Wis[s]e Words – Page 77 – Ceci N'est pas Un Blog

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.

WhY aRe ThErE nO wOmEn In LaBoUr??

Published on June 20, 2019Leave a comment

It’s not that Suzanne “yet another Grauniad transphobe” Moore is really thick enough to believe this, it’s that she and The Guardian think we are thick enough to believe this:

For the past few years, in every chat I have had with a senior Labour person, they have acknowledged that the party needs a female leader. The Tories have done it twice. Maybe the Lib Dems will appoint Jo Swinson. But Labour has a shortage of women, not on its benches but in its inner circle. This inner circle includes the same people who struggle to deal effectively with sexual harassment cases and antisemitism, so it’s understandable they would find it challenging to track down a woman – any woman! – with the intellectual depth and mental agility of the present leader.

You wouldn’t think from this the Labour Shadow Cabinet is gender balanced. No mention of Diane Abbott either, but then she’s a sore point for Moore, having stood against her and lost her deposit during the 2010 general elections. No mention either of any politics that might be of interest for somebody an alleged feminist, but then Moore’s brand of feminism is entirely driven by a jobs for the girls mentality rather than dealing with problems encountered in the world outside the Westminster bubble. It’s pathetic what The Guardian is reduced to in attempting to smear Corbyn and Labour.

Chelsea Cain shows you how to not handle criticism

Published on June 10, 2019Leave a comment

Eagle Eyed viewers noticed something strange in the latest issue of Chelsea Cain’s Man-Eaters, a dystopian satire about how menstruation turns pubescent women into werepanthers:

First panel from Man-Eaters 9 showing a critical tweet

In case you can’t read that, those are two mildly critical tweets about Man-Eaters hung on the walls of a rehabilitation centre for menstruators. Chelsea Cain breaking the fourth wall there to really own the person who wrote those tweets. (I won’t link to these tweets directly; they are googable if you really want to see them). Note that both of them are from the same person, a reader who didn’t tweet at Chelsea Cain directly, has fewer followers than even I have and only expressed mild disappointment that Man-Eaters wasn’t better than it was. Why feel the need to blow it all up by including them in the issue without approval and hence expose both them and your own inability to handle criticism to a much wider, much more hostile audience? Why do this to yourself?

Second panel from Man-Eaters 9 showing a critical tweet

It’s not as if Cain herself doesn’t know what it feels like to be a target of harassment. On Metafilter last year I posted an interview in which she talked about her own experiences being harassed for being outspoken feminist in her work for Marvel. Sure, she left the poster’s identity off the tweets she put in the comic, but as said, a simple search on that first sentence in the first tweet will find the originals. Fortunately for the original poster, the comix community so far has responded with horror at Cain and they seem to have suffered little consequences so far other than the stress of knowing a big name comic creator tried to sick their fans at you.

Whether the criticism is warranted doesn’t enter into it. The problem is that Chelsea Cain took the same right wing harassment tactics used against her and attempted to silence a critic, one with a much smaller following than she has. Once the backlash against that started this weekend she was quick to apologise and throw a pity party for herself for being so dumb, but she never once contacted the person she actually wronged before she deleted her twitter account. It’s not a good look, but you also have to wonder why her editor, publisher, or even whoever had to cut and paste those tweets into the panels in the first place didn’t drew Cain aside to ask her if she really thought this through? American comics are a cesspit of unprofessionalism but this is low even by their standards.

UPDATE: for those wanting to read a good analysis of what’s wrong with Man-Eaters as a comic and story, including its gender essentialism, may I recommend Véronique Emma Houxbois’ review of the series, written before #9 came out.

Hector (2005 – 2019)

Published on May 19, 2019Leave a comment

Today was the first time in almost fourteen years that I wasn’t woken up by a desparate meowing from just outside my bedroom at some ungodly hour because somebody had decided it was time to get fed.

Hector falling asleep on my arm

That was Hector in a nutshell, always afraid that he wouldn’t be fed, always convinced there was something just that little bit more yummy than whatever was in his bowl already. When Sandra and I moved here with our first cat Monty back in 2005, we decided that he needed a little friend to keep him company as he couldn’t go roam the streets anymore. So off we popped to the local animal shelter and one little friend became two, as when we found this little cutie, we found her playing with a small three legged tomcat and we couldn’t bring ourselves to separate them. She became Sophie, he became Hector.

Hector in happier times

As we were told it, he was found in a sewer drain, his back leg almost bitten through, probably a rat and it had been amputated when he came to the shelter. He never really missed it as far as we could tell. His own remaining back paw grew to twice the size of a normal cat’s, while his shoulder muscles belonged on a cat three times his size. He couldn’t jump, but boy could he sling his claws in you and hoist himself up if he wanted to sit in your lap. He did get a bit frustrated though when he wanted to scratch the side of his head his missing paw was on. The stump would move but he just couldn’t figure out why the itchiness didn’t disappear…

In the summer you wouldn’t see him until it was time for dinner. He’d spent his days somewhere in the garden complex inside the block our house was on, sunning himself in one of the neighbours’ gardens. He had a special bond with our next door neighbour and with the neighbour’s pet bunny, whom he seemed fascinated with. Perhaps because it had a similar gait as himself. But if the way he walked resembled a rabbit, his personality was more puppy than kitten. Enthusiastic, goofy, energetic, always wanting to be around you or near you, but not much for laying still. He was everybody’s friend, even though he was a bit of a scaredy cat with strangers.

He could be incredibly annoying and underfoot and I’ll miss him terribly.