I decided to try a bit of Lupin Zero and kid Jigen shooting at the bullies at his school was a bit too real for America. Doesn't look bad although I admittedly find Lupin very hit and miss for my tastes. I might come back to this later.

I also watched a bit of Aggretsuko Season 5. Way to turn this show into the Haida show. It's like the writers forgot who the main character was. They sidelined all of the more interesting characters for Main Character's homeless, jobless simp.

Gotta give props to Ol' Billy pulling in those paychecks. He's just phonin' in these days, right? Sit there and be a cranky geezer so people can point at the screen and say they saw Bill Murray.

You know, I kinda actually forgot Marvel movies are still a thing.

I was bored and tried Koikimo because it was recommended to me. From somewhere. I don't remember where. And I don't know why because this show's so fucking weird. It's not bad but it's closer to bad than it ever will be to being good. Random points below.

Age gap relationship: I could've overlooked this with a better story. It's always better to go with adult age-gaps imo. She's 17, I'm not gonna nitpick it that much. He's 27 though. The show plays it off as "how cool that older, hot guy is interested in her" but he actually comes off as a bit of a stunted loser who can only relate to a child.

Womanizer Character: He's a womanizer. Fine. I think this character type can be conveyed without being disgusting. The whole "what's her name" can be funny once or with a bit of spin on the joke, although it's otherwise trite and cliche. This show has no such spins to offer. "He such a maaaaan he dun know wamen's names because he's been with soooo many wamens." Give me a break. FFS, just look at your damn phone and read the name that last asked for a hookup.

Secret Masochist: The guy likes verbal abuse and the chick being disgusted with him. It'd be funny if it wasn't clearly a kink without the girl's consent. I also find it hard to believe this guy's kink has never been triggered before. The implication from this show is that he's soooo hot or whatever that no woman's ever called him a jerk or a creep before and gotten him hard from it. I refuse to believe this.

Cool Sister: I like the dude's little sister. Seems like a nice character.

Female Love Interest: She's actually okay. I don't find her obnoxious or anything. But homegirl needs to cover her mouth when she coughs.

Boundaries: He doesn't really respect her's and she puts up with it. Irl, you wouldn't blame the victim especially when she's a child. But it's okay. This is a cartoon. It's le funny ho ho. Crossing boundaries this egregiously just means it's TRUE love, y'all. At least according to fanfics I read in 1999.

CREEPER: Male Love Interest intimidates others who don't step into line with his wants. He looms over highschool boys that don't behave the way he wants. In the first episode, he assaults a woman by grinding a napkin into her face to violently wipe off her make-up and then threatens to pull out her real eyelashes when she bemoans he pulled off her fake ones. It's supposed to be funny, guise. Because women who wear makeup are, like, vapid hos and this woman was being bitch by telling a *checks notes* highschool girl that the older man grooming her is a womanizer.

This was the most disgusting scene I have ever seen in an anime romcom and that includes any show where the female love interest was nearly r@ped. At least when the latter happens, it's done by a bad guy who is clearly wrong and gets some sort of comeuppance. But in Koikimo, the male love interest just gets to assault a woman. I get it was supposed to be played off as a gag but it wasn't actually executed as a gag. There were no zany sound effects or zingers to cap a joke. He just violently rubs off her makeup and threatens her.

I'd have more respect for this show if this behavior was called out or were indicators of a future turn into a darker show. Like he starts murderin' people and sticking them in his van. Then we'd have a dark comedy. But this is supposed to be a romcom. And in a setting of sparkling eyes full of admiration and gifting a flower a day to court his lady love, he randomly assaults a woman.

Please, just watch Love is Hard for an Otaku with adorable adult couples.

Nah, you get to choose the gender but it changes nothing for the plot. The girl is cuter, even if they did give her those awful sock-tits.

Not playing it myself but am watching some Let's Plays of the newest Fire Emblem game. The gameplay looks cool. I'm really tempted to get a Switch. But ye Gods, the story is freakin' awful. It's a cringey mess. Like the worst Fire Emblem story in the franchise with copious avatar circle-jerking. I like a handful of character designs but most of them are no bueno. The music's great and the character movements are very fluid. The character voice-acting direction wavers between being good, passable, and terrible regardless of the actor speaking. There's tons of bullshit mini-games tossed into this game, too.

The game features past lords of other Fire Emblem games as magical "emblems" (like interactive force ghosts) and I find myself being unreasonably upset at how powerful they've made Roy from Binding Blade. Because he's an awful character gameplay-wise. In the game he comes from, he's a huge liability that you have to protect the entire time because he's force-deployed and weak as hell.

I don't think I've seen any trailers for that first show. I did see a couple trailers for the second show and had no interest in finding out the name of the show and what it was about.

In-coming Jane Austen post that no one but myself will read so I should've just made this a blog post but whatever:

So I'm listening to audiobook versions of Jane Austen's works. Persuasion and Pride and Prejudice are my favorites and they remain as such. I also tried Emma and Sense and Sensibility.

At least two or maybe three audiobook versions of P&P get way too ridiculous. Yes, yes, the character of Mrs. Bennet is supposed to be this brash, sorta ridiculous woman whose fears of being destitute fuel the obsessive need to marry off her daughters. But the narrators play this up entirely too much for me to be able to relax to this story.

Persuasion gets props for being the more palatable audiobook. All of Austen's stories have characters with quirks. I feel Persuasion leaves less room in the story for an audiobook narrator to get too ridiculous because it's mostly through the quiet Anne's viewpoint. The narrator can be a snob with "No one will want you in Bath" or whine about how the Musgroves did not call upon Anne as they should and then story moves on. There isn't the space like in P&P for a narrator to get too silly.

Emma I just can't bring myself to even try to finish. Emma is too damn long of a book for starters. And the conflict in Emma can be summarized as "bored, rich girl matchmaker unbores self." What is Emma's risk or stake in the plot at all? The P&P girls risk poverty (if they do not marry well; inheritance doesn't allow girls to inherit from their father) and ruin (when one of the sisters runs off with a rake). In Persuasion, the family is also running into money issues because the patriarch is a spendthrift and the main character is sad, lonely, and unappreciated. Like, this is the first line of Emma:

Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.

And it just makes me dislike her. Fuck you and your rich, happy ass. I kept listening and it goes on about how she's sad her governess or whoever got married and left her house so now Emma and Daddy are all alone by rich, happy selves. Boo hoo. Why do I care about any of this?  Anyone remotely interested in this story is better off just watching "Clueless."

Sense & Sensibility is hard for me to rewatch as a movie or show because it makes me angry and unfortunately I find the audiobook no different. The main characters, the Dashwoods (a mother and three daughters), are supposed to be taken care of after the death of the family patriarch by his son. Instead they are let down and must leave their home; they are resented for their station in life; and the two elder daughters are meddled with by well-intentioned matchmaker. Marianne is led on by that carousing, callow jerk Willoughby who knocked up Col. Brandon's ward. Elinor must watch as Lucy the golddigger calls claim on the man she loves by virtue of meeting him first. All this story does is make me angry and it all goes on for too damn long.

I'm still trying to figure out why this book makes me angry because the Dashwoods aren't any more or less screwed over than other Austen characters. Maybe it's because this story makes the reader experience the "screwing over" too fully. In P&P, Jane Bennet is screwed over when she goes to London to visit Mr. Bingley and the latter's friend and sisters hide the fact that she's there (so she doesn't get to see her man). But the reader doesn't actually get to hear and see all of this happen. The reader experiences this through Jane Bennet's letter to Lizzy in which she talks about the Bingley sisters brushing her off and the fact she doesn't get to see Mr. Bingley. And Jane even gives the sisters the benefit of the doubt that they were only being unkind to be kind, so to speak. We don't have to wallow in the sisters being bitches to Jane and Jane feeling awkward and hurt. We are left to read between the lines of a second-hand account and don't fully grasp Darcy's involvement until he admits to it later in the book. While in S&S, we have to suffer bitches being bitches to people feeling embarrassed for it and it's tiresome.

I remember nothing about Free Willy other than the whale jumping over the boy. Perhaps that's as it should be.



Oh, yeah, and the time Willy had a loud orgasm in public.

I tried one a couple COURS back about a yakuza raising a little girl, and the little girl was totally out of whack. It's almost like she was depressed and neurotic all the time, and while I acknowledge that small children can experience mental health issues, it really doesn't manifest the same way as it would in a teenager or an adult like the way it was depicted here.

Also, the way her head/hair/face were drawn was like... put it like this, you could have taken her head and dropped it onto the neck of any of the women characters and it wouldn't look out of place. Like, "Oh, I have to draw a kid now, guess I'll just draw a lady face like I usually do and put it on this tiny body."

No.

I saw clips of the some show with a yakuza and a little girl. Dunno if that was the same show or not. But it was weird. The dude was acting so fucking dramatic in the clip and I had no idea what I was supposed to feel when watch it. I know it wasn't supposed to be "apathy" but... meh.

You have me curious about Tomo-chan. It was a pass for me because I didn't care for the look of the show and Tomo-chan looked straight out of the generic "Peppermint Patty tomboy in love with her best boy" mold. And maybe there'll be some jokes where she's called "young man" or "sir" and she'll be all angry and the audience is supposed to laugh.


I watched this a couple of times. Some people were calling it a short film but I legit think it's a long commercial, especially because some of the comments mentioned product placement and encouraging students on their exams. Whatever it is, it's great. From the same studio and director as "Summer Ghost."



This show looks kinda interesting.


And then there's this weird show. Which I read spoilers for and I'm even more confused than ever:

I was telling Merla this morning we're gonna get at least one high-profile death to take us out of 2022 with a bang. Between Wawa and Former Pope, I gotta give this one to Wawa.

Cool to at least see that first scene adapted, which I had read in a fan translation and seen in the manga.


Apparently it's just a special or something. But it's got a neat-sounding Hiroyuki Sawano song to go with it.

And I have to give props to the design style. Gilgamesh's facial profile has a forehead, a nose, and a chin again unlike in prior itinerations (see bottom of linked post). Last batch of Fate shit seriously went the flounder face route. Gilgamesh's features are more narrow and he looks more mature, which suits his character. Even the requisite "cutesy" characters look better in this style. I'm sure as with all Fate media, this special will find the most boring characters and focus on them. But at least everything looks and sounds nice.

Ha ha, yeah. It's like the same video game town. You could splice some of these shows together and pretend everyone's playing on different servers.

"I'm a strong, independent Barbie who don't need no Ken."

You delivered.

I haven't seen that vid yet. I just realized I haven't watched him in four months because my last watched video on the channel's the Goofy one.