1536: Looking for the Calm Lands

I’m having one of those occasional periods where I don’t feel my mental health is in a great place. I’m feeling a bit stressed out (for no specific reason), I’ve been feeling wracked by anxiety before I go to sleep for the last few nights and I find myself occasionally lapsing into depressed feelings during the day, particularly if I stay in working for the whole day.

I think part of the cause is the working from home aspect. It may sound like a dream situation to be able to sit in your pants all day every day tapping away at a computer without fear of interruption from man or beast (well, occasionally from beast if I hear the rats causing mischief in the other room) but in actuality, it’s a ticket to Stir Crazy-Town, and thus every so often I just feel the need to get out of the flat and go work at the coffee shop or something. Somewhere. Anywhere but here.

It’s an underacknowledged aspect of working from home, this stir crazy business. And I think it’s particularly apparent if you live in a fairly small environment such as a flat. In our flat, my study is just one wall away from the bedroom, which in turn is just one wall away from the living room. The temptation is always there to just wander into the living room, flop down on the sofa and stare at the TV for a few hours — or, on particularly bad days, to just go back and lie in bed for a bit. But, as I’ve established pretty firmly for myself, that’s a terrible idea, because if I don’t get up as soon as I wake up, I’ll fall asleep, wake up five minutes before I need to work and make the whole anxiety-depression-stress thing a whole lot worse.

Going out to work at the coffee shop, like I did today, helps largely from the “change of scenery” aspect, and also helps remove a lot of distractions from the immediate vicinity. While distractions can sometimes be helpful motivators — “I’ll do this, then reward myself with [distraction]” — they can also be… well, distractions. You know how it is. Today I felt like I got a lot more done than usual for sitting down, focusing and concentrating on what I was doing, even if sitting on one of Costa’s arse-numbing chairs for most of the day hunched over my laptop isn’t quite as comfortable as working on the big screen of my Mac in my rapidly-disintegrating-but-still-quite-comfy office chair. But at least I can break to get a coffee or a cake or a sandwich when I want to. (I know I can do this at home, too. But I have to make them myself.)

It doesn’t really help that I feel like I have a lot on my plate at the moment. There’s a lot of games I need to cover, and my inbox is full to bursting every day with PR pitch after PR pitch that I just don’t have time to contemplate in the depth they deserve. Pro-tip to anyone eyeing a career in the games journalism biz: reviewing games is the worst part of the job, despite the freebies. Review commitments make it very difficult to play the things you want to play, and in many cases they even make it difficult to explore the review titles in as much depth as you want. At the same time, I feel it is important to give consideration to a lot of the titles I end up reviewing, as many of them are often dismissed outright or treated somewhat unfairly by other critics, so it’s a tough balancing act at times.

Oh, and the air quality around here is shit at the minute thanks to a combination of a Saudi Arabian dust storm (apparently) and a big fire just down the road from us earlier today. This isn’t helping me recover from the plague that laid me low recently.

I don’t know. I’m just having a complain. Things aren’t too bad really, I guess. They’ve certainly been worse. Like I say, it’s just one of those times when my mental health is getting the better of me. I should probably just go sit in bed and play Steins;Gate until I fall asleep or something. That sounds like a good idea, doesn’t it?

1534: Self-Study

I successfully managed to get up early and do some Japanese self-study today. I’m glad I finally managed to make myself do it, because with a month off from my classes for Easter, I really, really need to undertake some independent study if I’m going to continue to progress.

Today I prioritised the reading and writing aspect, as those are areas where I’m weak. I want to get away from reading in romaji (Japanese words spelled using Western characters) as soon as possible and into being able to parse and understand hiragana and katakana before moving onto the more complex matter of kanji.

I’ve been gradually building up my hiragana knowledge in particular quite a bit for a while now, but I’d somehow convinced myself that I only knew about half of the characters involved. Actually, I knew a whole lot more than that, with it only really being the characters for ね (ne) and ぬ (nu) giving me a bit of grief — that said, writing them down like that will probably help me remember them a bit better.

I’ve been working through the companion Kana Workbook for the series of Japanese coursebooks we’ve been using in class (Japanese for Busy People, if you’re curious), and it’s proven to be quite a good resource. It walks you through how to draw each of the characters accurately, and highlights common sticking points such as characters that look similar to one another (ぬ nu and め me, for example, or ね ne, わ wa and れ re for three even more confusing examples) as well as little quirks such as the ability to change the basic sound of some　characters with a smaller character following it — に ni plus や ya becomes にゃ nya, for example — or the ability to double a consonant by adding the つ tsu character in small format — for example, いつ itsu versus いっつ ittsu. And then there’s the times where characters don’t mean what they normally mean — は is normally ha, for example, except when it’s being used as the particle wa, while お is usually the character for the vowel o unless you’re using the particle o, in which case you use を instead because of course you do.

I’ve hardly touched katakana as yet and I was a bit concerned as it’s a whole new set of characters that refer to the same syllables but which, in many cases, look completely different. For those unfamiliar with Japanese script, katakana is used both as a means of highlighting text similar to how we use italics, and also to denote “loan-words” from other languages such as English. For example, you’d write the Japanese word for “computer” — konpyuutaa — in katakana rather than hiragana since it’s a loan word from English, and the two character sets make the word look rather different: こんぴゅうたあ versus コンピューター, to be exact — note how katakana uses a long dash for long vowels rather than the extra vowel characters hiragana uses. Confusing, non?

However, then I thought back to learning English and how we effectively have to learn two alphabets — lower-case and upper-case, not to mention how different fonts depict certain letters such as “a” — and it suddenly didn’t seem quite so bad after all. I mean, what’s another forty-something characters to learn? Yeesh.

Still, I’m getting there. I’m making good progress and I’m confident I’ll be able to read at least some Japanese script a bit more fluently in time if I keep practicing. In the meantime, it’s back to studying.

1533: Motto

As a suitable means of switching my brain off when I need it (which is quite frequently at the moment) I’ve been continuing to watch To Love-Ru and am now onto the second series, Motto To Love-Ru.

I was interested to discover that this second series is structured rather differently to the conventionally episodic first season, instead adopting the same approach as Ika Musume (aka Squid Girl) by making each individual episode up out of three short stories rather than one large story that kind of sort of ties into the overall narrative. That said, narrative coherence is not a huge priority in To Love-Ru, since there are a couple of points throughout the series where things just evidently happen “between episodes” without explanation — or perhaps they just happened where I didn’t notice. (Or, more likely, in the original manga, since it’s not at all unusual for anime adaptations of popular manga to simply skip over chapters at a time for brevity’s sake.)

The series remains enjoyably fluffy, however, despite the predictability of the protagonist Rito falling over at least once per episode either face-first into someone’s crotch or with his hands on someone’s boobs. Despite the occasional bout of fanservicey smuttiness — which gradually increases in frequency between the first series and the first set of OVAs, and then again between the OVAs and the Motto second season — the show remains consistently good-natured, with it generally being Rito as the one who is ridiculed and made to look an idiot rather than the rapidly expanding female side of the cast, most of whom tend to come off pretty well out of their various misadventures.

And as clichéd and tropey as a lot of those female cast members are, they all have their own appeal elements and twists on the usual formula. The stern, harsh class president Kotegawa, as you might expect, has her deredere side to go with all the tsuntsun, and predictably, it’s adorable. Meanwhile, teen idol Run-chan’s twist is that she turns into a boy when she sneezes — a side-effect of being an alien, naturally — while Oshizu is a ghost whose spirit has a tendency to evacuate her artificial body whenever she gets scared, such as when she sees a dog. (Naturally, one of the other characters has a dog, so this situation comes up quite a bit.) And then there’s Yami-chan, aka Golden Darkness, who is all the things I loved about Ell from My Girlfriend is the President and then some. Also, she has hair that can turn into weapons and punch people. Hnnnnng, as they say.

I’m not even going to pretend that To Love-Ru is anything more than fanservicey, switch-your-brain-off fluffy nonsense that is designed for pure entertainment value rather than attempting to say anything big or meaningful. It doesn’t have the clever Lovecraftian references of the rather similar (but later) Haiyore! Nyaruko-san, nor does it have the clever self-awareness of other comedy anime. It’s simple, it is, at times, sexy, and it is, at times, utterly stupid. And sometimes that’s exactly what you need from a piece of entertainment. And thus I make absolutely no apologies whatsoever for enjoying it; it’s a delightful accompaniment to my brain’s boot-up sequence while I’m having breakfast of a morning, and it’s likewise a pleasant accompaniment for the shutdown sequence of an evening before I go to bed.

Anyway. Once I’m done with To Love-Ru (the rest of Motto, followed by some OVAs, followed by the third and, currently, final season To Love-Ru Darkness) I will watch something a bit more intelligent, I promise. Maybe. Possibly.

Come on, I survived Clannad. I deserve this! 🙂

1532: Get It Done

Oh, for the ability to extend days as long as necessary so you can fit everything in. Oh, for the ability to call up motivation on demand and just get things done with time to spare.

There are lots of things I want to get done at the moment. You may recall quite some time ago that I was working on a game project with RPG Maker and that I was very excited about it. I am still very excited about it, and yet I haven’t done a whole lot on it recently. Why? I can’t really explain that, other than the fact I just feel like there hasn’t been a whole lot of time to do so recently.

I’m not sure whether or not that is actually true or whether it is just the perception in my mind, but that’s certainly the way it’s been feeling recently. I get up, I do work, I flop down in the evening, I relax, I go to bed, I repeat the process throughout the week and then take the weekend to recover.

I could, of course, use my time more efficiently. I could get up earlier in the morning and do stuff, and in fact I had been intending to get into some good routines having rejoined the gym/swimming pool complex in town, but unfortunately getting horribly, revoltingly ill put paid to those plans almost as soon as I had put them into motion. As soon as I shake off the last remnants of whatever plagues have been filtering through my systems, I will get back on that.

In the meantime, though, there’s nothing stopping me getting up early and, instead of going to the swimming pool or the gym, working on my game instead. Tomorrow morning I will at least make an attempt to do that, though it will depend on how I feel when I wake up.

I also need to do the same with my Japanese studies, since I now have a month off from classes and don’t want all the things I’ve learned to fall out of my head.

I think I am probably going to have to make myself some sort of schedule to try and stick to, though the mistake I often make with this sort of thing is making it too strict and consequently not wanting to stick to it. I think if I can set myself aside a few hours in the morning before I start work — I start late — to do something productive, be it game development, Japanese revision or going to the gym/pool, then that will get me into good habits and good routines, and thereby get some things done. When the evening comes, then, I can settle down and relax without guilt and do what I want to do. Maybe.

This is all fine and good until I get a bunch of lengthy, time-consuming games to play through for review and as luck would have it, several of those are on the way now. But we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it; for now, let’s try and get into some good habits and get shit done!

1530: 50 BC

Over the intervening years since leaving home, I’ve either discarded or left behind a lot of the trappings of childhood. But one of the things that has constantly travelled with me is my modest collection of Asterix books — by no means complete, not by a long shot, but consisting of a number of adventures I occasionally like to revisit.

For those unfamiliar with Asterix — I’m not sure how well known it is these days — it was (is?) a series of full-length comic book stories based in the era of the Roman occupation of Gaul, circa 50 BC. Originally composed by French duo Goscinny and Uderzo and subsequently translated into a variety of different languages around the world, the stories combine a certain degree of real-life ancient history with material that is played purely for laughs to ridiculous effect. Central to all the stories are the eponymous protagonist Asterix, a cunning Gaul who is usually entrusted with his village’s most important matters, and his overweight, somewhat dim friend Obelix who fell into a cauldron of magic potion as a baby and was consequently blessed with permanent superhuman strength.

The books range from relatively small-scale adventures in which Asterix and his friends defend the village from the Roman encampments that surround them to grand adventures that see the indomitable Gauls heading off to places such as India and the Middle East. Elements of sci-fi and fantasy — usually in the form of magic — are incorporated into some of the later books, but the emphasis is always on vaguely plausible but ridiculous situations that poke fun at modern society through the lens of ancient Roman times.

A particularly identifiable characteristic of the English translations — I can’t speak for the other languages — is the sheer number of utterly cringeworthy puns used throughout, usually in the form of character names. Asterix and Obelix are pretty self-explanatory, but they’re joined by village chief Vitalstatistix, druid Getafix, blacksmith Fulliautomatix, fishmonger Unhygienix, bard Cacofonix and numerous others. The female Gaulish characters have similarly unsubtle names — Vitalstatistix’s wife is called Impedimenta, for example — as do the Romans, who usually have amusing Latin names of some description. One story features a centurion called Cumulo Nimbus, for example, while another features an athletic legionary called Gluteus Maximus.

The books are filled with visual gags, too, not just in the panels’ artwork, but in elements such as typesetting and fonts, too. An Egyptian adventure in which Asterix and friends visit Cleopatra, for example, features a number of sequences in which Egyptian characters “speak” in hieroglyphics, for example, while in Asterix and the Great Crossing, which sees Asterix and Obelix initially accidentally discovering America and subsequently coming into contact with some Viking explorers on the way home, the language barrier between the Gauls and the Vikings is represented by the latter adding stereotypically “Scandinavian” punctuation to the things they’re saying. It’s a visual equivalent of the TV series Allo Allo representing characters speaking in different languages through different accents, essentially.

What I’ve been most surprised about on this most recent revisiting of the few Asterix books I do own is the fact that they hold up very well despite, in some cases, dating back to the 1960s. Not all humour ages terribly well and indeed there are certain elements of the Asterix books that clearly come from a, shall we say, somewhat unenlightened age, particularly when it comes to depictions of people of non-white races, but to be honest, there’s a certain appeal to the fact that the early books in particular just don’t give a toss about political correctness and end up being often darkly hilarious as a result.

I’ve never got around to expanding my collection since leaving home, but I’ve now read the few Asterix books I do own so many times to know them pretty much inside out. Perhaps I should look into getting some of the ones I’ve never read — if these ones hold up well enough, then it’d be a pleasure to read some completely new ones that I don’t know at all.

1527: Trope-ical Crush

The word “tropes” has taken on something of a pejorative meaning in recent years, but I find something oddly comforting about the use of common, established, recognisable tropes — particularly when it comes to Japanese entertainment. I also find it interesting that Japanese entertainment — both games and anime — is a lot more willing to fully embrace the idea of tropes as part of the medium’s language rather than attempting to hide what it’s doing.

Take the common character tropes, for example. In a typical “harem” situation (usually a male protagonist surrounded by female characters, one of whom is typically positioned as the “main” love interest, but the others of whom are optionally also either interested in the protagonist or the objects of the protagonist’s affections) you tend to have your tsundere, your kuudere, your childhood friend, your “princess” type, your genki girl and, depending on how many characters are involved, numerous others. And yet the predictability of this type of cast makeup, for me, doesn’t prove to be tiresome; quite the opposite, in fact. I enjoy being able to point to the various characters and say “well, she’s clearly… and she’s clearly…” because it provides a recognisable, established starting point for these characters that can then subsequently be built on over the course of the rest of the work.

Exactly how — or if — these tropes are built upon by the work depends entirely on the work in question. Some works embrace the established tropes wholeheartedly and make the characters into textbook examples of the character types they initially appear to be: a valid approach. Conversely, some works deliberately work to subvert the tropes they establish in their early hours with some surprising twists and turns for the characters: also a valid approach. And, for some archetypes, subversion of expectations is part of the trope itself: witness the tsundere, for example — usually frowning, overly defensive and, at times, somewhat aggressive — and how her character arc typically involves her “softening” and showing her deredere side. Or the yandere — quiet and meek, but with something seriously unpleasant festering inside that demure exterior. Knowing that at some point she’s going to strike doesn’t diminish the impact when it happens; if she’s a particularly well-disguised yandere, it’s even more shocking and surprising.

I’m a fan of tropes, then; I enjoy that feeling of comforting familiarity that comes about when I come across a new character and recognise their traits. And everyone has their favourites, too; for me, I must confess to having a soft spot for tsunderes, but I do also like a kuudere and there’s always something heartwarming about a nice childhood friends romance. And the older sister “nee-chan” type. And a cutie imouto. And… Oh dear. (Essentially, I think I’m saying that my ideal anime harem would be made up of the cast of My Girlfriend is the President.)

If you’ll excuse me, I’m off to bed to read TVTropes. (Warning if you’re at work: settling down for a “quick read” of that site is a good way to lose a few hours.)

1522: Esuna

If only the “Esuna” spell was a thing. (For the non-Final Fantasy-literate, Esuna is a spell that immediately heals all negative status effects.)

That would have sorted me right out on Monday night when I felt this bug hitting me. It would have prevented nearly a working week of lying in bed coughing, moaning and realising that actually, my bed isn’t all that comfortable at all, really, particularly when you’re in quite a lot of pain.

Still, what’s done is done, and unfortunately it’s not as if I could have done anything about it anyway. You can take all the preventative measures you want, but if an illness decides it’s going to strike, it’s going to strike. Fuckers. I do find it slightly worrying and ironic that the last couple of times I’ve felt particularly bad recently — this week and one day last week — have been immediately after I made a conscious effort to do some exercise. It’s like my body doesn’t want to get fit and healthy. I’ll show it who’s boss, though. (Unless I get struck down with the plague immediately after going swimming again. In which case, fuck everything.)

One thing I’ve never been able to shake out of my mind is a hangover from my days working in schools, and that’s the guilt I feel at being ill. Taking a day off sick when you work as a teacher is a massive inconvenience to all of your colleagues, you see, and in many cases you actually end up having to do some work anyway to ensure you have some stuff sent in for those covering your lessons. In most schools, pupils don’t simply get a free period if their teacher isn’t there, after all, and when you teach a specialist subject such as music you can pretty much guarantee the person covering your class will not be a music specialist. (They will almost definitely be a PE teacher, which is pretty much the polar opposite of being a music teacher.)

Guilt at being ill when you’re a teacher is somewhat justified, then, as it often has a significant impact on a number of people’s days — the office staff have to sort out who’s going to cover your lessons, the staffers who were looking forward to a free period or two now have to cover your lessons and, more often than not, your head of department has to check that the kids aren’t killing the poor cover teacher.

But in other jobs? Variable. I felt particularly guilty this week due to the fact that my USgamer colleagues are at GDC and could have done with some support on the home front, but I have no doubt that they successfully handled it between them. And if I had a job that didn’t face the public at all, like my ill-advised brief jaunt into temporary office work? My absence barely mattered at all; in fact, I don’t believe anyone even noticed when I wasn’t there, since none of them talked to me anyway.

Anyway. I think I am on the mend. I still have a nasty cough that keeps flaring up, but the headache and accompanying dizziness appears to have faded. I’m not sure how well I’m going to be able to sleep tonight, given that lying down seems to exacerbate my cough somewhat, but we’ll see. In the meantime, Hatsune Miku is keeping me entertained.

1521: Wretched

Still feeling utterly wretched, though not quite as bad as yesterday in that I can actually move and do things now, so long as I take an hour or two to psych myself up beforehand. Most of the more horrid symptoms I’ve been exhibiting — a cough that makes my head feel like it’s exploding, a fever, body aches so strong that it hurt to even think about moving at several points yesterday — appear to be calming down a bit, but I’m still stuck with an unpleasant sore throat and, perhaps the most annoying of all, a bunged-up head that is not only the source of a constant, dull ache but also has kept me feeling consistently dizzy any time I stand up.

I mentioned yesterday that this has been quite an “interesting” illness, though, and whatever is going on in my head is presumably something to do with that. I’m not sure of the exact definition of being “delirious”, but my mind was definitely doing something odd any time I closed my eyes, particularly when I was lying down.

If I lay on my right side, my brain would immediately kick into some sort of in-depth technical project that, for some reason, I associated with Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes, despite the fact that I 1) haven’t played it and 2) have no evidence that there is a Metal Gear in Ground Zeroes. Said project would repeatedly get tantalisingly close to completion, but I’d never quite figure out what it was, and by the time it looked like I might get somewhere, the process would start over again.

If I lay on my left side, meanwhile, my brain would immediately start planning some sort of low-tech project to do with bows and arrows, possibly prompted by the fact that I spent part of yesterday whimpering on the sofa watching Disney’s Robin Hood, which I haven’t seen for a good twenty years or so. Again, this project would never come to fruition; by the time it felt like it might, I’d get uncomfortable and have to turn over and start the other one again.

Both of these mental workouts, whatever they were, were interesting to see, but they made it an absolute bugger to get to sleep, and as such I’m not entirely sure quite how much sleep I’ve actually gotten in the last couple of days. Lying down isn’t relaxing at all right now, but when I sit up I just don’t have the energy to do anything. It took me a while to summon up the strength to sit down in front of the computer and pen this post, and said strength is already fading.

As such, I’m going to dose myself up with Lemsip and try to actually get some sleep. Good night.

1518: New Media

I’ve been contemplating the ways that people “consume” (ugh, I hate that word, but it seems to be the one in use most frequently these days) content online, and trying to determine a way it could be applied to our currently-stalled podcast over at The Squadron of Shame.

The Squadron of Shame SquadCast certainly worked extremely well for the episodes we did it for, but it did often end up being a little more demanding on the editing time than I would have liked, particularly as we’re all amateurs making use of not-brilliant equipment that often results in things like background hum, echo and other annoying flaws that are difficult to edit out. Much of my editing time was often spent manually trimming out echoes and funny noises, and in the case of a 2-3 hour episode — which most of our episodes tended to be — it would take the majority of the day to do this.

One of the things I’m wondering right now is how relevant the podcast format still is. Obviously I know that there’s enough of a market for sites like Giant Bomb to keep making one every week, and for established podcasting personalities like Garnett Lee to be able to start a new show and have people follow him to see what he’s up to. But I’m also conscious of the rise of alternative means of “consuming” (blech) content in the last couple of years, with YouTube being one particularly disruptive influence, and live broadcasts such as Twitch streaming and Google Hangouts being another.

Awareness of these alternative forms of media has made me ponder whether the standard podcast format is absolutely the best possible thing for the SquadCast going forward, or whether it’s worth contemplating an alternative means of presentation (with an accompanying means of archiving/downloading where necessary.)

The SquadCast has always been a “book group” style of discussion surrounding a game or gaming-related topic, and it’s worked well for us in the past. But gaming is also an inherently visual medium, which makes me wonder whether some form of video presentation might be worth experimenting with, perhaps combined with live broadcasting.

Another reason I bring this up is that Skype, which we have previously used to talk to one another and record the discussions we have, has become a largely unworkable mess ever since Microsoft bought it, making it impossible for me to “archive” the complete conversation just in case someone’s individual recording fails to work properly. I haven’t needed this facility on many occasions, but on the couple where someone’s recording was destroyed by Audacity’s frequent crashes, having that backup facility was a godsend. With the way Skype works now, though — you can’t run it in more than one user account on a Mac at once, which is what I used to do — working this way is impossible without an unnecessarily convoluted setup involving more than one computer.

What I’ve been pondering is making use of something like Google Hangouts, which allows for a number of features that would seem ideal for a discussion about games. It allows participants to converse via either audio or video chat, and it also allows for the footage of the participants to be intercut with other things such as videos from YouTube and the like. For example, while discussing a particularly interesting scene in a game, making use of Google Hangouts would allow you to find that scene on YouTube and then broadcast it to the people watching the Hangout, which strikes me as an eminently good idea. Presumably it would also allow for playing footage while the conversation continues over the top, which is a little more interesting than just gazing at a bunch of talking heads for a few hours.

Google Hangouts can also be easily archived to YouTube, and then one of the many YouTube-to-MP3 converters out there can be used to archive an offline version of the discussion’s audio, which can subsequently be released as a standard podcast for those who wish to continue listening in that way. It’ll be rawer due to the lack of editing and its inherently live nature, but I’ve often felt when I edit a show that I was making the job a lot more difficult and time-consuming than it really needed to be.

Anyway. I’m just thinking out loud here. Interested to know your thoughts, though, particularly if you’ve been either a listener or a participant in the SquadCast at any point in the past. (Those who are neither, you can educate yourself thanks to our archives here.)

1517: The Misunderstood Fan

It can be a trying task being a fan of something at times. And by “fan” I don’t mean “rabid, frothing fanboy/fanmadam” (thanks NISA); I mean simply someone who has a particular preference for something, and who will, in many cases, indulge in that thing to the exclusion of other, perhaps more “mainstream” things.

Since pretty much “coming out” as a fan of visual novels, anime and associated goodness around the time Katawa Shoujo was released, I’ve run into this issue a number of times. In the case of Japanese entertainment, the cultural rift between East and West means that some people are less than understanding about certain aspects of what our friends in the East produce.

And perhaps that’s understandable in some cases; even as a fan of a broad spectrum of Japanese entertainment, I’ll happily admit that there’s plenty of content — primarily around the area where sex and violence cross over — that makes me uncomfortable, and so I deliberately choose not to expose myself to that sort of thing. (“Discovering” Urotsukidoji in my teens was quite enough, thanks.) It exists, though, and I can deal with that; it’s simply something I choose not to engage with. (I also don’t believe for a second that it’s actually harmful — to believe as such is to show an alarming lack of faith in humanity’s ability to distinguish between fact and fiction, and a similarly alarming willingness to believe that everyone is stupid enough to just want to emulate everything they see. Sometimes fantasy is just fantasy.)

The trouble comes when people start to assume the worst about an entire culture’s output based on some of its more questionable or discomfort-provoking aspects, or even, in some cases, based on things they just think they know — the “lol Japan” approach.

Let’s take the recently released Senran Kagura as an example. Here we have a game that explores and respects its characters in great detail — going so far as to give each and every one of them their moment in the spotlight in lengthy, well-written visual novel sequences — that also happens to feature characters with big jiggly boobs who occasionally flash their pantsu. Are the jiggly boobs and pantsu necessary? Of course they’re not, but they don’t detract from all the other good stuff that the game is doing — and frankly, what is there to be ashamed of there, anyway? Senran Kagura’s cast is depicted to be a bunch of strong, independent young women who are more than capable of taking care of themselves and who are, above all, confident and comfortable in who they are and what they look like. (Those who have played it will know that the possible exception to this rule is Hibari, but her own character arc revolves around her coming to terms with her own inferiority complex; the end result is her accepting herself, flaws and all, and recognising that she doesn’t have to go it alone.)

Admirable traits, I’m sure you’ll agree, and so what does commentary about the game focus on? You guessed it; the jiggly boobs and the pantsu. And the aggression with which these criticisms are delivered is astonishing — take this outstandingly vitriolic takedown of the game that appeared not on someone’s personal blog, but on the official Nintendo magazine’s website. Or take the comments that habitually appear on any article about the game, which usually involve accusations of those who enjoy the game being “perverts” or, in more extreme cases “paedophiles”. It’s gross and disgusting, and it makes my heart sink any time I see it. And there’s no point trying to argue your case against these people; they’re people who have made their minds up about something, and have no interest in changing it.

For what it’s worth, I’m firmly of the belief that there’s not actually anything wrong with enjoying the fanservicey aspects of titles like Senran Kagura and its ilk; acknowledging your own sexuality is a healthy thing to do, and finding something that isn’t real attractive does not necessarily say anything about your attitudes towards a real-world equivalent. Indeed, I’ll happily admit to having been attracted to some Japanese titles purely by the fanservice aspect, whether it’s video games or anime; in pretty much every single case, I’ve been pleasantly surprised to discover that beneath the often in-your-face sexuality of some works, there beats a heart of gold; in many cases, I’ve even discovered that the fanservice aspect is a lot “tamer” than a lot of people tend to make out, and the whole point of it is actually to tell an interesting story with some loveable and, yes, attractive characters. (There’s also some stuff that purely exists to be sexy, and that, too, is both fine and can be enjoyable.)

Here’s the thing: I, like, I’d wager, pretty much anyone else who enjoys anime and other Japanese forms of entertainment, am capable of distinguishing between fantasy and reality — and anime-themed entertainment is so obviously fantasy that I find it very difficult to take the more vitriolic criticisms of it seriously, particularly when they’re delivered with such furious anger that it often becomes clear that the one raging has very little actual experience with the work in question beyond the most superficial knowledge — see that Official Nintendo Magazine piece.

I often find myself wondering if fans of other niche interests find themselves subject to similar scorn. Is one of my dearest friends, who is such a fan of heavy machinery (whether military or agricultural) that he describes his reaction to various hulking metal beasts in terms of how “tumescent” they make him, likewise a “pervert” for talking about things in this way? Of course not. Whether or not they really do make him tumescent is neither here nor there, and is nothing but his own business; his own personal interest in such things is something that is important to him, something that I respect and something that, on several occasions, has in fact led me to checking out things that I otherwise never would have explored for myself at all. An ultimately positive experience, in other words.

It’s a pity that not everyone feels they can be open-minded about things not immediately familiar to them, and instead jump to conclusions without bothering to investigate them for themselves. It happens in all aspects of society, not just the ultimately not-all-that-important really fandoms of various forms of entertainment, and it sucks every time it comes up, particularly when I see it upsetting people I know and like. (Or when it upsets me which, I won’t lie, it has done on a number of occasions.)

Live and let live. And perhaps, just once, ask your friend what it is about [x] that they like so much. Be willing to take a look for yourself and reconsider your opinion.

And if you still don’t like it? Don’t be an ass to people who do.