn’t about consent, but about kinks and the supposed absence of lines to draw.
I’ve made it a point several times that I don’t default to isekai, but I don’t remember clarifying what that means. I make a beeline for shows I find interesting, that some of them are isekai is pure coincidence. I’m not an isekai junkie like Gigguk or an isekai avoider like The Anime Man. I’m in the middle of it, all things considered. Of course, I’ve made it clear that I don’t always find contemporary anime to watch, but the subject of this week’s blog was all the rage when it was airing.
Remember when I said that I don’t particularly gun for isekai anime? Well, it’s not because I have strong feelings towards it; it’s quite the opposite. I’m indifferent. A few good isekai will make the rounds and come up on my radar a few months after people finally stop yapping about them… except in this case where I discovered this one due in large part to its upcoming and currently airing anime adaptation that I haven’t been able to access through the usual channels.
I’ve said before that I don’t make a beeline for Isekai. I don’t love or hate it, I’m just indifferent and for a while I was curious why so damn many anime fell under the Isekai genre as of late, but looking at the goings on in Japan, it wasn’t hard to connect the dots. The same could be applied to much of the rest of East Asia, all things considered. There are still a few Isekai that I enjoy and stop me if these sound familiar: KonoSuba, Overlord, I have plans to watch The Saga of Tanya the Evil, Gate, and probably Re:Zero if more people shut up about it. Technically, I got the gist of what to expect from all of these thanks to the Isekai Quartet parodying all of them.
But it’s no substitute for all of them. Watch the originals or read their source material if you haven’t already.
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.
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.
Opinions on Entertainment 