Tag: web comics

Fat Otaku Today, 10/10 Girl Tomorrow

TiberiusLeave a comment

Who’s this chick in the mirror? Is that… me?!

You may remember in January when I wrote about my Korean manhwa arc of which a high number of the series put out was pornographic in art. Several series I remember fondly not just for the tits and ass on the page (read: my phone/computer screen), but because of some of the unique premises they played around with. Even some of the very Korean drama-esque stories had something interesting to keep me coming back. Observe:

This one, for instance, called Lady Long Legs, is about a man who pays a debt owed to a businesswoman by becoming her man-servant. There is porn in this one, but slight spoilers, it comes later than you’d think.

Circling back to my post on manhwa, the topic of this post is about a manhwa adaptation I watched in Spring of 2021, a few months out from my first excursion in the Army.

The series is called When I Woke Up, I Became a Bagel Girl and with a title like that, we already have to do a little bit of homework on Korean culture. The term “bagel girl” has nothing to do with bagels, so those of you who were looking out for that, I’m sorry. The best I can do is direct you to the closest bakery or Wawa if you live near one. The term is a play on words of sorts, where bagel girl is a Korean portmanteau of “baby face, glamorous body;” think of it like old cartoons where a smokin’ hot babe is referred to as “babe” or just “dollface.”

The protagonist is a 26-year-old virgin otaku named Bong-gi. No ladies that aren’t plastic or standing in dynamic poses on his shelf, no looks aside from those that cause onions to cry, no hope for the future seeing as he’s in a dead end job, and no confidence unless it’s on a screen in the dead of night. Alright, enough about myself, let’s talk about Bong-gi. Well, a lot of that is true of Bong-gi, so I’m definitely not one to judge. After a s[PS2 bootup]ty day at work, Bong-gi makes a beeline for his PC and games all night, snacking in the process. I mean no hyperbole when I say that’s extremely relatable, at least for me recently.

The next morning, he awakens in his waifu-splashed one-bedroom apartment, clutching his body pillow to answer the door only to discover that there are two large protrusions coming from his chest. He swears on best girl Hestia that he was a man the day before. What happened? Thankfully, he’s also curious or there wouldn’t be a series. An immediate comparison to make for “guy becomes girl” is either Gonna Be the Twintail or Ranma 1/2, but unlike those two series, Bong-gi can’t change gender at will, nor does he have any memory of it happening seeing as it happened in the dead of night while he was fast asleep. It’s also not an action series, but it’s not a pornhwa either, though it does have fun with the genderbend concept.

Just like its concept, the central plot of the series can be considered a bait and switch of sorts. If you went in thinking it was going to be a slice of life, think again. It’s more of a detective series with more beneath the surface than meets the eye. Without spoiling too much of the plot, the entirety of the series is based on this mystery plot with different twists and turns that give it a distinct thriller feel. I’m compelled to compare it to a telenovela or a soap opera.

Now to judge it on non-spoiler-y elements. I read many manga series and watch many anime series, as evidenced by this very blog. Manhwa is still a bit of a blind spot of sorts. As I mentioned above, I had a whole arc dedicated to this medium all through community college, however, but with the animanga scene exploding on its own home turf and abroad, whatever I wanted to watch or read from the Korean side of things has been a struggle. Either there’s not enough of it or it gets buried under a wave of other series from Japan. Tying back to my post on the history of manhwa, local Korean politics may or may not be responsible for this.

The youngest Koreans born under Japanese rule may at best be in their mid-to-late 80s, but the generations following still grew up under a military dictatorship hellbent on warning its citizens of what would happen if they bent the knee to the North in particular and the communists on the whole. As a result, in Korea (and by extension Taiwan), creative minds in both countries have been apprehensive about including anything remotely satirical. Some of the manhwa I’ve read (to include Lady Long Legs) have some reference to a real life Korean concept or even law. I’m a bit ashamed to admit that this was how I learned that the country still has conscription; just goes to show that the true opposite of love isn’t hate, but indifference. There wouldn’t be conscription there if they didn’t care about their wacky neighbor (but to be fair, neighboring the hermit kingdom isn’t easy).

I bring that up once again to highlight why manhwa seems to be getting the spotlight only recently. It could simply be Korean politics overpolicing media as a consequence of Cold War politicking; it could be viewers running out of material during the pandemic and reading whatever’s available; it could be a more subtle form of Korean pop culture spreading, sitting side-by-side with K-dramas, movies, and music; it might be all of these or none of these.

For me, it’s along the lines of adding to my fortress of consumable content. I have so many shows and movies in my watchlist that I barely get through all of them. I can watch a few episodes no problem, but I’m not 19 and my days of watching content ’til 2:30 AM are long behind me. Even if I didn’t have the responsibilities demanded of me by the military, I wouldn’t be able to sit there and browse anime to watch anymore. I’ve done it before, and while I haven’t exactly seen it all, the 24-hour binge is far from ideal or even recommended. I don’t even like 24-hour news cycles; you think I wanna watch the same specific series uninterrupted? For this reason, I adopted a method employed by Adult Swim ten years ago: the Double Shot method. It’s a reference to an old Adult Swim promo from the time.

I can’t find any evidence of it online, but as I recall, the programming block aired two consecutive episodes of a certain show for the hour and continue to the next show in it’s line up. For example, King of the Hill would air Episode 15 at 9 and then Episode 16 later at 9:30. The same for American Dad at 10 and 10:30, then Family Guy or Rick and Morty or China, IL at 11 and 11:30, and so on. So far, it’s a sound method that only fails when I feel lazy. Otherwise, it works. This being the second time, I’ve mentioned manhwa, my crystal ball doesn’t say with certainty whether it’ll come up again this year — I only have the first half of this year filled with blog topics — but it does highly recommend the series. As of writing, it’s available for free on Tubi and there’s generally no pressure to sign up if you haven’t already. As for the manhwa, most manhwa hosting sites are gonna be flooded with pop-up ads on the side for a crappy mobile game or porn site, even if you’re not reading a pornhwa. There’s no shortage of them, but I highly advise you be careful where you choose to read this if that’s more your angle.

Also, this series clues you in to how strict Korean beauty standards can be. Most places tend to be like this, but the cultural shock will give you a headache.

2024: Blog Review and Anime Releases for 2025

Tiberius1 Comment

Hopefully I come up with a better name for next year.

2024 is behind us and we are now in the futuristic year of 2025, as predicted by Call of Duty: Black Ops II. From January to mid-March, I was in Army basic training where access to technology was reduced to 30 minutes a week for training purposes. Too little time for me to organize my thoughts into a blog entry, so to supplement that I had a notebook full of journal (read: diary) entries as training went on. It helped me trudge through training, though looking back, it wasn’t as bad as I dreaded. Keep in mind that your mileage may vary depending on where you do training if you choose to join the military. Most accounts sing the praises of Relaxin’ Fort Jackson whereas Chill Fort Sill is either ironic or on-brand due in large part to the cold winds in that part of the country.

Using it as an energy source is the most praise I’ll give to the Central Plains.

January to mid-March was a blank period for obvious reasons, but I got myself a new machine and made a comeback post where not much needs to be said. On an unrelated note, I learned at the tail end of training that the man, the myth, the legend Akira Toriyama passed away in early March and thus made my own separate tribute to the God of Shonen.

So long, father of Goku and Dr. Slump. You changed and influenced millions of people the world over with the story of a monkey-tailed little boy eating bullets and growing up to be the strongest fighter in the universe. My goal will be to get around to reviewing the new Dragon Ball DAIMA arc. I’m not the biggest Dragon Ball fan, but it holds a special place in my heart.

Once I was properly back into the fold during AIT, I started April off with a reflection of my first attempt at writing an anime-themed blog. I’ve tried to forget about it, but having this one up reminds me of what I could’ve had damn near four years ago if things went swimmingly, and if I broke it up with an extra focus on other forms of media. Thankfully, this blog has rectified that issue and has branched out many times over to other forms of media, even with animanga keeping me anchored.

Something something lead a horse to water and all that jazz.

Speaking of which, when it came to reviewing animanga I started off with obscure series that flew under the radar. Titles you may have heard but haven’t investigated further, or titles you’ve never heard of until recently, either through me or another medium. This continues the trend I started here from 2023 and continues to be a personal crusade of mine. Not limited to Shonen titles, less celebrated and mostly unheard of titles give room for a few surprises; like how the creator of Prison School also wrote the Robert Johnson manga.

The man who gave us Dommy Mommy Imprisonment wrote a manga about an enigmatic black Mississippi blues artist.

I dare you to tell me that that’s not cultured!

Of course my regular content throughout the year kept to standards, games and animanga kept on pumping through the summer, and I got to writing about two awaited topics: the long-awaited anime adaptation of The Elusive Samurai as well as a Paradox game that couldn’t happen.

As much as I loved Running from the Ashikaga, it really kneecaps itself with a 12-episode run. Fortunately, a second season is in the works and in the drafting of this post, I was gonna say that going without a second season would be illegal. The art direction, the soundtrack, the name behind the series, even the soundtrack and corresponding merch set for release this year would speak volumes of marketing another season. Even if Sprinting Level MAX’s claim to fame is coming from the same mangaka as How to Kill Your Tentacle Sensei, it was enough of a motivating factor for me to check out the manga when it was licensed for an English release in 2021. I admit I was stunned at Japanese Twitter’s reaction to that one scene, and I’m keeping my eyes and ears peeled for the next viral reaction.

Elsewhere, Paradox joined the shortlist of game devs attempting to dethrone The Sims with a life sim of their own under the title “Life By You.” It was announced and showcased in the latter half of 2023 with an early March 2024 release day, later moved to June before it was unceremoniously put to bed for good. In the meantime, people continually string together campaigns connecting Crusader Kings to Europa Universalis to Victoria to Hearts of Iron for a mega campaign. One day, I’ll join those people because it sounds ambitiously fun.

Going further down the list, my entries stepped away from animanga to address other forms of media. I don’t review movies as much as I do animanga and video games, and I really wish I did. The military-sphere said goodbye to Evan Wright who tragically took his own life over summer after years getting raw stories to put into novel form from the widely celebrated Generation Kill to dozens of other publications in magazines and websites throughout his life. I doubt everyone will appreciate his work as much as military and adjacent types usually do, but there’s no denying his work over the years.

And the blog posts after did address more serious topics surrounding the medium interspersed with regular reviews. You know me as the chief advocate of anime piracy as an alternative when streaming decides to get funny. I continue to stand by that claim and I will do so for many years to follow. It was how I watched many of my favorite series over the years, and I continue to do so to this day. There’s no telling when a series will suddenly drop from, say, Netflix or Hulu and sites like Crunchyroll prove unreliable and at the worst of times dangerous. If more news crosses my feed, I’ll write about it as I had back in August.

Going back to regular reviews with more and more interesting titles until it stops making sense, I hadn’t had to reorganize my notes as much for 2024 as I did for ’23, merely putting them in the list set for weeks to a couple months at most down the line. It got messy when I did it like that back in 2023, but it made things interesting personally. It also kept me in the loop before the topic died off, but the consequence of that is some topics had more information about them come out and were at risk of aging rapidly. Such was the case of a couple of YouTube recommendations. I used to do that for channels I like and enjoy from a content standpoint instead of a personality standpoint. So far, only two of those didn’t work out as well with one getting flack for abusive behavior and the other following shareholders and causing a mass exodus of the media team, the latter of which I wrote about a week after it happened.

The last quarter of 2024 was based primarily around animanga, which was fun to write about, but I left a mildly large gap between that and other media. I definitely watched more than anime at the tail end, some of these are gonna get posts in the future. For just January, I plan on covering series I haven’t seen but would like to both in animanga and in video games with that nifty emulator on my devices, as well as another form of manga/comics that is quite celebrated but is mostly slept on. What I mean is, there’s good series from this medium, but I rarely see most anitubers address it. It might be due to its country of origin, but it that doesn’t make it any less worthwhile.

It’s manhwa. I had a whole arc dedicated to this with an interesting start point.

As of writing this, my notes are filled out ’til at least May, covering most of the first half of 2025. After that, I’ve gotta wait and see what I’ll fill it out with.

The Hunt for Unsung Manga

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I’ve come across a lot of manga series over the years, and while I don’t remember all of them, if I had something similar to My Anime List, I’d probably rank the ones I’ve read or heard of in terms of read (past tense), reading, going to read, or no interest; and based on what I’ve recommended across this blog this year, I’d say that there’s going to be a lot of series that the average manga reader has never heard of or can’t find through conventional means. However long you’ve read manga or watched some of their corresponding anime, you’ve undeniably heard of series like Naruto, Bleach, Dragon Ball, or One Piece. And you know some recent trendsetters by name: Attack on Titan, Sword Art Online, KonoSuba, My Hero Academia, etc.

But be honest with me: before reading some of my entries from this year, did you ever know about Wave, Listen to Me? Or Rokudenashi Blues? How about House of Five Leaves? Mashle? Black Torch? No? Well, that’s to be expected. Some of these have only recently gotten their well-earned press and praise and the others rode that ship ages ago. Rokudenashi, for instance, is from the 1980s and it shows.

Only JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure still looks like this.

This quest of mine to find and screen through manga we’ve never heard of or haven’t heard much about is in equal measures personal and exciting. Personally, I don’t mind much of the series that get praised online these days or even IRL, but sometimes the praise can be a bit much. Although I enjoyed Chainsaw Man, my previous excursion with Black Torch by Tsuyoshi Takaki subconsciously colored my perception of the anime. It took me a while to realize how similar they were in structure, but fortunately for Tatsuki Fujimoto, CSM is more comical in comparison. Takaki’s manga seems to have been a victim of the times.

As for the excitement, call it the general sense of joy that comes with discovering something new. And it’s not these are hard to find. Google and Bing are likely to have them indexed and sites like Mangadex may have it in the archives. As for discovering the series myself, some series were the result of accidental Google searches. Others came from digging through the Manga Plus front page or reading an article about supposedly underrated series.

This one specifically came from when I was trying to Google Do You Love Your Mom, AKA the MILF-sekai.

Alternatively, there’s online forums dedicated to discussing manga, the most common one for me being Reddit. It is worth keeping in mind that sites like this will have a younger audience (i.e. early middle school to middle high school age), so what was popular when you were graduating is gonna be seen as old by the time some of these users are your age. I’m writing from personal experience and the weight of this gap is felt for me, but hey, at least Yu-Gi-Oh! and Pokémon still make the rounds, even through memes.

Another point to bear in mind is availability. There’s a difference between knowing the name of a series and knowing where to read it. Mangadex is a weeb’s go-to for series that are running but can’t be easily found, but there’s a chance the series in particular is available to the public in some form or another elsewhere. The only barrier in that aspect would perhaps be the age of the reader or just a trip to the local bookstore. Any Barnes & Noble employee worth their salt would know better than to let a high schooler go home with a raunchy series, but let’s be real there’s always a loophole. Grab a friend who’s older than 18 or go online like everyone else.

Going back to Mangadex, there’s no shortage there of the big four genres of Shonen, Seinen, Shojo and Josei, but if you want something 18+/hentai, then Mangadex will not help you. Even these sites have their limits, and that’s fine. Digging through a pirate site that’ll have what you’re looking for is tricky. In my experience, some pirate sites are overridden with pop-up ads that open a new tab bursting with malware, and it isn’t always when looking for hentai. Some Korean manhwa get scanned and translated into multiple languages by groups advertising these services on donation/contributor sites like Patreon, and many of the pirate sites that they end up on are all third party hosts.

Other sites like Webtoon or Toomics do host them free of all the issues that come with a pirate site, but sometimes have a string or two attached. I’m not lambasting these sites for putting walls up to entry. That’s what deserves praise. It may sound odd of me to admit to pirating while also condemning it, but I’ve been clear on where I stand on that. For some things that, thanks to the passage of time, have grown increasingly difficult to find conventionally, piracy is the most convenient* way to experience it firsthand; and I apply these same rules for series that have concluded or ongoing series that aren’t available in your region (*it’s not always reliable though).

For something ongoing, general or NSFW audience notwithstanding, if you’ve got the means to do so, it’s heavily implored that official releases are supported and as tempting as it is to head for the raw, untranslated version, I won’t act like I have the authority to stop you but for some series, unless you can read and speak fluent Japanese or Korean, I don’t recommend pulling double duty running the dialogue and speech bubbles through Google Translate. Depending on how it’s written, straight translations will contain slang and references that are gonna get lost that way. Translate has gotten better over the years, but it’s no substitute for a structured class. And finally, these languages have scripts that can and do show up as calligraphic works of art. I find it beautiful, but tracing the damn characters into Translate, especially on mobile, gets tedious quickly.

Now I’ve not abandoned or wholly used uncommon means of getting to my favorite series. I recently downloaded the Shonen Jump app on my phone and I have a tab on my computer logged into Manga Plus, and true to the title of this week’s post, I’ve discovered a new manga series that I’d like to explore further called Beat & Motion.

Take this as more of an exploration for how to discover new or underappreciated series and my experiences doing so. My method of doing so, though, is quite slapdash and haphazard, so if there’s a more sensible way of going about this, use that method to the fullest extent. Only go on sites you trust, and please use a VPN of some kind. Opera and its GX variant go a long way, but if you have the means to my recommendations come from those that I’ve seen sponsored on YouTube including but not limited to Dashlane, Atlas, Express, Nord, and Private Internet Access. I like to think everyone is in wide agreement that nothing ruins the fun of reading manga/watching anime more than when a simple mouse click puts you on a site with malware on it.

But of course remember to have fun with what you find.