She caught herself a sister — Slow Loop — anime 2022 #20

Anime
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One day Hiyori is fly fishing at the shore line when she runs into a strange girl who thinks it’s appropriate to try and swim in the ocean in March. Desperate to stop her, Hiyori casts her fishing line at her to reel her back in and that how she meets her new step sister, Koharu.

Koharu in school swimsuit, blonde, lies on her back looking up at the black haired Hiyori dressed in her fishing outfit

It’s a time honoured setup, having your protagonist’s parent remarry to get a new sibling they already have feelings about. “Oh no, the girl I have a crush on turns out to be my new stepsister“! It’s almost a romcom subgenre at this point, a way to get a little bit of that delicious incest in your anime without having to deal with the messiness and taboo of actual incest, cf. Summer 2022’s My Stepmom’s Daughter Is My Ex. Here, it’s used much more innocently, with Hiyori and Koharu learning to live together as sisters, a purely platonic love. What I always wonder with this setup is how realistic it is. Do people in Japan really remarry without involving their children until then? Call me naive, but I’d expect that if you got into any serious relationship as a parent, you’d want your children to be involved long before you ever thought of marriage. Especially in a situation like that of Hiyori and Koharu, both of whom lost a parent. Is this something that happens in real life Japan as well or is this just an anime convenience?

Hiyori: This is the only way to fish that my father taught me

Realistic or not, this is Slow Loop‘s premisse: Hiyori lost her father through illness, Koharu lost her mother and younger brother in an accident, their parents met and decided to remarry and now they learn to live together as sisters, mostly through the power of fly fishing. Hiyori learned it from her late father and has kept it up ever since, partially as a way of remembering him. Koharu, coming from an inland part of Japan has never fished at all but is immediately captured by it. Much of the series therefore is like your typical hobby anime, with the girls learning different ways of fly fishing, with plenty of exposition on the technical aspects of it along the way. As such it’s not dissimilar to e.g Houkago Teibou Nisshi, another cute girls go fishing show, but for that underlying current of grief and remembrance that pops up occassionally.

Koi on a rant about how her father only cares for fishing

For the most part however this is a show about fly fishing, with Hiyori teaching Koharu how to fish while she in turn turns out to be quite good at cooking the fish. They’re joined in this by Hiyori’s childhood friend Koi, who’s slightly jealous of Koharu. Koi’s dad was friends with Hiyori’s and an even greater fishing fanatic than him, to the point of not being present at the birth of his daughter, to the latters great annoyance. Nevertheless, she’s just as interested in the sport, not just working in her parents fishing shop, but also going fishing with Hiyori and Koharu. She’s usually the person explaining the technical details of fly fishing to them as well. She’s a great character, somewhat protective of Hiyori but also sharp enough to notice it when Hiyori is fussing too much over Koharu.

Ichiga and Futuba introducing themselves to Hiyori and Koharu

Rounding off the main cast of fishing loving girls are the sisters Ichika and Futaba, the former being a college aged (semi) professional fisher with her own boat and the later being in elementary school. Ichika is the cool, tanned outdoorsy type with a bit of a lecherous side to her and an equally cool hunting (girl)friend. Futaba meanwhile is worried that fishing isn’t girl like and that her best friend would hate her if she knew she liked fishing. In all the cast is diverse enough that the various fishing adventures they go on are never boring even if you like me lack much interest in it. What also should be mentioned is the presence of Hiyori, Koharu and Koi’s parents and their relationships with them, which does play a much more important part in the series than usual. A hobby anime like this usually doesn’t feature parents at all, but the evolving relationship between the main three and their respective parents is a large part of what makes this show stand out.

A photo of Hiyori fishing with Koharu clinging to her and Koi looking on

In all this was a mellow little slice of moe anime, something to watch to unwind after work. The animation was decent, fluid where it needed to be. As befitting a series with large parts set in the more rural parts of Japan, the background were gorgeous. I did have to get used to the character styling at first, somewhat different from your usual cute girls anime, but it works. Recommended if you like easy going series with not too much plot but which focus on characters by way of their hobbies.

Their teacher was a pedo. The boys noticed.

Feminism
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So they decided to keep track of his behaviour as they noticed how awkward and upset he made the girls in their class.

“Sometimes they’d laugh. Sometimes they just kind of just sit there awkwardly,” the boy recalled. “Even the ones that said he was ‘creepy’ laughed, because they were obviously not trying to tick him off or anything. So they’re just fake laughing, awkwardly laughing.”

Reading the story and the Twitter thread I found it on, I was struck by three things. The first two things are depressing, but the third one gives me hope. To start with that latter one, that it was the boys in who noticed this behaviour and then tried to do something about it, that’s exactly the way you want your boys to behave. Not just noticing sexual harassment, not just being uncomfortable with it, but to try and step in and stop it. Their parents should be incredibly proud they raised their sons right. The assumption with this has always been that boys neither noticed nor cared when this happened and these kids just put the lie to it.

Which helps take the sting out the more depressing facts that it still took decades before this particular sex pest was handled. Decades of parents, teachers and other authority figures not listening to the kids in their care, allowing him and who knows how many others to get away with their molesting. Worse, that this wasn’t an unique situation by any stretch of the imagination. Look at the Twitter thread and you see multiple examples of people bringing up their own experiences with handsy teachers and other pedos. Not just coming from American posters, but from all over the world. Certainly I immediately remembered the chemistry teacher who was a bit too eager to teach the girls ‘hands on’. This is the reality of pedophilia, of child molesting. Not so much strangers in white vans as the respected high school coach next door getting away with it because nobody believes or cares what children go through.

Seeing so many adults have these awful memories from their own childhood, you’d think they’re ready to believe their own children, but this still seems rare. And when it’s poor children, or children of colour, children who already don’t really count, then it becomes almost impossible to get anybody to care. We’ve seen that with the whole “Muslim grooming gangs” panic in the UK, where wghen you dug down, the real issue wasn’t “Asian gangs recruiting white girls as sex workers”, but more the police and other authorities just didn’t care about what happened to poor girls from council estates, were insulted that they had to care, thought it was their own fault in the first place and then latched on to “political correctness made it impossible to do our work” as an excuse for their inaction.

Luckily these boys did care. While they learned they couldn’t trust the authorities, they also learned solidarity. That if nobody cares to keep you safe, you have to rely on each other to keep yourselves safe.

She’s a Mira-cle — Kenja no Deshi wo Nanoru Kenja — Anime 2022 #19

Anime
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If I had a dime for a gender swapping isekai anime that came out in winter 2022 ?I would’ve two dimes. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s strange it happened twice.

Mira is a young white haired girl striking a kung-fu pose

For reference the other series is Fantasy Bishoujo Juniku Ojisan to in which two best friends get isekaied together and one of them turns into a girl, which the other does his best not to fall in love with. In Kenja no Deshi wo Nanoru Kenja on the other hand we get our protagonist reincarnating into the future of the VRMMORPG game in which he played an archetypical overpowered mage character complete with Gandalf style beard, to find himself to be a young teen girl, an alt character he’d created the night before. As per usual for this sort of series, he’s not all that bothered inhabiting a girl’s body, though slightly annoyed at needing to re-establish himself. Because he can no longer pass himself off as Danblf, the character he played, he instead calls himself Mira and passes himself off as his own disciple, which is what the title refers to. Mira then sets out to discover what has happened that made the game world real and why he was reincarnated into it thirty years into its future, meeting up with old friends along the way. The series rapidly devolves into a series of typical RPG adventures with increasingly difficult challenges. It’s clear that something is going on but no real conclusion is reached by the time the series ends.

Danblf the wizard looks like Gandalf and is the ideal self of his creator

When the first episode dropped it was widely derided for its ‘quality’ as there were some rather unfortunate CGI animation sequences and also because it ended on a minutes long montage without dialogue as Danblf woke up as Mira and discovered he was now a girl. Or at least had a girl’s body. I had therefore been loath to try this, but once I watched that first episode I thought it wasn’t that bad? That ending sequence without dialogue was clearly intentional and while it didn’t quite succeeded, I like that it tried to do something different. It was a pretty good way of introducing all the secondary characters. Likewise the frequent CGI battles were not that bad. In the end this was a perfectly acceptable isekai fantasy, a step above something like Leadale. I liked that the main gag about Danblf reincarnating as Mira was that she still spoke in the same grandiouse language as he did, rather than any sexist bullshit about now being a girl and not respected or anything. The times Mira was judged according to how she looked it was because she looked so young rather than because she was a girl. In another season I might’ve skipped this, but I can’t say I didn’t enjoy watching this.

It’s grim up north

Tories, UK politics, video
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This Arte documentary looks at the impact Brexit has had on cities like Grimsby and Hull, but in the process makes it very clear that Brexit was just the final nail in the coffin after decades of neglect and decay.

It’s easy to be judgmental about somebody like Darren Kenyon, the fisherman featured here. How could he have been so stupid as to believe the lies told about Brexit? How could he have voted to cut his own throat? It’s easy and tempting to do so because it absolves everybody else. Your own fault, you shouldn’t have been so stupid as to trust the Tories. You made your bed, now lie in it. But the reality is that Darren’s company was in trouble long before he voted for Brexit, one of the few fishing companies left in a town that once had thousands. Through decisions made and policies created beyond his control, Darren and thousands like him, not just fishers were left to struggle. No wonder they went for Brexit when it was explicitly sold to them as the one thing that could take away all those obstacles. Somebody like Darren, who started work at 13, not “very educational” as he puts it himself, but who managed to create a small, thriving business with his own hands yet sees it threatened by forces beyond his control, was primed to believe the promises Brexit and Boris Johnson made.

As such Darren and all the other Brexit voters like them are the least culpable for this disaster. Their fault was to trust the media and politicians who lied to them. Decades of tabloid lies about the EU and politicians blaming everything bad on it, but who steal the credit for the good it brought set the stage for the referendum. Then the media, from the BBC on down failed completely to educate and inform, at best just parroting what both sides said with few attempts to actually determine the truth. And even in those rare cases where this was attempted, it once again was reduced to “experts say X but these politicians disagree, we’ll let you figure it out”.

Worse, once Brexit was a reality and the only issue in question was how damaging it was going to be, the media and the political establishment did its upmost best to make it as damaging and hardcore as possible, while sinking any chance of an alternative. It was deemed more important to keep a mild social democrat out of Number 10 then it was to make sure the country wasn’t entirely fucked over. Time and again chances to get a soft Brexit were missed and the end result was the clown show that was the 2019 election, where Boris Johnson was shitefested over the finish line by an united press and political establishment determined to see off the threat of Corbynism. That three years later it has ended with hyperinflation, a crumbling economy and a health service on the edge of collapse is the price they would pay all over again if asked.

On the remain side there’s this annoying tendency to blame Brexit for all of the UK’s woes, but at best it’s a catalysor of already existing trends. Back in 2001 I was doing leafletting in the then elections for the Socialist Alliance in Plymouth and getting to see some of its estates was shocking. A level of poverty I’d never seen in the Netherlands. Again, reading between the lines in this documentary it’s clear that the poverty and misery in places like Grimsby and Hull aren’t recent either, but have been present for decades. This is why people voted for Brexit because it promised to change things and people were desparate enough to take that gamble. We shouldn’t blame them for it.