Nyanpasu! Non Non Biyori Nonstop — First Impressions

Anime
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The timeless beauty and horror of the countryside.

I don’t think it’s even possible to be as deeply rural and remote as this in the Netherlands. The village school in Non Non Biyori Nonstop only has five students. Where I grew up there were similar such small schools, but even then the students numbered in the tens. The farms my father’s family ran were a ways away from the villages, but we could still bike to them in less than an hour. The Netherlands just isn’t big enough to have this deep a back country. In any case, such a landscape is probably better enjoyed through anime than by actually living there. The slow, deliberate pace and the beautiful setting are relaxing in twentyfive minute long weekly installments, not so much if I was stuck in it 24/7.

As it is though, Non Non Biyori Nonstop is as calming as its predecessors, a nice way to close out the week with. Renge and the rest of the cast are as charming and funny as ever. No need to watch the first two seasons if you hadn’t already, but why wouldn’t you?

Hortensia Saga: hate bow guy already — First Impressions

Anime
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This is one of the dumbest fight scenes I’ve seen in anime. A bow is not a gun, son.

Hortensia Saga, which starts with a violent coup, had the misfortune to drop on the day of an actual real life coup attempt, as deranged Trumpists stormed the Capitol, egged on by the man himself. Course, in the anime, the coup was started by a werewolf murdering the king in front of his daughter, while the capital was overrun by actual monsters rather than elderly Mid Westerners prone to heart attacks. The chaos in both cases is the same, though in Hortensia Saga‘s case I blame the writers, as the whole coup makes even less sense than Donald’s failed putsch. You got a rebellious duke transforming in a werewolf and killing the king in front of his daughter. Fine. You got the duke’s soldiers attempting to storm and occupy the capital city. Understandable. Then dozens of monsters are also teleported in, as if the loyalists not have enough to deal with. Okay, so the rebels are evil, makes sense. The princess is rescued and taken to safety away from the capital. Which is what you would expect from this sort of story. A hidden princess leading the rebellion agains the tyrant that slew her father. But then, after the OP has kicked in, we get a recap of what we just saw and it turns out the rebels were driven away from the capital, with the younger brother of the princess crowned king.

Hortensia Saga: the crowning of Mariel's younger brother

Then there really is no reason why the princess should remain hidden, masquerading as a squire to Alfred, the son of the knight killed defending her, now is there? If things are safe enough her younger brother can be crowned king, doesn’t it make sense for her to return? This first episode never makes it clear why Mariel has to keep hiding as Marius, even as it skips ahead four years, with Marius and Alfred now teenagers. Mariel has to stay Marius because that’s what the plot says has to happen.

Hortensia Saga: Marius in trouble

It’s emblemic of the sloppiness of Hortensia Saga as a whole. This is the most generic of generic medievaloid battle fantasy. Based on the battles shown in this first episode, don’t expect any sort of realism or proper tactics, just red shirts being hacked down by the heroes or villains respectively. Every named character will have their own personal super weapon, like bow guy in the video above and they will all be ridiculous. I don’t like any of the character designs, it all looks far too flat and shiny and I got a sneaky suspicion Mariel/Marius won’t actually be the protagonist. Especially because she spents most of the episode being rescued. I’m not really interested in yet another medievaloid generic fantasy series that just takes its setting from every other anime fantasy. Therefore, unless things improve in the next two episodes I won’t bother with this. A disappointment.

(An aside: in Dutch, a hortensia is a type of plant, usually associated with retirement. This does not help me with taking this seriously.)

Love Live has always been queer

Anime, LGBT
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At the end of a long thread full of examples of Love Live being explicitly gay, Andrea Ritsu asks:

When the “gay subtext” begins to take up more space than what regular text is there, maybe it’s time to reevaluate exactly what something has to do to count as “gay” to you.

Love Live has always suffered from its reputation as being aimed at male otaku looking for waifus, which to be fair, is part of its fanbase. But those are far from its only fans. In Japan, the fanbase is split roughly equally between men and women. Overseas, it’s likely that female outnumber male fans, with a large part being queer fans, drawn to the series especially because it’s hella gay; take a trip through the AO3 archives if you want proof. As Andrea’s thread shows, this appeal wasn’t coincidental. Love Live was queer from the start.

Which is why it hurts when even a mostly positive article about the franchise at Anime Feminist has paragraphs like this in it:

Both groups have attracted legions of adoring fans both in Japan and around the world, and you probably won’t be surprised to learn the core target demographic is straight men. Our birthday party for Nozomi painted a different picture, though. There were some men in attendance, sure, but a little under half of us, including the host, were women—and queer to boot.

This paragraph is representative of the article as a whole, which consistently reiterates that Love Live is aimed at straight male otaku but that suprisingly, it has gotten a large female/queer following nevertheless. Reading the article, you get the impression that the queerness in Love Live is a) accidental and b) a subversive reading of the franchise. This does a disservice to both Love Live‘s creators and its queer fans. To its creators because it implies that none of them knew what they were doing. To its fans because it implies they’re intruders in a fandom not actually meant for them.

We should get out of the mindset that any queer content in our Japanese anime is there only by accident, especially when there’s tonnes of evidence to the contrary. Demoting all queer content as “subtext” there for enlightened western fans to discover is a bit insulting to the original creators. It also reinforces the idea that any queer content is invalid, not real. With Love Live in particular the queerness was baked in from the start and has been only made more explicit as the franchise evolved.

Similarly, if you insist a franchise is aimed at straight men, than any fans which do not fall into that category are not legitimate fans. We should get rid of the idea that things are strictly “for men” or “for women” when we rightfully mock that idea when talking about pink screwdrivers or over the top macho moisturisers. Companies have their demographics to aim at, but that doesn’t mean we should indulge them in that crap. If only because it omits those who are neither male or female, but as said, also because it invalidates those fans you decide are the wrong gender to enjoy something. (As a personal aside, it’s also annoying if you decide all the things you dislike about a franchise is because it’s aimed at people like me. Lesbians can enjoy pinups too.)

“people really want the Democratic Party to fight for them”

US politics
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The Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez interview in the (ugh) New York Times is a must read:

I’ve been begging the party to let me help them for two years. That’s also the damn thing of it. I’ve been trying to help. Before the election, I offered to help every single swing district Democrat with their operation. And every single one of them, but five, refused my help. And all five of the vulnerable or swing district people that I helped secured victory or are on a path to secure victory. And every single one that rejected my help is losing. And now they’re blaming us for their loss.

Biden may have finally won the election, but in both the House and Senate the Democrats either lost seats or won less than expected, leaving the possibility of a divided government open. This unexpected result was of course immediately blamed on “the left” and Black Lives Matter and other centrist bugaloos, but as AOC points out, the actual leftwing candidates won. And, as she also points out in the interview, a lot of the losses by more rightwing candidates were due to just plain incompetence: not spending enough money, not spending it on the right channels, just plain not running a proper campaign.

If the party believes after 94 percent of Detroit went to Biden, after Black organizers just doubled and tripled turnout down in Georgia, after so many people organized Philadelphia, the signal from the Democratic Party is the John Kasichs won us this election? I mean, I can’t even describe how dangerous that is.

What AOC is careful not to say here is that the Democratic Party’s establishment finds it less important to win than it is to keep their left in check. Medicare for all, the New Green Deal, Black Lives Matters may be vote winners but the Democratic establishment opposes these policies just as much as the GOP does. In general, they’re content to be the junior partner to the GOP in America’s political duopoly, only getting in power once the Republicans have fucked up too much and the country needs a cleanup again. Democrats winning elections with actual leftwing policies is the last thing they want.

WOW WAR TONIGHT — D4DJ First Impressions

Anime, video
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Whether you would like D4DJ first Mix depends entirely on how much you like the song in this cut from the first episode:

D4DJ first Mix is basically Bang Dream, a computer animed series tied to a mobile rhytmn game, but instead of high school girls in bands it’s high school girls DJ-ing. CG anime can be hit or miss, but this series is one of the better ones. You can see it in the dance scenes.. Idol and idol adjecent series have long used CG for dance sequences of course, in frex Love Live or Aikatsu. what you usually see is that these use stock facial expressions that never quite match the actual dancing. Not here. Rinku, the blonde girl dancing at the end reacts to the music, her expressions matching her dancing. A small detail perhaps, but noticable.



It’s been a long time since I have been as obsessed with a song from anime as I am with this one. It’s been stuck in my head ever since the first episode and all through the second I was anxiously waiting for its return. Turns out WOW WAR Tonight us actually an old pop/house song from 1995, a number one hit in Japan for H Jungle with t, orginally a sort of synthesizer electropop ska beat with an unironic “jungle is massive” shoutout in the middle. Apparantly it has remained popular enough to get a cover version by Korean girl group AOA a few years ago. (That cover is very different from the version used in the anime, but worth watching because AOA sure is pretty.)

D4DJ first Mix‘s plot is simple. Blonde girl Rinku is new to DJ-ing and electronic music but has a natural sense for it and Maho, the girl through which eyes we saw Rinku dance, is the veteran who teaches her the ropes. So we get a bit of DJ 101 as Maho explains various things to Rinku, while the latter’s enthusiasm fires up Maho into taking a chance on her. It’s a well trodden formula but executed well. The series doesn’t pretend Rinku can just pick up DJ-ing and respects the craft that Maho puts in it. A bit of a Pet Shop Boys/Erasure situation: the serious musician supporting the flamboyant lead. They form a good pair, though we know from various clues in these first two episodes they won’t stay a pair for long. In all this has been excellent and I’m looking forward to the rest of the series. My own quibble, and it’s a big one, is that none of the songs used had been subtitled, something that always annoys me with music anime. Get it sorted.