Wis[s]e Words

Koikimo & Higehiro: adult men chasing high school girls is romantic, right?

Published on April 5, 20211 Comment

In Koi To Yobu Ni Wa Kimochi Warui, it is the pureness of the school girl protagonist that makes the adult co-lead want to pursue her:

Koikimo: a grown up man proposes to a high school girl

Amakusa Ryo is a womaniser who one day leaves the apartment of his latest one night stand without breakfast. He gets dizzy trying to walk down the stairs towards the subway and is saved from falling by Arima Ichika, who also ends up giving him her lunch. When the two unexpectedly meet again because it turns out she is a friend of his younger sister, he tries to reward her by offering to sleep with her. She refuses and he is smitten by her purity and declares her his one and only. From there on he starts wooing (from her point of view, harassing) her through gratitious romantic gestures. And that’s the premisse of the series. He tries to flirt with her, she finds it disgusting, hilarity ensues. She by the way is the only one bothered by all of this. His sister supports his advances and even helps him, her mother finds it all charming that she gets flowers from a mysterious lover.

Higehiro: I will let you do me, so let me stay

In Hige wo Soru. Soshite Joshikousei wo Hirou, salaryman Yoshida, fresh from being rejected by his crush, stumbles across a high school girl, Ogiwara Sayu, near his home, who promptly offers to “let him do her” in exchange for a place to stay:

Yoshida is not that kind of man however. He lets Sayu stay at his place, but not for sex. Sayu it seems comes from Hokkaido, had run away from home six months ago and had made a habit of sleeping with strange men in return for food and shelter. Yoshida vows to break this habit and rehabilitate her, by doing household chores. I can’t help but feel there are better ways of dealing with this situation. Are there really no social services in anime Japan?

Two series in one season that feature a romantic situation between an adult man and a high school girl. One presents stalking as comedy, the other thinks that trading shelter for sexual favours can be explain by selfishness. Which is worse?

With Koikimo the series at least understands that being romantically pursued against your will by a much older man is scary, even if only Ichika thinks so. Higehiro on the other hand presents an equally uneven relationship as something noble because Yoshida doesn’t immediately wants to have sex. That he still holds power over Sayu because he can withdraw his protection at any moment is never even recognised by the series. Which is worse?

Koikimo continually contrasts the “purity” of Ichika with the supposed nastiness of an adult woman’s sexuality; Ryo seems to hate the women he sleeps with. There’s a scene where one of his past lovers bumps into him and Ichika and warns her about him, but it’s shown as her being jealous, not concerned. Higehiro instead has the high school girl as aggressor, promiscuous, treating sex as a commodity, with the male lead having to train her out of this habit. Which is worse?

For me, it’s the second one. While purity culture is dangerous and obnoxious as well, the idea of a young girl as temptress so universally used as an excuse for pedos that it makes me more uncomfortable. Check out for example the lyrics of this little ditty I listened to by sheer coincidence today:

Thirteen summers past by your door
You think its time to score
Alright but don’t tell all the neighbour boys
Your mamas out of town
Thirteen summers got left behind
The minute you found out
Indeed that your blues eyes could hypnotise
Drive a man insane

That’s “Hold Me Back”, by British prog rock group Patto. And while it is from 1970, that attitude is still alive and kicking today. Again, Koikimo at some level seems to at least understand that a ‘romance’ between an adult man and a high school girl is wrong, even if it calls it “gross” rather than criminal. Higehiro on the other hand seems to say that as long as you don’t immediately have sex with her, you could have a romance like this and not be scum. Me, I doubt it.

Watame’s lullaby — Hololive Showcase

Published on April 5, 2021Leave a comment

Watame has such a great, soothing voice:

Hitsuji mofu mofu / Kedama moko moko
Watame fuwa fuwa / Do do do do
Futon ni kuru mari / Kyou mo oyasumi

Ashita no koto de / Doki doki shitari
Sowa sowa shitari / Shinai de
Yukkuri nan ni mo / Kangaenai de nee you
Nemure nai yoru ni / Yorisou hitsuji ga
Beeeee iru yo
Atatakai miruku ni / Hachimitsu ga tokeru yo ni
Good sleep sheep sheep

Hitsuji mofu mofu / Kedama moko moko
Watame fuwa fuwa / Do do do do
Futon ni kuru mari / Kyou mo oyasumi

Tsunomaki Watame is supposed to be a sheep, singing you to sleep. Well, it works for me. In general her streams are soothing enough already, let alone like here where she deliberately tries to put you at ease.

The limits of Owen Jones

Published on March 18, 2021Leave a comment

Oliver Eagleton exposes the limits of Owen Jones and puts the boot in hard in his review of Jones’ new book on the failure of Corbynism:

Of course, Jones is most aligned with his Guardian colleagues on The Antisemitism Crisis (which he places centre-stage, awarding it more coverage than any other topic). Here again, press relations are the overwhelming concern—a fixation evidenced by the semantic fluidity of the term ‘crisis’. Sometimes Jones suggests that antisemitism had reached crisis-levels within Labour; sometimes he describes a pr crisis rather than a real one. A similar sliding of sense afflicts the word ‘failure’: it is unclear whether Corbyn failed to deal with a racist infestation, or failed to rebut a smear campaign—as if Jones cannot distinguish between the objective reality and the media representation. He accepts that allegations of antisemitism have sometimes been cynically deployed to gag critics of Israel, but he would presumably lose his column space were he to describe the charges against Corbyn as a politically motivated miasma. So instead he strives for ‘balance’ through a series of self-contradictions. Corbyn is a lifelong campaigner against antisemitism, yet he has a ‘blind spot’ on the issue. Only 0.3 per cent of Labour members were accused of antisemitism, yet it is a ‘crisis’ within the party. The leadership team vastly improved the disciplinary process, yet their response suffered from ‘a lack both of strategy and emotional intelligence’. The party produced a thoughtful pamphlet ‘designed as a political education tool for members’, yet it ‘never rolled out political education’. Alongside such incoherent formulations is a summary of Israeli history which ‘could have been written by Shimon Peres’, as one critic has remarked. The description of Israel’s foundation as a valiant socialist endeavour, worlds away from ‘settler-colonialism’, which subsequently degenerated under a series of reactionary leaders, is a rehearsal of liberal-Zionist hasbara that betrays scant engagement with scholarship on the region.

The inability or refusal to see the Labour antisemitism crisis as manufactured is the worst failure of Jones and people like them on the (soft) left. Being employed by The Guardian it is likely more the latter than the former, because his employer was such a major player in ginning up this crisis in the first place. Column after op-ed pretending NWO1488ILoveHitler tweeting something antisemitic had anything to do with Labour just because he said he was a Labour voter. Granted, Jones was one of the few nominally left wing voices in the UK media that even tried to argue against this, but in the end he still accepted the framing of Labour and Corbyn as inherently antisemitic.

Like almost every other pundit, Jones now has to keep up the pretence that this was a serious crisis, because to do otherwise would reveal his own culpability in the whole ‘scandal’. Less guilty than others, sure, but he still played an important role in it, by establishing the limits of acceptable criticism. Jones could say that the attacks on Labour were politically motivated or exaggerated the crisis, but not that the crisis wasn’t real. Even now we conclusively know how little substance there was to the allegations thanks to the EHRC report, Jones has to keep up the charade. That’s why his retrospective is so incoherent, because he cannot afford to admit the truth.

Larnell Lewis is sickenly talented

Published on March 17, 2021Leave a comment

Michel is right. It’s unbelievable how talented Larnell Lewis is, that he can learn to play the drums to this song in the time it took him to fly to the studio:

The first I heard about Snarky Puppy too. It reminds me of Pierre Moerlen’s version of Gong, especially their first two albums, Gazeuse! (1976) and Expresso II (1978), fusion/jazz rock with lots of mellow brass, piano and bongos. Not the most innovative music in the world in 2021, but gorgous nonetheless. Certainly deserving to be listened to in more detail.

And, sickening as it is watching Larnell Lewis hearing “Enter Sandman” for the first time and immediately nailing the drums when you yourself struggled for three years learning to play “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” on the guitar —badly–, you can’t deny the man’s talent. Not just in being able to play a song perfectly after hearing it once, but also in how he breaks it down beforehand while listening to it.

Poor… Tired… And Depressed on Planet Earth — Evan Dorkin’s Hectic Planet

Published on February 22, 2021Leave a comment

This is it. From Hectic Planet: Checkered Past this is the most Gen X comics panel ever created:

Hectic Planet: when you are so poor you cannot afford a glass of Nesquick

When you’re so poor, tired and alienated that the only thing you can think of to bring a little light in your life is a shitty overpriced chocolate milk substitute drink and you can’t even afford that. Welcome to Reagan’s America, except this is 2074 and what you’re reading is supposed to be a light hearted space opera sci-fi comic about underground Pirate Corps sticking it to the man. Instead it’s a series about twentysomething slackers with no jobs, no money, no future, living from day to day adrift in a world with no use for them. They survive on a diet of insipid pop culture references, underground zine culture and ska. Mix Clerks with Repo Man and 2-Tone and you sorta get what Hectic Planet was about.

Hectic Planet: the covers of the collected editions

Hectic Planet was Evan Dorkin’s first series and it shows. The beginning is a bit rough but can see his art improving as the series progresses. Everything that he would later put in Milk & Cheese or Dork! is already here in an embryonic form. The density of the writing and art, the pop culture trivia, the background of quiet ennui & depression that’s present throughout brought on by the knowledge that there’s no place for you in the real world nor do you want one: this is perhaps the most Gen X comic ever created. Written in the late eighties, it anticipates the pop culture of the nineties, the depression after the false dawn of Reaganomics failed to turn into a mushroom cloud and a whole generation had to get used to the idea that they would have to become adults after all.