Subatomic Brainfreeze

Christopher Handley pleads guilty: LET'S OUTRAGE

I wouldn't usually cover a story that everybody on the internet is already all over (I have a Mazinger blog to run here), but this one has worrying consequences for pretty much every American manga/anime fan. Christopher Handley has been in some very serious trouble lately. His crime was importing some manga from Japan: a package was randomly searched by the postal inspector, and they decided they did not like what they saw. They didn't like it so much, in fact, that Handley's house was raided. We don't yet know what the comic in question was, but that's not really the point. It can be the most unimaginably horrible thing ever put to print and the government still wouldn't have the right to break into a private citizen's home. Simple reason: it's not real.

Let's get to what's bubbling under the surface here: lolicon makes me sick, guys. Hell, a lot of my own comics make me sick. But it's got absolutely nothing to do with what makes us sick. Fiction contains these things. Should anybody ever be sent to jail for fiction? Why? What does that accomplish? At best, we've prevented something from happening that we had no way of knowing would actually happen, punished a theoretical crime. Good job?

Anyway, long story short, Handley's been in legal hell since '06. Jerked around and manipulated by clueless law enforcement (an ad for Gaogaigar was used against him, I kid you not), yesterday he finally put in a guilty plea, finishing the government's long work of wrecking his life. He could be put away for up to 15 years for comic books. This is insane.

As fans of anime and manga, and under the insanely strict standards applied to Handley, I wouldn't be surprised if all of us have something that could be deemed obscene by an overzealous postal inspector. I've got my Koike comics, mainstream fans have their sexualized teenagers, and the moe fans have, well.. everything. How many jails would we need to fit everybody who ever bought that Hellsing volume where the Nazi vampire takes a big ol' bite out of a baby? It's child abuse, you know! So, yeah, it's draconian madness and all, but let's stay safe. Let's all not order any comics from Japan for a while, okay? Especially if we're in Iowa. Hell, if I was in Iowa I'd be getting around to burying my comic books under the earth forever about now. Write your representative, give to the CBLDF. Listen to Neil Gaiman.

(note: I am an hour from Book-Off NYC and sacrifice nothing by this course of action)

What pisses me off is that while the government is wasting its time legislating fantasy and law enforcement is wasting its time on hunting witches, children are hurt, abused and violated in this country. Actual children. What positive goal does putting Handley away achieve for us as a society? I just don't see one. The way I see it, the people doing this are just doing it so they can feel better about themselves, so they can say they "protected the children". The children in question, of course, are imaginary: but then, we seem unable to tell the difference anymore. Mission accomplished!

Training with Hinako: AREN'T YOU A LITTLE CHUBBY TOO?

This is pretty brilliant in many ways: some anime studio decided to think outside the box and make an exercise video for otaku. But wait, you say! Sure otaku need exercise videos, but why would they ever actually buy one? And the answer is: tits.

A long time ago, you see, Hinako was just like you and me: she ate junk food and watched shitty cartoons all day and clapped with delight like a five-year-old. In other words, she was an awful human being. One day, though, she was so god damn excited that she became a cartoon character. Her bosses have demanded that she lose weight or lose her day job on a magical girl show (and presumably her drawn existence). Well thank god you're here, viewer, because you are going to work out with Hinako. At the end of the workout, Hinako tells you what a nice guy you are and how she has so much fun doing this with you every day-- not to imply anything-- and blows you a kiss. Like this was one of those pictures where the nerd puts dinner in front of his computer.

But that's not what pays the bills. Like we said, it's tits. Hinako does push-ups, sit-ups and squats, and the camera explores a number of vaguely pornographic camera angles as Hinako sweats and bounces and grunts and moans. The animation is actually really detailed: of course, given the repetitive nature of exercise, it's the same couple shots over and over again from a couple of different angles. There are variations with Hinako in different pervy outfits and so on for, you know, maximum replay value. Eventually the video just discards all pretenses and has Hinako bounce in close-up for the camera repeatedly. One of the many reasons this is a brilliant idea: the DVD is only twenty minutes long, it's composed mostly of repeat footage, and it's 20 bucks. I hear it's selling well, and they must be making a god damn mint. It's always simple things like this. Don't you wish you'd thought of it?

School City Valanoir: SUGOOOOOOOOI

It's been a while since we hit the bad anime, so let's get our dose. School City Valanoir is a work of QUALITY. When I say QUALITY please don't assume that I'm talking about a geniunely good piece of work: I'm talking about QUALITY. It takes a drive not to be driven, a certain dedication to finding the bar and digging a hole in the ground beneath it to get across, to create a work of true QUALITY. Valanoir is one such anime.

In the filename, the fansubbers have helpfully included the tag [Yashigani]. Let's talk about that term so that you can, in turn, better understand QUALITY. Sage otomen bangin calls Gundress, Lost Universe, and Valanoir the three great Yashigani anime. The term comes from the title of the fourth Lost Universe episode: it didn't exactly run outright unfinished, the way Gundress did, but the animation, outsourced to a Korean studio that did not give a god damn, was legendarily terrible. Everybody's off-model, ill-proportioned, and jerking around onscreen. To hell with in-between frames! The work was so bad that the studio had to re-animate the entire episode for video release. The Lost Universe and Slayers anime weren't exactly high watermarks of animation quality in the first place, so the result is what is likely the ugliest anime episode of all time. Here's a best-of reel, since you won't find it on the DVDs.

 But in laziness, Valanoir might be a cut above the Yashigani episode. The Yashigani episode has motion. People do things. Even if the outsourced studio boned it, there was least the intention of animating something entertaining. Valanoir has no such ambitions. It doesn't need to, after all. It's in the worst genre: Valanoir is an anime based on a videogame. Valanoir is a PS2 school-life sim set at the titular school. I assume the game wasn't too popular, but that didn't stop developer Idea Factory from tossing out two $50 episodes of Valanoir. These DVDs claim to be 50 minutes in length, but the episode I have here is only 26, and I'm pretty sure that only two episodes exist. I assume whatever else is on those DVDs is filler material of some kind, and considering that this entire anime is filler material, you have to wonder what didn't make the cut. This episode is called, as the fansub puts it, "Tilde Myu's Doki-Doki Ellipsis First Experience Heart Tilde".

From the contents of the anime, I'm going to go ahead and assume that this game wasn't worth animating, or hell, probably even playing. The plot is a typically obnoxious pile of anime cliche: an unbearable heroine who only says "waaaaa" or "waaaaiii" or "sugooooi" goes to Valanoir, a school where she will make unbearable friends and say "waaaa" and "waaaaiii" and "sugooooi" to them. So in that sense, they gave the story the treatment it deserved. The backgrounds are all CG, and they've clearly been slapped together in about two minutes. Nobody moves in Valanoir: if there is movement, expect that shot to be used repeatedly in order to fill up time. The best and laziest trick used is when they have the main character's grandpa "eat" a hamburger for the entire first scene, while the main character is almost entirely offscreen. His head moves up and down behind the thing, but the hamburger never gets any smaller, and they never really have to animate his mouth moving. Brilliant.

And it actually gets worse than that: there are transition scenes (indicated, for some reason, by letterboxing) that contain no animation at all. They're just slideshows. Even the OP is just the artwork from the videogame being moved around the screen. It's as though they were actually working really hard on the parts they animated, and they couldn't keep up the standard. Except we know they weren't: even the parts in Valanoir that do move can barely even be called "animation" in the first place! You have to wonder what the budget was, or whether they just locked three guys in a room for six hours and told them to make a cartoon.

The gang at ADTRW translated and released Valanoir at the start of the spring season as a prank: people would figure it was a new, current show, and then they'd be tricked into watching Valanoir. A couple thousand people downloaded, is what I hear. Good job, bros, now get going on that second episode. I hear it's even worse, and I can't imagine how little they'd have to care to manage that! Plus, I'm wondering about the mysterious Naruto Channel.

The Great Happiness Space: I GUESS I'M EMOTIONALLY DAMAGED

Let's shift gears yet again and talk about a documentary. I watched this on Netflix streaming the other night, so if you have an account, you can really easily check it out that way. Ever since then I've been unable to stop telling my friends about it, and I guess I have to count you all from now on. The Great Happiness Space is a doc about the real host club scene in Japan, and how it and the rest of the companionship/sex industry in Japan form this endless black hole of despair. You know that cliche image of someone falling down an endless void, their arms and legs sticking up in the air and flailing as they yell? That's how I felt this entire movie. "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA".

Rakkyo is the stage of of our vicious cycle, a big host club in Osaka where women pay by the hour for the false companionship of pretty boys with spiky hair. Even though all a host really does is flirt, karaoke and drink with his customers, partying as hard as five or so desperate women are willing to pay you for is still pretty tough work. Leader and club owner Issei guesstimates that he puts down ten bottles of champagne in a night, immediately noting "My liver's probably fucked". Anybody would be willing to risk their liver when they stand to pull down what these guys do, though: 10 grand a month is considered low, entry-level pay, and Issei makes 50.

It's okay to stop here and drop your jaw and say "Jesus fucking Christ", so I'm going to give you a minute.

The guys make all that money by how well they play the girls, naturally: the main trick is that they've built a small ceremony around opening and drinking a champagne bottle, the "champagne call." Order a bottle and the hosts crowd around, pour the booze into a giant novelty mug (you have to have a tissue under your chin while you drink from these things), and either customer or host-- more often host-- chugs it down while the rest of the guys dance around and give the customer the attention she's really paying for. The idea, of course, is to make the customer feel so special that she's miserable when the drink is done and the guys go to the next girl. That way she'll buy another, the hosts will come back, Girl B will be left alone, and so the process repeats itself. This sort of bidding war for love is how the hosts make the bulk of their money.

The hosts are transparently cynical and manipulative by trade, simultaneously presenting the fantasy their customers seek and making sure that it's very costly. One host has a crisis of conscience, and the guys have a group talk where they ultimately agree that while too much exploitation is an awful thing, a little exploitation is just what the girls came here for. It doesn't seem to honestly satisfy anybody's conscience, though. "I love you", for example, is tossed around cheaply by both host and customer, and neither party is really stupid enough to believe it. Ultimately, the hosts are numb, distant, and a little tragic themselves: the job has completely separated them from their own ability to honestly love. Plus they puke up their own blood sometimes from all the champagne.

There's this subplot with a new guy who's real clean-cut and straight-edged, and you can tell they want to show you his gradual decline, but nothing really happens to him short of getting his hair bleached.

The customers are about as interesting as the hosts, and a lot sadder: they have no apparent regrets about the kind of money they spend, and as I mentioned, they're deeply involved in the host club fantasy. Many of these women are so involved, in fact, that they've managed to go utterly beyond reason and earnestly believe they have a chance at a serious relationship with their chosen host.

When the first half of the movie details how much people are spending, you're asking yourself throughout "Where the hell does anybody get this kind of money?" Well, sometimes the answer is simpler than I imagine: they're in the sex business too. Only other hostesses, and more often prostitutes, can actually afford the ludicrous costs of high-end host club membership. And this is what's truly baffling about it: more than anybody, you'd figure these women would know better. I can't imagine, in their heart of hearts, that they don't. But they sure as hell don't show it! Night after night, these women put down thousands upon thousands of dollars towards their mutual dream of being with Issei forever and ever. The phrase "financial worship" is used more than once.

As miserable as the hosts probably ultimately are, they've at least got tons of money out of the deal (the money trail goes john to hooker to host, it seems), even if they don't seem to have any time to do anything with it. These women are sad on a whole other level. I want to say "like otaku," but it's really a lot worse than that. Otaku aren't so beaten down by the world that they feel like selling their bodies to buy $10,000 hugpillows is the only way they will ever achieve happiness.

The movie really slams home the point when you finally get to see Issei leave his number one customer and turn to the camera in total disgust, launching into a speech he can't say to her but clearly wants her to hear about how she's crazy and manipulative, and says things to the cameras that she wants him to hear. These two might only have ever been able to honestly communicate with each other through documentary film cameras. Maybe it was a good thing, after all.

Ultimately, the whole thing is a terrible cycle of despair, and the participants are all prisoners by choice. You can't feel sorry for the guys because of the cash and the exploitation, and you can't feel bad for the women because they really crave said exploitation. There's not much to say about it, except maybe to put your hands up in front of your face, reach towards God and ask why.

FEEL THE SHOCK OF EROTIC RACING ACTION

I was reading up on the state of the internet when an "advertisement" caught my eye. To put it quickly, the Moero Downhill Night games are a series of porn racing games being brought to market by the always-creepy J-List under their Peach Princess label. (Please note that none of this is even a little worksafe.) You will note that as you flip through the description that the whole act of racing is curiously omitted. I wonder why! Luckily, one of the three games' trailers actually opts to show some gameplay and, well, when you see it you'll know why I had to make this post.

Stunning! As you can see, we're all the way in the beginning of the Playstation era with this: the graphics are only a notch or two past Cosmic Race, and you could argue that Cosmic Race has the better vehicle models, couldn't you? Lesson learned: you can put moe on absolutely anything and sell a couple of copies (see also SNK's current April Fool's prank).

MAJOR FANDOM LOATHING

Gentlemen, I love sushi. I love Japan period.

I love anime.
I love manga.
I love desperation.
I love hug-me signs.
I love glomping.

GIROOGAMESH! (AW YEAH)

I love running around a room, screaming long-dead catchphrases over and over again.
I love being the reason anime fans don't talk about it in public.
I love prostituting myself outside the con center for additional Pocky.
I love getting kidnapped by old men who promise to take me to Ikkicon.
I love masturbating on comatose girls.

Gentlemen, I love anime conventions.

HEY!! GO TO-- wait am I exploiting you people or are you people exploiting me I can't figure it out anymore

Anime voice actresses cover punk: THE WORLD PAYS THE PRICE

Usually I keep posts like this to the Twitter feed, but I want to make sure everybody is aware of this most horrific of cultural juxtapositions. Evil Japanese record company Avex has, for some reason I can't even begin to comprehend--is it because anime voice actress ultrastar Aya Hirano loves Avril Lavigne and does awful faux-punk covers of her own songs?-- hired a bunch of anime voice actresses to cover a bunch of punk songs. Specifically, to cover them like they were moe anime songs. The results were really messy. You can listen to samples on the album's Amazon.jp page. They are more than, more than enough. Hell, the cover art is more than enough, but I dare you to listen anyway. Nothing is sacred: nobody knows what the hell they're singing about, and each and every track has been shot up with enough sugar to destroy the arteries of twenty men! Utterly beyond words. Mind-blowing. God, I can't get past the fact that this CD exists. Haruko Momoi covers Blondie, okay? I'm going to go ahead and Google Translate a one-star Amazon review:

Conceive how the project is a combination of WAKARAN考ETARA do this translation.
And you know what I can not flat, and from where this product will be PANKUFAN'm just a stupid punk.
A blasphemy to the song. Funny stuff funny cover.

Funny stuff indeed.

A Tribute: OVERMAN KING GAINER IS A MECHA FETISH EXTRAVAGANZA

Photos by me, text not.

A new far-future science fiction series directed by legendary Gundam creator Yoshiyuki Tomino? Bring on the fleets of giant robots and the geo-political jockeying, right? Uhh…try half right. Unfortunately, the 26-episode animated television series Overman King Gainer is a mecha fetish extravaganza cooked up according to the following proportional recipe of creative ingredients: 85% action, 10% plot, and 5% character development. So much for the nuanced far future politics that make its director famous.

Visually speaking, at least, this show is better than by all rights than it “should” be. Too bad it's hard to make the same claim about any of its other characteristics. Perversely, the hatches to all the Overmen, including NASA spacesuit/Milli Vanilli lovechild King Gainer, have hatches in their bellies with openings that look disturbingly like female genitalia. In Brunhilde especially the pop psychoanalysis was painfully obvious. The highlight of the Japanese dub is, without question, Takehito Koyasu in his supporting role of Asuham Boone.

 
The show's music, composed by Kohei Tanaka, ranges from the unmemorable and generic to the vulgar and grandiose. The opening theme in particular, sung by the veteran performer Yoshiki Fukuyama with lyrics by Tomino himself, is a lamentable waste of time and talent that tries too hard to be a surreal head trip and ends up just degenerating into a migraine headache. In fact, unless your life will not be complete until you see a dancing mecha with dreadlocks flying, you would be well-advised to skip the poorly considered and anachronistic opening animated sequence altogether. It's a poor fit with the otherwise high serious nature of the series that further diminishes the halo effect of what is left to genuinely like. Overall: C+.

(Editor's note: King Gainer owns.)

BILLIONAIRES: YOU KNOW, I'VE ALWAYS LIKED SHIRLEY TEMPLE

Now let's do something completely different! It's often said that at Comic Market, you can find fan comics on just about any subject you could possibly imagine. It may not occur to us, however, what exactly this entails. We need to be reminded. Today, in that spirit, I give you a boys-love doujinshi (translated by blogbro kransom) about Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Larry Ellison and Steve Jobs. Steve Wozniak cameos. Proof that you can be that passionate about just about anything.

Our author (Takada Yuuki) comes from out of the background all the time to let us know about pictures of Gates (Gate-chan) she has, or to watch Wozniak (Woz-kun) on his webcam, or to suggest that maybe in this one picture Bill Gates is in Paul Allen's lap? Gate-chan is the author's clear favorite, and in the comic he's a character along the lines of Honey and Clover's Hagu: he's an otherworldly genius who doesn't really know how to live and inexplicably looks like a ten-year-old. In Takada's words, he is such a bottom! In between such observations, the guys go about their business, occassionally pausing to give each other looks.

You kind of wonder, reading this, how much is actual history-- as the author certainly knows a lot-- and how much is fantasy (I kind of doubt Paul Allen and Bill Gates have a set of stuffed Ernie and Bert dolls, or that Bill sleeps with his at night). In any case, this is certainly a strange and fabulous novelty piece. I look forward to the next Gate-chan book: perhaps we will learn the contents of the author's secret, self-made Gate-chan video.

Urobura: IT'S DEFINITELY A VIDEOGAME

Over on Canned Dogs they were (and I was) talking about how they're trying to remake the rather awful Nitro+ Royale into a proper, professional-grade arcade fighting game, the way Melty Blood was successfully transitioned into a big arcade favorite in Japan. Unfortunately for creator Nitroplus, their game is so bad that no matter what happens, it's probably not worth saving. It's kind of like if someone had decided to have people play Rise of the Robots at Evolution. In the discussion thread, Urobura came up as a game that deserved an arcade port more than Royale, and well... I can't believe I'd never played Urobura. The joke of the title is lost on me, but it comes from the Japanese abbreviation for the popular Tsukihime fighting game Melty Blood, and the game is certainly a kind of Melty Blood.

Made by evil geniuses in ASCII's 2D Fighter Maker, the game is an intentional parody of Melty Blood featuring gimped approximations of its play mechanics, threadbare production values (including music I'd swear I've heard in other videogames), and characters reimagined as perpetually frowning, bored-looking shadows of their former selves. Character choices range from the Tsukihime cast to increasingly bizarre guest appearances ranging from Saber to the swimming Rei clones from Evangelion to a piece scribbled into a fifth-grader's notebook during a particularly boring class. The game is brilliant. Not good, mind you, just brilliant. And yes, it needs to be brought to the arcades. On April Fool's Day, in every Melty Blood: Actress Again cabinet in the world.