This month, I feel incredibly fortunate to have a good life, and I wish to have a country that could provide good fortune to others, now more than ever. I don’t know how long it would take, but I hope we can someday live in a place where all the xenophobia, sexism, racism, and continuous trampling of the poor are no longer systemically baked into everything. I want people to love and thrive and not be so punished for things beyond their control.
There are a lot of VTuber concerts this month, including from hololive, so I get the feeling I’m going to be writing a lot about them. I don’t intend to make July nothing but those, but no guarantees!
Also, I watched the first episode of F.D Signifier’s Goon World, which is about the sheer unavoidable volume of pornographic material that people encounter these days, and the myriad complexities that come out of living in that world. It’s a topic I’ve been thinking a lot about myself in recent years (especially with how the internet encourages parasocial interactions), and I’m glad someone like F.D is tackling such a difficult topic.
Manga author panpanya drew the final web bonus for Rakuen, which involves exploring a store based on all the different Rakuen titles. Kio comments “Heh-heh-heh, what a suspicious store this. How wonderful…”
To celebrate the 500th issue of Young Comic, the magazine interviewed various creators about their fetishes, and Kio drew a short informational comic about his fondness for futanari. Kio comments that the preview thumbnail makes it look like he’s calling himself a futanari.
(I’ll probably write a summary of Kio’s entry and post it to the blog in the near future.)
Having watched the World Cup match between Japan and the Netherlands, Kio says that getting a tie score demonstrates that the Japan team isn’t just for show, and that they have what it takes to win.
Watching Ueda Ayase play is also apparently quite the rollercoaster.
Dooby3D is one of my favorite VTubers. As an independent creator, she had a lot of say in her own design, and something I find really charming and noteworthy about her look is her large ears.
In a field where it’s more common to find animal ears (like those of a cat girl or dog girl) on top of the head or elf-like knife ears on the side, it’s actually quite rare to have two honkin’ huge ones like hers that are both cute and comedic. They tie into Dooby’s lore by hinting at a jerboa’s rabbit-like ears, but the more human appearance straddles the line between realistic and cartoonish. Heck, I have relatives with ears almost that big.
There’s a lot more to Dooby than just her looks (like her laid-back attitude and her creativity with 3D and 2D anime) but I just wanted to highlight this small but effective element of her design.
Happy birthday to Dooby! I never tire of her antics.
Todoroki Hajime of hololive held her 3D birthday concert in June, and one of the biggest moments was a group performance of the song “Kokkara” featuring her, Hakos Baelz, Isaki Riona, and Mizumiya Su. As expected, they all showcase why all four of them are almost inarguably the best dancers in hololive, but one thing that really stood out to me is how they were given opportunities to show off their unique dance personalities.
While the most clear example of unique expression is when they each perform by themselves, one thing that really caught my attention is how they each move during the chorus. There’s this pivot/twist move that they do, and if you look closely, you can see that they each perform it differently. I don’t know enough to actually fully make sense of their individual approaches, but to me it looks like:
Hajime has her hands in different positions every time, with weight on one leg and both knees bent. It reminds me of a C-walk, but also feels like she’s drilling down with her body.
Bae also has her weight on one leg, but the other is more extended, she’s bent lower at the waist, and her arms are out like she’s doing the classic Twist. To me, it comes across almost like a sit spin in figure skating and has a clearly different silhouette from Hajime’s.
Riona does more of a shuffle in place with less of a clear twisting motion and more hip movement, and she ends with a very pronounced kick to the side. Her hands are also moving in vertical circles, like wheels.
Su seems to shift her weight back and forth between each leg, though I might be getting fooled by the fact that her left leg is really crossing over her right as she pivots. It gives the impression that Sue is very light on her feet, even compared to the others.
Additionally, in the first chorus, the four backup dancers do the choreography as well, and they also each have their own take on the move!
Incidentally, Hajime gave their names during the concert, but given her particular speech quirks, I couldn’t fully decipher them. I think they’re Hajime’s personal crew from her backup dancer days, so I think it’d be cool if someone could figure out who each of them were in other performances, including but not limited to the birthday concert.
For a couple months, the yuri film Cosmic Princess Kaguya seemed to be all over my social media timelines. It was a big enough hit for Japan to screen it in theaters after its Netflix release, multiple VTubers mentioned it or did watchalongs, and there’s still a lot of ongoing buzz. Before sitting down to watch it, I only knew two things: 1) It’s inspired by the Japanese folk tale The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter 2) The movie includes covers of Vocaloid music remixed in a way to invite a bit of debate and disagreement.
In a near-future science fiction twist on the original folk tale, a high school girl named Iroha discovers a baby inside of a utility pole instead of bamboo. The child, who quickly grows into a teenage girl, calls herself Kaguya and claims to be from the moon, and says she decided to leave to find more excitement. Life together isn’t easy, especially for Iroha as she studiously tries to get into a good college while working part-time, but a contest to see who will perform on stage with Iroha’s favorite virtual idol has them launch Kaguya’s VTuber career.
Cosmic Princess Kaguya comes across to me as Summer Wars if it was made for a younger generation than Hosoda’s film. Both works center around a vast virtual world where people can interact through their avatars, but whereas Summer Wars shows how old-fashioned modes of communication and relationship-building still have an important place in an increasingly online world, Cosmic Princess Kaguya feels firmly planted in a kind of late Millennial to late Gen Z mindset—or late Heisei, if we’re going by Japanese terms. Between the Vocaloid music, the VTubers and metaverse stuff, and even the inclusion of a game that’s basically Fortnite + League of Legends, it feels very much like the film is aiming for a “digital natives” generation, to use a somewhat outdated term.
Cosmic Princess Kaguya has multiple false finishes, intentionally emphasizing the arbitrary nature of endings, when stories are “supposed” to be done, and who even gets to decide when things are over. While I appreciate this playing around with narrative structure, I do think it’s hurt by an overall structure that drags in multiple places. Perhaps it’s because I’m not a really devout yuri fan, but there are scenes where it just seems like Iroha and Kaguya are interacting just so that viewers can bask in their presence together, but it makes the narrative hang in place instead of inching forward. The aforementioned combined “battle royale and arena battle” game does feel like it was devised by people who understand both genres, but its inclusion in the middle feels excessive. The inclusion of Vocaloid stuff also just seems to be there, as if it’s assumed it’s the best and coolest music ever, whether or not it fits. In other words, I feel that Cosmic Princess Kaguya targets a certain audience, and I feel like I’m just ever so slightly out of that range.
There is one moment in the film that sticks with me, and it’s a kind of reference to the history of digital media in Japan. At one point, a character explains that the moon is the world of dreams and separate from Earth, but that the gap is inadvertently bridged by the digital and virtual world as a halfway point between dreams and reality. On the moon, a depiction of a character is done with dither graphics, a technique used in 1980s and 90s dating sims to work around the limited palettes of that era’s computers. In doing this, Cosmic Princess Kaguya makes a reference to some of the earliest attempts to portray anime characters using computer graphics, and implies that this is the closest the film can get to visually representing the inhabitants of the moon as they truly are.
I find Cosmic Princess Kaguya to be a pretty good film that revels a little too much in what it’s offering. There’s a solid story in there in terms of the big picture, but it loves to indulge in its portrayal of its virtual world and the simple existence of its main characters to a degree that bogs the whole thing down. Both cohesive narrative continuity and plot contrivances somehow exist in an elegant but awkward dance, and I think how much you like this film comes down to how much you resonate with the internet culture that is represented within.
As part of a trip to Japan earlier this year, I ended up eating a lot of curry, both Japanese-style and otherwise. Some were places I had scouted out, but others I just happened to find by happenstance. One such instance happened on an evening walk back to my hotel, where I got lost. While trying to find my bearings, I ended up in front of the original Hinoya Curry. A sign proudly boasted that it previously won an award for best curry in the Kanda area of Tokyo. Given that the area has some pretty stiff competition, I changed my dinner plans and went in there instead.
The decor was unpretentious and inviting. There were seats at a counter where the chef prepared curry, as well as a counter facing a wall, and a few tables for groups. The menu was full of items that sounded interesting (like the raw egg curry and the beef tendon curry), but I decided to go with what seemed to be a signature item of theirs: menchi katsu curry, or minced-meat cutlet curry.
The sauce was rich in flavor, spiced well but not extremely spicy. It sat on the rice well, and was neither super thin nor super thick. I bet if I had just gotten a plain curry, I would’ve been pretty satisfied, but then the menchi katsu elevated it to something superb.
The cutlet was enormous. While sometimes portion sizes in Japan can feel a little small even when ordering large sizes, that was not the case here. It was a middle ground between a pork or chicken katsu and a hamburg steak, and as someone who loves both and can sometimes feel conflicted over which one to get, the menchi katsu was just a wonderful thing to have, with its satisfying combination of tender meatiness and crispy breading that borders on fried fish batter.
Hinoya Curry has stores throughout Japan now, and they’ve also expanded overseas with locations in Malaysia, China, and even San Francisco. Next time I’m in the bay area, I might just decide to check it out again and see how the American branch stacks up.
Last month, I attended a US screening of the second movie in the Mobile Suit Gundam Hathaway trilogy, The Sorcery of Nymph Circe. It was actually my second time seeing it, having catched it during a trip to Japan. I had originally planned to write about it after that first viewing, but I came away confused about a few things that I felt would benefit from a repeat viewing.
Prior to the release of the first film in 2021, the Hathaway’s Flash novel was always something of a mystery to me—a work I merely read about in dedicated online forums or guides for Gundam crossover games. It’s wild to think about how by the time all this wraps up, it’ll be 2031 and an entire decade will have elapsed, alone the 30 years since I learned about the novel.
In the first Hathaway movie, we were introduced to Hathaway Noa as a full-grown adult, years removed from the child and teenager we saw in previous works like Zeta Gundam and Char’s Counterattack. While he’d previously been best known as the son of Bright Noa, commander of the famed White Base from the original Gundam, here we discovered that Hathaway is now the head and namesake of a militant anti-government organization called Mafty. While living his double identity, he encountered a mysterious female Newtype named Gigi Andalucia, who reminded him of Quess Paraya—the girl he loved and whom he saw die in combat after having defected to Char Aznable’s Neo-Zeon.
After a big battle, the first film ended by introducing a ton of new faces as Hathaway reunites with the other members Mafty. The Sorcery of Nymph Circe continues from there, and I have to admit that I originally got a little lost keeping track of everyone, trying to remember if I even saw them last time, all while they threw names and places around. By the second viewing, though, I came to understand that Mafty was trying to coordinate an attack on a gathering of Federation leadership, all while Hathaway struggles with his relationships towards women and his sense of guilt/responsibility as leader. All the while, Gigi contends with the fact that she has been sheltered and showered with every luxury imaginable due to being both such a powerful Newtype and the favored mistress of one of the richest people in the world.
Hathaway is surrounded by gorgeous women, many of whom have feelings for him, and the film really wants to make that clear. Watching in the moment, the frequent indulgent shots can feel gratuitous, but the film eventually reveals that there’s a greater point being expressed beyond cheesecake: Hathaway suffers from PTSD brought about by his involvement both direct and indirect in the death of women from his past. He angrily and desperately chides himself for feeling sexual desire when he’s supposed to be fighting for loftier goals, as Char Aznable did. In this light, our protagonist becomes something of a pathetic James Bond, whose pain and determination become a form of charisma that attracts women and acts as both a curse and a blessing. In other words, the fanservice is portrayed in a distracting manner because it is meant to show how distracting it is for Hathaway himself, and I find having such patheticness in a main character to be pretty interesting.
Now, whether that approach works is a more complicated question. It’s not the main driving force of the movie (which would be the whole “attempting to overthrow the Federation” thing, but that turmoil does reveal itself to be the foundation of Hathaway’s character and the thing that undergirds his actions. In the moment, however, the T&A can feel excessive and gratuitous, and like an attempt to get some horny fans.
A similar issue exists with Gigi. There are many scenes of her basically playing fashion model and home designer in ultra-wealthy settings, and they’re ultimately meant to show how Gigi is trapped in a gilded cage. She has her position and privilege because she’s desired by a very powerful man who values Gigi for both her psychic gifts and her body, and this gives her access to more than most can even dream of. In this context, all the opulence feels like an attempt to exercise some form of autonomy, and the limitations of this are what attract Gigi to the mess that is Hathaway Noa. However, the sheer amount of expensive outfits, furniture, and decorations portrayed—not to mention Gigi’s statuesque beauty that is very rare in Universal Century Gundam even among its most beautiful characters—can also come across as trying to appeal to people with similar tastes, or perhaps those obsessed with luxury goods.
The movie also can sometimes just be visually hard to follow. In addition to not always being clear who’s on what side, there’s a particular problem that stems from Hathaway’s Mobile Suit, the Xi Gundam. It is a chunky hunk of metal that almost feels like a very burly and pointy linebacker, and between that, the night battles, and the amount of weapons being fired, sometimes action scenes can be a huge blur. Rather than being able to follow the “choreography” so to speak, I found myself enjoying it more when I let the chaos wash over me and lived in Hathaway’s head. There’s also a big moment that really delves into his psyche, and the world portrayed there ironically shows how much more clarity these battles could have had.
I’ve given some criticisms, but I ultimately did like The Sorcery of Nymph Circe. It feels both mainstream and experimental, and I do like that Hathaway Noa is such an unusual protagonist whose internal struggles oddly seem more relevant than ever with how the male libido has become a weird battleground in culture. He is an imperfect hero whose attempts to become more ideal are filled with pitfalls.
As the credits finished during that first viewing I watched while in Japan, there was a girl behind me who was crying. Talking to another girl next to her, she simply commented that it was really good, all while drying her tears. If a film can move someone that much, I feel like it’s gotta be doing something right.
For some reason, I continue to watch MF Ghost. I think the races have genuinely gotten better, and it’s just enough to overcome some of the weird aspects of the series that comes partly from an old man trying to write a young romance for an old man audience.
Something I’m more neutral on that keeps popping up in the anime are these scenes that are basically shilling Japan and its culture, like they’re doing tourism advertisements. Kanata, the half-Japanese protagonist who recently moved from the United Kingdom, is constantly in awe of Japanese Things. He’ll eat the most delicious rice ever in Japan, or go into a speech about why the country is uniquely suited to seafood because of various environmental factors. And all that is wrapped up in a show that’s about Kanata’s Toyota 86 GT facing off against Ferraris, Lamborghinis, and other elite foreign cars.
I’m not necessarily against this, and it’s true that Japan has a lot of delicious food and excellent rice. It’s just that it feels like an ongoing undercurrent of Japanese nationalism, though I have no knowledge of the author Shigeno Shuichi’s political beliefs. I’m just confused as to whether this ties into any sort of previous Cool Japan initiatives (or its successor, whatever they’re calling it).
In 2006, I met up with a group of friends from online in New York City. We were all there for the Pokémon National Video Game Championships, and these were people I had known through the competitive Pokémon community—in some cases for years. In a time when Smogon had just begun establishing itself as the go-to hub for serious multiplayer and Pokémon Showdown had yet to even exist, I had spent many hours joyfully discussing movesets and testing out teams on older battle simulators.
This was the era of Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald, and the National Championships reflected this not just in game choice but also the fact that the official format was Double Battles for the first time. As someone who cut their teeth on the unofficial Singles 6v6 format and preferred it, I had never really tried it, in contrast to everyone else who was there either participate in or spectate the tournament. Back then, those friends I met encouraged me to play Doubles, which they argued was more interesting, had the extra benefit of being officially sanctioned, and wasn’t inundated by the glut of restrictive “clauses” that characterized 6v6.
I didn’t take up their offer, and not long after, I fell off of competitive Pokémon in general. It was a lot of time to dedicate, and it just stopped being a priority for me. I would keep playing the games, and held onto dreams of making at least one competitive team per generation, but it never came to fruition. Meanwhile, a number of those friends would go on to found Nugget Bridge, a now-abandoned site dedicated to the official “VGC” Doubles Format.
Now, literally two decades later, I’ve been playing Pokémon Champions, the new game that is specifically built to be an official competitive platform. I’ve also devoted myself to playing Doubles primarily for the first time, and I have to apologize to my old friends because it is very fun. Some of that is regardless of format, as it’s bringing up a joy and passion that sat long dormant within me. But Doubles also has a lot going for it in particular—namely the complex interactions that come with having four Pokémon on the field, as well as the speed at which it plays. I don’t know if I have it in me to do 40-minute 6v6 battles anymore.
However, I have a dilemma when it comes to battling again: I feel there is no community for me in Pokémon anymore, and it has become a very solitary hobby when that wasn’t the case in the past. Part of it is that I feel too old to interact with the greater community, and many of the people I did know are old like me and living their lives, but that’s not the only factor. Another issue is that as a player, I am neither wholly devoted to doing everything it takes to win, nor am I someone who thinks all that tryhard number crunching is antithetical to the spirit of Pokémon.
Instead, my love comes primarily from making goofy teams and trying out unusual Pokémon while knowing that what I’m doing is suboptimal. In other words, how do I win within the parameters I’ve set for myself? The main team I’m running in Champions currently is one that includes all four weather effects—sun, rain, sand, snow—and as such constantly steps on its own toes like a Three Stooges gag. It’s a blast to play, and I’ve somehow reached Master Ball Tier using it.
I feel that discussion in the competitive scene would primarily be about how my team idea is inherently bad (and it definitely is, IMO), whereas in the non-competitive scene I wouldn’t get the dedicated conversations that would allow me to push my team as far as it can go without betraying its core concept or cordoning it off in weaker tiers of play. Granted, this is also how the scene was 20 years ago, but I knew for sure back then that there would be at least a few like-minded folks who were willing to entertain my silly notions of how to maximize the effectiveness of a Whiscash.
I understand that nostalgia may be the actual culprit of how I’m feeling, and I might be able to actually find that type of community I want—one that’s not entirely competitive or casual but falls somewhere in the middle. I’m also very pleased to see the biggest names in the VGC, notably Wolfe Glick, leading by example and willing to try out unusual strategies and teams while battling at the highest levels. Ultimately, I think my problem is that I’m having so much fun playing Pokémon Champions but don’t have anyone to share that joy with, who can appreciate battling in a semi-serious way.
That being said, I’m going to leave off on a goofy note: a Ninetales moveset that I’ve been using that has made a huge difference for me. I think it’s pretty self-explanatory, but do with it what you will.
Ninetales (Kanto)
Ability: Drought (But Flashfire is okay too)
252 EVs in speed
Rest in defenses (I am not good at figuring out EV values, though, so I’m sure someone can figure out something better)
This past month was lighter on anime and manga–specific content for that reason, which I hope to rectify.
My mind feels like it’s in a whirl. There are a lot of things I want to write about anime-wise, but I find myself unable to get everything out there in a timely fashion. On a personal level, I think I’m struggling with writing well and putting out insightful commentary. I’m shooting from the hip pretty often, for better or for worse.
June is actually a month I look forward to, though, as it’s an important time for me. I have many plans, and I look forward to some memorable experiences.
Kio gives his thoughts on Patlabor EZY, Ghost in the Shell, and more.
Closing
It’s also been a hell of a time as a VTuber fan, between a Haachama anniversary message that’s trying to bring hope after some serious turmoil, two graduations from V4Mirai, and more. Since Saturday, I find myself listening to the final cover from Komo Dokueki (the Mahoromatic opening) and Serina Maiko’s cover of “Secret Base.”
OGIUE MANIAX 