no proofreading and full of typos, not paid for this after all.
These days, I don’t have the time to write here. However, I’m not planning to abandon this blog and would like to come back to it every now and then most notably to vent. Around tow years ago, I started renewing it changing the theme. A few months ago I also added an actual banner. The Prichan Rinka smug smile one I added around 2 years ago was temporary. The very first banner was hakomari, then it was the Prichan Rika smug smile. And now I have an actual banner. The Nekketsu Nikki banner is by Mochiplanet. You’ll have my respect if you can guess who the characters are.
I’m currently writing about Japanese games at an american gaming site, and all the time I used to spend on my blog these past 9 years now go to there. Please check the site out and my Japanese news there if you liked my way of writing here and my Pretty Series coverage. Speaking of that, I’m still planing to write and translate more Pretty Series material one day, but it’s not a priority for now.
Yeah. I want to write on my blog, without Twitter’s limitations, and free to share my own thoughts. Twitter rots your brain. It’s bad for to talk about anything serious on it. Everyone betllitles each other and wants to correct and crush each other in public.
So I’ve got this idea to start this post and frequently update it with new thoughts. I’ll try to expand on the ideas I share here on a weekly basis, and explain my thoughts, but I might not either. I want to spend as less time as possile writing this so I’ll be very brief and blunt. Meaning there’s a high chance you won’t get what I mean or misundertand. But it’s fine. I’m not proofreading either.
XXX Virtual YouTubers
I don’t have aything against people making Vtuber content. However, I hate companies who try to profit from it in a capitalistic way and try to turn it into a brand and exploit people adn stuff. Also you can’t eveb begin to imagine how much I judge people who watch vtubers for a very long time. Not “hate” mind you, as disliking someone for their taste is a bad thing. And I wouldn’t bring it up in a discusison? But yeah I think that maybe around over 2 hours a week? is too much ctuber a week. In the first place v tubers themselves shouldn’t make too much content each eek, because of all the work it is.
There are a lot of other things I want to add here and my thoughts aren’t complete but whatever. If you didn’t get my point or don’t understand me, please remember that the best wayt to summarize my opinion is that there’s nothing wrong with tubers but vtubers as a trends as it is now is bad.
XXX
XXX Cosplay, Twitter, discriminations in france
Since 2019 or so, I often had instances of starting writing in Japanese (and maybe in English too )something explaining to Japanese people why non white people don’t care about skin color when cosplaying and cosplay any character they want. So similarly, if you want to cosplay Barret, don’t change your skin tone. While I don’t think I took an actual example like Barret, I’ve shared multiple tweets like this on Twitter over the years, mainly emphasising that my cosplay philosophy is that we’re human, not fictions characters, so we’ll never actually look like fictional characters anyway. So don’t do things like changing your skin tone. (kinda related but another problem: people who randomly accuse others of doing this. There’s a Pretty Series cosplayer I like who’s been a victim of this too and what made me realize this actually exists. This era of social media where people always look down on each other, try to bellite each other ,always being sour, is so wrong. If you believe someone did something worng, just chat with them about it in private. Unless it’s something like ultra bad like murder and sexual violence)
But then I just stop writing or don’t do it because I don’t have the time and I just don’t care enough. I guess maybe I’ll regret it one day. Or maybe I’ll feel a bit bad if a Japanese person I like on Twitter like a Prety Series fan ever does this kind of error. And no, I don’t agree with “yeah but they just don’t know” argument. Doing discirminatory things willingly is bad. Doing it by ignorance is bad as well, sometimes worse, especially as certain people won’t learn in purpose and use “yeah but I’m doing/saying this but I’m not racist” and use ignorance to defend the discriminatory thing they’re doing. Ignorance is bad. One of the worst kinds of ignorance and hte most annoying, sometimes even more annoying than racist people themselves, is when you have naive people, not necessarily white people, who see non -white people trying to fight against discrimination by often talking about it, and who tell them things like “why do you always talk about discrimination? Wouldn’t it be better if you didn’t care about people’s skin color? Why are you so obsessed with that?”. They fail to put themselves into non white people’s shoes. They fail at reasoning. They fail. Because of ignorance. They failt to realize that of course we’d like to do tha,t but it’s simply not possible when the world has always been built around inequalities like this and we’ve felt and will always feel them. That’s why I tend to simply ignore people who say stuff like this, who say they don’t want politics, etc. Unless it’s someone I like, I don’t bother trying to explain all this either. Yet another example is people who act as if far right politicians and voters are the only discriminating people in france or in a country. Pretty much every single politician in france hates either muslim people, non white people, LGBTQ+ people, or everything before. Most of them act as if they don’,t but will often betray themselves with words or acts and fail to hide their discriminating views. I particularly hate when french humorists, singers, actresses and actors, artists in general, take a stance against racism and act as if iconic far right politicians like the Le Pen family is the sole problem. it’s not something done by a certian group of individuals. It’s something anchored in society, in institutions, in laws, etc. Like what true anti dscrimination activists say in france, there’s state racism in france, racism fueled by the governments and state themselves. And when these activists say that, they get shunned, criticized, sued, banned from TVs and media and get death threats.
I’m not saying I’m perfect either. I’ve been writing this blog for tean years. I changed a lot in ten years. I’m sure that if we go back to at least the first five years of the blog, I had at least once written something offensive towards LGBTQ+ community, seeing how ignorant I was in the past, and I apologize for that.
XXX Depressive and pessimistic protagonists, Sword Art Online, isekai stories, sexual fanservice in anime and manga. Gyaru manga. Okamoto Lynn. Japanese politicians who want to ban “unhealthy” manga. Manga and japanese media produced in a world pririotizing profits above everything.
It’s obviously not enough to make me stop reading a manga since most of the time it happens in the first chapter, but I really hate how since like post 2015 or so a lot of protagonists have low self esteem of themselves and also rank people and say they’re at the bottom etc. I don’t know if it’s true though but IIRC I once read on ANN it’s because the protagonist of Romantic Comedy SNAFU or whatever the name was, never read it, is like that, and everyone copied him since it’s one of the best selling LNs of the 2010s.
One thing for sure is it’s a shame a lot of actualy good manga have protagonists like this, I think they’re a bad influence for teens kids who read the manga. There’s that manga whose name I forgot about a guy ranked 1 in a fighting game meeting a girl who’s ranked 2 and who starts coaching him to be fashionable.
“other people had high specs from birth, we’re not the same race”
“this person is rank A in the school while I’m just a “background character””
This kind of dumb mindset from the protagonist made me temporarily stop reading this manga. It’s a shame because it’s actually really fun and well written most of the time, and actually seems fine / realistic as a basic tutorial on: talking with other people and social interactions, dressing up like what is deemed good, fashionable and attractive in a western country like Japan, and date people.
If I was a japanese politician I’d crackdown on manga like this. And badly written manga in general. For example, when it comes to the blood donation uzaki chan poster controversy, I agree with those saying the poster is unappropriate for what it’s advertising, something as serious as blood donation. But other things, for example the blood donation collab Valvrare did with shouko saki and l-elf dressed as doctors, was good imo.
IMO the main problem in the first place is that the world is screwed up by big corporations who make this kind of dumb manga exist in the first place for money. we need less quantity and more quality. I never read Uzaki so maybe it’s a actually good, but from a first glance it looks like gag manga with smug acting girl with a big chest number 84894984984 and has 0 attractiveness. Why would I check it out when I already read ton of other similar manga? This kind of manga who seem to only have been made to follow a trend shouldn’t exist in the first place (again I’m assuming Uzaki is as bad as it looks).
That’s also why I don’t think (the vast majority of) isekai stories with male protags should be called trash because of reccuring themes such as sexual slaves. The vast majority of Isekai is trash because it’s trash for a billion of other reasons of that on top of being sexist. Bad writing being the biggest reason. Writing essays about isekai and why it’s a bad influence would be a complete waste of time. Isekai doesn’t need analysis. It’s just trash. If you actually pick and read isekai stories with themes like sexual slavery, it’s so badly written and lazy that nothing actually comes out of it. The girls in the vast majority of these aren’t “real” slaves but just willingly end up falling in love with the protag just like any other shonen. It’s not any more sexist than the usual stuff.
Saying isekai stories are sexist is giving them too much credit for what they’re worth.
For the same reason, I don’t call SAO bad for its sexual assault scenes, but because it’s badly written in general. There are actually some goods things SAO, and I ultimately do like the series, with ALO arc and Mother Rosario being my favorite parts, and GGO arc ad Alicization being the worst. Anyway. What makes the sexual assault scenes so bad in SAO is the fact that barring the very first arc’s villain, it’s nearly ALWAYS what SAO villains try to do, bringing up a “he’s trying to taint the girls, our trophies, so he’s evil” sexist vibe that definitly gets annoying after a while. There’s also how the sexual assault attempts tend to be used for sexual fanservice, trying to titillate the watchers instead of dread or shock. The animators depict the scenes by including things like boucing breasts animations when the assaulted girl’ clothes get ripped. That’s a thing in a lot of Japanese media and I’m used to it though. My theory is that the people who work on anime ultimately believe it’ snly entertainment and made to please people as a hobby. That’s why they still do things to please people even in darker scenes like this. I believe that’s true for most japanese fictional entertainment. Of course there are exceptions. And SAO is like that because it’s a entertainment and supposed ot make readers feel good. Same with some of the stuff Okamoto Lynn makes. Meanwhile, stories that are dark from the start and whose goal is to make you sad or depressed don’t do that. If you take a look at Uta Kata, it’s a dark anime with a lot of dark themes, so while it does have sexual fanservice scenes, stuff like sexual abuse isn’t depicted in a sexual fanservice manner. Same thing with stuff like Narutaru etc. For example, iirc the goblin slayer main manga doesn’t show you much of the goblin raep scene at the beginning, which effecively makes it scary and disturbing. At the end of the day though, Goblin Slayer isn’t supposed to be a dark story. And if you take a look at the spinoff goblin slayer year one manga, it does use the raep scenes just a typical sexual fanservice scene, showing the girls blushing, etc. But yeah it’s thanks to being used to this and not being bothered by it that for example I kept watching Cross Ange past episode 1 and saw how amazing and feminist of a show it actually is.
(There are some parts of SAO I like a lot, most notably the first arc, the ALO arc, and mother rosario. I hate GGO arc, and I really dislike Alicization and it’s what made me stop reading. I often say SAO should have ended at Mother Rosario, would have been a perfect ending too.)
(Note that to me, isekai is a trend, not a gnere, I don’t consider things like Escaflowne a Isekai, and I don’t consider Sengoku Collection a reverse isekai for example, because neither follow the trends and patterns of the isekai boom trend of mid 2010s.)
My point is, if we had better stories/ less copypasted stuff being published in the first place it’ll help solve problems like sexism. Then again, I’m not saying manga made on a trend are automatically bad. Since 2015 or so, there’s been a influx of manga with gyaru characters, kinda like how delinquent male protagonist were popular in the 80s. It’s not like they’re all bad. Gyaru Tensei was great and sadly ended way too soon and got canceled, its author is a genius. Gyaru Gohan is really good. Thatmanga about gyaru hokkaido is really good too. Etc. (most of the “gyaru” characters in these manga barely actually feel like “gyaru” imo and show how the various gyaru fashions uniformed themselves sadly and “gyaru” post 2010 means any fashionable/cute girl)
So yeah in conclusion, If I was a japanese politician who wants to remove “unhealthy” and “bad influence” manga, I’d start by making some kind of laws/plan so that every publishing company has better authors and editors. So there are less bad manga in general. I wouldn’t bother mangaka like Watashiya Kaworu for her Kodomo no Jikan lolicon stuff, especially as she actually did a really great, helpful, educational manga like Jouo sama no Eshi. Instead, there are specific authors I’d ban instead like Okamoto Lynn and prevent them from writing and publishing anything forever.
(We need less pessimistic&society ranking protags, but we also need less characters who play gacha games and glorifies it too. Screw that and how it got normalized. Imagining that out there, be it in france with DBZ dokkan battle, or in japan with random billions gacha games, it’s possiblle that there have been kids at school who got bullied into gacha or for not having rare enough chars in a gacha game pisses me off a lot.)
April 14, 2020, Kancolle, Azur Lane and Touhou
I recently saw a video with Azur Lane’s stuff. It made me realize as much as I look down on the game, it’s made by (seemingly, as it’s on camera) really cool people and I really wish it stays that successful. At the same time, I really can’t like it, just like many similar girls characters only mobage, for multiple reasons I might explain another time.
IMO, in ten years no one will remember Azur Lane unless its staff manages to do something awesome with it. Meanwhile people will still remember Touhou and still do Touhou doujin content. I think FGO will stay too. the sole reason why is because while most people only know FGO, its ultimatelypart of the bigger nasuverse, and Nasu is definitly a great writer who can make new stories about it. But that’s not enough. What makes me certain FGO (and the sequel it’ll probably get in the next five years) will always stay relevant even in ten years is that Nasu is also smart/witty/lucky to have been friends with many other excellent authors since his doujin days. When worst come to come, he could just ask Narita Ryougo or Haganeya Jin to write an arc or two for him for example.
april 14, 2020, Sengoku Collection
I spent some time rewatching Sengoku Collection again. If I ever finish a top 50 list of 2010-2019 anime, it’ll definitly be in top ten along with G Reco, Gundam Tsubasa Yugioh Fighters, Pretty Rhythm, Tiger& Bunny, and Moretsu Pirates. I think one of the manyreasons why I like it is how it doesn’t suffer from the same syndrome most japanese anime mang agames suffer from since the end of the nineties imo: how things stopped inspired themselves from outside Japan. If you pick a random 80s anime or manga, there’s a high chance for no reason at some point you’ll see an Alien lookalike villain in it or a totally not che guevarra character. You never see that anymore. I’m oversimplifying my thoughts cuz no time. Each episode of Sengoku Collection is inspired from a classic movie or something form the 80s. Stuff like back to the future. It’s mainstream stuff even I who don’t know much outside of islam, anime games and manga, knows about. it’s fun.
13 sentinels aegis rim is the same too.
Another reason is how touching the story is with most characters ending up in a dilemna choosing between their dream or what they think is their dream, against their friend, and always choosing the later ultimately. It’s also a ver ygood mix of happy and tragic moments, like pretty rhythm, princess sarah, ie naki ko 1977; hokuto no ken, etc etc; al my favorite stories are like this.
April 4, 2020 / I hate Japan part 1
I hate Japan so much. You can’t even imagine. At the same time, I love the country. But there are more social, cultural, etc hings I hate about the country than I can count. One of these is the global idea that europeans/american/westerners are better or more beautiful. (I consider Japan a “western” country though). Like “oh, this guy is “half”, no wonder he’s so beautiful and smart”. You also see that in a lot of sports manga but with varying degree.
In Yakitate Japan the author is joking when he says ever yfrench kid knows how to bake a baguette, and it’s funny. In kenran Taru Grande SCène however, Cuvie seems extremely serious and sharing the same idea when she make characters say that asians and Japanese are good at arts/sports like ballet but have a hard time when they get to the sekai level because they lack the cultural knowledge: Unlike their europeean peers, their parents never brought them to museums and ballets and opera since childhood to epxerience art stuff. She’s feeding the idea that all europpeans are like this; While not at all, especially when it comes to lifestyle. You can have rich parents and live in the center of paris meaning you’ll probably experience stuff like oper more, but it’s not 100% sure at all. meanwhile, you can be living in a poor paris suburbs, born from north africa immigrants whose parents fought against nazis for france, and have a bigger interest in opera than any white kid.
It’s even more weird when you know Cuvie actually visited France multiple times, so I expect her to know Franceh si the wost country in the world with Japan, and not idealize french and european people like that. I want to ask her about it one day. Maybe I could on Twitter. It’s pretty mch the sole thing I don’t like about the manga. Besisdes that it’s just like Pretty Rhythm, the ultimate sports shoujo. Though without romance in Kenran Taru Grance Scene’s case, which is an original twist for the genre. at least no romance so far. I haven’t read the manga for over a year now, and I haven’t read since vol 8 or 9, even though its so excellent. I’ve been reading it in Japanese, and in Japan volume 15 is releasing on 20 may 2020. My favorite character is Kurisu Sakura.
Nekketsu Nikki 
An entire decade, huh? Been on and off too, and I always come back to see if you’ve posted something!
ill try to read when i can too.