nanashi

Would you like me to do this? No? Didn’t think so.

Look what I found when looking for a site that prints custom motives on paper tissues:

Paper Tissues

Consider yourself lucky that the actual thing is so expensive! But Mona Lisa will have to pay for this!

Anyway I know what you want:

You know what you’ll get:

Only Happy When It Rains

Seriously:

When I was around 2×7 years old I read a certain youth magazine which among other things that interested kids my age also had a love counseling column. I remember reading the following kind of reader’s submission quite frequently. Basically it was young girls being depressed about their boyfriend dumping them after having sex with them. The answer was of course to stop caring about those kind of boys as they’re not worth it anyway.

Pretending to love someone to have sex with them is clearly a pretty much asshole kind of thing to do. Not to forget dishonest. And I certainly didn’t want to be a dishonest asshole like those boys. But. I was very eager to have sex. And not exactly into the whole romance thing. Which is kind of the part which seems to be most important to them.

So how do you convince a same-age girl to have sex with you and be clear about not wanting a relationship? It pretty much seals off your chances. One time, before going to a party I fantasized about a girl from my class (we called her lint since she was supposedly small as a lint) fellating me at the party and then going all the way. We were close but certainly not close enough for that fantasy to have much of a chance of happening. And I couldn’t lie to her about my intentions anyway. So I ended up never asking.

My views on sex and relationships have changed somewhat over the years but the behavioral patterns established during that time are to some degree still in effect even today. The following years, when my views were still very close to the ones described above I discovered the same opinion (wanting sex without the relationship) in other people as well but these weren’t girls. Casual sex is easily realized when you broaden the horizon of your sexual orientation but even though I wasn’t completely opposed to the idea it was much less tempting than the booby variety.

And I was kind of afraid that if I decided to go down that road it would kind of block the other road forever. I wanted to try both but try my favored one first. Which blocked both roads for the longest time. Until I realized that going either road would not really block the other one. In the end I went the homo road all the way first but by that time I had at least gone a few steps down the hetero one as well. Each time I went the homo road it was disappointing in a different way and when I finally went all of the way of the hetero road it was great. So experience did prove my preferences right.

Did I become an asshole after all? I hope not. But maybe I can try to become half of an asshole. If that’s what you want.

When Nakamori Akio christened the Comiket community Otaku he called them a lot of things. Not the often cited “never leaves the house” part which he retconned into the Otaku myth years after he and his column were kicked out of Manga Burikko. He mocked them for their overly use of the (somewhat effeminate) word otaku, which is one of the many ways to express “you” in Japanese and applied every nerd steretotype in the book to troll them.

But he was also concerned why the male readers of Manga Burikko didn’t like manga by female artists like Okazaki Kyōko in which these female artists depicted their adult selfs. Manga Burikko liked to call itself the Ura-Margaret (Margaret being a popular shōjo manga magazine and Ura implying it being its hidden darker cousin) and was full of works defying the usual separated publishing labels for boys and girls, instead catering to both sexes at the same time. The lolicon manga by its male writers were heavily influenced by shōjo manga whereas the contributions by the female ones tried to create a mature female comic style.

Manga Burikko’s editor Ōtsuka Eiji didn’t tolerate Nakamori alienating the magazine’s readership for long and soon canceled his column, which didn’t stop Nakamori spread his hate in other media. When the Miyazaki incident drew attention to Otaku in a major way both Nakamori and Ōtsuka were suddenly in the spotlight as experts on the matter. Ōtsuka fashioned himself a valiant defender of Otaku, but never refused to acknowledge criticism towards them. He actually elaborated on a lot of it as well. His defense partly consists of extending much of said criticism to society as a whole, a prime example of which is his interpretation of the fact that in porn manga the Otaku rarely ever depict the rapist (not entirely true today but he provides evidence for early lolicon dōjinshi). He sees their refusal to put themselves in the criminal’s shoes as an expression of the refusal to face up to their country’s history. An idea which is easily applicable outside the nerd niche as well. Rape in these manga might not refer to actual rape as much as it is an metaphor for repressed guilt.

Female comic artist Uchida Shungicu’s view on Lolita complex is much more grounded in reality as she was actually abused by her stepfather when she was 15. It’s no surprise that she isn’t particularly fond of Otaku and strongly opposed to their defenders. But even more so than Ōtsuka, the most prominent one among them, she sees the problem more on the side of the mainstream rather than the comic fan minority. It’s not uncommon for men to prefer women younger than themselves, shorter than themselves, in essence women weaker than themselves. These men revel in the role of the “criminal”. Whereas Ōtsuka fears the emasculating effect of picturing oneself as the victim, Shungicu is more concerned with the men who don’t mind being active jerks. Many of Shungicu’s manga retell the story of women triumphing over men that turn out to be losers. There’s so many facets to chauvinist stupidity, it never gets old.

For Otaku she seems to have mostly pity. From her manga Minami-kun no Koibito:

The End ▼

From Akuma no Hanayome: Maō no Merodi by Ashibe Yūho and Ikeda Etsuko

I don’t find concepts like sin and guilt particularly useful and much prefer the one of responsibility. Carrying responsiblity can be very empowering. You should try it.

Good girls go to heaven…

Cover of Akujo na Okusan by Uchida Shungicu

…bad girls go everywhere.

I find it puzzling that some fans religiously memorize every little detail of a fictional world but never even think about how the story might relate to the real world…

When I was around 14 years old I started to hang with friends from the neighboring village. Some of them went to the same school as me, the others I met every morning on the bus. One girl in particular that wasn’t also a classmate of mine was sitting next to me on the bus every morning. You could say she was the main reason why I even spent so much time there rather than with friends from my own village like I had before.

Around the same time we started playing truth or dare. Maybe a year later the documentary of the same title about Madonna’s Blond Ambition tour came out but we had practically already stopped playing it at that point. My best friend, who was from another neighboring town, one not quite as small as the villages the rest of us lived in, was (and still is) a big fan of Madonna, same as I and the girl I liked. We also liked the movie of course and it was kinda fitting that we had played that game together almost a year before we watched the movie.

At the time when we were playing truth or dare they had just started to build an Autobahn close to our villages. We often went to the construction site to play there since it was ideal for our games, away from the eyes of the grown up villagers. That particular time it was just the three of us, our other friends didn’t have time that day, I think. And of course we were playing truth or dare.

There was one particular dare that we had already talked about and wanted to address to her but didn’t get the chance when we played before. She totally saw it coming for that reason. Of course there’s many obvious questions you want to ask in this kind of game and many interesting dares too. But we played the game quite regularly and the good ones became sparser each time. Suffice to say we knew she didn’t wear bras because she had mentioned it before and we wanted to dare her raise her T-shirt.

It was my best friend’s turn and he asked her, truth or dare? She took the challenge and chose dare, which she probably wouldn’t have if I had been the one to address it. Anyway, our dare was already decided but my friend had a hard time putting it into words. He asked me to say it instead. “Show us your tits”, is what I said, instantly. But she insisted that he should say it since it was his turn, not mine. She also knew that he was too shy to put it that bluntly.

In the end he couldn’t say it and asked her another dare or gave up completely, I don’t remember exactly. She was as disappointed as I was. She was counting on him to ask her to raise her shirt and had put on underwear just for that moment, to spite us of course. Well her plan didn’t work out. And I didn’t get to see any tits either.

It was pretty much the last time we played truth or dare in this constellation because some of the smaller kids from her village started spreading rumors about her hanging out alone with boys, which didn’t exactly do wonders for her reputation. There were also other issues that caused her to have a hard time and truth or dare had gotten boring anyway. We still met regurlarly and the sexual tension only increased but I still remember that particular time very fondly since it is one of the cooler episodes from my childhood.

This is why you should never ever use your real name on the internet. Certainly not on googlable forums and web pages. But also not even when replying to private emails.

Thanks for the interview scans, btw.

Troll me
Troll me,my friend
Troll me
Troll me again

Don’t click if you haven’t read Level E yet.

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Taken from 00 (Zero Zero) by Ogami Wolf.