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Floating Catacombs 2024 Roundup

Another year, another twelve days of weeb blogging, and I'm quite satisfied with this batch. You will be too, if you're interested in yuri, moe, or Gundam.

Here’s a roundup post, in case you missed anything or are new to this blog.

1. Zeta Gundam and Being Weird About Women

2. Anaheim Gals Being Anaheim Pals

3. Do Not Watch Stardust Memory

4. UFO 50 Abducted Me For 159.2 Hours

5. So Help Me God, Lucky Star is Actually Good

6. Getting Scared Shitless by Boards of Canada

7. Teekyuu and Hubris

8. Tech So Bad It Sounds Like The Reviewers Are Just Plain Depressed

9. Clear Card Crit

10. Trying to Talk About Touhou Two

11. The Normal Author’s Girlfriend’s List Of Bad Yuri Anime

12. More Yuri About Adults To Accompany Your Seasonal Festivities

Thank you for reading, and I'll see you next December!

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More Yuri About Adults To Accompany Your Seasonal Festivities

12 Days of Aniblogging 2024, Day 12

Happy Christmas and Hanukkah!

Per usual, I will close out this year’s blogging by going over some yuri I read this year starring adults.

Ayaka is in Love with Hiroko!

It’s always surprised me how unpopular Sal Jiang is amongst yurigoers. This is a woman who knows exactly what she wants in her stories and executes on it every single time. The thing in question just happens to be masochism. The pain in her work exists on a spectrum from physical to emotional, and honestly the emotional side feels like even more of a punch to the gut than watching women punch each other in the gut.

That all said, Ayaka is in Love with Hiroko is the first time Jiang plays her shtick for laughs, and to great effect. Hiroko is comically self-torturing, the kind of work-closeted lesbian who has developed insane control issues because of this and freaks the hell out at the mere thought of PDA. So naturally, her work kouhai, Ayaka, is a silly little femme who is head-over-heels for her and really wants to show it. Unfortunately, Hiroko thinks Ayaka is straight, and just being overly familiar and close because straight women are like that sometimes. A comedy of errors ensues that leaves Hiroko in her own personal lesbian hell. It’s fifth-dimensional lesbian kriegspeil, and it’s great! The usual Sal Jiang emotional violence is played for slapstick, and she’s a natural at it. There's even honest-to-god dyke drama at a lesbian bar! The emotions depicted in this manga feel very real, even as exaggerated as it all is. We need so many more stories about punished lesbians who will sooner eat their own organs than make a move if there’s even a hint of ambiguity. It’s such a fun character type to poke at.

This manga actually got a TV drama adaptation earlier this year, which I’ll have to check out! I hope she got paid plenty for it.

Wicked Spot

That’s right, we’re double-dipping with Sal Jiang manga this year. Wicket Spot is a new series that's currently being published under a new LGBT imprint from Kadokawa. It’s worth it for the “Oh yeah, I’ve been getting into Wicked” jokes you could make alone. This one's another comedy series, and I’ve liked what I’ve read so far. There’s plenty you can do with the modern-day-witches premise, and we'll just have to see how far she's willing to go this time around. The character faces are incredibly dynamic, and I love how much she’s leaning into the cheesiness and camp with stuff like that.

Jiang noticeably draws black leather with a lot of love and consideration, and I just think that's neat.

The Dentist Won't Stop Teasing Me

Look, I don’t want to be mean, but all of the yuri manhua series that make it over to Dynasty-Scans have even goofier and more contrived premises than comparable Japanese lilyschlock. At the same time, I appreciate how quickly they tend to spell it all out. This may be pure pulp, but teeth are important.

_

Sal Jiang has a Youtube channel where she'd upload ukelele songs, so I was going to link her cover of All I Want For Christmas Is You to cap things off here. Unfortunately, at some point she privated all of her videos! You'll just have to take my word that the gentleness with which she plays was hilarious given her work. So go check some of that out, or barring that, get in a sexually-charged fistfight with another woman. Mariah Carey would approve.

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The Normal Author’s Girlfriend’s List Of Bad Yuri Anime

12 Days of Aniblogging 2024, Day 11

So you’ve seen some good yuri anime: Revolutionary Girl Utena (and the movie, if you want), Bloom Into You, Puella Magi Madoka Magica (plus, of course, Rebellion, which is essential), Bocchi: The Rock!, Girls Last Tour. You know HaruMichi and Farcille and poor sweet Tomoyo Daidouji and Quanxi’s whole deal. You’ve been queerbaited by Kyoani, or maybe you got lucky and watched Dragon Maid which was actually gay; you no longer get weirded out by incest; you wanted more Utena and got The Witch from Mercury S1 (good) or Revue Starlight (bad); maybe you’ve even gone back to Oniisama e and discovered Ryoko Ikeda’s incredible butch-for-butch technologies.

You’ve seen some good yuri and that’s been great. It’s just… there isn’t that much of it. Well, you could start reading manga, or books, or talking to actual women, but you want more yuri anime specifically.

To you, dear reader, I offer up this solution:

Bad Yuri.

Floating Catacombs 2025 Presents:

A Normal Author’s Girlfriend Production

The Normal Author’s Girlfriend’s List Of Bad Yuri Anime

Before we get started, let’s define our terms. First: Bad Yuri must not be in good taste. Second, let us consider some ‘ungood’ yuri, that we might understand what we aren’t looking for:

Case 1: Liz and the Blue Bird.

Boring and forgettable. Bad Yuri must be watchable.

Case 2: Shoujo Kageki Revue Starlight.

Yeah the butchfemme was good but I spent this entire show waiting for KuroMaya and they only got half an episode. I don’t fucking care about ‘childhood friends’. Bad Yuri must be enjoyable.

Case 3: Hibike Euphonium

It has to be gay. Come on. This is like the most basic requirement.

Case 4: MagiRevo, Undead Murder Farce

Being gay is not enough. You have to have actual characters.

In sum: Bad Yuri must be in bad taste; it must be watchable on a minute-to-minute basis; it must not leave the watcher with a bad taste in her mouth; it must actually be gay; and it must have some semblance of characterization. In practice it is basically always violent and horny. We’re talking like Kill La Kill levels, although if you ever want to watch that you should just go see Promare instead. Also, I reserve the right to break any and all of these rules whenever I feel like it. Without further ado:

Cross Ange

Content Warnings: Blood, Violence, Death, Sexual Assault, Ryona, Incest, Bad Taste, Needlessly Edgy, It’s Just Porn At This Point, Incredibly Stupid Plot Twists, Pretty Much Every Fetish

Princess Ange’s traitorous older brother exiles her to an island full of lesbians, where she must pilot a mech to fight dragons in incredibly revealing clothing.

This is Code Geass if it was about a girl and also worse (sorry Roze of the Recapture). This show starts with a baby being arrested. They put the baby in a special little baby jail cage in the back of a police car. The first episode ends with lesbian rape under the justification of a strip search. The weak girls on Pussy Fight Island pull knives on each other at the slightest provocation; the stronger girls pull guns; the strongest girls just use their hands.

It’s got all the subtlety of villainess manga. It’s got girls pissing themselves. It’s got a girl named Riza, short for Lizardia, because she is secretly a DRAGON. Forget ‘Lesbian soldier hopelessly in love with her commander’ – it’s got that too but it has I kid you not a lesbian harem where the top dies in combat so one of the four harem girlies has to turn into a top like a clownfish undergoing sequential hermaphroditism and take over. And then she dies too and the next one in line has to take over and then it happens again and then when it’s down to two one of them leaves because she can tell the current top’s heart isn’t in it and defects to Akio Ohtori’s side, because at least he’s willing to fuck her (lesbian cuckold count: 1) And everybody’s ass is out at all times.

It’s also got a surprising amount of Gundam intertextuality? The comparisons to Iron-Blooded Orphans are obvious; Kira Yamato is there, for some reason; her mecha is the Zeta Gundam but if it was the Strike Freedom with the TR-6 Woundwort’s Psyco Blade Goddess Antenna from Mobile Suit Gundam: Advance of Zeta: The Flag of Titans; the girls in Ange’s squadron each map perfectly to Shaddiq Zenelli’s Grassley girls.

But that’s not what you’re here for. You’re here for the scene where Hilda confesses that she’s in love with Ange but understands that Ange can never love her back, because Ange is already in love with Kira Yamato, and also with Salamandinay, a DRAGON princess from the True Earth who arrived through a dimensional rift to free Aura, the first DRAGON and the source of all magic, before Ange grabs her and gives her a full kiss while telling her that the world she’s fighting to create will have all kinds of relationships.

God Jill is so hot.

Shlock: Maximum

Lesbian: Yes, somehow, and bisexual as well. It is a male gaze thing but that’s going to be a constant with this microgenre. The vast majority of people who like women are men statistically and sometimes thank god they produce something like this

Watchability: High, if you have covid

Quality: Awful.

The Executioner And Her Way Of Life

Content Warnings: Death, Ryona, Incest, Bad Taste, Needlessly Edgy, Incredibly Stupid Plot Twist

Menou is a priestess in Isekai World whose job is to hunt down and kill Isekai Boys before they start causing problems with their Isekai Boy Powers. But this latest Isekai Boy Target… is a Girl With Enormous Tatas who she can’t kill because she auto-rewinds time to erase any wounds.

What really does it here for me is Menou’s relationship with her mentor, Flare, who groomed trained her from a young age to cut off all her emotions in order to make her a better executioner. I’m not immune to Empty Spaces/Combat Dolls/Signalis. What if Christianity wasn’t about raising girls as lambs to the slaughter but was instead about raising girls to use knives to kill people? A seductive premise for those with my particular flavor of religious trauma. Akari is fine, although I feel like Smith (Bravern) did Homura better.

I also like Momo, although I have a weakness for lesbian cuckolds (more on that later, possibly).

Shlock: High

Lesbian: Lesbian

Watchability: Moderate

Quality: Mid

Kakegurui

Content Warnings: Bad Taste, Needlessly Edgy, Boy Protagonist before the story thankfully gets bored of him, It’s Just Porn At This Point

Yumeko Jabami transfers into Gambling Academy, where everybody gambles and failing to pay your debts means being forced into petplay slavery. Luckily for her and unluckily for everyone else she is the world’s most perfect gambler because it turns her on.

Maybe the highest exposure show on this list? It’s got gambling, and sexual gambling, and a girl who can only orgasm if she’s actively taking place in a gamble where she could die. At one point she whacks off in a bathroom playing solo Russian Roulette. It’s got a Netflix original season 2 villain who was a girl forced to dress as a boy for years in ways that drove her sexually insane. It’s got The Tower of Doors, which is the most woman game that any woman has ever played.

My favorite bit character is probably the early villain who collects fingernails from everybody she beats because that’s her fetish, or the hopelessly-devoted Student Council Secretary who wants only to lay her face on the chair where her beloved Student Council President sits (lesbian cuckold count 3; 4 if you count Midori). She asks to gamble with her life and Yumeko says that that’s boring, and that there are things she values more – and that they’ll gamble with one life vs her relationship to the Student Council President instead.

Watch the opening for this one – it’s very clear about what it is, and if it doesn’t hook you it isn’t the show for you.

Shlock: Very High

Lesbian: Surprisingly

Watchability: Very high

Quality: Fine

Akuma No Riddle

Content Warnings: Violence, Sexual Assault, Death, Ryona, Bad Taste, Needlessly Edgy, Fanservice, Various Fetishes

Bishonen girl assassin Tokaku Azuma has received her first assignment: attend the Black Class at Killing People Murder High School and kill sweet and innocent-seeming Haru Ichinose, who she immediately falls in love with. Unfortunately the other eleven members of the Black Class are also there to kill Haru.

And they’re all lesbian or bisexual. And they’re all freaks.

They’re constantly pulling guns and knives on each other. Like every conversation a weapon will come out – possibly two. There’s a lesbian serial killer who really likes using scissors on girls. Sexually. The Student Council President is sexually devoted to the school principal. There’s a twenty-year-old spoiled rich girl with a boy’s name because she was named after her mom, who was a gay man. Her dad was also a gay man. If you dare say anything homophobic about this she will kill you. Two of these girls locked eyes right as they transferred in and immediately dropped everything to engage in a 24/7 ageplay dynamic. The other spoiled rich girl is secretly a cyborg and in love with the multiple personality girl, who wants to kill her as well.

This is by the author of infamous shotacon BL manga Loveless, so I guess all that is to be expected.

Also… Akiko Morishima got really into making doujinshi for this one? Sure.

Shlock: High

Lesbian: Yeah

Watchability: Pretty decent

Quality: Sure

Yuri Kuma Arashi

Content Warnings: Sexual Assault, Bad Taste, It’s Basically Just Porn At This Point, Bears

Lesbian Bear Storm.

For my money, the best Ikuhara post-Utena work is Sarazanmai, but Yurikuma Arashi absolutely earns its spot on this list. The pieces of a story about how lesbian desire is used to titillate a male audience but never fulfilled, how desire is regulated and rendered hideous, and how girls enforce heteropatriarchy by manufacturing consensus completely independent of men are in there somewhere under the moaning naked girls licking honey off precisely-positioned lilies. I think? It’s well-directed, at least.

Shlock: Ikuni

Lesbian: Ikunirappa

Watchability: Ikunichauda

Quality: Ikunigomamonaka

(the first half of) Birdie Wing: Girls Golf Story

Content Warnings: Violence, Bad Taste, Incest but not really, Golf, The Threat of Having To Resort To Survival Sex Work Underlying This Stupid Golf Show

Birdie Wing is the story of a girl who hates golf and a girl who loves golf. Season two fails to make par because it loves golf too much; season one, with the baffling metaverse vr episode, the underground mafia roguelike golf-to-the-death course, the woman who golfs so hard her robotic arm explodes, and the inexplicable Bandai property references, is the way to go.

I hate golf in the way only an eldest daughter forced into golf lessons hates golf. When Birdie Wing hates golf – when Eve swaggers onto the course in her stupid outfits, refusing to adhere to any etiquette, uses only three clubs and slaps a ball directly into the flag to drop it straight down? I love that. When she lifts her driver and points it and says she’ll kill somebody with it? I love that.

Also like when Aoi says she’ll get her attention with this and pulls her extra long driver out and holds it like a strap. And then her beleaguered caddie talks about how Aoi pierces everyone through with an innocent smile. That was good.

The thing that stuck with me the most wasn’t actually any of the golf shenanigans – it was the way that Eve effectively shoots Aoi down when they discover that they shared a father and were therefore half-sisters. Well, it’s yuri – incest is just something you get used to. Except then it gets revealed that that was a fakeout, because Aoi’s dad was actually her dad’s best friend and her parents were in a throuple that the dad who raised her left behind to secretly raise Eve. Also her dad is Amuro Reiya and also Char Aznable is in this one? And the HG Turn A Gundam? Don’t forget to increment the Lesbian Cuckold clock up to five – Aoi herself and her poor caddy, who didn’t deserve a mysterious blonde swooping in like that.

Oh god I didn’t even mention Vipere, the slutty snake-themed bisexual underground mafia golfer (you know, for the underground golf mafia) who uses pheromones to control her opponents, gets outgolfed, and then shonen-rival style sticks around to help out whenever somebody needs a car (as the girls are too young to drive).

Shlock: Absolutely

Lesbian: Somehow

Watchability: High

Quality: Better than it had any right to be

Maria Holic

Content Warnings: Transphobia, Bad Taste, Fanservice

Kanako Miyamae is a hopeless hapless lesbian excited to attend Lily Yuri Girls Only Academy. She falls in love with a beautiful blonde girl, the queen of the school – and discovers her ideal gf is actually a boy crossdressing to attend the academy who wants nothing more than to torment her sexually.

Maria Holic works like this: Mariya wants something from Kanako, and wears a sexual little outfit/exposes his feet/blows her a kiss/strips his maid’s top off to control her through her sexuality or just because he feels like it and she falls over of anime nosebleed disorder before she remembers “oh right Mariya is a boy” and starts eating her own organs Pearl Steven Universe style. Occasionally a girl who calls herself god will say something uninteresting. Kanako has a little pervert fantasy about one of her classmates. The cast has a reference-heavy Studio Shaft Conversation. Kanako can’t get Mariya out of her head. God I had to retype every ‘him’ up there from a ‘her’ because there is no way that little bitch is anything but a girl – it just doesn’t stick in my head. They don’t make boys like that. Torturing a girl like that is a female trait.

If you don’t want to watch a lesbian get relentlessly edged by a brat this show may not be for you. In all honesty even with Studio Shaft direction I found this almost completely unwatchable but it does earn its slot here. If you want a good Studio Shaft yuri show? Go watch Madoka Magica or Hidasketch.

It does have an excellent opening though.

Shlock: High

Lesbian: Well it has at least one

Watchability: No

Quality: No

Re: Cutie Honey

Content Warnings: It’s Basically Just Porn At This Point. but god. Natsuko Aki

“Honey Flash!” yeah she sure does huh

Transforming android Honey Kisaragi fights against evil organization Panther Claw, with the reluctant help of her annoyed cop eventual bestie Na-chan. This is good, actually. Go watch it.

Seriously. The animation is so fun and vibrant! They do the super-cost-saving stills being moved thing in a very high-energy way that comes across as a reference to the original manga format and then every so often they’ll pull out absolutely incredible action sequences.

Look at this!!! Her triangular stompy steps! The super low line count on her as she slowly advances with the gun flying toward her hand! Her Go Nagai snarl!!!!! It’s a real treat for the eyes even without the naked women. There’s only so much “saving your best friend by the power of being naked and kissing” you can do before it stops being bait and starts just being They Are In Love.

Shlock: Absolutely

Lesbian: NATSUKO AKI

Watchability: High

Quality: Yeah

Akiba Maid War

Content Warnings: Genre-Typical, No Spoilers Don’t Worry About it

Go watch this right now.

Shlock: Less than you’d think

Lesbian: Yes

Watchability: Extreme

Quality: Genuine

A Very Specific Set Of Monogatari Arcs

Content Warnings: yeah that guy is sexually harassing that 11 year old and also that tiny little vampire and also both of his little sisters.

Show beloved by pretentious internet perverts.

Alright. You are going to watch Episodes 1-8 of Bakemonogatari Season 1, (skipping 3-5 depending on your tolerance for watching small girls getting sexually harassed) and then you are going to watch the five episodes of standalone arc Hanamonogatari, halfway through Season 2. If you really like Hanekawa, who is bisexual, watch 11-15, Neko Black and Neko White. If you really like animation, watch Kizu. Do not be tricked into thinking more of this show will be gay because Hanekawa and Senjougahara had sex in a shower once. If your goggles are really on tight, enjoy Nadeko Draw but you’ll have to sit through the previous Nadeko and Yotsugi arcs to get there and I can’t in good conscience recommend you do that.

Shlock: Less than you'd think

Lesbian: One

Watchability: SHAFT

Quality: Yes

[floatingcatacombs]

Trying to Talk About Touhou Two

12 Days of Aniblogging 2024, Day 10

Hot off the heels of my touhoublogging last year, I continued playing through the games, and am proud to say that I now have a one-credit clear on every Touhou game from 6 to 19! It’s been a hell of a journey, and I’m legitimately proud of myself for rising up to the challenge, taking my own advice from last year whenever I could to great effect. Today’s post is mostly going to be about various official Touhou manga, but I might as well wrap up the game discussion from last year first.

My favorite games of the pack ended up being Subterranean Animism (11), Legacy of Lunatic Kingdom (15), and Double Dealing Character (14). While I praised the hell out of Subterranean Animism last year, the other two might surprise you! I’ve totally flipped on LoLK since last year – it’s a rough game if played traditionally, because it’s really meant to be played on the new checkpointing mode. The checkpointing system unique to Touhou 15 also leads to the spell cards in having a fundamentally different design than the rest of the series – attacks are actively designed to trip you up, like they’re puzzles to be solved more than anything. There’s a lot of micrododging and fast maneuvering required, but most of the patterns are fairly deterministic, so experimentation is strongly encouraged. It leads to a frustrating first playthrough but an incredible sense of satisfaction with every small bit of ground gained, and the ability to save and quit and return later helps sell the feeling of going on a long journey that the game’s plot is conveying. The music is amazing and I love you Junko. Meanwhile, Double Dealing Character ended up being a sleeper hit for me! It’s got a chaotic and lighthearted story where you beat up a bunch of monstergirls before proceeding to explore an upside-down castle, which means that it’s legally a Castlevania game. There’s a real sense of constant forward momentum here, with the expanded point of collection system encouraging frantic risk-taking with very high potential rewards on the other side. It’s straightforward, simple fun, and Seija’s whole deal is great, so I'm glad that she got her own spinoff. The soundfont for Touhou 14 and 15 really feels special…. I love you Retrologue Crystal Lake and Retrologue Pristine Chime for being part of ZUN’s toolkit during this time.

Of course, there are some more flawed games, too. One of the reasons that Touhou 14 feels like such a breath of fresh air is that 13 is just plain sleepy. Ten Desires offers very few resources to the player, meaning that dying once early on can be a run-ender. There aren’t really any systems you can engage with to gain extra bombs or lives beyond a passive accumulation of fragments over time, making the whole thing a slow and unexciting affair. Miko’s fight is at least brilliant. Touhou 16, Hidden Star in Four Seasons, sought to provide a very “traditional” experience for those turned off by LoLK’s radical one-time changes. Unfortunately, this leaves it a bit uninteresting and aesthetically bland, though I get that it’s important to the lore. Finally, Touhou 18, Unconnected Marketeers, is ZUN’s first swing at metaprogression mechanics, and suffers a lot for it. It’s very difficult to gain power in this game, which means that dying just once is ruinous, especially since it's a very hard game to begin with. You really have to cheese this one, which means that I kept going for the same ability cards again and again once I found out what worked. I managed to beat it with liberal use of the “your power cannot fall below 3” card, so thanks Mamizou. Unconnected Marketeers does at least have a spinoff called 100th Black Market which I found to be great. People tend to like one or the other, but not both, because the metaprogression systems play out very differently even if they share ability cards.

So, what are my Optimal Touhou Design takeaways from all of this? You want an extra lives system which rewards you the more you engage with it, while also allowing for small mistakes here and there. Games with a higher ceiling of earnable lives feel a lot better than the alternative, while being stingy with bombs is a valid decision and makes those games feel like an extra challenge to rise up to. I’ll learn to love the new characters no matter what if the game is fun enough, but the music and atmosphere are important to get right. And lastly, continued experimentation is decidedly worth it.

Having familiarized myself with all of the modern Touhou characters, I could finally read all the manga! I tried a few times in the past, when the only games I’d really played were 6 and 10, but I felt intimidated by an endless onslaught of characters I didn’t know and was expected to at least be somewhat familiar with. While I’m sure some wiki-diving would have cleared that up, playing through all of the games felt like it would be the more fun approach, and it paid off. Without further ado… some Touhou manga I read this year!

Wild and Horned Hermit

First things first, the artistic evolution here is quite impressive. The manga goes from dinky little sketches in the early chapters to a fully developed and soothing style. Wild and Horned Hermit was being published for ten years! That's a long run for any manga, but here it means that it spanned from Touhou 12 to Touhou 17, which was an incredibly pivotal time for the project that introduced some of my favorite characters. As far as broader arcs go, we move from the religious wars into the sage conflicts, but these generally aren't the main focus of the manga. Instead, Wild and Horned Hermit is about the minor antics and everyday lives of all the humans and youkai you’ve hopefully come to know and love. This is the slice of life-inflected version of Gensokyo that’s plenty implied in the games, but that you can’t ever actually experience there because you’re too busy shooting danmaku at every fairy and youkai in sight. The Incidents of each main game happen off-screen, which seems to be a constant with ZUN-written manga. Instead, we’re dealing with the setup and aftermath of larger events, and the girls from the new games will usually get be introduced with a few focus chapters, which is nice. Kasen is a fairly straightforward POV character, even if she’s got plenty of mysterious connections, helping her bridge the gap between the humans and some of the more out-there youkai. But ultimately, the manga’s goal is to follow Reimu and Marisa as they go about their lives, and it’s a joy to witness.

Forbidden Scrollery

I know this manga has its fans (it’s also the only one to be officially published in English), but it didn’t leave nearly as much of an impression on me as Wild and Horned Hermit. They actually ran concurrently for a while! Our insert character this time is a librarian in the human village, so the stories lean towards rumors and legends, though there’s plenty of other youkai schemes afoot as there always are. It’s funny to see which youkai keep showing up in these largely human-centric stories, and it makes sense that it’s Aya and Mamizou, both of whom really like blending in with humans and causing mischief. As far as I can tell, this is the manga that introduced Aya’s plucky newsboy outfit, so I can’t be too hard on it.

you are perfect

The Fairy Bullshit

Makoto Hirasaka has illustrated three separate comedy manga series about the misadventures of the shitty little fairies that live in a tree by Reimu’s shrine. He also did the all the portraits for the spinoff game Fairy Wars! These are breezy, inessential reads, but the artwork really is special. It is canon to me that all of the fairies look this stumpy, and maybe also Marisa.

Marisa exists in the superposition of being both 5'1" and 6'1"

Lotus Eaters

This may well be the definitive Touhou manga. While Wild and Horned Hermit has the privilege of getting to introduce a lot of important characters and lore details as they emerge, Lotus Eaters demands more of a setting understanding up front. But if you’ve got that, it’s like seeing old friends. This is what Touhou has ultimately become to me and so many other people – a framework for these beloved characters to hang out, occasionally get up to some antics, and otherwise take things easy. Every mini-incident in this manga begins and gets wrapped up in two long chapters, which provides a nice narrative rhythm that still manages to feel fairly organic. The new character, Miyoi, is far less of a presence than Keisen was – this is The Reimu Show, and maybe sometimes The Mamizou Show. And isn’t that why we’re here at the end of the day? To check in on the friends and inhabitants of the Hakurei Shrine, especially the times when they're not resolving major incidents. And in that regard, it’s decadent. True to the narrative framing of a supernatural bar, this is Touhou Cheers. Characters are constantly drinking together and running festivals and having a grand old time, and I love it. The manga really does feel true to its name. Coming from Forbidden Scrollery and Hornet Hermit, the artstyle here took a few chapters to get used to, but now I truly adore it. It’s like everyone’s hair has been ruffled just a bit.

There are a few stray series that I didn’t get to, and obviously an endless amount of doujin to chip away at, but I’ve really enjoyed my time in the world of Touhou manga. All of these would probably be uninteresting as standalone works, but as corollaries to the games and the broader Touhou world, they’re fantastic. The games and the print works really round each other out – characters don’t get many lines in the games, and the world of Gensokyo is only broadly sketched out. The manga helps fill in these spaces, making them feel more real and lived-in, while also periodically canonizing popular fan characterizations and extrapolations.

Maybe next year I’ll become a Hifuuhead, but seeing as I’ve already read its greatest cultural export (Otherside Picnic), it doesn’t feel quite as urgent. Adieu.

[floatingcatacombs]

Clear Card Crit

12 Days of Aniblogging 2024, Day 9

I've been waiting to go hater mode on this manga for years, but they just kept pushing back when it would end again and again. Only now that it's over can I properly lay it to rest. Full spoilers, of course.

Veteran Floating Catacombs readers should be well aware that Cardcaptor Sakura is my favorite CLAMP series, with a truly classic anime adaptation to boot. A couple of years ago I underwent a chronological readthrough of their works, and collected my takes in a series of essays titled "Why Is CLAMP Like This". My big takeaway was that they’re shoujo libertines, but it's also true that on some level, CLAMP defies categorization entirely. Unfortunately, their post-TsubasaHolic output has largely consisted of retreading old ground, with an endless progression of rehashes, sequels, and callbacks. Sure, there have been crossovers since the days of the CLAMP School, but it’s felt extra blatant this past decade and a half. We’ve gotten 2010s sequels to Wish, Legal Drug, xxxHolic, Tsubasa, and, of course, Cardcaptor Sakura.

How could they resist? Cardcaptor Sakura is CLAMP's most famous work by far, and its 20th anniversary was coming up in 2017. With promises of an anime adaptation and plenty of merchandising in tow, CLAMP got to work on the Clear Card Arc.

First things first: that anime is a terrible way to experience the Clear Card Arc, and Cardcaptor Sakura in general. A surprisingly weak effort from Studio Madhouse, the anime adaptation of Clear Card Arc has middling production values, a washed-out aesthetic with far too much bloom, and bland designs. Something's wrong with all of the eyes. I do appreciate the continuity changes to reflect the original's anime-only arcs – Meiling is back! However, this adaptation suffers from a staggering amount of filler. Even the manga-adapted parts play out at a dreadfully slow pace, as if they’re just stalling for time and padding out a dearth of chapters. I like even the most aimless parts of the 1998 anime, but here it just doesn’t sit right. Also, the new soundtrack is so bad that they start recycling the original OST halfway through the production.

The Clear Card Arc anime ends in a truly terrible fashion. By the final episode, we still know nothing about the main conflict, just that a handful of characters, including Syaoran, are deliberately keeping Sakura in the dark. We're left with only Sakura’s cryptic nightmares and a friend's ominous butler as clues. Ten minutes before the show ends, we’re still fucking around and baking sweets, until finally Sakura has an encounter with the presumed main villain that results in a timeline reset. The first few minutes of the first episode play out again, except everything feels a little wrong now.

Writing this out, this sounds almost kind of cool. Surreal, even. But for such a mediocre show, it's not that in the slightest! No resolution, no foreshadowing, just all of the plodding events from the past 21 episodes fully undone, as if the show is mocking and taunting the viewer. “How’s that for wasting your time?”

The Clear Card manga at least knows what it wants to be – a plot-driven mystery doubling down on the series lore. The first few volumes of the manga act as something of a smokescreen for the eventual plot developments, much like how xxxHolic Rei began as a continuation of the original before revealing itself to be an alternate timeline and getting plotty. Of course, this being the only stuff that the anime adapts explains exactly why it felt so vague and formless – it’s supposed to be an aimless rehash! You see, Sakura’s powers are now growing at such an unchecked pace that she’s able to create new cards unconsciously. Through recalling old memories she’s been unknowingly manifesting remixes of old CCS scenarios into reality, capturing cards that are largely simulacra of the originals.

I’ve gone back and forth on the merits of this plot twist, but having now read the whole thing, it’s one of the better tricks in this manga’s repertoire. It’s a bit of a meta jab at nostalgia – Sakura is simply going through the motions because that’s what’s expected of her, to the point where the past is literally being summoned into the present, preventing any character growth or development on her part. I wish it had been the main narrative conflict, to be honest.

Of course, I can’t give them too much credit, because a lot of Clear Card’s problems can be blamed on CLAMP simply playing it safe with their characters. I went into it expecting to see cute moments of Sakura and Syaoran early on in their relationship, having confessed at the end of the original manga and again in the second movie. But it often feels as if they’re right back where they were before, fully unable to convey their emotions to one another and relying on friends and circumstances to mediate. Characters like Yukito and Toya don’t get any meaningful or sweet moments, instead showing up only to move the plot forward when their abilities or connections are necessary. And don’t even get me started on Tomoyo. Sure, she’s around plenty. But when plot comes to shove, she’s narratively set aside every single time, hardly even getting to dress Sakura in cute outfits. You can’t keep that from her!!! She needs her dressup time to live!!! Though in the end, I’m almost willing to forgive it all for Frogcaptor Sakura. Almost.

Anyways, as I said earlier the initial episodic format gives way to mysterious plot development after mysterious plot development. A lot of the card capturing is from here on out is largely incidental. Of course, the in-universe explanation is that Sakura is just manifesting cards left and right at this point in ways that don’t really require card abilities to be used, since she’s not being tested like in the original. But also, if we’re tapering down the fun card usage and the cute slice of life scenes, how much is really left?

Well, there’s a powerful sorcerer named Yuna D. Kaito who’s manipulating events behind the scenes. His goal, it seems, is to try and put pressure on Sakura in such a specific way that she manifests the exact card that he needs. What card is that? Why? What should be a straightforward scheme is drip-fed so slowly that it’s easy to lose the narrative thread. At least he has a cunty little rabbit who acts as his Kero-chan type guardian. She’s fun, although her role in the plot ends up oddly convoluted.

Kaito is the butler and sole guardian of a young girl named Akiho, who is Sakura’s age and gradually becomes more and more similar to her in both personality and demeanor as the series goes on. Unfortunately, neither of these new characters are a particularly exciting addition to this world. A more introverted Sakura without her existing social ties is fairly uninteresting, and it’s obvious from the very first appearance that the butler is scheming and going to be our Eriol-style villain.

Except Eriol wasn’t really that bad of a guy, was he? So one gets the feeling that Kaito’s villainy will give way to sympathetic motivations and a bittersweet resolution. This process somehow takes the entire manga. Sixteen volumes is an unbearably long length for the story actually being told here. For reference, the original Cardcaptor Sakura is only twelve volumes, and Eriol doesn’t even show up until halfway through. In the meantime, new characters are steadily introduced, and secret aspects of existing characters are gradually revealed, so it never feels stale. In comparison, Clear Card Arc has an incredibly small pool of new characters and concepts to work with, and it has to stretch them out soooooo much further than the original ever did. This means that Sakura as well as reader are constantly kept in the dark, and plot payoff happens so infrequently and is so carefully measured out that it just never feels good. The result is a truly meandering plot instead of anything resembling “narrative arcs”. 

It’s maddening. It’s lunacy. This is all pretty similar to the rest of CLAMP’s modern sequels – take the existing setting and add a few new characters, layer on the intrigue, provide some additional backstory, and see what happens. Drug & Drop and xxxHolic Rei are both like this, but they’re only a few volumes long apiece! Once again, sixteen volumes of drastically less substance than the original, is ridiculous. After the initial fakeout (which, to repeat, encompasses the entire Clear Card anime), the manga has a noticeable aversion to returning to the original’s vibes, except there’s nothing to replace it.

CLAMP’s modern artstyle, developed in the Tsubasa shounen mines, has noticeably thicker lines than their spindly compositions of old. It comes off as a bit simplistic in the early chapters, but as CLAMP drops all of their other series and begins to work at a slower pace, the drawings reach an impressive fidelity. Card Arc is a timeloop narrative with a lot of fairytale elements, so they went with steampunk and Alice in Wonderland as the primary motifs, neither of which are aesthetics that I'm particularly a fan of. At least they do go hard on them.

I’ve been putting it off, but I’m going have to actually summarize the later plot beats. Kaito keeps rewinding time for the sake of his Schemes, and curses Syaoran so that he can’t talk to Sakura about it. Great! He straight-up cast a spell of Narrative Contrivance. This will surely make things fun to read. Anyways, all of the time magic is taking a toll on Kaito, and he starts dying about it before we even know what’s going on or why. Sakura continues to get impossibly powerful, but it kind of stops being of concern to the plot? It’s is a shame because I was hoping they’d do a thing where someone dear to her has to try and put her down to keep the world from breaking.

CLAMP does finally detonate the setting in the last few volumes. We go full clockwork calamity, with every aspect of the narrative colliding such that the entire Tomoeda school puts on a steampunk fair revolving around a play titled “Alice in Clockland”, which was originally a magical book that nobody but Akiho read because she's the one who manifested it. Still on track? Okay, by putting on the play, Sakura and Akhio get sucked into the world of this book, but Syaoran (dressed as a steampunk catboy, for reasons) is able to dash in to help at the last second thanks to… Touya gaining the ability to stop time for a few seconds out of nowhere? Why are we stealing classic Jojo asspulls for Cardcaptor Sakura, of all things?

From here on out the manga aims to speedrun Tsubasa levels of Plot Bullshit. Syaoran has to fight his NPC doppelganger (also a catboy) because he wasn’t expected to make it into the narrative that Sakura and Akiho got sucked into. That whole mess ends with Kaito swapping Sakura and Akiho’s roles in the play, setting of a cascading chain of events that resets the timeline one last time and recasts Akiho as Sakura’s twin sister. That was Kaito’s plan all along. He needed to remove the magic from within her and place her under the protection of the Kinomoto family, so that evil British wizards wouldn’t seek her out and do fucked-up experiments to try and draw out her magical potential. That’s it! Why did this scheme need to be slow-rolled over the entirety of the manga? It’d be fine if it showed up late like Eriol in the original, but as a grand overarching justification for Clear Card Arc existing, it’s so shallow.

This timeline reset means that the opening of the manga rolls AGAIN, this time with Sakura and Akiho as bestie sisters. At least it explains why Kaito and the plot in general were so invested in making Sakura and Akiho converge on having nearly the same personality. Also, three or four separate characters take the time to call Sakura a siscon, including Tomoyo, who must be eating her own organs while saying that. I cannot fathom why they would take the time to brand her as such. I had to guess, it’s because stepsiblings are the one kind of ~scandalous relationship~ missing from the original CCS, and they wanted to finally get around to it decades later. But why is this coming up eight chapters before the end, only to be fully undone alongside the rest of this particular timeline in the finale? What did you mean by that, CLAMP?

Since everyone’s clued in on the time-loop bullshit at this point, Sakura and company are able to use the Clow Cards to record messages that can persist through loops, allowing them to break the cycle once and for all and travel to space in order to rescue the dying Kaito, who has… turned into a dragon and been imprisoned inside an illusory moon?

Look, nothing makes sense at this point, but at least this is compatible with my take on Touhou that any plot revolving around the moon is destined to become incredibly convoluted. Sometimes you gotta pull a quick Imperishable Night! The closest thing we have to a final boss at this point is an automated meteor spell set up by those damn offscreen British magicians, which Sakura does manage to disarm using her nascent demiurge powers. With one last reset, everyone gets their happy ending. Akiho can hang out with Sakura and friends and take care of Kaito as they figure out how to cure his time dragon illness, and she never has to worry about wizards hunting her down ever again. End manga.

Who is this for? Demographic crossovers have always been a strong point for CLAMP. They’ve got plenty of shoujo that can just as easily be appreciated by boys, and shounen and seinen that draw in all kinds. Combined with their unique aesthetics and atmosphere, CLAMP's best manga has something for everyone.

But Clear Card Arc is, comparatively, a funnel. You have to be a diehard fan of Cardcaptor Sakura to understand it in the first place, and you also have to be deeply invested in its lore and magic system. I don’t know about you, but those are just not what I come to this series for. Groups who will be disappointed include: Sakura x Syaoran shippers, slice of life enjoyers, acolytes of Tomoyo (patron saint of pining lesbians), people who like the nonmagical extended cast, and fans of the original anime who appreciate quality adaptations.

Clear Card Arc is a curious, yet ultimately meaningless, exercise in nostalgia. It mostly fails as a throwback, and decidedly fails as a soft reboot for pulling new fans in. Its priorities would interest almost no one except for CLAMP themselves, and its few novel ideas are stretched so thin that the whole thing feels like a well-drawn exercise in meaninglessness. CLAMP’s clearly been running out of steam these past fifteen years, shelving most of their projects in favor of ever-safer investments. Cardcaptor Sakura was the logical endpoint for this endeavor. And while they did enough obligate rehashing in the first few volumes to script the anime and stock the gashapon machines, one wonders who the rest is for. Were these sixteen volumes a passion project, borne out of total creative freedom, or was it stretched the way it was out of contractual and financial obligation? Both answers are dire.

Now that Clear Card is over, CLAMP plans to resume xxxHolic Rei, and while I liked that one, I hope more than anything that they’re able to take a good, long, break. CLAMP’s members are starting to grow old, and they've been working near-nonstop since early adulthood. Hopefully the royalties are good enough that they can take a break and get those creative juices flowing again, or even retire for good! I wouldn’t begrudge them one bit. They’re fascinating and accomplished mangaka, even if they also did Chobits.

One more rating, for old time’s sake.

CLAMP BULLSHIT-O-METER: 4/5

OVERALL RATING: 2/5

[floatingcatacombs]

Tech So Bad It Sounds Like The Reviewers Are Just Plain Depressed

12 Days of Aniblogging 2024, Day 8

I really do try to stay away from armchair cultural criticism, especially when it's this far removed from my weaboo wheelhouse, but this one’s been eating away at me for the entire year. What are we doing here?

2024 has been full of downright bad consumer tech! The Apple Vision Pro, the Rabbit and Humane AI pins, the PS5 Pro… those are just the big ones, and that’s not even getting started on vaporware like Horizon Worlds and Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC initiative. Sure, there are Juiceros every year, but this recent batch of flops feels indicative of a larger trend, which is shipping products that are both overengineered and conceptually half-baked. Of course, there’s plenty of decent tech coming out too – Apple’s recent laptops and desktops have been strong and competitively priced, at least the base models. The Steam Deck created a whole new product category that seems to be thriving. And electric cars… exist, which is better than nothing. But it’s been much more fun to read about of the bad stuff, of course. These days it feels like most of the tech reviews I read these days have the journalists asking “what’s the point?” halfway through, or asserting in advance that it will fail, like this useless product with a bad value proposition is prompting an existential crisis for them. Maybe it is!

yeah yeah journalists don't write their own headlines. I can assure you that the article content carries the same tone for these though.

What did a negative tech review look like before the 2020s? Maybe there wasn’t one, really. The 2000s and the 2010s were drenched in techno-optimism. Even if skepticism towards social media emerged over time, hardware itself was generally received well, mixed at worst, because journalists were happy to extrapolate out what a product and its platform could do. Nowadays, everyone takes everything at face value! As they should –the things we buy rarely get meaningfully better over time, and the support window for flops is getting shorter and shorter with each passing year. On the games side of things, look how quickly Concord ended! With that out of the way, I’m going to start zeroing in on the hardware I saw a “why does this exist” type review for this year.

The Apple Vision Pro

People have been burnt time and time again by nearly every VR headset ecosystem to release (other than mayyybe Oculus, but Facebook’s tendrils sinking in don’t feel great either). The PSVR was a mild success at best and the PSVR2 was an expensive and unmitigated disaster that lost support in a matter of months. Meanwhile, the Valve Index couldn’t cut it with its price, and Microsoft actively blew up their own HoloLens infrastructure earlier this year. It’s at this point it's clear that VR is a niche, and one that’s expensive to develop for and profit off of.  Surely Apple will save us!

completely isolate yourself from your family for the low, low price of multiple paychecks

With most of the competition focusing on gaming, Apple attempted a blue ocean strategy with the Vision Pro by instead making their target audience… nobody! It’s hard to tell what anyone was ever supposed to do with these things, and reading long-form reviews, it became very clear that the reviewers were trying to come up with viable use-cases and largely failing, because it’s just not very practical tech. There’s no physical input devices, so you’re instead using mix of hand-tracking, eye-tracking, and voice commands to control the thing. That’s pretty cool, but it means that the one niche that VR has been proven in, gaming, is effectively impossible. Things like office software can also be hard to use without a keyboard and mouse, and even when there’s tailor-made headset applications for existing software, it’s still usually not better than just doing it on your desktop!

The tech is real, and that’s the saddest part. Looking at teardowns, I fully believe that the hardware had to cost multiple thousands of dollars to break even, and as someone who suffers from VR motion sickness, I’d be really curious to see if all the stabilization tech from their extra onboard chips helps with that as much as the press releases claim. It’s like a more drastic version of the iPad problem, where the hardware is amazing on paper, but interfacing limits with the form factor itself combined with a subpar operating system mean that you can’t actually do as much as you’d hope to with all that power.

Of course, the Vision Pro is also full of prototype hacks and hard design problems – that battery pack is a nightmare! If it’s a productivity device, how are you supposed to share content with other people when the headset has to be custom-fit every time and there’s only one profile? Apple still has no good answer. That leaves the only available niche for this device as white-collar productivity done in isolation, and most people fundamentally do not live in that world. It feels lonely and dystopic, even.

If I had to guess what happened, the VR division at Apple was working on this for the better part of a decade, and facing headwinds, Apple decided to cut their losses and force them to deliver a doomed product. There’s a potent business fantasy of a bad version 1.0 leading to a successful 2.0 and beyond, but Apple has not pulled that off any time in the twenty-first century. It’s either a success or it is a proven failure, and this is so, so, obviously the latter. I do hope that the stabilization tech makes it into other headsets eventually though, so that I can play Blade and Sorcery at my friend’s house without throwing up. Everyone else, please copy Apple’s homework or steal their patents, preferably to the tune of under $3500.

Rabbit R1 and Humane AI Pins

The current AI paradigm has been around for two years now, and since we've all heard way too many arguments already, I will try to keep my own takes brief. The LLM results we have right now are real (even if everyone is trying to dress them up as superintelligent snake oil when they’re just cool computer synthesis), but from everything I read, it seems like the era of drastic improvement is over. It would take exponentially more text and images and video than we already have to get more linear improvements, and a good chunk of the world has already been scraped, and the lawsuits are already pouring in, further slowing down data ingestion. The tech is slowing down, and the industry won’t be able to grow its way out of the hard social problems it’s invoked. If there are gains to be made, it's in more fine-tuned and curated LLMs, and that's far harder work than most of these companies want to get up to right now.

With that out of the way, are you interested in wearing an LLM on your shirt?

The video that notoriously tanked a company. Of course, now I'm also supposed to make fun of this guy for using b-roll of himself speeding in a school zone . Nobody wins.

Not one, but two separate startups pushed this idea to market this year. Humane’s AI pin launched for seven hundred dollars plus a twenty-five dollars per month subscription, all for the privilege of getting to ask a little square on your chest questions and getting GPT answers spoken back to you. But what about like… ChatGPT’s own phone app? Or hell, even Siri! Apple and Android’s voice assistants are both are over a decade old– do you really have that many ungoogleable queries? And specifically, ones that voice responses make the most sense for, and not text? To make things worse, this thing has serious overheating issues and a battery that can’t even last a day. The Rabbit R1 at least has a cute design, and actually has a screen, and is much cheaper, but it requires a data tether to your phone, so like…why not just use your phone. Reverse-engineering has confirmed that its app can just run on a normal Android phone, so there’s really nothing special other than the little orange square that it’s hosted in.

Why would you even try to roll out a product as doomed as these, instead of just going bankrupt and pocketing a year or two of salary like most startups? The AI boom, of course! After the NFT hype cycle, everyone really did convince themselves that you can just fail upwards with no real limit. Unfortunately, people have higher standards for hardware than PNG transaction platforms, as they get far more upset when they’re left physically holding the bag. I’ve been watching Deep Space 9 recently and have to ask, are these companies trying to capture the fantasy of Star Trek comms badges? Because if so, they should honestly lean more into it. It wouldn't be any more functional of a product, but if there’s one thing nerds always love, it’s themed garbage.

welp

The PS5 Pro

This one just launched a bit ago for the holiday season. It makes some sense on paper – most PS5 games offer a choice between a performance and a fidelity mode, so why not just make a version strong enough that it can get the benefits of both? Great! That’ll be seven hundred dollars.

Okay, $700 doesn’t sound as insane in the context of that Humane pin I was just talking about. But it’s $200 more than the PS5 at launch, and it doesn’t even come with a disc drive unless you want to fork over another $80. The past few generations of gaming have been defined by heavily subsidized console prices with the goal of roping gamers into more lucrative ecosystems, but Sony here seems to be testing the waters for an unsubsidized era.

I've heard the external disc drive install process is surprisingly user-friendly, but at this price point they should have included a little automaton who does it for you

If you can stomach PC gaming, at that price you’re halfway there to buying something that could trounce a PS5 Pro, plus a monitor close enough to your face that you might actually notice the 4K improvements. There are also only a couple of games per year being produced at high enough fidelity for there to be any noticeable quality improvements. The returns are diminishing and the AAA landscape is narrowing, and console upgrades like these only hasten the industry’s spiraling. Is all this sustainable from a development perspective? I don’t know. If Nintendo announced a Mario Odyssey sequel for the Switch 2, I’d buy it at launch regardless of the graphics, and my PS3 can play Demon's Souls and my anime blu-rays just fine. So I’m well aware that I’m not the target audience for stuff like the PS5 Pro, but I think it's going to become harder and harder to compel that audience going forward.

_

The end of the low interest rates in US has drastically changed the underpinnings of its tech industry, and I think every one of these bad product launches can be traced back here one way or another. The era of running flashy ventures at a loss for years in order to corner the market is profoundly over, unless you’ve got Thiel blood money or a GPT transformer, and even then. This, combined with the end of quarantine-era user habits, has left many companies to repeatedly go all in on hype cycles like blockchain and the metaverse and AI, pretending like the last one never happened every time. This trend-chasing means, that depending on each company’s circumstances, they need to either spin something up quick, reroute an existing prototype, or risk delivering laughably late. You need a product and you need it fast. And rushed tech is always going to have load-bearing and stupid problems, no matter how long the initial development time was. Everyone loses, especially the saps who actually believe in the sales pitches enough to buy these things. And those poor, poor tech journalists who have to review it all are being consumed with eldritch madness watching this all unfold. Hey, at least they’re not trying to simp for Microsoft Copilot!

Hopefully, this particular era of tech ends sooner rather than later, so that I don’t feel compelled to do another essay of this type. If I were more of an idealist or a doofus I’d be dreaming of a serious anticonsumerist movement and/or Xi Jinping liberating us all, but unfortunately I’m of the belief that we’re doomed to dumbass gizmos destined for the landfill until the end of the silicon era.

[floatingcatacombs]

Teekyuu and Hubris

12 Days of Aniblogging 2024, Day 7

Chronic illness begets a certain amount of magical thinking. Having to deal with your own body attacking itself at random intervals leads many down the path of desperation and conspiracy. That’s is why it’s important to instead channel that energy into little rituals that don’t provide any physical aid but do help establish a sense of control. In my own struggles with sickness, I’ve gained exactly one such ritual related to anime. For whatever reason, my consolation prize for particularly bad health days is shotgunning an entire season of Teekyuu.

This may sound like a huge endeavor, but these are two-minute episodes we’re dealing with, and that's counting the opening. Teekyuu is a moe gag anime about girls in a tennis club who only rarely actually play tennis. Everything plays out at a staggeringly fast speed, like it’s cramming four minutes of jokes into half that time. This works heavily in its favor! Even if only half of the jokes ever hit at best, the whole thing plays out so fast that the failures don’t really stick around in your psyche, but the hits can really add up. Fuck it, I’ll just post an episode, it'll fit within Tumblr's file size limit.

So, what did you think? Actually, don't answer that, just imagine twelve of those back-to-back. That’s the kind of shit that I’m on during the days where my gut has decided in advance to kill me. It is absolutely the kind of show that boils your brain, but sometimes you need your mind simmered for sanity’s sake. And for that, it is my ideal show. If watching Lucky Star is like basking in CGDCT moe, then Teekyuu is like getting slapped with it, repeatedly.

I could honestly end the writeup here, but Teekyuu actually has a surprisingly serious production history surrounding it, which I would be remiss to leave out. Also, I really like the idea of making you spend so much time with this essay learning arcane industry drama that you could have just watched a good chunk of a Teekyuu season. Now then....

MAPPA is a big studio! They took on adapting Chainsaw Man and Jujutsu Kaisen and the later parts of Attack on Titan and a million other high-profile anime, and are renowned for their fights and animation quality. Of course, they’re also notorious for paying terribly, taking on way too many projects, and absolutely grinding their workers into dust. They’re a company of extremes, but in a way that makes them extremely emblematic of where the anime industry is at right now.

It wasn’t always this way, though. MAPPA started out in the early 2010s with some lower-profile but mostly well-received projects, such as Kids on the Slope, Ushio & Tora, and an original titled Punch Line which one of my friends from high school insists is peak. And during this early period, they were also churning out season after season of Teekyuu. Shin Itagaki is something of a D-tier auteur when it comes to Teekyuu, acting as the director, character designer, key animator, in-betweener, and sound director for almost every episode. Itagaki’s actually got a pretty cool resume – he helped out on Princess Mononoke’s animation, contributed to a few Gainax shows, and wore quite a lot of hats on the underrated stupid comedy brawling anime Ben-To. But Teekyuu is his real brainchild, and it seems to have garnered enough of a following to justify continued releases (of course, the production costs must have also been pretty low).

Anyways, in 2015 Itagaki quits MAPPA and founds his own studio called Millepensee, with him as chief director and his wife handling the business operations.  With this newfound and total creative control, he goes on to make…four more seasons of Teekyuu, as well as two spinoffs. The dude knows what he wants. But that’s his pet project. His wife has greater ambitions, and is steadily growing the studio in order to try and take on a larger project. They manage to get Berserk.

It still baffles me that someone looked at Itagaki’s resume and saw his seven nearly-consecutive seasons of high school girls getting up to rapid-fire antics and decided that he was the one for this job. I guess he had enough cred from his past projects like Hajime no Ippo and Ghibli contracting that they decided he could take a turn at adapting probably the greatest fantasy manga of all time.

It wasn't just going to be his studio, thankfully. This was organized to be a co-production with the 3DCG studio GEMBA, who up until then had only contributed background VFX to various shows, and had never handled an adaptation on their own. So Itagaki's job as director and key animator in pre-production was to handle storyboards and guide the artstyle of the adaptation, making sure it mapped well to the 3D models and animation techniques the studio was using.

When Berserk 2016 was announced, a lot of people were worried that Itagaki’s recent near-exclusive work on moe anime would pose a problem with the Berserk artstyle, but it turned out to be the other way around. He wanted to stay extremely faithful to the original artwork with techniques that the 3D software of the era simply couldn't render in real time, such as cross-hatching that Berserk is known for. Instead Millepensee had to add 2D textures and effects over the completed renders, taking on the laborious and messy task of fixing it in post. That’s why the texturing looks so janky and inconsistently applied in the final project, a lot of it had to be done by hand against a strict deadline!

The information in this section is mostly taken from a very good ANN writeup.

In between seasons of this Berserk adaptation, and right afterwards, Itagaki released Teekyuu 8 and 9. I guess this was his way of letting off steam.  

You’d think that this experience would deter them from CG productions, but in 2020 Millepensee purchased a 3D animation studio, and most of their productions are now in a hybrid 2D+3D animation style with Itagaki directing. Granted, they're all low-rent isekai adaptations, but at least they're still getting work after Berserk.

The saddest part about this failed Berserk adaptation is that it could have gone way better had they just tried a few years later! Hybrid 2D + 3D pipelines started getting really good in the late 2010s, with Studio Orange and his old bosses at MAPPA both mastering the craft on shows like Dorohedoro and Land of the Lustrous. Nowadays it’s absolutely everywhere, and you hardly see anyone complaining, especially when it’s used for a striking artstyle or to adapt something that would be near-impossible to do right with traditional animation. It's probably the only way you could animate the later parts of Berserk sanely, but nobody wants to try again after the 2016 attempt went so poorly (and also Miura's fucking dead). Also sad is how MAPPA really came into prominence just as Itagaki was leaving, with hits like Yuri on Ice and Kakegurui and Zombieland Saga coming out year after year. Though I don’t know if he would have been assigned to any of those had he stayed, and he probably gets a much bigger paycheck now even though he's working on stuff ten percent as popular.

We have drifted far, far, away from Teekyuu, so I’ll just loop back by saying that Teekyuu changes a person. It is kind of evil on some fundamental level. And yet, it is occasionally load-bearing on my psyche, like pushing a reset button somewhere in my synapses. I’ve still got a few late seasons stashed away for when I need them. With the last one coming out in 2017, I think it’s safe to say that there’s no more Teekyuu on the horizon, but what we’ve got is plenty. Its total runtime is almost as long as a standard 12-episode season, even! Someone should just bite the bullet and make a hell-on-earth video upload or torrent that stitches them all together. It might have to be me.

[floatingcatacombs]

Getting Scared Shitless by Boards of Canada

12 Days of Aniblogging 2024, Day 6

I promised a more sketched-out music post this year, and while I got into a ton of artists in 2024, there was only one where my listening experience was a narrative that practically writes itself. That would of course be the Boards of Canada, those elusive Scots.

Every once in a while, an electronic musician will write an objectively perfect song. I’m talking about the kind of instrumental that you listen to once and can immediately imagine living inside. To me, the genres of ambient and IDM are the study of making such songs. Every musician in that sphere worth their salt will stumble onto one eventually. Rhubarb by Aphex Twin is a particularly iconic example amongst the Selected Ambientheads. Autuchre’s Slip is perhaps the earliest of their Perfect Songs, of which they have many. And then there's the works of Eno and Squarepusher and Plaid.... there’s just something about the United Kingdom that births a lot of these guys for whatever reason. Anyways, after going through Boards of Canada’s discography, I can safely add Roygbiv to that hypothetical list of Perfect Songs.

I’m not the best at describing sonics, so I'll just post the song. It’s only two and a half minutes, but could have just as easily been ten.

While Roygbiv is the obvious standout track on their first album, Music Has the Right to Children, the whole thing operates on this wavelength. Samples from 70’s public-access television combined with addictive downtempo beats and impressively warm synths, swapping off between long, hypnotic tracks and shorter soundscape-y interludes. All of these songs have the potential to just get stuck in your brain for days. The production doesn’t feel like it’s aged one bit since 1998, which is a byproduct of how it’s invoking the unique feeling of decontextualized memories from someone else’s childhood. Nostalgia, but for what? There’s a sense of comfort, but everything’s just a bit hazy and on edge as well. Like there’s someone watching from the other room, even if it’s probably just your mom and dinner is soon.

Their second album, Geogaddi, uses similar production techniques but fully leans into the discomfort. It’s quite the unsettling album! Songs like Gyroscope have percussion that’s mixed to feel uncomfortably close to the listener, which interplays perfectly with the warbling binaural voices to create a bad time. Even the “brighter” songs like Sunshine Recorder and Julie And Candy have an creepy side to them borne out of reversed samples and synths, like the whole soundscape could descend into horror at any time. And then everything after that is a descent into horror. The interlude songs start getting freaky, then Alpha and Omega doesn’t help things at all. It’s seven minutes of a surprisingly catchy synth progression that never quite resolves, just looping back into itself while feeling like it’s rising in tension forever and ever. It's like the Mario 64 endless staircase music but for dancing around a fire after sunset. In this case though, the background ambience is actually getting more suffocating as the song goes on, until it eventually chokes out the lead. Meanwhile, The Devil Is In The Details seems practically engineered for freakouts, with its impossibly wet ambience, ominous melody, and vocals that sound like someone is gargling water. It’s like being in a bog at night as a disembodied voice whispers into your ear. I Do Not Like It! Things start to lighten up after that, but there’s still plenty of spooky samples and stomach-churning auditory textures before the album reaches a haunting and beautiful end in Corsair.

As I’ve been detailing, the production alone is enough to make this album creepy as hell. But then you get curious and start checking the wikis and learn that Geogaddi is full of subliminal messaging and references to the Branch Davidians and numerology and Satanism and some truly nasty child abuse. It’s borderline childish, the way that a teenager might get into the occult for the sake of being a contrarian edgelord. Like sure, Boards of Canada set out to create a comically evil album, so they made sure to stuff it with whatever subliminal spookies they could think of. Unfortunately though, even when you rationally understand it as a prank, you still can't wash away the knowledge of what it's trying to invoke. Remember how I said that these guys are great at creating songs that get wedged into the back of your brain for days? That’s still true for Geogaddi, but this time around the songs are creepy as shit!!. Normally I can wash out earworms by just listening to something else, but something about Boards of Canada leaves me fully unable to. And let me tell you, you do not want The Devil Is In The Details lodged in your brain while you’re alone at night.

So what’s a girl to do but fight fire with fire? I decided to listen to more Boards of Canada to try and steer my mind elsewhere, since other music clearly wasn’t doing it. The Campfire Headphase didn't really leave much of an impression, so I moved on to their fourth and final album, Tomorrow’s Harvest. This was not a good decision!

You see, Tomorrow’s Harvest is a difficult listen for reasons completely orthogonal to Geogaddi’s. It’s their film score for the apocalypse. Released in 2013 after a long hiatus, Tomorrow’s Harvest is strongly inspired by Cold War disaster movies about the Earth becoming nigh uninhabitable due to some combination of famine, plague, climate change, and nuclear strikes. The vibes are bleak. Plenty of ominous synth pieces giving way to percussive tracks that manage to sound downright mournful. Jacquard Causeway is like the doomed mirror to Roygbiv – it’s built on this lurching mechanical sample, with an entire world gradually building up through the background ambience before the machine gives out and everything fades away. The back half of Tomorrow’s Harvest is noticeably less devastating, taking some moments to reflect on hubris and religion and renewal if the song titles and samples can be trusted. But the final track ends the thing on an even more dour note than it started on.

With its on-the-nose theming and its cover art of a ghostly San Francisco skyline, Tomorrow’s Harvest was clearly colored by anxieties over humanity’s future. The thing is, the members of BoC have been deliberately cagey about this in interviews, instead stating that “it's not post-apocalyptic so much as it is about an inevitable stage that lies in front of us.” Hell of an artist’s statement! It’s a far more upsetting answer than just saying that your album was inspired by climate concerns or whatever. I respect the take, but it haunts me just like the rest of this album haunts me. Geogaddi is scary in a fairly juvenile way, but Tomorrow’s Harvest was like a pit in my stomach.

So that’s the context for how I had a multi-day freakout fueled by getting into Boards of Canada. I assume this kind of thing happens regularly to people with more magical outlooks than mine, and also those who really like drugs, but it was a fairly novel experience for me! Wouldn’t want it to happen again, but I think it speaks to the power of Boards of Canada to create such impactful music, even if it did cause Problems for a bit. I’ve made my peace with these troublesome albums, through both time and recontextualization. I put on individual songs from both occasionally when the mood feels right, and it turns out that a lot of these tracks make for great TTRPG scoring!

Like any electronic band, Boards of Canada have a lot of EPs and bootlegs and demos lying around. Of particular interest are some early Geogaddi outtakes from before they decided to make it evil, which are collected in a 2000 EP titled In a Beautiful Place Out in the Country. With the clarity of hindsight, this would have actually been the thing to calm me down. It’s good downtempo stuff that feels like a perfect blend of the approaches on their first and second albums, a four-track EP where I like all four songs! There’s still a ton of Branch Davidian references, but like, it’s chill about it.

[floatingcatacombs]

So Help Me God, Lucky Star Is Actually Good

12 Days of Aniblogging 2024, Day 5

As someone who was hard-filtered by the choco cornet during my first attempt a decade ago, some part of me still finds it hard to accept, but I now believe Lucky Star to be a great anime. Veneration is in order.

The real miracle is that I was probably watching the same upload both times. For whatever reason, Lucky Star has been on Youtube for as long as I can remember, in perfect HD quality. Unlike other anime uploads, which persist only through a widespread game of DMCA whac-a-mole, uploads of Lucky Star remain untouched, as if divinely blessed. The one caveat being that you will be watching the dub.

Some background is in order, for the archaeologists and the young. This is a “cute girls doing cute things” anime, which aired at the peak of the “moe boom” in "2007". Market forces had shifted away from the hypermasculine gorefest that was the OVA era and the psychodramas of the late 90s to early 2000s. Now the people demanded moe. Anime girls became ever more neotenic and proportionally compressed until their default designs resembled the chibi and super-deformed sketches you’d previously only see in gags and parodies. The cuteness of the characters themselves began taking absolute precedence over plot developments, as more mundane and relatable settings grew in popularity. It was a perfect storm and generated unfathomable profits for the studios willing to cash in on it. Exactly why this all happened is up in the air, and everyone you ask will have their own answer, guided in part by their own emotions. Weebs with old-school taste view the moeboom as a monstrosity that ate the entire industry for a moment there, from which it never truly recovered. Cultural critics and psychoanalysts will be sure to point out how the artists and directors were knowingly pandering to lolicons by accentuating the innocence and purity and youth of the girls through their designs and demeanors. The more business-oriented might point to how the genre lent itself to heavy merchandising through viewers developing attachment and loyalty towards specific characters, and the later success of idol anime being built directly on the backs of CGDCT.

But watching Lucky Star in 2024, that's not where much of my focus goes. Mostly I’m thinking about whatever the hell is going on with Konata’s gender.

You see, Konata has all the traits of a stereotypical male otaku from this time period, transposed onto a moe girl. That’s it. It’s brilliant in its simplicity. If you’re the type of person to put on Lucky Star in the first place, it’s impossible not to feel a sense of kinship, regardless of your gender. She’s the kwasatz haderach of weebdom.

Konata is the obvious star of the show, and the whole anime would fall apart pretty quickly without her. Her best friend Kagami can be fun, but her snappy personality only works because of her chemistry with Konata framing them as a comedy duo. The other two girls in the main four are kind of nothing, conceived of as helpless by design to appeal to people who are into female helplessness (I can and will judge). There’s a bit of meta charm to Miyuki because she’s being actively pedestalized as a moeblob by Konata herself, whereas Tsukasa’s whole deal can just feel downright patronizing at times.

Between calling her friends moe to their faces, dishing out otaku-based insults left and right, and emotionally leading on Kagami, Konata is a bit of a shitlord! She’s got a real dirtbag voice in the dub, which absolutely helps sell her character, especially compared to the universally shrill Japanese voice acting. It is very, very rare that I watch dubs, but I considered Lucky Star’s survival on Youtube for this long to be a sign, and it mostly paid off! It does its best to treat cross-cultural references as totally mundane which goes a long way for the atmosphere, and the casting thankfully predates the Funimation monoculture that got to dubs a few years later.

Of course, in this day and age, “having the traits of a guy” more often than not means something. It’s impossible for someone like me not to want to poke. And what I propose is that Konata is a lad.

Let’s jump over to some other anime to illustrate my reasoning. One of my favorite games to play while watching CGDCT is “Which girl in this anime's main group is transgender?” It's important that this question cut both ways. Bocchi from Bocchi the Rock is something of a modern classic when it comes from transfeminine headcanons, due to her sublime mixture of hypercompetency and anxious failgirl patheticness. But I've honestly always thought that she makes more sense as a closeted transmasculine character. Hear me out. The boy band sketch, the intimidation around Ryo’s somewhat androgynous demeanor, her insistence on wearing her party outfit with a fake mustache for a liiiitle too long, until someone asks her what’s up with that and she panics…. It’s as if she views herself as a guy on some level, but has no idea how to integrate this into her psyche, and certainly does not have the mental and social acumen right now to work through it sanely. Poor Bocchi.

Sometimes, you even get series like Hidamari Sketch, where my question actually has a somewhat official answer: Hiro was conceived of as a boy who wanted to be a girl. Though this idea was ultimately shot down by the mangaka's editor, it still seems like fair game to parse Hiro as a trans girl when going into the series.

But I digress. With regards to Konata’s gender, what seemed like simply a tomboy’s gap moe back in 2007 now feels like a signal that Something’s Up. We know she plays the same bishoujo games as her dad and projects onto the male protagonists. She RPs as a boy in MMOs, and in-game-marries a guy playing as a girl. Her anime taste skews heavily towards the male demographic, and she's also familiar enough with shounen ai to tease Kagami about it with specifics. But she also expresses comfort, maybe far too much comfort, with her role as a short and cute high schooler capable of being objectified by the otaku gaze. There’s something going on, and that something makes her a crazy power fantasy for people in pretty much every position of the great web of gender, cis and trans alike. Konata as The Divine Moe Androgyne. Seeing the Macross Frontier crossover figure that fuses her with beautiful girlish boy Alto Saotome only furthered my conviction in this.

look at them

Anyways, Konata is clearly genre-aware and uses this to torture her tsundere bestie. Kagami, being what she is, will never admit to anything ever regarding romance, but it seems pretty likely that she’s in love with Konata. The OVA practically spells it out by depicting a particularly psychosexual dream of hers. The Lucky Star mangaka is famously against pairing off his characters, but even he admits that Konata and Kagami have a one-sided love. Most importantly, HE DOESN’T SPECIFY WHICH WAY. While definitely the less likely option, it would be extremely funny if it turned out that Kagami’s tsundere mixed signals were actually just genuine confusion and disinterest, and that Konata’s joke-flirting was real and unrequited all along.

The mangaka may not be interested in shipping, but the staff at Kyoto Animation working on this show were Trve Yuri Warriors. The animation director even drew them married, with Kagami as a butch in a suit and Konata her femme (Maybe I need to re-evaluate my gender takes, but also, dressing as a girl is clearly still a sex thing for Konata). Sakamoto Kazuya, I hereby award you the title of Furtive Himedanshi.

KyoAni understands the importance and hilarity of leaving those two unfulfilled, and goes all in on the underclassmen instead. Konata’s sickly younger cousin Yutaka is introduced halfway through the show, a plot development which immediately threatens to break everything. The background moe concentration of Lucky Star is already at somewhat dangerous levels by default, and throwing in even more childish designs can quickly make things feel uncomfortable. But they thread the needle and it genuinely turns out fine. Yutaka quickly befriends Minami Iwasaki, a butch kuudere who instantly and silently vows to Always Protect Her. Their dynamic would be just as passive and unaddressed of a crush as Konata x Kagami if it wasn’t for their pervert friend Hiyori, who constantly draws art of them as takarazuka couples. She exists in a state of perpetual agony and self-torture from of the shame of shipping her buddies in secret, even if they probably are gay. Obviously, I think she’s great. She and Konata only get a few scenes together but it’s so funny to see how they’re two sides of the same evil pervert lesbian coin, with shame as the dividing line.

From a yuri perspective, the underclassmen round out the upperclassmen well. We’ve got unrealized, possibly one-sided love, and some unfulfilled hazy feelings of dependence and warmth being observed through a terminally yuribrained third wheel. I’m very satisfied by their efforts here. I expected the yuribaiting to be fairly half-assed, but it’s incredibly fun for the most part, and my goggles are lily-tinted enough that I simply see it as the truth.

Speaking of characters that threaten to shatter Lucky Star, everything surrounding Konata's dad walks an extremely fine line considering that the punchline is that he's a total creep. Miraculously though, things never goes too far, and he even gets some sad and sweet character moments in a episode towards the end.

I was kind of surprised by the visual quality of this show! This is a late SD-era anime, but the Youtube uploads I watched are all full 1080p. How is that possible?  Basically, they threw it into a late-2000’s upscaling program which generally produced terrible results (the Haruhi BDs are famously rough) but works alarmingly well for Lucky Star’s ultra-simplistic, solid-color designs. You start to see jaggies at the edges of character’s hair, and some background detail is blurry upon examination, but in motion it works really well, and I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary at all for the first few episodes. Also, it was entirely animated at 30 frames per second??? That’s why the footage in the Out of Touch Thursday meme still looks surprisingly smooth even when slowed down like that – most of the Lucky Star OP was animated on the ones, so at half-speed you still get 15 frames of animation, as opposed to a maximum of 12 frames from the customary 24. Neat! Otherwise, the increased framerate is largely unnoticeable. Thank God it doesn’t do the jarring 30fps panning that a handful of productions from the mid-2000s are guilty of. Looking at you, Haibane Renmei.

Lucky Star showed up in my life at an important time. I first started putting it on as something to watch during lunch, but it ended up serving a far greater purpose. Lucky Star helped me survive a terrible vacation where everyone immediately got covid and we were fully bedridden the whole time. Having a tablet on hand and the show already sitting there dubbed on Youtube genuinely kept me going. The English voice acting was much easier for my covid-addled mind to parse, compared to trying to follow along with subs, as keeping my head up was already a full-time activity. It was also so much more logistically accessible than having to hunt down torrents or DVDs or pirate sites. I suppose that’s the appeal of Netflix and Crunchyroll, eh? Unfortunately for them, I have far too much of a chip on my shoulder to ever pay for streaming anime.

it was like this minus the stuffed animals because I was away from home ;_;

Lucky Star episodes are typically cozy affairs, but the episode where they visit the KyoAni studio is kind of heartbreaking now. The director of Lucky Star was one of the ones caught in the fire, alongside countless other contributors.

Well, the second Lucky Star director. The first one was unceremoniously fired four episodes into the production after a deluge of complaints and chocolate cornet memes regarding his middling introductory episodes. His current hobby is being racist online.

Lucky Star ends as it begins, with the whole ensemble cast of girls working out how to perform the hectic opening theme. It’s an act of eternal return, and provides some nice closure to the show. CGDCT anime often struggle with capping off their seasons, so it was very welcome here.

Somehow, Lucky Star might go on a list of my ten favorite anime??? Even months after finishing it, this is still hard for me to accept, being a weirdo elitist with antiquated weeb prejudices. But I think it’s true. It’s been fun to observe how Lucky Star’s second life in the 2020s has been split cleanly between “webcore” aesthetic collages with nostalgiabait revisionist memes, and a general critical reappraisal of the moe-boom now that we’re so far away from it. I’m obviously in the latter camp, but I’m here for it. This show was a dive into the deep end for me (I avoid shows from the SD era 2000s like the plague, and CGDCT isn’t my thing unless it's explicitly yuri), and it paid off splendidly. One could even say that it saved me.

[floatingcatacombs]

UFO 50 Abducted Me For 159.2 Hours

12 Days of Aniblogging 2024, Day 4

I love video games...

UFO 50 may love video games more than me, though. It’s a preposterously ambitious compilation of fifty small-to-medium-scale games, developed and published by Mossmouth, which here refers to Spelunky creator Derek Yu and like five of his buddies.

These are retro-styled games, with three or four asterisks apiece on ‘retro’ and ‘styled’. The overall aesthetic approximates the eight-bit period, with a limited color palette and sequenced music, but things get tricky after that. There’s deliberate anachronisms everywhere, with a heavy focus on genres and mechanics popularized far after the NES era. There’s games in this collection that take elements from real-time strategy, 4X, deckbuilders, tower defense, platform fighters, and even immersive sims. The evolutionary lineage of games influencing other games is practically flipped on its head here! The Steam page for UFO 50 describes this as “a familiar 8-bit aesthetic with new ideas and modern game design”, which I think is a frankly bad way to describe the means by which these games constantly astound and surprise by playing with our expectations. It's the kind of collection where you boot up some shit titled "Waldorf's Journey" expecting a dinky little mascot platformer, and after twenty minutes of calibrating walrus trajectories you're forced to contend with the fact that Waldorf's Journey has imprinted itself into your very soul.

Only a few of the games in this collection are straightforward pastiches of popular NES genres – there’s a beat ‘em up, a space shooter, some arcadey sports titles, and a Bubble Bobble, but that’s about it. Everything else is either a novel idea or working within far more advanced genre mishmashes. The panicked unit reorganizing of Attactics, the death-based puzzle platforming of Mortol, the glorious Fire Emblem and Pogs mashup that is Lords of Diskonia - even when liberally borrowing from other games, it’s really creative stuff! I loved all the times when my initial assumptions of how the game would play ended up completely wrong. You may think Rock On! Island is a tower defense game, but there’s a secondary aspect of creating chicken-immolating factories to get more resources that practically supersedes the tower defense aspect in later levels.

Of course, these are the Spelunky guys, so procedural generation and roguelike elements feature heavily in more than a few of these games. That’s the biggest jump in plausibility – more than half of the games in this collection could hypothetically run on the NES with enough tweaks, but anything with enough randomness fundamentally could not. If you hate procgen with a burning passion then a fifth of the collection will probably be out of reach for you, but there’s plenty of bespoke design to go around as well.

UFO 50, as a collection of a defunct fictional company's game catalogue, conjures up the feeling of playing old games without the manual or a copy of Nintendo Power to help you out. For younger players it might invoke the times you tried to emulate NES games to see what all the older gamers were always going on about, devoid of the original context. There’s a real willingness on the part of UFO 50 to just drop you in and have you figure out the controls and strategy yourself. Because of this approach, the first ten minutes of any given game are often the roughest! That’s a wild trust fall on the developer's part, asking someone to stick through the period of confusion and frustration so that they can watch those emotions bloom into understanding, then competency, then joy. These “dude trust me” design moments are everywhere.

It doesn’t always work. Caramel Caramel has a straight-up backwards difficulty curve, Star Waspir has way too much going on on top of demanding shmup literacy in advance, and Porgy plus Divers are both extremely divisive for their slow and punishing starts, which definitely made me lose interest. But sometimes the difficulty and hostility actively draw you in, in a way that easier or more tutorialized games would not have. Rakshasa is a short but extremely difficult platformer inspired by Ghosts N’ Goblins that I just kept chipping away at in between trying out games. Rail Heist seems simple at first but is chock-full of emergent systems that let you truly rip the levels open if you think outside the box, something which is actively encouraged by the optional clear conditions. Onion Delivery is Crazy Taxi with tank controls and random events to make driving even more stressful. It's hell on earth and I love it for that. Mortol 2 also has very open-ended design, with each new run of 99 lives and one-hit deaths forcing you to rethink and optimize your approach until you find a way through its winding map.

The fifty games here are organized in chronological release date, with the “earlier” games being far simpler and often less polished than the later ones, even if their quality usually still shines through with gameplay. This is a bold move on Yu’s part. The first game in the collection, Barbuta, is a cryptic La Mulana-like with cheesy traps, clunky movement, and a truly painful learning curve. It is what the true game design freaks out there refer to as “kino”. I’m not on their level yet, but there is plenty in this collection for me to enjoy. Generally, I’ve found Eirik Suhrke’s contributions to be the most personally compelling to me on a gameplay level. Mooncat is an absolutely sublime platformer that forces you to relearn movement from first principles with controls that cannot possibly be described in text format. Campanella is a delightful little obstacle course of a game, and I had a fun time hunting for secrets in it. Warptank is a solid puzzle platformer, Pingolf is easily my favorite multiplayer game in the collection, and I’ve already praised Onion Delivery and Rakshasa. Surhke has a knack for fiendish little games where the difficulty comes across as more of a punchline than anything else. They’re bursting with character through the gameplay alone. I felt the drive to rise up to almost every one of his contributions, which is similar to how I feel about my favorite indie game developer, sylvie. I hereby award Eirik Surhke the UFO 50 Game Design Pervert Award. Who would’ve known that the Spelunky composer was as good of a designer as the Spelunky guy himself, if not more?

play mooncat. I am not fucking around

UFO 50 also has quite the elaborate metapuzzle, which is only really worth investigating once you’ve become familiar with the whole game library. It’s a good’n, though. The puzzle hunt unlocks a secret 51st game snuck into the collection by a disgruntled employee, chronicling the late days of the company with an atmosphere that feels hollow and downright wrong. The vibe is RPG Maker horror more than anything else, which is a cool and unexpected pull for this kind of compilation. Through Miasma Tower, the small team process that created UFO 50 is mythologized and problematized, with the fictional company UFO Soft undergoing serious financial and cultural problems, as well as implied fraud, cults, and even a missing person investigation. It was an incredible privilege for Derek Yu and company to be able to pour all of their time and skill into creating a game collection of this caliber without the pressure of money or deadlines due to the success of Spelunky, and Miasma Tower is something of a reckoning about that. Very happy it’s here.

UFO 50 isn’t for everyone. You have to be a fan of either retro games or indie games, ideally both. You have to have an open mind for getting your shit kicked in by both mechanical difficulty and initial game obtuseness. You need to be able to look past the deliberate anachronisms and learn to roll with the mechanical surprises that each game has to offer. But if you’re a weirdo like me, then maybe you’ll also sink a hell of a lot of time into superclearing more than two-thirds of the collection. If nothing else, it’s an amazing value proposition!

[floatingcatacombs]

Do Not Watch Stardust Memory

12 Days of Aniblogging 2024, Day 3

The Universal Century Gundam OVAs are pretty well-regarded as a whole. War in the Pocket is an antiwar Christmas classic from the perspective of a civilian child, and is also one of the most accessible Gundam shows. The 08th MS Team is regarded as having some of the best-animated fights in the whole franchise, and Gundam Unicorn keyed a new generation of fans into the setting, for better or for worse. Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory does not receive any such praise. Every once in a while a weirdo will vouch for it as an underrated series, or someone who grew up with it as their first Gundam will express blind devotion, but otherwise it goes mostly unaddressed, which is a surprise at first glance. This is the Gundam set between the original show and Zeta, bridging the gap by displaying the origin of the Titans and cataloguing the return of Zeon in the public consciousness. But Stardust Memory is buried for a reason: this is a deeply frustrating, slow, and confusing series. I hope I can convey why.

Stardust Memory (no relation to the Woody Allen movie) follows a cohort of soldiers at a Federation army base and later a space fleet as they try, very unsuccessfully, to unravel a scheme by Zeon remnants to… do something very bad! Zeon's central scheme doesn’t actually come into focus until the final episodes. Until then it’s mostly guys in rooms making sketchy deals and Zeon ace pilots screaming “you could never understand the importance of our mission!” and then…not explaining their mission. Being kept in the dark like that with very few other compelling plot developments does not good pacing make!

The main narrative thrust of this show is Kou’s growth from a boy into a man, through being forced to pilot a Gundam in service to a Federation which makes teens do its dirty work. Of course, there are obvious parallels here to Amuro Ray. But Kou manages to get through this ordeal without the introspection and anguish and trauma that makes Amuro’s arc so good. Kou gets plenty upset at himself for fucking up military objectives and not being Strong Enough, and his superiors dig into him plenty as well. But ultimately, it just comes across as a boy who fucked around and enlisted at a backwater Feddie base, and is currently Finding Out. It is much harder to feel sympathy for volunteer soldiers, even if they’re green! This may be my politics leading the conversation, but I just couldn't care about Kou. He’s a jerk and he sucks! So do his squadmates! Everyone in this show sucks!

This is actually a serious structural problem. Stardust Memory does not have likeable characters whatsoever. It’s one of the most negative depictions of the Earth Federation in any Gundam series, and on some level I endorse that! They may have had the moral high ground during the One Year War, but at the end of the day the Feddies are tactically incompetent, laughably corrupt, and morally spineless. Unfortunately, that does not make for an enjoyable cast whatsoever, as this rot extends all the way down from the leadership to our pilot protagonist. You kind of want them dead.

Zeon does not fare any better. Kou’s rival and the show’s main antagonist, the ace pilot Anaval Gato, ping-pongs between anger and extreme emotional stoicism. He flat-out refuses to acknowledge the protagonist as an equal, which means that their dynamic consists entirely of talking past one another. He believes in only the virtue of his mission, and executes it with brutal precision, while refusing to mention any clarifying what his mission is to the view or introducing any personal stakes. He’s just a guy here to start some fights, do some terrorism, and push some evil hacking buttons. Why do people like this guy? Seriously, it’s ridiculous to me that he is the most favorited character for this series on MyAnimeList, far above the protagonist and his love interest. Is it because he’s so flat and boring that he’s not actively jeopardizing his character like the rest of the cast? Maybe it’s just cryptofascism on the part of the site’s userbase. But either way, he’s nothing.

On the other hand, Cima Garhack, the other space fascist in play, is a top-tier Fucker. She enters the plot to cause problems for all sides, betraying whoever she can. Unfortunately, she suffers from what seems to be an irreconcilable number of late-breaking rewrites. Is she the ultimate mastermind? It seems that way for a second, but no. Is she introduced way too late with no context, forcibly sidelined for three episodes, and denied a satisfying resolution? You bet your ass! The fact that there’s a 3-minute short bundled with the home video releases that explains her backstory is indication enough that something went horribly wrong with fitting her into the narrative. She deserves way more to do. Honestly, she should have taken Gato’s place narratively! Instead, she’s left to strike deals with Anaheim Electronics, the Federation, and the rest of Zeon, selling everyone out to the highest bidder. That’s fun, but the contents and value of those meetings are unclear enough to the viewer that they’re just confusing and narratively weightless. Seriously, if I hadn’t played Anaheim Girl’s Love Story, I seriously would have had a tough time piecing together that Anaheim gave her the reskinned Gerbera Tetra as quid pro quo for an agreement of neutrality between the company and Zeon. And then it hardly matters, because all she does is fly it around for a bit before getting impaled by one of the stupidest Gundam designs imaginable. I wish she had been able to go down with agency, whether dignified or as the most pathetic and sopping wet older woman imaginable.

We spend shockingly little time in the offices of Anaheim Electronics, a disappointing decision that leaves me all the more impressed with AGLS for making their whole game using just a few scenes for reference. Our primary window into the company is Nina Purpleton, a mobile suit engineer who brings two of her division’s prototype Gundams to a remote Federation military base for testing at the start of the show. One of those Gundams is notable for having a fucking nuke attached to it. Within minutes, due to the base's laughable security, a Zeon pilot (Gato) manages to sneak in, steal the Nuke Gundam, flee to a Zeon-controlled launch site, and escape into space. Everyone in the Federation blames one another, and Kou is forced to learn to use the remaining Gundam, the one designed by Nina, to find and defeat Gato before Zeon can make use of the nuke.

First things first, Nina Purpleton has an absolutely adorable late-80s fluffy office woman design. For a moment there, it genuinely seems like she’s going to be allowed to be forceful and intelligent and commanding, but hahaha no of course not this show sucks. Within an episode or two she’s made into the Reward that Kou gets for learning how to pilot her Gundam, and the way they put the moves on each other feels so obviously forced. It’s a shame that the central romance here is just no good! And sure, maybe that’s on design, just like how the rest of the show is bad and meaningless and miserable to witness, but it’s a bad design! After mostly being sidelined and told no by everyone for the second half of the show, Nina does get some interesting agency in the very final episode, but we’ll get to that later. Gotta talk politics first.

Gundam broadly carries an antiwar message, though each entry stakes out its own unique position. Even the shows where the depicted war feels necessary and one side is clearly less bad make sure to rub in just how much it sucks for everyone. Except for Stardust Memory. This is the one Gundam series I’ve watched that is blatantly and uncritically fascist in its value system. Femininity and weakness are disparaged and punished, and the military values strength above all else and forces it upon our main character. Zeon of course is just as bad with their culture of valor and self-sacrifice. But for once, the two sides don’t feel that far apart in demeanor. And there's really no civilian perspective to try and remind us of the horrors of the war that they're caught in the crossfire of, which is genuinely unusual for a Gundam show.

The best part of Stardust Memory is clearly episode 5, when Kou gets his fancy new Gundam ripped apart by Cima, who’s actively confused by how bad he is at piloting and is honestly just toying with him. It’s downright erotic watching the Gundam’s limbs get shot off and torn apart and seeing it forced to make a desperate emergency landing, bound up in a series of nets as everyone in the hangar screams in panic (I think mecha guro may honestly be the one valid reason to watch this OVA). This is Kou’s low point, and it really is nice to see such an unlikeable protagonist get put in his place.

After the humiliation of all that, Kou runs away from his obligations while quartering in a lunar city, gets beat up in the street, and ends up getting rescued by Kelly Layzner, a former Zeon soldier turned garbage collector. Kou starts tinkering with the half-wrecked Mobile Armor in Kelly’s garage, only to discover that it’s a weapon that he’s being commissioned to fix up for the Zeon cause. Instead of fighting Kelly, or leaving, Kou continues to help him repair his ship while simultaneously making plans to rejoin his unit. The two of them vow to meet each other on the battlefield as equals and depart in noble esteem, as the heartfelt R&B of the ending theme swells in.

What?? It’s this stupid Honor of Battle character motivation out of nowhere, forcibly asserted by both sides in a broader conflict full of dirty tricks. You can show examples of how the individual fighters of Zeon were not bad people! 0079 does this constantly, and War in the Pocket is built around it. But this series of events is Nietzschean star lovers bullshit – it’s the molding of Kou from cowardly soldier into an ubermensch, through a series of increasingly baffling plot developments. Given how much of a pushover he’s been in the early episodes, this is a deeply drastic series of decisions, and it happens strictly because Stardust Memory needs Kou to Become A Man. This was the moment where the show's blatant, all-encompassing fascism became unavoidably clear to me. Kou's romance is affected as well – he has to become assertive and chivalrous and masculine in order to get the girl, minimizing Nina’s agency and involvement in the show’s important events afterwards. Come on.

Zeon slowly advances their plan in the later episodes of the OVA, scoring win after win from skirmish victories to surprise escapes to nuking half of the Federation fleet during a training exercise. Honestly, they could just keep doing this and probably win the protracted guerilla war? But no, their secret scheme must be executed at all costs! It’ll change everything.

Operation Stardust turns out to be…a colony drop! On the moon! Wait no, that was a fake-out, their real plan was to hit the Earth. And the colony’s going to fall right on Jaburo, as a perfect decapitation strike. Actually, nope, one more twist! The final step of Operation Stardust is for Gato to get to the colony control station and change the trajectory so it hits…North America. Wait, barely anyone lives there after the devastation of the One Year War! Ahh, I see, they’re going after their grain supply with this colony drop, in order to…. cause famine on Earth…. so they have to buy food from the colonies…to tip the scales politically for Zeon’s return and economically uplift the colonies…

Look, at that point why not just hit Jaburo? I get that they want to force the Earth to become dependent on space, but why not just end the military relevance of Earth once and for all? It’s clear that these Zeon remnants are totally insane and amoral and don’t care about human life or the environment – they nuked a whole ship fleet! All in all I really have no idea what the purpose is of this surprisingly inconsequential scheme. I don’t really like Watsonian analysis, but there is so much nonsense to poke at here.

Towards the end of show, Nina and Kou visit La Vie En Rose, a very yonic weapons development factory owned by Anaheim all the way out in space. Kou essentially starts cheating on Nina by agreeing to test the Mobile Suit of another woman – that is the main way they've mediated their relationship, after all. This other woman gets shot and killed later that episode in order to force Kou to be Stronger and willing to pilot her prototype Gundam. It’s Zeta levels of fridging women for the sake of moving the plot forward for guys. Nina Purpleton is the one who’s actually left heartbroken, and I think watching a rogue general execute her coworker like that is what makes her truly lose faith in the Federation. She also reveals around this time that she has a romantic history with Gato, and that watching Kou and Gato fight is the most terrible thing in the world for her, because she loves them both.

But of course, they have to fight, and the show makes sure to valorize kamikaze any chance it can get during the major battle sequences. Out of her two boys, Nina ultimately picks Gato, even while watching him orchestrate a colony drop right in front of her. Sometimes you just can’t beat the old flame. I personally loved watching Nina Purpleton pick up a gun and shoot at Kou and run away with Gato only for him to die, and for her to be forced to watch the Earth burn while court-martialed on a Zeon ship. It’s good, bitter stuff for such a complicated and resentful character. That’s why it’s all the more disappointing when Stardust Memory walks that back in its timeskip epilogue.

A year later, Kou is wandering the wastes of North America outside of his new military base. Nina and her mechanic drive up to greet him, mirroring their introduction in the first episode. Nina and Kou have a complicated staredown and then…completely make up, smiling like nothing happened without even a conversation? Roll credits???

Let me make something clear: Nina is a hated character in the larger Gundam fandom, but I think the reason that most people hate her is that weird thing that anime fans have where they treat the main character getting cucked as the literal worst thing in the world. I’ll probe that complex another day, I promise. But honestly, Nina hasn’t acted any more irrationally than the rest of the cast up until this point. Everyone has been making nonsensical moves, and at least she’s been following her heart with hers. But this final scene is so implausible on all levels that it feels like a slap in the face to the viewer’s intelligence and their suspension of disbelief. You can’t come back from what she did!! You shouldn’t have to!! It’s insane that they tried to give these two characters a happy ending!! Just make Nina run off with her butch mechanic or something!!

you two would have been unstoppable as lesbians

The series ends with the formation of the Titans, who go on to brutalize the Earth Sphere in Zeta. Every one of the insufferable Feddies that we’ve had to endure in this series goes on to join the faction where they’ll be blasted to pieces by the AEUG in a few years for their blatant fascism. Thank God. At least Stardust Memory acknowledges that the Titans are borne out of a collaboration between the most corrupt and power-hungry branches of Zeon and the Federation, with Anaheim signing on to make suits for them. Of course everyone here were going to become bad guys, but they still could have had some traits that would make them compelling to follow this whole time!

Anything else I could possibly say about Stardust Memory has already slipped my mind. It’s a surprisingly dull show for what could have easily been a slam dunk. But instead it’s this strange mix of hugely consequential UC lore and minimal impacts, leaving a confused and inconsequential story. There’s also surprisingly little Anaheim office lady drama, especially after the VN I just read. Do not trick yourself.

me after all of this blogging

Honestly, if you want what this show purports to offer, do yourself a favor and watch Macross Plus instead! It’s another 90’s mecha OVA with some of the best mechanical animation ever put to cel. Like Stardust Memory, it centers itself around testing prototype mechas and a messy MMF love triangle, and even though it’s willing to have messy and unlikeable protagonists, it manages to actually craft intrigue with them. Amazing Yoko Kanno soundtrack too. There’s an awful plot twist near the end that throws the whole story into question, but that’s still a better outcome than 13 drawn-out episodes of a bad story in a good setting! Just please, don’t watch Stardust Memory.

[floatingcatacombs]

Anaheim Gals Being Anaheim Pals

12 Days of Aniblogging 2024, Day 2

Zeta Gundam has a real lurching, strange start by design. In the time between the One Year War and the Gryps Conflict, things have gone terribly! Not only did a good amount of Zeon’s forces escape to the asteroid belt and start rebuilding, the Earth Federation is getting taken over from within by the ruthless Titans. But wait, the Titans are still feddies at the end of the day, so why are they the ones piloting Hizacks and other Zeon-style designs at the start of the show?

The answer to this is brilliant and sadly relegated to a narrative footnote. You see, after the One Year War, Zeonic’s personnel and blueprints got absorbed into Gundam manufacturer Anaheim Electronics, as part of an Operation Paperclip-style deal. This leaves Anaheim's mobile suit aesthetics during the interwar period a total hodgepodge, iterating on both GM and Zaku style designs while also moving forward with plenty of secret prototype successors to the RX-78 Gundam. Maybe it’s just the OL in me, but this particular era and company really pique my interest! The culture shock and office politics that would follow from Anaheim folding in the engineers from the other side of the last war, the competition between rival design teams, the back-channel deals of an arms manufacturer now compelled to play both sides…

I’d been told that the Gundam OVA entitled Stardust Memory was vaguely about this, but I’d also been told that Stardust Memory was terrible and just plain not worth watching, so I steered away from it. Instead, my prayers were answered in the form of a lovely 2009 yuri doujin visual novel called Anaheim Girl’s Love Story.

I don't feel like cropping the screenshots, so peep my VM setup. it'll add to the vibe

First things first, I would like to simply acknowledge the joy of being alive, and alive at this exact moment in time. It is so wonderful that a group of dedicated fans made a complete visual novel starring lesbian office workers at the Mecha War Crime Engineering Company. And not only did they realize this dream in the first place, a separate group translated the script into English in 2013, and then another team reverse-engineered the game’s engine and released a patch in 2020 so that now the translation can be experienced in its original format. Each and every one of you is a true yuri warrior.

Anaheim Girl’s Love Story is a passion project through and through, extrapolating from all the bits and pieces of lore we get about Anaheim Electronics across various shows and crafting a believable setting, while still making it feel like a Gundam story on some level. It’s also fully voice acted? I don’t know what typical doujin VN production values were like in 2009, but still, color me impressed. We play as Rinne, a new recruit to Anaheim and a mecha otaku through and through. She loves these mobile suits, just like you and me! And she wants nothing more than to work for the company who invented the Gundam. Anaheim is a tech company through and through – most of the workers on the ground really believe in what they’re doing and put their whole heart into it, even as their leadership takes on increasingly shady and secretive contracts. But it’s also implied, in the VN and in the Gundam shows, that the company is staffed by mostly women. Great! I really do like when a setting asserts that being invested in mecha is primarily something that women do. After all, girls were the ones that kept 0079 popular in the first place according to Tomino.

All of the Anaheim girls have pale blue double-breasted suit jackets and long pencil skirts, culminating in an extremely 80’s look. AGLS also covers its blurry background photos with a dark blue filter, resulting in a fairly monochrome game where the character expressions really pop out from everything else. The mecha CGs are surprisingly well done, even if they suffer a bit from 2000’s shading syndrome, when everyone went a little too hard on the airbrush. The character portraits holds up a lot better in comparison. All of this to say that the presentation is fairly minimal, as they were clearly working with limited resources, but it gets the job done.

Rinne likes milk tea and is equal amounts excited and anxious about her job. This is the sort of milquetoast relatable protagonist traits you’d find in any dating sim, so the fun twist here is that when she’s feeling down about her work, she’ll go to the hanger where an RX-78 (the RX-78? It’s left unclear) is being stored and start talking to it. Rubber-ducking your mobile suit designs with an actual mobile suit is cute!! Things unfold as you’d expect, with Rinne befriending her hacker kouhai, starting a rivalry with the office villainess, and getting intimidated by her boss Sophie. It’s nothing revolutionary, but that’s fine, because the setting alone does a ton of the lifting. While no named characters from any official Gundam series appear, they’re namedropped ever so occasionally, and there’s plenty of cameos and lore sprinkled about for a Universal Centuryhead to lap up.

Of course, Rinne invites her boss over for dinner a bunch and discovers her soft and vulnerable side, and the two of them engage in a slowburn office situationship while trying to also trying to win the Gundam Development Project, an internal competition to develop next-generation experimental mobile suits. And wouldn’t you know it, office politics are afoot. She’s been keeping it from Rinne, but Sophie was originally an engineer from Zeonic. Trust issues ensue, as do complicated feelings about being in love with someone who designed the weapons that nearly killed you. The leadership of Anaheim has a clear bias towards Federation-style suits, and still views the Zeonic hires with scorn and suspicion, even if they bring useful perspectives in design philosophy. Sophie wants to design every part with cost and performance in mind! That’s what enabled the Zakus, after all. But if we skip ahead and look at the results, the end goal of this intra-office competition seems to have been extravagance bordering on wastefulness. Rinne and Sophie’s team produce a fairly standard but combat-versatile Gundam, while the other teams contributed a hyper-flexible Gundam, a hilariously overinflated mobile armor that you can stick a Gundam into, and a Gundam with a fucking nuke attached to it.

Most romance VNs and stories in general have some sort of last-act plot development that threatens to end things so the couple can bounce back and have a narrative climax. Sickness, family, trauma, a breakup feint, really anything is fair game. Anaheim Girl’s Love Story pulls out the most brutal one yet – “Stardust Memory happened”. It turns out that Anaheim has been playing both sides of the emerging Delaz conflict, and was planning on giving your team’s ship to a particularly unhinged Zeon commander as a gift of goodwill and temporary alliance. In doing so, they dismantle the iconic Gundam armor from the mobile suit frame, replacing it with a new and undeniably Zeonic red outer shell. It’s a genuinely fucked-up moment! To see your child ripped away from you and corrupted into being the other kind of war crimes monster, and your boss/girlfriend knew this was going to happen and was too ashamed to tell you. Rinne runs out of oxygen while trying to stop the Gebera Tetra from deploying, and falls into a coma afterwards. By the time she wakes up, the events of Stardust Memory have all played out, and things are in the process of returning to normal. Our protagonist ends up on a research vessel to Jupiter to test cutting-edge mobile suits, but promises to meet up with Sophie again when she returns. One wonders if she got recruited into joining Paptimus’ crew while on Jupiter, and was subsequently killed by Kamille. The timelines just barely overlap to make it possible!

Anyways, that’s Anaheim Girl’s Love Story. I’m not sure how fleshed out the hacker girl’s route is, or if there are different endings I could have gotten on mine. Maybe I’ll give it another shot next year. This game is by no means amazing. It is on some level just a softcore lesbian eroge with a Gundam coat of paint. But the delicacy with which it fits itself into the UC chronology without messing things up or being a fully irrelevant plot, the care put into having these ladies fall in love and do the usual OL yuri rituals, the honesty with which it carries itself… I’m so charmed by it all. I don’t know if I’d recommend it outright (you’d want to already be very invested in this slice of Gundam, and you need a VM with an older version of Windows to play it, and I think the website linking to the patch went down earlier this year), but I’m so happy that this exists in the first place and that I got to play it.

What I am less happy about is that this visual novel made me trick myself into watching Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory. This is entirely on me, mind. Most lesbians are fooled into watching Stardust Memory because they saw images of Cima Garahau online, but I was ready for that trick. No, I genuinely wanted to fill in the finer plot details of the 6.5/10 visual novel I just played. Oopsies.

[floatingcatacombs]

Zeta Gundam and Being Weird About Women

12 Days of Aniblogging 2024, Day 1

I watched the original Mobile Suit Gundam series last year and found it to be what the kids call “peak”. War and death and despair laundered through the aesthetics of a 70s children’s show remains an unmatched combination, and the slower parts only add to the overall atmosphere. The last ten episodes are masterful in that after a seemingly endless deluge of fights, something different is offered up. A dream of peace in space, manifested through child soldiers becoming so traumatized that they develop psionic hyperempathy towards one another. This dream is abruptly extinguished when Amuro kills Lalah Sune during a fight with Char that none of them really want to have. It leaves a real effect on the viewer after 30something episodes of extremely grounded and drawn-out hell war! And Zeta Gundam, at its core, is about recapturing this bitter feeling. Zeta Gundam is about the slow death of the future.

The vibes are off as soon as the show starts. Things have changed significantly in the eight years since the One Year War concluded with a Federation victory. The Feddies are being devoured from within by an elite and increasingly fascistic military wing, with most of the space colonies are already under de facto Titan rule. The atmosphere is bleak and hazy, as is the film transfer, which is not nearly as crisp as 0079’s gorgeous modern remaster. Protagonist Kamille Bidan’s parents are brutally killed within the first five episodes, but not before they’re both made out to be terrible people. Though this is ostensibly peacetime, the world has gotten much, more worse, and we must experience it through the narrative lens of an autistic child.

couldn't help myself from using this screencap

The faction Kamille reluctantly joins, the AEUG, is a ragtag operation that mostly uses salvaged and stolen mobile suits. They’re launching Gundams and Zeon-inflected designs in the same skirmishes! Meanwhile, the Titans are using classic Federation iconography but painting them Evil Colors, right alongside Zaku successors. Both factions have GMs! This can make skirmishes hard to keep tabs on while the show is still getting off the ground.

It's all a bit overambitious! Which makes for a double-edged sword, as the Gryps Conflict is a messy war. 0079's fog of war was a deliberate narrative decision, since the White Base was on the fringes of the conflict and being kept in the dark by their superiors. But here in Zeta we’re on the AEUG flagship. Also, is the AEUG… just a couple dozen guys? Or are there constant battles happening off-screen with other divisions? The scale is all over the place, but this becomes less of an issue as the show progresses and focuses more on character arcs and the goings-on of enemy factions. One of the trickier parts of Zeta is just how much cool stuff happens off-screen. There’s a lot of telling and not showing, with how the Titans came be, how Zeon is regrouping its forces, and why Char is fighting for the AEUG in the first place. Or how Anaheim Electronics absorbed Zeonic after the One Year War, but we’ll get to that one in another post. Some of these questions eventually have payoffs, but not others, relying on supplementary media to provide explanations.

But when Zeta hits, it hits. The relationship between Kamille and Four is this beautiful glimpse of a better world, taken away again and again. It’s about being abused and trying to grow past your circumstances. It’s about finding love on the battlefield and hoping that that’s enough. It’s about having blue hair and pronouns. The two of them develop a genuinely sweet dynamic, and that makes it so much worse. Four Murasame goes through hell in this series, getting tortured and drugged and brainwashed, and of course, dying horribly after throwing herself between two rivals. This forces Char and Amuro to give Kamille a “oh yeah that can just happen with the girl you love and it will haunt your life forever, sorry” talk. It’s as hilarious as it is bitter.

The villainous Paptimus Scirocco (perfect Tomino name) is another highlight, and has one of my favorite scenes in the entire show. It’s the first time he really shows his hand. He delivers a speech to a female Titans ace pilot he's trying to curry favor with about how humanity must free itself from the shackles of the Earth Sphere in order to reach its true potential. However, even if the Titans win the war, the Earth itself will be left in poverty and famine from all of the fighting. It will take a strong, sharp leader to rule during those troubled times, and who should it be? He’ll offer himself up, surely? “I believe the next ruler of Earth will be a woman.”

It’s a genius line, and one of Zeta's more interesting moments with regards to gender politics. What seems like it will be a power grab instead becomes Paptimus spelling out his worldview. He’s making an explicitly feminist statement to win the trust of a female subordinate, although the statement just as easily reads as contempt when you consider Scirocco’s earlier lines about souls being bound by gravity and wanting to move humanity beyond the Earth Sphere. Women are a tool to get that done, treating the Earth as tantamount to a hearth. It’s the words of feminism wielded as a weapon against women. Paptimus goes on to groom her and maybe three other women throughout the show, subtly pitting them against one another and dispensing just enough affection and agency to keep them trapped in his orbit until they eventually die terribly for him one by one. This is all very Akio Ohtori, and knowing that Ikuhara was a Tomino fan, I wouldn’t be surprised if Paptimus was something of an origin point. He’s even got the purple hair!

Unfortunately, Zeta Gundam itself also hates women. A comprehensive feminist analysis could easily fill another two essays, but in short, Tomino’s Madonna-whore complex is on full display here. This show has a surprisingly large female cast, but the vast majority of them get killed in particularly nasty ways, so zoomed out it comes across as this endless carousel of character introduction, narrative condemnation, and death.

The Titans have their fascist patriarchal obsession with power and dominance, so women in the system have either to assert masculine-coded authority, like Mouar, or defect, like Emma. It’s one of the reasons that Paptimus is so successful– he’s targeting vulnerable women by presenting an alternate values system within the Titans that pedestalizes, or at least accepts, their womanhood. On the other side of the war, the AEUG has a certain egalitarian nature, with women serving all the same as men. But as the show goes on you have more and more moments like Fa Yuiry getting forcibly reassigned from piloting to childcare duty, an irrational decision that essentially boils down to the purity complexes of the AEUG’s leadership. At least when Axis Zeon finally shows up midways through the show, they’re lead by certified girlboss Haman Karn. Tragically, this has to happen on the side that’s even more fashy than the space junta we’ve been dealing with up until now. And we’ve also got a lot of medical malpractice to get through.

This is the Gundam series that introduces Cyber Newtypes, but also decides that every single one of them is a BPD girlie. Sarah Zabiarov has fallen hook, line, and sinker for Paptimus’ game, and is willing to commit terrorism for scraps of his affection, and is subject to heartbreaking levels of being led on. As previously mentioned, Four is a great character, and a beacon of hope in this bleak setting as she wrestles with her purpose. Of course, we can’t have nice things. Four is killed in battle, but not before an extensive and excessive sequence of her getting tortured in the lab because that’s what they do to Cyber Newtypes. She’s narratively replaced by Rosamia Badam, a woman under even more psychological duress spending even more of her screentime getting brainwashed and medically examined, the lab rat to end all lab rats. Wait, is the purpose of Cyber Newtypes in Zeta just to appease someone’s women-torturing fetish?

It's deeply frustrating. This isn’t happening for some larger narrative reason, as Zeta doesn’t really have much interesting to say about women. The closest it gets is Reccoa Londe asserting that men and women are fundamentally incapable of understanding one another, right before defecting out of love and self-interest, an act which Zeta fans have been fundamentally incapable of understanding for decades. She’s a hated character, and the show sets her up to be hated, by handing her feelings that run perpendicular to the rest of the cast. And mecha fans are famously good about complicated and conflicted female characters. We don’t get much of her interiority until she’s essentially made up her mind, which only serves to widen the narrative gulf between men and women. Zeta is this frustrating mix of intentionally toxic gender politics and the writers being just plain bad about women, and untangling that knot is both worthwhile and infuriating. Sometimes it seems like Tomino is more scared of women than anything else, but it’s misogyny all the same.

I have no equivalent defense of Rosamia Badam. The last act of Zeta Gundam is an exciting time! The Gryps conflict has devolved into a three-way war, Haman Karn is #slaying and setting up tactical alliances with multiple factions, and Paptimus is engineering one last coup to let him assume control of the entire Titans fleet. It’s at this exact moment that someone on the staff holds Yoshiyuki Tomino hostage and forces him to indulge in their little sister fetish. That’s honestly the easiest explanation. There’s no good reason for Rosamia to be in this show at all, even less so in the final ten episodes! It’s downright embarrassing that we have to hit the brakes on the overarching plot to throw in a twentysomething woman who’s been brainwashed into thinking that she’s Kamille’s sister, and her subsequent psychosis spiral when this fantasy unravels. It’s just no good.

That being said, Zeta sticks the landing. The four-person shootout in the Axis theater, half of the cast dying in the last two episodes, Kamille casually trying to kill himself by taking off his helmet in space, Scirocco cursing Kamille with his final breath and breaking something in his mind…. it’s all great! Why was Rosamia here just five episodes ago?

I’ve somehow managed to get this far without talking about Amuro and Char Lieutenant Quattro Bajeena! They’re here, they’re good, and the Argama landing on Earth is when the show really starts to spread its wings. I love Char’s genuinely radical speech in Dakar and how he subsequently internalizes those themes in Char’s Counterattack because Amuro in Zeta basically tells him to die for his convictions. The two of them have plenty of iconic lines. But this is fundamentally a show about the women (and Kamille, who is not a woman, but the ease at which he can be grouped with the women is something that troubles him immensely).

So that’s Zeta Gundam. It’s not nearly as focused as 0079, but that’s a good thing in the broader scheme, as it set the stage for how different a mecha sequel can be while still being a major success. It felt like eating my vegetables at times, but its ambitious scope leads to some incredible moments and emotions. Great soundtrack too. As one of the most popular Gundam series, it’s a springboard for a ton of other works set around this period of the Universal Century. Like a sweet little visual novel I decided to read earlier this year...

And no, I don’t plan on watching ZZ.

[floatingcatacombs]

Floating Catacombs is Back

As fate ordains, I'll be posting one essay per day during the twelve days leading up to Christmas.

Topics this year include moe, sequels, and ghosts of the past.

[floatingcatacombs]

Floating Catacombs 2023 Roundup

Thanks for sticking with me as I descend ever further into my weeb niches. Here’s a roundup post, in case you missed anything or are new to this blog.

1. Bandai Taketh Away

2. It’s the Tar Taking Over That Came Unexpected

3. Patlabor is On Lock

4. Compile Hagiography Through Reading the Hyperdimension Neptunia Wiki

5. Bro Your Taste….

6. annual music post?

7. Macross Zero Gets Me To Blog About Macross Here and It’s Honestly a Surprise How Little I've Done That Considering How Much I Like Macross as a Whole

8. Go Nagai was insane for this one

9. Trying to Talk about Touhou

10. GENSHIKEN POWER LEVELS

11. The Little Guys Who Live on My Desk

12. What Else Did You Expect But More Yuri About Adults

I hope you enjoyed reading, and see you next December!

[floatingcatacombs]

What Else Did You Expect But More Yuri About Adults

12 Days of Aniblogging 2023, Day 12

It is my sworn duty to document the yuri genre as it continues to graduate from high school. Here's the pickings from this year.

She Loves To Cook, She Loves to Eat

Two women who live by themselves in the same apartment complex slowly bond over making and eating food together. There’s a fundamental feminism at this manga's core which says yes, we will be talking about periods and eating disorders and shitty families and institutional sexism instead of being trapped in our own coffins forever. That alone makes She Loves to Cook, She Loves to Eat a landmark work, but it’s also extremely relaxing and sweet. By some metrics it’s one of the most popular manga for women in Japan, and it warms my heart to know that it’s reaching the people who need to hear what it has to say.

Also, it received a live-action adaptation that aired on NHK during prime time. It's definitely worth watching! While the manga will use a good third of its panels to depict Kasuga devouring a meal from bite to bite, the show instead places the camera on Nomoto watching Kasuga eat. It’s an interesting inversion, keeping us more locked into Nomoto's perspective, and makes sense for the medium. There is no clear cultural box for what these two women are doing, something which they’re each keenly aware of. And yet, they continue to take care of one another, cutting through the fear and loneliness dinner by dinner. Watching through this with my girlfriend healed my relationship to food just a little, and I can’t wait for the second season to adapt some of the really juicy parts of the manga.

Cheerful Amnesia

A woman gets in a terrible accident and loses the last three years of her memories, much to the chagrin of her girlfriend during that time. This is a sex comedy with exactly one joke, and the bluntness with which it is applied won me over. I probably would’ve hated Arisa if I had tried reading this a year or two ago, but now that I'm familiar with High Femme Camp Antics I can understand what's going on with her. It’s so stupid, and arguably not very good, and yet I had fun. Though it is genuinely great that the latter volumes shift the subject matter to the perils of coming out to your family and the heartbreak of planning a wedding in a country that won’t recognize your marriage, but keep the tone exactly as lighthearted.

Umineko-Sou days

I mostly picked this up because it appeared while I was searching for the Umineko manga on my reader app. It was fine.

Naoko Kodama’s true calling, though, is writing cheating manga. Her newest is “A Lying Bride's Case for Same-Sex Marriage”, a manifesto of a title if I've ever heard one. There's only one chapter so far, but the heteropessimism on display is so scorched-earth that it’s hard to fault the lesbian protagonist for any homewrecking that may occur down the line.

Kodama is on a fucking mission with this one

A Face You Shouldn’t Show

Thank god you can just publish fetish porn in Comic Yuri Hime now. I approve of this on an ideological level, if not always a personal interest one.

_

All of the manga on display here are chipping away at the purity complex endemic to yuri in their own ways, and that’s the real miracle. Here’s to newer, weirder lesbians, now and always. Merry Christmas.