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.
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.
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 transzombie Lily!
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?
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?
So Cyndi Lauper. Started out in the eighties as a bit of a Madonna clone, broke through with this annoyingly cheerful ditty about girls wanting to have fun. She got three more top five US hits of her first album, released in 1983 and in 1986 got a number one hit with the song this episode is named after: True Colors. A slow ballad, this became a bit special when it was adopted as a gay anthem and if you look at the lyrics of the chorus it’s easy to see why that happened:
So don’t be afraid to let them show
Your true colors
True colors are beautiful
I see your true colors
Shining through (true colors)
I see your true colors
And that’s why I love you
So don’t be afraid to let them show
Your true colors
True colors are beautiful (they’re beautiful)
Like a rainbow
Oh oh oh oh oh like a rainbow
If this sounds a bit oblique in 2019, let’s not forget the context in which this was released: the eighties was not a good decade for LGBT people. The AIDS pandemic killed thousands upon millions of (mostly) LGBT people and few people seemed to care. Televison evangelists saw it as a judgement from god striking down the sinful, Reagan administration officials joked about the “gay disease” and Thatcher’s government was seriously proposing concentration camps for HIV positive people. Cyndi Lauper herself had lost a close friend to the disease and he was in her mind when she recorded this song, original an ode to the original song writer’s mother. She therefore fully embraced its status as a gay anthem, to the point where she would later name her charity to combat LGBT teen homelessness after it.
And in the first episode of Carole and Tuesday, Tuesday reveals it was hearing this song on the radio that made her want to become a musician, which ultimately led to her meeting Carole when she runs away to the big city from her middle class home to become a musician. We follow her as she runs away, gets her luggage stolen, wanders the city until she hears Carole playing her keyboard, just when she’s at her lowest. Carole meanwhile is shown as she goes through her day, working as a waitress at a fast food joint, getting lip from customers, taking revenge and getting fired, before she comes to the bridge she’ll meet Tuesday on. There she plays without much hope anybody will be moved by it, until she looks up to see Tuesday there, tears streaming down her face.
It’s a meet cute if there ever was one in anime, the two immediately bonding over music while having to run from the cops for busking. Carole takes Tuesday home, where they exchange stories about why they wanted to become musicians. When Carole confesses to having music but no lyrics, Tuesday reveals how much she inspired her, having come up with lyrics on the spot, leading to a very good sounding jam session. In English too, though that took me a few seconds to realise. The animation quality in the scene matches that of the music, as you’d expect from a series that revolves around it. The first episode really sets up the idea that these two have a special bond through their music. The second episode only reinforces that, as they sneak into a concert hall to play the piano there and their performance gets captured and uploaded to the ‘net. This doesn’t necessarily have to be a romantic bond, but it does feel like one.
In general, everything in Carole and Tuesday is a cut above what you’d expect from a good series. The animation is on point throughout the first episode and stays the same high quality in the second. The character designs look great too, each distinct without going into the usual anime short hands of outrageous hair colours. The only thing a little bit lackluster is perhaps the setting. The city of Alba looks vaguely futuristic but doesn’t feel like it’s on Mars in any significant way. Instagram is still around and cultural references are mostly to modern day artists like Daft Punk.
With episode two we get the opening, which is excellent throughout but off which I like the ending segment here the best. In a future where apparantly 99 percent of music is AI generated, cloning previous hits, here we have two young women who have the audacity to play live music. It’s a very ‘rock’ sort of story. Not unexpected, coming from Watanabe Shinichirō, the man behind Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo. I don’t think the story will be as simplistic as human vs AI music, but so far the series has been setting us up to expect something revolutionary to come from Carole and Tuesday, as the opening narration outright tells us. The first two episodes had them as their main focus, but they had spent time setting up other characters, potential rivals perhaps, as well. It will be very interesting to see how this will work out.
Sewayaki Kitsune no Senko-san is a deeply dystopian anime, in which the only way to even alleviate the stress and worries build up by Japan’s horrifying work culture is to have a cute little fox goddess willing to serve as your house wife:
Yes, this is a feel good series about an ordinary, overworked salary man coming home to find out a friendly kitsune fox goddess has adopted him to pamper like an indulgent grandmother would. The first episode is basically him adjusting to this, after first worrying she was a cosplaying neighbourhood kid who snuck in his apartment. Doga Koba, the studio responsible, has made its niche by adapting this sort of cute, fluffy slice of life manga and this was done with their usual quality. I do think though that the manga’s art style doesn’t translate to anime well, it falls a bit flat at times. The pacing is a bit off too. What are quick one/two panel sequences in the original here are dragged out a bit too long, receiving undue emphasis. What in the manga was a one panel gag about him panicking finding a cosplay wearing little girl in his house in the anime becomes a scene where he imagines himself being led away by police as a pedophile, complete with responses by his co-worker and family. It kills the joke and undermines its own premise to fill up screen time.
Because unlike the worries Vrai Kaiser put in their review over at Anime Feminist, I don’t think Senko the fox goddess is meant as a girlfriend to our overworked protagonist. Rather, she comes across to me as an indulgent granny wanting to spoil a favourite grandson. The episode isn’t particularly subtle about this either, what with several flashbacks to Nakano’s actual grandmother. Senko is there to comfort Nakano, not sexually gratify him, but the scenes Vrai Kaiser complains about, do reinforce the idea that this is one of those series.
But despite these missteps, the fantasy that Sewayaki Kitsune no Senko-san wants to indulge in isn’t sexual. Rather, it’s the fantasy of going back to childhood, to simpler times without the responsibilities and stress of an adult in a job that overworks you. To have somebody waiting for you, cook you dinner, pamper you. To not have to face life alone when you’re only living to work, rather than working to live. Somebody there to selflessly love you without expecting anything in return. That fits a grandmother more than it fits a lover. It’s still a very male fantasy of course, to have this no questions asked love and devotion magically appear in your life.
It’s a fitting fantasy for those salary men who have no option but to overwork themselves, trapped in the exploitative, dead end work culture of Japan. Only the interference of a benevolent fox goddes can bring them any relief and even then only temporary because tomorrow they still have to go back to work.
