2185: #WaifuWednesday

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I don’t really have the mental capacity to write anything particularly deep or meaningful today, so here are some pictures of pretty girls.

purplesisters

This is Purple Sister (left) and Purple Heart (right), the HDD/goddess forms of Nepgear and Neptune from the Hyperdimension Neptunia series respectively. This is one of my favourite pieces of official artwork for the series.

ikaruga

This is Ikaruga from Senran Kagura, displaying an uncharacteristically exhibitionist side of herself. Normally very prim and proper, we can probably assume that she is in private while this is going on, but I also have little to no doubt that Katsuragi is hiding somewhere just out of shot.

deviluke

The three Deviluke sisters from the To Love-Ru series. Lala (centre) is the original and best, but she was somewhat sidelined after the first series in favour of her two sisters Nana (left) and Momo (right).

miia

Miia from Monster Musume, who simultaneously encapsulates the inherent sexiness and strangeness of the lamia while also fulfilling the “doting girlfriend” trope nicely. Darling!!

saopantsu

A pleasantly candid shot of Asuna (canonical girl) and Lisbeth (best girl) from Sword Art Online.

nozomi

Nozomi from Love Live, who might be my favourite…

makipic

…although it might also be Maki.

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Hanako from Katawa Shoujo definitely deserves a mention.

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And we’ll close with Amane from The Fruit of Grisaia, who adorns my actual real-life wallet, and so I guess probably tops some sort of waifu leaderboard somewhere.

That’s your lot for now. Hopefully I will be feeling better tomorrow and have something a bit more substantial to share with you all. In the meantime, enjoy the pics.

1919: #WaifuWednesday – Shin (Criminal Girls)

The temptation to pick another Senran Kagura girl this week was very high indeed — I’ve just finished the main story of Shinovi Versus and there are, after all, 25 very interesting female characters in that game. But since I’m planning on doing a more comprehensive Senran Kagura writeup over at MoeGamer later this week when I’ve finished all the side stories in Shinovi Versus, I thought I’d mix things up a bit and show a bit of appreciation for the girl who currently graces my Windows wallpaper on my living room PC: Shin, from Criminal Girls on Vita, which I beat a few weeks back.

Spoilers ahead.

2015-03-22-001444Shin, real name Makoto, is based primarily around the commonly used anime trope of the hikikomori, or shut-in. A renowned, well-known and somewhat notorious MMO player who was viciously bullied in real life for her interests and passions, Shin had, over time, retreated from society to live in her own private world where she felt safe. She’d done this to the exclusion of everyone around her — going so far as to lock herself inside her room and only eat whatever food had been left outside for her.

When you encounter Shin for the first time in Criminal Girls, none of this is apparent. She simply seems like an overconfident “leader type”, wanting to boss everyone around and, as the oldest member of the group, believing that her opinion carries a considerable degree of weight. Her “leader type” personality is even reflected in her game mechanics; by herself, she’s not very formidable, but most of her power comes from her “Operation” skills, which partner with at least one other party member to effectively deliver multiple special attacks in the space of a single turn.

Over time, her facade slips, however; she continually makes poor decisions that put the group in danger, and throwaway comments she makes gradually reveal her otaku side. It eventually becomes very apparent that she’s trying desperately to be someone that she isn’t, and that by hiding herself away she’s hurting the people around her.

The main thrust of Criminal Girls’ story surrounds the player’s attempts to “redeem” the titular girls from their past sins, to prevent them being incarcerated in Hell and giving them another chance at life. Shin’s sin, then, is that of neglecting others; she personifies the Deadly Sin of Envy. She envies those who have a normal life and is embittered by her drop-out, shut-in existence; the arrogant persona she initially displays is both a reflection of the character she played online and of who she thinks she “ought” to be — a persona she believes to be more likeable.

As the girls and the player character come to trust one another more, though, Shin starts to open up. She’s more honest and less confrontational, though she still bickers with the rather spoiled Kisaragi; the two are more similar than either of them would care to admit. Most importantly, she learns through others accepting her that it is also possible to accept herself without being ashamed; there’s no need for her to cut herself off from her problems and hide away. In doing so, in fact, she had simply made matters worse; the longer she was alone, the more she believed she needed to be alone, and so her resentment and envy towards “normal” people grew.

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Those of you who know me well will surely not be surprised to hear that I found Shin to be one of the most relatable characters in Criminal Girls. While I haven’t gone to the lengths she has — I’m fortunate enough to have a good circle of friends (both online and off) and a wonderful fiancee who tolerate, understand and accept the things I’m interested in — I can very much empathise with her feelings of isolation, the suffering she endured while she was being bullied and her envy for people who seem to be able to go about their business “normally”. I’ve been through some of the things Shin has been through — though fortunately in my case it didn’t involve a literal trip to Hell and back — and as such she occupies a special place in my heart.

A toast to you, then, Shin; you were one of numerous reasons I’m glad I made that journey through Hell.

 

1912: #WaifuWednesday (special guest: #BoobsNotBlood)

So Wednesday rolls around again, and as we established last week, that means it’s time for Waifu Wednesday.

Before that, a short hefty preamble, though, because it’s being discussed as something of a hot topic on the social media Interwebs at the very time I type this. I refer to the issue summarised under the Twitter hashtag #BoobsNotBlood, in which a number of people have begun pointing out the hypocrisy of popular media in being absolutely fine with graphic violence — the most recent example of which being the new Mortal Kombat game — but immediately shunning anything that has even the slightest hint of being sexual. (Unless, of course, it’s being used for advertising, in which case it’s fucking everywhere, no play on words intended.)

Mortal Kombat, to put things in context for those who are less familiar, is a series that has always prided itself on being graphic. Back on its original release, it was one of the first games to use digitised real actors as its sprites, and one of the first arcade fighting games to feature blood and gore splattering around the screen as the fight continued. Its most notorious feature, though, was the ability to perform a “Fatality” move on a defeated opponent — by entering a convoluted series of button inputs, you could kill your opponent in an assortment of overblown and violent ways, ranging from ripping out their heart to pulling out their spine. The latest Mortal Kombat continues this tradition, even going so far as to provide some of the most obnoxious microtransactions I’ve ever seen — the ability to buy tokens allowing you to perform these Fatality moves more easily without having to learn the button inputs. That’s a whole separate issue, though, that I’m sure we’ll talk about another time.

Anyway. I have absolutely no problem with Mortal Kombat, or indeed pretty much any violent game or piece of media. Violence has become so normalised in modern popular culture that, for the most part, people tend not to bat an eyelid at it any more. (There are exceptions; very realistic gore, torture and any form of depicting realistic violence against women still tends to make people uncomfortable at the very least.) That, in itself, is perhaps a concern for some people, but so long as you’re able to distinguish fantasy from reality — and pretty much everyone is, with the exception of people who already have some pretty severe mental disorders — it’s not a problem as such for your average adult human. (We could get into the whole “think of the children” thing here, but again, that’s probably an issue to tackle another day; I’m primarily concerned with people old enough to make their own decisions here.)

So violence is, for the most part, A-OK in the eyes of popular culture in the West. Sexuality, though, is a big no-no. And this is where the primary resistance to modern Japanese games tends to come from: because the otaku market in Japan — who enjoy fanservice and sexualised content — is a sizeable one with disposable income to throw around, that is the market that many anime and game creators choose to focus their attention on. And with good reason: you go where the money is. It’s the exact same reason we have so many annualised sports games and dudebro shooters here in the West: they sell.

You may not think that otaku games and dudebro shooters have much in common, but there’s one very important aspect in which they’re very much alike: people outside of their core demographic seem to wilfully misunderstand and misinterpret them, and then make a point of talking them down — in the process alienating the people who do like them — at every opportunity. I’ve been guilty of this myself over the years, but since throwing myself more into the things I love to the exclusion of things I didn’t like but explored because I felt I “had” to, I’ve become more content to simply live and let live: I’m never going to play, say, Halo 5 because it just doesn’t appeal, but I certainly don’t begrudge anyone who will enjoy it the experience of playing it.

A key difference, though, is that otaku games are a relatively small market in the West, while dudebro shooters make up the majority of the market. This is the complete inverse of the situation in Japan. The otaku games are seen as a minority, so they’re an easy target; I don’t know if their critics are simply trying to outright get rid of them altogether — I suspect there are at least a few people out there who wouldn’t mind if we never saw a doe-eyed moe girl ever again — and so it’s their controversial aspects — their sexuality — that tends to inflame the ire of critics who, generally, have absolutely no fucking idea what they’re talking about.

And yet, as Mr Matt Sainsbury of Digitally Downloaded said during a Twitter discussion yesterday, sex has been a crucial part of artistic expression since… well, forever. And yet the moment we see a flash of panties, a bit of cleavage, a provocative pose or a bit of dialogue about boob size, that seemingly invalidates the whole experience in the eyes of some critics. It’s painfully inconsistent and hypocritical to completely devalue an experience on the grounds of sexualised content when extreme violence passes without comment. (To clarify: I don’t have a problem with either, and believe that content creators are free to make whatever they like — or what they feel will be popular — without external pressure from people who speak from an ill-informed perspective.)

So with that in mind, let’s take a conspicuously sexy character for this week’s Waifu Wednesday.

KatsuragiThis is Katsuragi from the Senran Kagura series. She’s a member of the Hanzou Academy, a school that trains “good shinobi” — ninjas who supposedly do work for the benefit of all, rather than individual self-interest.

Katsuragi is an interesting character in a number of ways. She’s arguably not the most explicitly sexual of the Senran Kagura girls — that honour probably goes to Haruka, who I’m sure we’ll talk about in the near future — but she is certainly one of those who is most comfortable with her own body, personality and sexuality.

This is an important and interesting point about most of the cast of Senran Kagura, actually; while the series is most widely renowned for its exaggerated jiggling boobs — indeed, the series creator has gone on record as unashamedly saying the reason the series exists at all is because he wanted to see pretty girls with jiggling boobs in 3D on the Nintendo 3DS — the girls aren’t simply well-stacked stick-figures, as sometimes seen in other anime-inspired work. Rather, in most official artwork — and indeed in the game, too — they’re depicted as having healthy curves and, in most cases, being happy with their bodies. (The couple of exceptions to this — Mirai and Ryoubi — have their dissatisfaction with their bodies explored as part of their own personal story arcs.)

1841023-7b5add5ed1389cbf5b843ed6047b6a8dLike most of the cast of Senran Kagura, it was not happy circumstances that drew Katsuragi to the Path of the Shinobi. I shan’t spoil her personal plot here, as it’s explored in more detail than I can give justice to in a few short paragraphs in both Senran Kagura Burst and Senran Kagura Shinovi Versus (and, presumably, the recently released Estival Versus, which is currently only available in Japanese). Suffice to say, though, Katsuragi has a fair amount of personal demons to take on, and a lot of sorrow to deal with.

She has two main means of dealing with these things: firstly, by acting as an “older sister” figure for many of the other group members, who recognise this and refer to her as “Katsu-nee”, “-nee” being a Japanese suffix to denote an older female sibling, but also often used in contexts like this where intimate personal relationships take on a “sister-like” quality. She is a character that her friends in Hanzou look up to and trust greatly, and often confide in.

Her second means of dealing with the emotional baggage she’s been dragging around with her is being a complete pervert, and it’s this aspect of her personality that is more obvious from the start. It’s also this aspect of her personality that cause many people to write her off as little more than a shallow, fanservicey character, but it goes much deeper than that.

Katsuragi’s perversions — particularly her habitual groping of her peers’ breasts — are a form of self-expression for her, and a reflection of the fact she has had to, to a certain degree, bring herself up without some of the normal “boundaries” set for youngsters. She herself refers to her behaviour as sekuhara (sexual harassment) and confesses in Shinovi Versus that she uses it as something of an icebreaker. Her peers don’t always see it the same way, of course — it’s a rather intimate invasion of personal space, after all — but as they — and the player — come to understand Katsuragi, it becomes more and more apparent that this exaggerated behaviour of hers is simply a front for how she’s really feeling inside; she maintains the facade of an energetic, enthusiastic, overly sexual young woman in order to avoid having to burden others with her own emotional turmoil; while others are happy to confide in her, she has some difficulty in being truly honest with them.

Katsuragi develops something of a rivalry with Hikage from Homura’s Crimson Squad. In many ways, Hikage is the polar opposite of Katsuragi, in that while Katsuragi is vibrant and, at first glance, extremely open about her feelings and passions — although as we’ve just talked about, the truth becomes apparent over time — Hikage is dour, emotionless and seemingly unable to enjoy anything. Katsuragi makes it her mission to try and get Hikage to “enjoy” a fight between the two of them, even though they are technically on “opposite” sides of the good/evil divide between shinobi. The two eventually strike up something of a friendship as a result; opposites, as they say, attract.

Katsuragi is an unashamedly sexual character who likes to show off — she explicitly says so when she performs her Ninja Transformation sequence in Shinovi Versus. Where critics tend to habitually misunderstand her — and the Senran Kagura series as a whole — is that this isn’t just there “for the sake of it”. It’s part of who she is, and that should be acknowledged — without shaming it — but, more importantly, it’s not the entirety of her being. She’s a complex, interesting character, and very much one of my favourites in the series, and that’s why I’ve devoted so many words to her today.

Thank you.

1906: Waifu Wednesday

There’s a sort of tradition among anime and game fans on Twitter — well, game fans who are into the Japanese end of the spectrum, anyway — called Waifu Wednesday, which is often used as a simple excuse to post lots of pictures of anime girls the posters in question find attractive, but sometimes also used as a means of celebrating a favourite character for more than just their physical appearance. Perhaps their story arc resonated with the person who posted it. Perhaps they simply liked them as a person. Perhaps they represented an ideal they wanted to aspire to. Whatever the reasons, Waifu Wednesday is a thing, and, well, why not here too?

Nepgear-mk2For today’s Waifu Wednesday, then, I think I want to talk about Nepgear, pictured to the right.

Nepgear, as those of you paying attention to my deviant, disgraceful taste in video games will already know, is the protagonist of Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2 (and its recent remake Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth2) and the sister of series protagonist Neptune. Specifically, she’s Neptune’s younger sister; in the series’ tradition, she is the personification of a specific game platform, in this case the Sega Game Gear to Neptune’s… well, Sega Neptune.

Nepgear isn’t the only younger sister character to make an appearance in the series. Sony PlayStation personification Noire — who you better believe will be the subject of a future post like this, because she’s one of my favourite characters in the series aside from Nepgear here — has a younger sister called Uni, who represents Sony’s handhelds the PSP and Vita. Nintendo Wii personification Blanc, meanwhile, has two younger twin sisters called Rom and Ram, who between them represent the two screens of Nintendo’s handhelds the DS and 3DS.

The fact that these characters are personifications of well-known brands and platforms is one of the most well-known things about the Hyperdimension Neptunia series, but it’s also one of the least important things about them; it makes up little more than their concept and, in some cases, influences aspects of their design or basic personality type.

The reason I like Nepgear so much is because I can see a certain amount of myself in her. Obviously I’m not a young, pretty, skinny girl — I’m pretty much the exact opposite of her in that regard — but I find her personality and the way she goes about her business to be eminently relatable. Why? She’s awkward, she’s nerdy, she’s lacking in self-confidence and often finds herself the butt of jokes: these are all traits I became aware of in myself when I was younger, and which persist to this day.

It’s not just about “negative” traits, though. Although often doubting her own abilities, for example, Nepgear is someone who will try her very best and follow through on a plan when she makes it, even if things don’t go entirely as envisioned. She tries hard to do the right thing in all situations — though doesn’t always succeed — and makes an effort to bring people together and ensure they are getting along with one another. Obviously she then goes on to fight giant robots and evil goddesses and whatnot, which are parts of my life that haven’t happened as yet, but, without wanting to sound too arrogant, for the most part she represents some of the aspects of myself that I actually quite like.

Nepgear-full_form-transform_formAside from the relatable aspects, Nepgear is just an altogether pleasingly wholesome character; she’s cute, sure, and in her transformed “Purple Sister” form (left) she ups the sexy quotient considerably, but she has never been a character that attempts to take advantage of either her cute or sexy aspects.

Instead, well, I’ve already used the word wholesome above, but it really is the best way to describe her. She’s someone who is very pleasant to spend time in the virtual company of, and she’s just plain nice. The kind of person who would always have tea and cake for you if you stopped by; the kind of person who remembers your birthday; the kind of person who does random acts of kindness without any expectation of reward — and who often doesn’t receive any kind of reward for her hard work.

In many ways, poor old Nepgear is one of the most “normal” people in the entirety of Hyperdimension Neptunia, and she suffers a bit for it. There’s a running gag in the games that followed her starring role in mk2 where she’s paranoid about everyone thinking that she’s “boring” and, when you compare her to the other characters in the series — particularly the pure, unbridled chaos that her sister Neptune tends to create in her wake — it’s perhaps easy to see why she worries.

But even if she goes unappreciated in her own dimension(s), certainly appreciate Nepgear, and thus it’s with pleasure that I give her the dubious honour of a Waifu Wednesday post on this little backwater blog.