Kun is not a gendered Honorific

This is a fact I was well aware of when I started using it in my Kuudere based Username while also identifying as Fluid.  There was an old TheAnimeMan video about how neither the Chan or Kun Hoonorifics are inherently Gendered.

I choose it over other Honorifics I could have used because I like alliteration.

But to the casual Western Anime fan, Chan seems Girly and Kun seems Boyish.  With every well known example of a male character being called Chan being one who is less then ideally Masculine in some way.

Fortunately I'm now aware of some neat examples of Girls being called Kun.

In Detective Conan Professor Agasa usually calls Haibara Ai "AiKun".

Recently I was watching scenes from the Visual Novel Shiny Days on a website I won't name and noticed that Youko calls Mai "MaiKun".

Neither of those characters are Tomboys or Bifauxnen or Butch or any other kind of masculine woman.  

I've referred to Haibara as a Kuudere before, and Mai is the mother of the Kuudere I use for my Avatar.  So I feel reasonably vindicated in my decision to associate the Kuudere with the Kun honorific.

I also recently discovered that someone on Deviant Art had created a character named KuudereKun years before I independently came up with that for my new Username.  But they don't seem to have become super popular so I think the Username is still fair game for me to use.

Yuri needs both its Wholesome and Trashy varieties

Citrus is probably my personal favorite Anime of 2018.  

Citrus of course held an awkward place in the ecosystem of 2010s Yuri, being contentious already even when it was just a Manga as soon as the Anime dropped it was quickly the target of certain Yuri critics as the poster child of the kind of problematic “Trashy” Yuri they want to less of, with only Netsuzou TRap being even more hated.

I was a Citrus Stan who refused to watch Bloom Into You at the end of the year out of spite for how these people propped it up in contrast to Citrus.  Now here we are 6 years later and neither show has a second season to continue its story.  We both lost and in consequence got a few years of not much proper Yuri at all.  Now I’ve finally seen Bloom and it’s great, it was dumb of me to call it boring simply off the second hand vibes I got.  Also the Dub has Luci Christian.

Anthony Gramuglia released a video at the start of this June called We Need “BAD” LGBTQIA Representation.  And similar videos with similar sentiments have popped up before like one called something like “Good representation is boring representation”.  And I feel like someone saying this specifically in the context of Anime is overdue.

I don’t exactly agree with all the sentiments expressed in his video, I like my Edgy Trash to still also have some Heart hence my Elfen Lied is Wholesome Actually blogpost.  And comparing it to his older Anime Fanservice video I imagine he’d criticize Citrus for not going far enough.  I have long noticed a certain Semi-Puritanism in Anime discourse where some people feel like an Anime should only be Sexual at all if it crosses some line that makes you question how it was able to air on Television.  Never considering that for some people the exact level of eroticism shows like this have is exactly what we crave and is not a mere compromise.

Parallel to that is the complaint I know some will make of “why are they only Step Sisters, why not just go all the way if you want to appeal to incest feithsists”.  Step Siblings is a specific Fantasy on it’s own and not a mere Incest compromise.  It’s the fantasy of getting to live with someone about your age of whatever Gender you’re attracted to without the issue of having known them when you both were in Diapers.

So Citrus isn’t the Trashiest, and neither is Netsuzou TRap.  Not too long ago I would have suggested nothing could possibly surpass Prisma Illya.  But then this year we got Gushing Over Magical Girls.  If that isn’t “all the way” enough for you then nothing is.

Of course there are also the Classic Trashy Yuri to consider, from Strawberry Panic to Kuttsukiboshi.  There’s also Candy Boy which is a trashy premise on paper but utterly Wholesome in execution.

I’m starting to think 2023 might have ushered in a new peak era for Yuri.  The last year and a half has provided a lot to satisfy those who want Yuri that is as Unproblematic as possible.  But I gotta admit I kinda miss a lot of the madness only a Crazy 2000s Yuri like Kashimashi Girl Meets Girl could provide.

Fall 2023 was a Stacked Anime Season.

Since I started following Anime Seasonally at the end of 2016, it's been a notable special occurrence whenever I wind up watching 9 or 10 TV Anime from a single season to completion even with no foreseeable plans to potentially watch more.

For Fall 2023 I've watched 11 TV Anime to completion, with a few more I am still considering finishing later.  Plus 2 ONAs of comparable size to a TV Anime, and 2 smaller ONAs.

Only thing missing are any movies, but as soon as their Dubs are available I'll watch the Spy x Family movie and the latest Girls Und Panzer movie. 

And hey that's just the stuff I'm interested in, there is at least one popular new show that season I never even tried an episode of and a handful of sequels to shows I'd dropped or never started.

Honestly it's a shame the Freiren and 100 Girlfriends have monopolized so much of the Anitube attention for that season.  The only Spy x Family YT video I've seen cover anything from season 2 is someone who's outside the Anime community.  Shy has a sequel coming up and I have thoughts on it I am still working through.

That season deserves some dedicated 1 year later revisit or something. .

Male Sexual Assault Victims are not just played for Laughs

The YouTube Channel Pop Culture Detective has a video titled Sexual Assault of Men Played for Laughs Part 2 Female Perpetrators.  It’s a pretty exhaustive and seemingly thoughtful analysis of all the ways Male Sexual Assault is played for Laughs in media. 

However it is unhelpful in actually making progress on how Male Sexual Assault Victims are thought about and treated in society by only focusing on when it’s played for laughs.  Because he denies that it’s actually a “Double Standard” in any way while also emphasizing how allegedly rare it is.

Like by saying “Rape of Women isn’t taken seriously either” followed by a Quagmire clip. That Family Guy scene is an example of Dark Comedy, like most comedy involving women being raped by men, I don’t like these kinds of jokes but I’m not gonna pretend they are something else, that what’s happening is something everyone considers horrible and traumatizing is vital to the joke working as intended.  All these men being raped by women scenes the video documents are not Dark, they are instead treating the the entire idea of this happening as an absurdity.

But early in the video came the real warning sign of the video's problem.  Yes all these scenes are acknowledging that what the woman is doing is morally and ethically wrong.  Therefore he concludes the problem has nothing to do with people refusing to condemn a woman’s actions.

The problem is there is plenty of Male Sexual Assault in media that isn’t played for Laughs, sometimes a scene happens that almost everyone would call Rape if the genders were reversed, but instead is not only not considered Rape but if any moral judgment is passed on what happened at all it will entirely be that the Man did something wrong to the Woman.

The big example of this in my mind is episode 9 of School Days, which I've talked about before.  Early on it shows how a Girl inviting a Boy to the “rest area” is supposed to go.  Otome doesn’t do that but drags Makoto there, confesses and then assaults him before he can fully respond and then his eyes go weird, the Hentai visual language of Mind Break.

This is very obviously a Rape scene to me.  But because the popular narrative around this show as a whole is that Makoto is a selfish indecisive womanizer who deserves what happened to him at the end no one is willing to even consider the possibility that he was ever the Victim in the first 11 episodes.

That’s just the most blatant example, he had previously been kissed while sleeping and I frankly consider his consent to everything he does with Kotonoha in the last episode questionable at best.

Then I often think about the movie Poison Ivy: The New Seduction, where in one sequence Violet seduces Joy’s boyfriend by taking advantage of his Drug Addiction.  And one online review I read a long ago found laughable the notion that we’re supposed to feel sorry for him when he calls her out on that later.

DC Comics is filled with examples of Villainesses raping Superheroes but the writers being very inconsistent on if they want to acknowledge his lack of consent.  Most notoriously being hot Grant Morrison retconned Talia.

Update July 2024: Going back to School Days, in the VN it's Kotonoha who rapes Makoto.

In the scenario that comes from episode 5 being The Video Tape Kotonoha repeatedly assaults Makoto on the train against his protests, and once starts jerking him off while he's still asleep, and more.  Twice in these scenes a prompt will come up for the player but our options are only say no or nothing, no option to actually consent.

In a scene leading up to Bavarois/Lust after he tells her he loves Sekai and wants to break up she undresses in-front of him and tells him to touch her and when he doesn't she walks over and forces his face in her breast.

The issue today with how society treats Female on Male Rape is less a denial that it's theoretically possible and more having a different barrier to considering that's definitely what happened.  When it's a male assaulting a female at least most self described Feminists understand that any Consent given after an encounter begins as non consensual is dubious.  But in the scene I just talked about will go "look how easily he starts sucking on them" but I'm like "he barely even looks aware of his surroundings".

Then there is the matter of SA victims themselves often not being willing to recognize that's what happened to them.  And for male victims an added reason for that is this very double standard.  But because people enter this franchise with such a baseline cynical view of Makoto it's easy to go "even he admits he did something wrong...." when that's not how human psychology works, people feel guilty about things that aren't their fault all the time.

Smartphone Season 2 retry

I decided to rewatch season 2 of In Another World With My Smartphone and see if I could get over what made me feel so disappointed the first time.

And I did enjoy it more this time, the different Dub Voice Actors for some characters aren’t so jarring anymore.  And in general this show may be better binged.

One interesting thing to praise is how very harsh it is on Slavery, actively avoiding one of Isekai’s most commonly complained about pitfalls.

That said I do think I like it less then season 1 still.

I mentioned before not liking the confirmation that Leen will become one of the official wives. In general though I always had kind of mixed feelings about the Polycule expanding.  I kind of consider 5 the ideal number for a core Anime cast in general because of a lot of notable examples.  And for a Polygynous Harem I kind of consider 4 wives the ideal because of how much my Biblical defense of Polygamy is based on Jacob’s family.

Add to that how the additions to the group made post Toya becoming officially a geopolitical entity are going to have a disadvantage at feeling properly integrated.  Much of season 1 was like a lot of Fantasy Anime based on the vibe of a group of friends playing an RPG campaign.  It’s hard for me to buy that they can recreate that now.

Rumbling Hearts was an Anime missed by exactly who'd like it most.

Rumbling Hearts is an Anime that is underappreciated partly because it was missed by a lot of the very people it would most appeal to.

First of all it's mostly an Adult Life Drama but the first two episodes are in High School for the backstory.  So the people who want more adulthood in Anime should really check it out.

It also functionally has a very Shoujo or even Josei appeal but still gets officially classified as Seinen being a Visual Novel adaptation.

The show is an emotionally dense Melodrama where all the characters make bad decisions for bad reasons but you always understand them.  Something that takes really skilled writing to pull off.

The Toxic Masculinity of Hating on Male Anime Protagonists

 I mean a certain kind of Male Anime protagonist here but I didn’t want to make the title too long.  Thing is, the protagonists meant to be morally hateable are often the ones people like as characters, Light Yagami being the big one.  

I kind of felt like specifying “Bland” in the title, but some of these are hard for me to consider that word as even an accurate description of how their haters view them.

Sometimes people who self identify as Feminists and people who more uncritically accept traditional Gender Roles as they currently function sound shockingly the same as each other, not when talking about Politics directly but when critiquing fiction.  That includes male characters being critiqued for being too Passive, for not “making a move”, for being Romantically indecisive and so on.  

And in the context of Anime, partly thanks to Mother’s Basement, two posterchilds of the kinds of Male Anime Protagonists unfairly hated in this way in my head are Yuki Amano from Mirai Nikki aka Future Diary and Kazuya Kinoshita from Rent-a-Girlfriend. Both those shows and a lot of the other shows whose protagonists I’m defending here are flawed shows that don’t always do what I like about them perfectly and sometimes drop the ball in close proximity to the very scenes I praise.  But at their core I think they are good entertaining show including their protagonists so how their protagonists are hated on bugs me.

Yuki is as passive as he is to contrast with Yuno Gasai, and I already talked about the innate Gender subversion of the Yandere.  One part of the show I often think about is the part where the antagonists they are facing are this weird couple, and the guy keeps insulting Yuki’s masculinity for being protected by his Girl, telling him he’s supposed to be the protector, but not even in quite the most cartoonishly obvious Sexist way you’d expect either, they’re framed kind of like the villains who’s advise the Hero will actually take later on.  So I loved when at exactly the point when it seems like now is when that will happen, instead Yuki doubles down, he embraces the fact that in this relationship the Girl is the fighter, the Protector, and so he should actually just leave the frontline entirely so she can focus, completely placing his trust in her.

I know a lot of people are going to think there’s something inherently Patriarchal about my love of Polygynous Anime like Isekai Smartphone and Girlfriend, Girlfriend.  But the thing is the Internet Neoreactionaries who defend specifically Patriarchal Polygyny as what should be the norm have specific ideas about what kind of Man is supposed to attract multiple women that those Anime and even the Harem Anime unwilling to go for Non-Monogamous resolutions don’t play along with, to them it’s not supposed to be Soft Gentle Beta Males who have Harems.

And yet even critics who supposedly have more Left of Center perspectives on Gender watch these shows and express bafflement about how these “spineless” men are so attractive to women.  They don’t want to say that Traditional Masculinity is the thing these characters lack that makes them find it so unbelievable they’d be so popular, maybe they don’t want to admit it to themselves.  But that is what it is.

A lot of the time people hate these characters not for anything they do but for what they assume about the intended audience.  They are characters who aren’t Perverts but are put in Perverted situations so the Perverted audience can project onto them guilt free.  And yeah a lot of the time I do think that’s what the writers are thinking.  I however don’t like watching these characters I like put into situations that make them uncomfortable.  I would prefer the Nudity in Anime be characters unashamed of being Naked disrobing in front of characters who are equally totally comfortable with it.

Then there’s the “Nice Guy” and “Friend Zone” discourse, I really don’t want to have to explain what that is, if you’re somehow reading this and don’t already know what it is just google it.  I do not disagree with the Tumblr Feminism critique of these ideas. But I am annoyed at how it’s resulted in a hatred of every fictional character a self described “Nice Guy” might identify with rather than explaining to these people why they aren’t like these Actually Nice fictional characters.

Of course the focus of this post is on Protagonists of Harem or Harem adjacent Anime, where these men aren’t being “Friend Zoned” if anything it’s them “Friendzoning” the girls. But that’s the thing, once a character is deemed to have the vibes of a “Nice Guy” the critique becomes that their getting the girl is a wish fulfillment fantasy.  At that point I think critiquing a show for such Meta reasons is the embodiment of Bad Media Literacy. I never get the sense any of these shows are trying to tell the audience who’s entitled to love, they just want to write romances that start out being built on kindness.

I could go off on a tangent about how the characters in Anime that actually resemble a self described “Nice Guy” are a certain type of character in Yuri Anime who some of the audience will root for over the protagonists intended endgame, like Yaya from Strawberry Panic.  I’m not even the first to say this, I’m basically borrowing a talking point from the old WhiningAboutYuri Tumblr.

I currently identify as Gender Fluid with Any/All pronouns on Social Media.  But I was assigned male at birth and saw myself as Cis until less than a decade ago.  And I still mostly live as a Cis-Het Male offline.  And that makes me very hesitant to write something so predicated on disagreeing with other Feminist and Queer Media Critics. So I’ve been thinking about all this holding off on actually writing it for a while.  But I don’t think it’s a coincidence that these are the only non Crossdressing Cis-Male characters I’ve at all related to while sitting on the fence about my gender identity.

So I want to finish by briefly bringing up School Days again. I don’t want to retread stuff I already covered in my huge School Days post titled Sekai Did Nothing Wrong.  At first glance Makoto doesn’t seem relevant because he can’t really be called innocent of any wrongdoing.  But he’s relevant mainly because those who think of School Days as a “Deconstruction” see Makoto as this type of Harem protagonist actually suffering the consequences of their “indecisiveness”.  Of course for most of these characters the indecisiveness results in getting truly intimate with no one not everyone, and in the VN Makoto doesn't get with everyone on a single timeline.  But even Makoto in the Anime isn’t as bad as people make him out to be, mostly because they downplay the times when he is a victim of Sexual Assault.  He is a flawed character who makes dumb decisions as a horny Teenager, but a lot of it comes from his not wanting to hurt anyone’s feelings.  And I’m sick of seeing every few years a new School Days Video on Anitube that just repeats the same shallow reading of his character and Sekai’s, they’re always so boooring.

Shizuku is the first Visual Novel

Amelie Doree is a great YouTuber who's videos I highly recommend to everyone seeking to learn more about obscure Japanese Video Games from the 90s and 2000s.  I want to make that clear up front given how this post is about my disagreement with on specific thing she says in her video on Shizuku.  

Now the part about it not being the first Dempa seems to be true, Dempa I don't know much about but it seems like she's correct there.  However I am very invested in properly understanding the history of Visual Novels and other similar kinds of Games.

Her reasons why it's not the first Visual Novel are all very technical, I'd dare say even semantical.  One of my prior posts on Visual Novels takes the position that the mechanical distinction between them and other Games I feel are wrongly called Visual Novels is the dialogue choices being the only interactive element, and I learned from this YT video at least one prior game fits that definition.  But there's a lot about my older posts on Visual Novels I have come to regret since the fall 2023 Anime season.

Let's compare this to the debate about if the Slasher genre began with Halloween.  By every technical standard there are plenty of pre-Halloween films that fit the bill.  However what makes Halloween so vital is the fact that once people were making movies with the premediated concept of a Slasher being the genre they are making, Halloween and it's first sequel were the primary model they were using.

With Visual Novels it's similar, once we're in the time period when Visual Novels undisputedly exist, Leaf's spiritual trilogy not any prior games that technically fit the definition were the inspiration, the first two which are more Horroeqsque are very directly the inspiration for games like Tsukihime when you compare what Tsukihime originally looked like to what they look like.  And then To Heart is clearly the inspiration for One and Key's Seasons Trilogy and Rumbling Hearts and Shuffle.  Then over time those games became more directly influential then what influenced them.

However the difference between the Slasher situation and the Visual Novel situation, at least in the way I chose to describe the Slasher situation, is that no one was making Tsukihime or Kanon thinking of "Visual Novel" as the name of the Genre they are working in.  Because in Japan "Visual Novel" has never bene a genre name, it's only the Leaf series that are called that and it was part of their Branding not a subjective flexible Genre label.  So in that context it's even more indisputable, to the nation that makes all these Games we're talking about there are only 4 Visual Novels and Shizuku is unambiguously the first.

Bowel of Lentils videos on the history of Visual Novels and how that became a term more commonly used in the west then in Japan I highly recommend, and another prior post I made on VNs I kind of regret is the one disagreeing with them.  I have mostly abandoned my past refusal to classify Visual Novels as video games.  Though I still think something more specific then Adventure Game is needed to be the umbrella term for both the undisputed Visual Novels and Dating Sims and other games with this Style.

And that's why I'm indebted to the 2023 Anime 16bit Sensation: Another Layer.  That show has helped make me and others in the Western Fandom aware of how the Japanese term for these kinds of Games is Bishojo Game.

Visual Novel though is still a more distinct subcategory within that.

Magical Girls are my favorite Genre of Anime yet my Favorite Anime isn’t one

Conceptually how I’d define what I like about Anime in general and how I’d define what I like about the Magical Girl Genre specifically are virtually exactly the same.  No single Genre embodies what I love about Anime as a whole more than the Magical Girl Warrior.

Yet the Magical Girl Genre has had some bad luck that holds back every example of it from similarly perfectly embodying all of that.  The status of being my Favorite Anime has changed a few times since I first had one at all, but it’s never once been held by a Magical Girl show or movie.  In fact I often feel like I’m forcing myself even by usually having one in my top 10.

Now I love this Genre unconditionally so much that even its Mediocre or fatally flawed entries give me a lot of Joy.  And there are plenty of near perfect examples that I love more than most Anitubers seem to love their favorite Anime.

The first problem is the classic standard form of the Genre is a show that airs for a full year which is inevitably held back by a bunch of Mid or sometimes even bad one off Monster of the Week episodes. Now do not misunderstand me, my favorite episodes of these shows are also usually one off monster of the week episodes with little if any bearing on the overarching plot.  But the more opportunities you give a show to drop the ball the more they eventually will.  

On the other end of the spectrum the shows that have only one Cour lack fun one off episodes which are conceptually part of the Genre’s appeal.  And the few two Cour shows that do exist have something off about them.  None perfectly follow what I have deemed the ideal 26 Episode Anime Structure.

Some great Magical Girl anime are held back not because they did anything majorly wrong but because I feel they could have been better. From Pretty Sammy’s TV Anime to Pretear to Yuki Yuna Is A Hero.

There are a handful I have given a 10 out of 10 rating to. But I’ve given a lot of 10/10s and so it’s a steep competition to stand out among them.  To people who think I shouldn't give them out so easily I say 10/10 means a Masterpiece, I happen to feel a lot of those exist but they are still a minority of the total of what I’ve seen.  Point here is the few Magical Girl Anime I’ve given a 10/10 still have steep competition to be something I’d rank as a personal absolute favorite.

Sailor Moon R: The Promise of The Rose is probably the best movie installment of the Genre (certainly the purest form of Sailor Moon).  But the non Magical Girl Anime Films it’s most directly competing with are other annual tie in movies to ongoing TV Shows, a sub type of Anime films many don’t treat with respect, but Pokémon 3 Spell of The Unown is a movie you could almost trick people into thinking Ghibli made, and Detective Conan has four movies I consider not just great among Conan films but Masterpieces of the Detective Genre in general.

The thing is, many of my absolute Favorite Anime are not part of the Magical Girl genre but they feel connected to it in some way.  Noir has been the most consistent holder of the top spot and I already did a post on its climatic Sailor Moon reference. A lot of my favorite Male Protagonists are characters who personality wise practically are male Magical Girl Protagonists.  There are several reasons I’m confident the Fate/ Franchise wouldn’t exist without the Infinity Arc of Sailor Moon.

Interestingly since I started writing this the title has started to become less definitively accurate as I’ve also been doing a bunch of Fate/ rewatching in May of 2022.  And so have come to view Fate/Kaleid Liner Prisma Illya as possibly my favorite Fate/ Anime and my Favorite Magical Girl Anime and maybe even a contender to dethrone Noir.  However that may not stick if my mood changes later and a different franchise becomes my current main hyper fixation.  

But also I’m hesitant to unconditionally endorse Prisma Illya as a Magical Girl show while the 3wei arc is still incomplete even in the Manga.  If it fully delivers on the promise made by episode 9 of the 3wei TV Anime and what I’ve heard about certain character deaths doesn't stick then it can easily become my ideal Magical Girl Saga, but right now that’s still an IF.