we're finally notdotq anymore

These post titles shall descend further into the depths of obscurity as n(umber of posts) approaches infinity. And yet, these fingers will never type anything.

Time for some anibloggerality:

Munto sucks as of episode 7; Kyoto Animation turned the once-intriguing Yumemi into a puddle of moe moe jelly and basically sexified everything. lelangir approved; I just want more Gass. Too bad the guy’s dead because he finished pumping his gas. Har. Har. All he wanted to do was BANG BANG take your akuto. *badabum tshhhhhh*

Clannad After Story’s ending is officially balls, I don’t care what the game-playing purists say. Maybe it’s a good adaptation. A good adaptation of shit is still shit. I’m not saying Clannad’s shit, I’m just saying that this scenario is possible. I do know that the execution viewed objectively was weak, and I do know that the ending felt like Mai Hime 26. Only this time there was no Mashiro-chan to fix things, just a loopy plot that somehow had something to do with some nonsensical dreamscape that just didn’t make sense. Also Fuuko is Fffffffffffffffffffuuko. There—you got it, the invective I promised not to deliver.

Anyway, since that’s all the anime I’ve watched recently, I guess I’ll move onto juicier topics like my life. (I’m just too squeezable for my own good. Some might even call me ‘fruity.’)

Yesterday I helped SAKI relocate her bunnies to a new home, if you know what I mean. You probably know what I mean because I mean what I’m saying, and words are words. Which have meanings. Yeah. There was lots of bittersweetness for various reasons, but mostly it was a good day. I read the first chapter of Twilight whilst lingering at SAKI’s place and I must say, it’s a Shaft production waiting to happen. The sickening overabundance of adverbity is not so dissimilar from Shaft’s overabundance of Photoshop filters—meaningless, trite, a disguise that obfuscates none of the shittiness beneath the underneath.

Ate some delicious curry chicken katsu for lunch (apparently, SAKI’s family is more weeaboo FUCKING AWESOME even than I, and as such eats Japanese foods with more regularity than I—which is to say, more than once a year at anime conventions), which was accompanied by several doses of “oh my god I need to not laugh my food across the table.” I hummed some Loituma and got someone else at the table to struggle against the urge to laugh food across the table, and just now I broke the limit of cluttery anti-flow a lolikit can inject into a single sentence and it just keeps going oh my god I’m going to turn into Faulkner at this rate can you believe it? Tick-Tock.

But enough about yesterday—which concluded with a slew of torrenting and taquitos—and onto today. Because apparently, I’m just blogging my life here now or something.

This morning, I attended my philosophy lecture (History of Modern Philosophy, as you might recall from my course list; currently we are studying some B.S. Ethics), and for the first time in a long time I doodled something in my notebook that wasn’t abominable. Well, it might be abominable, but I was not abominated by it. Maybe my standards have fallen. Maybe I was just happy.

After that, I met up with a high school friend back from college on spring break. This was immensely pleasurable, as I missed this friend dearly. She noted that I was more comfortable in my outgoingness than I used to be. This may be the result of my time stuck in a cubicle last semester, or it might be the result of some decking action.

Speaking of decks, could I get some WOWers to level for me? Hurr hurr hurr.

I ate lots of pizza in the company of good friends and then I went home to mom to shit out half my fullness and sleep off the other half. Finally I made it back to the dorms, a place I’d been avoiding for a week as I tended my cat for my out-of-town father, unpacked ten gallons of clothing and damp towels, thought briefly about the fact that I hadn’t watched anime in weeks and how glad I was that I had no idea what the fuck was going on in the aniblogosphere, discovered that ghostlightning’s illustrious blog had attained the coveted 100th post, cursed my fate for now knowing some of what was going on in the aniblogosphere, and subsequently shut myself out of my dormroom, sans computer, in a frantic search for SAKI, who had similarly secluded herself away from a computer.

Apparently, she was in the library stacks on campus, in the deepest and darkest corner of the trollbooth, drawing ambiguously gay porn.

… I love my life.

EDIT: yes, yes, I’ll post her drawings, up in the Rule 34 section, once I feel giving. Right now, I’m not sharing. Use comes before generosity. Now to go fap to my potentially female self…

←[99] SHAFT + School Rumble + Strawberry Panic. That’s the impression I got.

One half of the lead character binary is Kanako: lesbian, tall, tomboy, deretsun for Maria; only becoming insecure (tsun) once her homosexuality is put into question. Her character design and personality remind me of a cross between Yakumo and Tenma. Her external side is amiable, unconfident, pretty darn moe; her internal side is yuri. She contains both the lady-like grace of Yakumo and the horribly klutzy comical antics of Tenma. Her internal/external tendencies can reflect both Maria’s “split” personality and that pleasant Tenma/Yakumo proportion. Maria in fact breaks the fourth wall and calls her out for her lack of verbosity.

The other half of the duo is Maria, the trap. Without drawing needless parallels to Eri Sawachika, it seems established already that Maria is the seme and Kanako the uke. Maria’s façade is humorous enough now that the entire universe has been spoiled of the secret, though it’s the masculinity that is paradoxically accentuated by the feminine appearance, making him much more conniving and serpentine. In some ways he reminds me of Light – not overbearingly GAR but with enough boyishness to possess “best” (or worst?) of both gender.

What’s significant is that the viewer experiences the anime through Kanako – we see her internal monologues. By positioning the viewer “outside” of Maria, [s]he is effectively transformed into the incrementalist, the character that is revealed bit by bit. Reaction porn for some hopeful action porn? I think what this means in the long run is, unless SHAFT starts dealing out paradigm shifts and situating the viewer within Maria’s soliloquies, it will be expected of the viewer to find humor (1) in that incremental revealing of Maria’s secrets and (2) Kanako’s predictable reactions – all the super deformation is reserved for her. The anime, replete with Kanako-colored lenses, establishes a sort of Unlimited Poetic Justice Works: since all of Kanako’s yuri actions are laced with guilt, it’s only natural that we expect Maria to backlash with hypocritical masochism (HUH?).

Anyway, this show is really hilarious! Its comedy does not downplay at all the yuri, and even if you DO NOT WANT trap, you’re basically forced to temporarily forget about it because we’re observing Maria via Kanako. Kanako the flaming lesbian.

Final verdict: if you liked the characterizations in School Rumble, the yuri/catholic(?) themes in Strawberry Panic, and SHAFT’s crazyness, you will definitely enjoy Mariaholic. [note: I did not catch a lot of marimite in here - marimite isn't really even indirectly satired.]

BTW, 100^th post, dedicated to lolikitsune, mai dear waifu.

Gee whiz, lolikit, the references are splurting out all over the place!

» Continue reading this…