Anime – Page 32 – Wis[s]e Words

Review: Sounan Desu ka?

Published on October 8, 2019Leave a comment

This screenshot from its last episode sums up Sounan Desu ka best:

we will drink this through our anuses

Four school girls get stranded on a deserted island with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Luckily the girl from the screenshot has been trained by her father from an early age in the fine art of survival, which quite often turns out to be something mildly or not so mildly humiliating. In this case it was because two of the girls were stranded on a raft with only bat guano polluted water to drink. They had the choice of drinking the water and getting sick to the point of diarrhea and vomiting, or not drink and get dehydrated to the point of collapse. Luckily our survival expert had a third option: ingest water through the anus, which involves taking a gulp and pushing it into the other girl’s butt. Ray Meirs never had to do that…

It’s this sort of humiliation play that the series derives most of its humour from. The contrast between the matter of fact Homare, who sees nothing strange about all this and the other three girls, ill prepared for life on an inhabited island is what makes this series. It can all get a bit much as in the last episode and if you don’t like this style of humiliation based gross out humour, this isn’t really a series for you. Apart from that what sets this series apart from any other cute girls doing cute things is the survival aspect. Every episode has Homare teaching the others some handy little survival trick or two and usual grossness apart, it’s always interesting. In all, I liked this series, something fun that at half length episodes never outstayed its welcome.

Best anime of the season — First Impressions

Published on July 14, 2019Leave a comment

If you haven’t done so yet, go watch the first episode of Araburu Kisetsu no Otome-domo yo so you can appreciate the clip below in its full glory:

Sex in anime usually is done on the same level as a raunchy eighties comedy, utterly incapable of any thought beyond “boobs are awesome”. Cheap tittelation and fan service is everywhere but it’s frustratingly rare for anime to move beyond that. I didn’t have high hopes for Araburu Kisetsu no Otome-domo yo because its MAL description made it sound like just another ecchi comedy. Which it is, but what I didn’t realise it was one written by Okada Mari. She always delivers something interestingly and it’s the same here. This series has the most honest depiction of puberty, sex and the attraction to it and fear of it I’ve ever seen in anime.

and drank every last drop of the sweet juices pouring forth from her

Not series start by having one of the main characters narrate a description of eating out a girl, to the mixed reception of her fellow Literature club members. While Sonezaki the club president is revulsed by it, the narrating girl herself, beautiful and melancholy Sugawara wants to experience sex for herself. Of the other three members, the stoic Hongō is writing eroica herself and sees all this as reserve, while the main protagonist Onodera and her shy friend Sudō are both fascinated and embarassed by it. Onodera may or may not have a crush on her childhood friend, who has grown up to be a popular football player at their high school, with his fan girls giving Onodera a hard time for even talking to him.

Samurai hair

She herself though keeps seeing the dorky boy she grew up with, still fascinated by trains and thinks he’s just grown bigger, hasn’t changed. She just cannot see him in a sexual light. That is, until one night she goes over to bring some leftovers her mother had made for him and runs into him, well not watching videos of trains anymore… Childhood friend discovers her crush’s hidden porn stash is an anime cliche of long standing, but I can’t think of any series in which she walked in on him having a wank. And he’s actually watching online porn, meaning anime finally caught up with the late nineties. His response, her response, the music playing through it and her final denial on the railroad bridge with the train going underneath between her legs: it’s all perfect.

This is my anime of the season.

Why you should’ve watched Hitori Bocchi

Published on July 7, 2019Leave a comment

Pefect comedic timing.

Every episode of Hitori Bocchi managed to make me laugh at least once, which is not always the case with adaptations of comedy manga series. It’s easy for the transition from four panel manga gag to animation to fall flat, to get that timing wrong, but Htori Bocchi delivered week in, week out. The clip above shows that perfectly. You know exactly what’s coming, you know that Aru will botch that serve, but despite that it’s still funny because it gets the buildup and timing exactly right.

It also works because it fits in with Aru’s character to flub it so badly. She’s the type of person to want to present herself as perfect, but unfortunately ends up failing miserably most of the time. But she doesn’t let this get her down, she keeps doing her best and even has her own theme tune to sing to cheer herself up(the full version of which was released as a single). She’s far out my favourite character of this series that’s full of likeable characters. Apart from Aru there’s the blonde ‘yankee’ Sunao Nako, who frightens their home room teacher who is sure she’s some sort ogf juvenile deliquent. There’s Sotoka Rakitā, the obligatory foreigner with strange ideas about Japan, who came to the country to look for ninjas. And then there’s the protagonist herself, Hitori Bocchi, who suffers from an incredibly amount of social anxiety to the point that she thinks her friends will forget her if she stays home sick for a day.

Bocchi’s social anxiety is what drives the series. It all started when she graduated from elementary school and her only friend turned out to go to a different middle school. Worse, she said they could no longer be friends until Bocchi had befriended her entire class. So Bocchi does the only logical thing: trying to cancel her class, because if she’s the only one in it, she’s technically fullfilled the quest. When that doesn’t work, she sets out to make friends and ends up with Nako, Aru and Sotoka. Her attempst to make and keep her friends are both adorable and hilarious and a lot of the humour revolves around how her social anxiety makes her over react. It’s never mean spirited though; Bocchi’s fears are taken seriously, it’s just the way that she reacts that makes it funny. What’s more, she has the support of her friends. Which is one more reason why this was the series that I wanted to watch first each week last season.

The most anticipated series of the season finally launched

Published on May 12, 2019Leave a comment

See if you can tell from the following video what Miru Tights is all about:

You have to admire the sheer focused horniness on display here, the devotion with which this has been animated. It’s honest in its perversion, doesn’t attempt to hide its fetish under a thin layer of conventional rom com plot. It’s just four minutes of three school girls arriving at their high school and complaining about the rain as they wring out their wet tights. The perfect translation of its source material, which is only natural as Yom the original illustrator is deeply involved with the series as you’d expect.

One of the drawings that inspired the series

I like both the original drawings as this first episode. Horny as they are, there’s a certain wholesomeness to them. This could’ve been very skeevy indeed but so far it has been respectful of its characters. No leering camera angles, no unnecessary panty or upskirt shots. Of course, we’re still talking about the fetishising of high school girls so it’s not that innocent. There’s still an element of voyeurism to the whole thing. The girls are going about their daily business while the camera zooms in on them stretching out their tighs with their toes and complain about how squidgy it feels. This is very much a guilty pleasure.

Lily in parliament!

Published on May 3, 2019Leave a comment

In events bizarre even for 2019, we’ve had what is possibly the first depiction of an anime character shown in the UK parliament and it was everybody’s favourite trans zombie Lily!

Joanna Cherry holding up a poster of Lily saying shut the fuck up terf

Unfortunately it was transphobe/terf defender Joanna Cherry who held up that poster of Lily, not as a rare example of anime getting a trans character right, but in an attempt to prove this particular picture was a death threat and the very word TERF was a slur on women. Which it isn’t of course, but you may ask yourself, well, how did we get there?

Lily says: shut the fuck up TERF

It all started with SonicFox, professional gamer, gay black furry and trans ally, tweeting a short video of him playing Mortal Kombat 11 and applying a fatality on Sonya Blade while shouting “die TERF”. Sonya Blade’s voice actor being one Ronda Rousey, ex-wrestler and still transphobe, not to mention a Sandy Hook conspiracy theorist. A nasty piece of shit in other words, with Sonic Fox letting off some steam there. He posted it to his Twitter and that would’ve been the end of it, if not for Helen Lewis.

Helen Lewis is one of the Grauniad/New Statesman stable of pet transphobes, also including Germaine Greer, Hadley Freeman, Suzanne Moore and Julie Bindel. These are all career media “feminists”, largely left irrelevant as times moved on, who have found new relevance by becoming transphobes. In the process intentionally or accidentaly providing cover for American right wingers to expand to the UK. Lewis found Sonic Fox’ tweet, immediately did her “I want to speak to your manager” schtick and demanded he recanted. Which he didn’t of course. He just found this whole thing hilarious, a bunch of white, middle aged, English TERFs demanding he stop mocking them.

Which started the usual TERF brigading, where they rope in all their followers to mass report, mass harass somebody to get their account suspended or them fleeing from Twitter. They ultimately got their victory by getting Sonc Fox suspended for a couple of hours and forcing him to delete his tweet. In the process Lewis got the usual sort of meme responses from people annoyed by her transphobia, several of which featured this picture of Lily, holding a badly photoshopped in gun, saying “shut the fuck up TERF”. And it’s one of these tweets that Joanna Cherry cited in a Human Rights Committee Q&A session in the British parliament. And she lied about it. She said it said shut the fuck up, cunt when it really said, as is clearly visible in the video, “shut the fuck up, terf”. And terf is not a slur, not an insult.

So first she lied about terf being a slur, when it in fact was coined by trans exclusionary radical feminists as a neutral description of themselves, then she lied about the actual “slur” on the image. It’s not the only time she lies. She talks about Sonic Fox’s original video as if it’s actual violence against actual women instead of him playing a video game death scene. (Incidently, terfs on twitter are currently busy slandering him by claiming all instances in which he playing a male character in Mortal Kombat hitting a female character are examples of misogynistic violence…) She also pretends that the person supposedly targeted by Sonic Fox and others is some ordinary woman rather than the deputy editor of the New Statesman. Three lies found with just a cursory glance at the video.

So why is a member of parliament trying to gin up non-existing problems of non-violence against not actually women, but video game characters, but completely ignoring actually existing violence against actually existing women, against trans women? Is Cherry a transphobe herself or just an useful idiot?

At least the creator of the picture could laugh at all this.