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.
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.
“Dysfunctional” implies that there was a solid function to begin with.
Before we start, I wanna say that I had planned originally on comparing and contrasting the Black Mass novel with its movie adaptation, but I couldn’t. Too much time had passed since I read the book or watched the movie, and assuming my memories aren’t that crooked and misshapen, there weren’t many comparisons to make between them. The book mentioned horseracing and bookmaking, but not Whitey Bulger’s son, Douglas while the movie did mention his son whilst omitting the horseracing aspect, though both did mention the Winter Hill Gang’s involvement in the assassination of World Jai Alai owner Roger Wheeler in 1981. Maybe I do have a comparison to make, but then again, I’d have to reread the book (or go over the footnotes) or watch the movie again.
So instead, I’m going to write about a point-and-click mental horror game about a pair of siblings and the dark world they call home.
Brought to us by the minds at Nemlei and Kit9 Studio, it’s an episodic psychological horror game that takes us into the minds and lives of the Graves siblings, Andrew and Ashley. They’re essentially trapped in a condemned building with a few other people who are all monitored by very uncharitable wardens who feign kindness for the cameras, but are content letting them starve for months on end. As of writing, there’s only two episodes with a third and fourth one coming out later this year and sometime in 2025 respectively.
I’m halfway done with the second episode, but I’ve seen enough Coffin of Andy and Leyley memes online to see where the story ends up.
It’s probably been spoiled to death since release, but I’ll be light on the details about the two episodes. The first one has the two going to drastic measures first to feed themselves (understandable, all things considered; months without food is hell), and then to get out alive. The second one involves them going on the run and taking their revenge against their parents for what they did to them. It’s an interesting carnival of horrors that feels like it’d fit with any given horror film franchise. You can pick your favorites, I’m going with Halloween… coupled the original The Hills Have Eyes.
As far as characters go, the attractive quality of the game’s writing leads me to believe that some of the characters are loosely based on real people. Focusing only on the titular characters this time (because I don’t want online discourse regarding their parents to color my own observations), Andrew and Ashley Graves are an interesting pair.
Yeah, let’s take the kid gloves off for this one. They’re a very disturbed pair of individuals in a world so black, Deimos retired and gave the position of God of Terror to someone else. As noted by the screenshot above, Ashley is marketed as the more disturbed of the two with her wicked and unorthodox ideas. Based on my observations, this is definitely in line and an accurate description of her character.
Most of her ideas she writes off as mischief and childish whimsy, but her callousness is reflected in her devil-may-care attitude and her lack of concern for the consequences of her actions. She knows she’s doing wrong, but she does it anyway, and the flashback scenes show that she hasn’t changed at all. As a matter of fact, her manipulative personality is why her brother is hopelessly attached to her, yet she doesn’t have absolute control over the guy. To pull from a box of nerdy, lines on maps enjoyer things to say, the power dynamic they share makes me think of the Investiture Controversy, where medieval German nobility kept attempting to buy favors for themselves in the Catholic Church, the papacy included. If that interests you, look to this video for a few more (oversimplified) details:
Channel: Oversimplified
Basically, what I’m saying is that there’s an illusion of power between them. Both of them think they’re stuck with each other, but honestly, they don’t have to be with each other… or rather, they wouldn’t have to be if Ashley wasn’t so clingy. Does that mean Andrew is a better person? Nope.
Also in reference to the screenshot from above, he’s subject to his sister throwing her weight around. Canonically, he has no problem talking to girls, having had romantic interests in other women and even an ex-girlfriends in both high school and college, but the more I think about his past relationships the more evident it becomes that he’s using them to hide from his sister. Not that there’s no genuine romance between Andrew and his lovers, and while not saying it’s not normal to cycle through dates in your lifetime, but the armchair therapist in me sees a MIGHTY NEED to be away from Ashley, even slightly.
Thinking about it even more, the two may share the same problem Zuko and Azula from Avatar have. Andrew doesn’t want to cause anyone any trouble, but Ashley couldn’t care less. Observe this meme from r/TheLastAirbender
It may be a joke, but look at all the scenes in the show that display or mention them and this becomes disturbingly closer to the truth than you’d like to admit, though in regards to the game, it’s worse since everyone has issues.
Having said all that, it’s not all doom, gloom and things go boom. One of the tags listed on Steam for the game is dark comedy. This part also shines in the game as the dark elements are campy. Dark and probable as it may be, it doesn’t really stop the game from being ridiculous at times. When I say you can compare it to some aspect of an old horror movie, I was not exaggerating. Michael Myers shrugging off six bullets is ridiculous; Jason Voorhees bouncing back up from life-threatening injury is very ridiculous; and the antics the siblings find themselves in is absurdly comical at times, you can’t help but wonder sometimes. The writers put a lot of care into making the game what it is and seem to be hard at work still drafting up the script of the final two episodes.
Obviously, a property this popular has its naysayers and harassers, neither of which deserve even a sliver of my attention, but on the “positive” attention the game has received, online forums, especially the game’s associated subreddit. Due to a scene in the second episode, the fanbase has run wild with fanart of the siblings in action. Again, being light on the details because I recommend this game and think going in blind is a sound approach, but IYKYK.
If in fact, you do know, then you also already know about the millions of other copy-pasted fan art of different sibling characters in the art style. This kinda leaves me divided, on the one hand, I commend the talent; but on the other hand,
And this is coming from a guy who has seen both Shimoneta and Highschool DxD yonks ago, both of which I plan on writing about in a future double bill. It was a certain aspect that kept me from playing it for the longest, but for curiosity’s sake (and to snub the naysayers and doombringers) I bit the bullet and I recommend a play through of your own.
For this YouTube recommendation, I present an up and coming Canadian YouTuber known as Art Chad.
At over 82,000 subscribers and counting, Art Chad is a channel run by a young man who asks a lot of important questions about modern topics and issues in our society and attempts to answer them from as broad and unbiased a viewpoint as he can. Often with the tone of one who wishes to make a better world for this generation and its succeeding ones a la Superman, or in a gradual yet noticeable approach instead of the ad hoc, hasty changes we’ve grown accustomed to. The link to his channel is up above.
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:
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