Honey, I’m home! The gig at PiQ magazine didn’t end up working out, so it’s time to come back to the gig I love - dissecting the sprouting and burning of the anime/game/manga world.

This week’s topic is one that bridges the burning and sprouting worlds. As Gainax co-founder and master of bounce Yamaga Hiroyuki told a Fanime panel introducing a fresh Guren Lagann, “Boys love drills.”

It’s true, too - going all the way back to Getter 2 with Drill Missile and up to Guren Lagann on the burning side. Some time in the last few decades of anime, drills became a staple of the sprouting side of anime, too - attached not to robots, but to hair. It’s a fascinating crossover phenomenon that appeals to both sides of a growing young Japanese boy.

Drills on robots are relatively easy to explain - they were easy to animate in the old days. Draw a few frames of a drill spinning, and you’re set for the next 26 episodes. It’s also very dramatic to see a drill kicking up a storm of sparks against the armor of an enemy robot. Plus, it’s a surrogate penis, and boys love those things.

Drills on girls, on the other hand, take a bit more explaining. For example, take a look at a couple of girls with different forms of iconic drill hair: Houjou Reika from Goshuushou-sama Ninomiya-kun (whose hair isn’t nearly as drill-heavy as that of others, but is important for the sake of discussion later), Karin from Street Fighter Alpha, and the Archer from Disgaea (who is so identified with her drill hair that in Disgaea 3, she actually says “Doriru!” as one of her combat noises).

Aside from being visually interesting and physically impossible short of wigs wrapped around foam, drill hair has three major features that lends itself to frequent use in character designs. First, it implies that the character spends a hell of a lot of time working on her hair in the morning, implying certain levels of leisure time combined with vanity. Second, the pointed nature of a drill and its resemblance to colonial European wigs adds to a general look of sharpness and nobility to a character design. Third, the standard drill is an upgraded cousin of the Twin Tail hairstyle, which has long been associated with tsundere. Add these three together and you have an easy route to the ojou-sama character archetype, the haughty character who looks and acts like a queen.

Pretty much every drill-haired girl will fall into this character type, from the above-mentioned Reika and Karin to Yurika from Project Justice and Char from Shuraki. Drill hair is character design shorthand at this point, giving you a bunch of character information in just a character’s hair and a little flag for ojou-sama or tsundere fans just like glasses are a giant flag for the tastefully named Richard Kim.

As a random note, Goshuushou-sama Ninomiya-kun also included a highly amusing bit about how anime drill hair is made - Reika wakes up late one morning, and has to manually drill up her hair by sticking her finger in her tails and spinning it at about the speed of an egg whisk. It’s more than a little silly, and wholly hilarious.

Are you a fan of the drills? Do you wish I’d talked about something else? Didja miss me (or not miss me?) Let me know in the comments!

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Just like the Round Table of Camelot, the Three Kingdoms era of Chinese history evokes images of a time when the world was simple and magical: Men were Men, Heroes were Heroes, and Great Beauties were Great Beauties.

The Three Kingdoms period has been kept fresh in the minds of the Japanese by a great many re-imaginings and retellings, from manga adaptations to the mega-popular Dynasty Warriors game series, in which Men are Great Beauties, Heroes are Men, and Great Beauties are Heroes.

So, of course, with Japan being Japan and money being money, there have been a great many Sproutifications of the Three Kingdoms characters, the most prominent being Ikki Tousen (Battle Vixens here in the states).  Ikki Tousen and its constant mix of action and fan service picked up the bakunyuu (爆乳, lit. “bursting boobs”) title from Tenjo Tenge, which lost fans with its endless stream of rambling crap (no, I’m not bitter about TenTen, why do you ask?) and used characters from the Three Kingdoms era to provide an excuse for big-titted teens to rip each other’s clothes off.

But the liberties Ikki Tousen and the Dynasty Warriors series take with the seminal epic of Chinese culture pale compared to a couple of recent travesties, which have made my Chinese friends weep at how horribly their history has been raped in the name of making money.  First up, you have Tsukisase! Ryofuko-chan, which turns the mighty warrior Lu Bu into a little magical girl (hey, at least Red Hare is still badass) designed to tickle the fancy of fanboys with Lolita complexes.

That one’s pretty bad, and has melted the minds of several friends of mine, but what really takes the cake is Koihime Musou, which started out as an H game (link for those who aren’t at work) and, because the Japanese have no taste, became popular enough to be converted to a PS2 game.  In Koihime Musou, the main character is thrust into an alternate version of the Three Kingdoms period, where the Men are Great Beauties, the Heroes are Great Beauties, and the Great Beauties are gay men (voiced by Wakamoto Norio, which is awesome on at least six levels).

You don’t even need to know Japanese to see how wrong these are - just poke around the sites and marvel at just how far moe peddlers will go in their quest to make money.  It’s pretty impressive.

By the way, don’t click on this link unless you’re secure in your sexuality and libido: here’s the Koihime Musou version of Diao Chan.

You’re welcome!

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I’ve gone into my Anime Wayback Machine and pulled the wondrous Giant Robo off of my shelf, and I can’t tell you how great this show was back in the ’90s.  Not only did this show have old-school giant robot action, but it was full of wire fu and went so far over the top that it shot straight past Fun right to Glorious.  Magic, martial arts, boxing, drinking contests, Giant Robo was full of Manly Men and Awesome Women.  Come on, it has the Experts of Justice fighting against Big Fire, how can you hate that?
Of course, it was incredibly frustrating to follow, too - 3 years passed between the release of episodes 6 and 7.  I wasn’t one of the people who had to wait for it (I got into Giant Robo late, long after the suffering), but people who followed The Pretender for a while can probably sympathize with those who had to wait years before seeing any kind of ending to their favorite series.

Anyway, try watching Giant Robo some time - you can find it on NetFlix pretty easily, and it’s a fast watch.  Hell, if you’re willing to listen to the recommendation of a grumbly old-timer like me, you should be able to find the whole thing (including the wonderfully hilarious GinRei specials) for $40 or less.

It’s worth it.  Trust me.  Action, passion, comedy, and Robots!  All the things that are best in life.

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When Hatsune Miku, the first Japanese Vocaloid2 program, was released on August 31, 2007, she was like God’s gift to Sprouting-type moe fans on YouTube and Nico Video.

With “her” easy-to-use interface and cutesy vocal stylings, users could re-imagine any song they wanted, set it to some video - or even just a still image - and voila!  Instant audio/video contribution to dazzle fellow otaku.  You don’t have to be able to sing (though the “I tried to sing it” genre is huge on Nico Video these days), you don’t have to have much musical talent, and you don’t have to have your own recording equipment, but you can still give the world some “new” music.

Just a quick search for 初音 (the kanji for Hatsune) on YouTube pulls up around 14,000 results for Miku-mixes of all kinds of songs, from Nanoha openings to the Kefka boss fight music (the best part is at 2:37).

Meanwhile, more machinima-minded otaku have had their toy since January 2007 - the home version of THE iDOLM@STER (yes, that’s the official spelling, and yes, it makes me sad whenever I have to write it out).  With its impressively expressive cel-shaded characters, a multitude of camera options, energetic dance moves, and ultra-Sprouting costume choices (I was a big fan of the Iron Mask, but I may have been the only one), it practically begged for anyone with a good video card to make music videos with it.

And they have been at it for over a year now, producing everything from brief, soulful ballads to full-length denpa dances.  If you’re of a mind to blow some time at work and want to see what the minds of otaku can do when combined with decent video capture cards, you could do worse than the 6,000-plus iDOLM@STER (god, I had to write it again) videos on the ‘Tube.

Anyone have any favorite performances from the Vocaloids or the iDOLs they want to share?  I’m getting pretty bored at work these days…

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Happy Valentine’s Day everyone!!! — uh..?  huh? wha– Oooooooooh, it was LAST WEEK.  Dang.  Oh well, better late than never, right?  I’d have had a good one, but lately the “love” shown by migraine headaches had me swooning.

 I’ll spare long discussions in favor of random artwork.  Everybody likes art!

Rediscovering old tools with new methods is exciting! (MS Paint)

[Demon Mage Tess, original character brought to you by Angry Viking Press]

And there’s nothing like that New Program Smell. (OpenCanvas)

[Casper, from a new arcade game, Deathsmiles] (c) 2007, CAVE/AMI.

But then, there’s always room for traditional fare. 

[”Ciel“, a mage character class in the Disgaea series] (c)2005-2008, Nippon Ichi Software.

And that’s it for now.  See ya next week!

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There is a long tradition of Hollywood stars going to Japan to make commercials that would be hideously embarrassing for them to make in the West (Lost in Translation dramatizes this process, along with being a very good movie about alienation and isolation). These range from Arnold Schwarzenegger plugging energy drinks to Sean Connery talking to a bunny puppet about yogurt. There are plenty more out there, but few of them have tread into our Sprouting territory, until Suntory coffee decided to raise the ante.

Behold, Tommy Lee Jones as an alien in Akihabara.

Does this mean that Tommy Lee Jones is maid moe? You make the call!

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Raise your hand if you remember Kimi ga Nozomu Eien (KimiNozo), otherwise known as Rumbling Hearts. You know, the heartwarming story of a boy, his girlfriend who gets hit by a car, her best friend he’s in love with, and their years of mental breakdowns. When it came out in game and anime form, it became famous for its overwhelmingly depressing mood, which led to the creation of the term 鬱ゲー (utsu gee, or Angst Game) for it and its legion of imitators.

Now raise your hand if you managed to watch Akane Maniax (AkaMani), the pseudo-sequel to Rumbling Hearts - which is the heartwarming story of a brilliantly stupid anachronism and the romance/giant robot action series he keeps living out in his head. For the short version of how diametrically different this is from its predecessory, you just have to watch the openings of each: here’s KimiNozo, which starts out with a report on the victim of a hit and run, and here’s AkaMani, in all of its burning/sprouting wonder. It’s hard to believe that both games/anime came from the same studio, and that studio’s transformation from Angst Peddler to Creator of Glorious Stupidity is a funny story to follow.

The game company age (warning: not all links safe for work) released its first game, Kimi ga Ita Kisetsu, in 1998, but the game that really put it on the map was KimiNozo in 2001. The story and characters really connected with fans, in spite of (or because of) the story’s constant abuse of emotion - nothing good ever really happened to the characters, and many of the stories were spirals into depression, PTSD, and depression. It was so massively popular, it spawned a TV series, a couple of re-releases, and a bunch of fan discs that are worth a mint today if you can find them.

However, as a response to the overwhelmingly dark atmosphere of the original work, the age staff packed as much humor and stupidity into the KimiNozo omake discs. First, they made all of the theme songs parodies or outright ripoffs of old burning anime. Here’s the opening for one of the omake discs, Daikuuji Kiki Ippatsu! Please note the similarity to the classic Saint Seiya opening, Pegasus Fantasy. To add even more Fake Burning to their games, they contracted out a few JAM project singers to belt out their parody hits, striking up a strong relationship that continues to this day - a topic I’ll get to when I get to Muv-Luv in a few weeks.

Akane Maniax represents the peak of age’s period of pure silliness. It is filled with parodies of Tekkaman Blade and Gundam: Char’s Counterattack, most of which occur in the imagination of ’70s throwback Gouda Jouji. In the anime (I’ve never had the pleasure of playing the game), all things close to angst are resolved by mental battles with the evil robot King Irresoluter, piloted by a masked villain eerily similar to the main character of KimiNozo. It is, in short, the best thing ever.

After Akane Maniax, age has worked pretty much exclusively on its Muv-luv series, which straddles both burning and sprouting equally - which means you’ll see me talking about it a lot more in upcoming weeks.

Final tangent: age is part of the “Chiyoda Federation” (千代田連合, or ちよれん for short) along with two other companies with neighboring offices: 0verflow of School Days fame/infamy, and Nitroplus, who gave the world a similar dose of angst in Saya no Uta and also made up for it with giant robot cheese in Demonbane. This tells you all you need to know about the influence these companies have on each other.

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Not Curly.

First, my apologies for the lack of posting recently. Holidays, being sick, and work all prevented me from having the time to think of a good post.

Then my fellow poster, Mr. Win-Myun Kim, gave me something to build on.

Tsundere is one of my favorite moe, as some of you may remember. But before tsundere became a standard moe, and heck, even before the idea of moe was unified, as it were, there was the idea of ‘takabi’.

Takabi, short for ‘takabisha’, is a term used for ‘princess types’. In anime, this would be the rich girls, the actual princesses, the women (and sometimes men) who were or felt that they were socially superior to you/the main character. (Some more uncouth people might call this archetype the ‘rich bitch’)

Good of examples of this kind of character are Kuriko Kazetsubaki from Maburaho, Mira Kagami from Tokimeki Memorial, and Aeka from the Tenchi Muyo series.

How is takabi a predecessor to tsundere? Here’s a comparison:

Tsundere

• Cold/mean in public to the main character
• Eventually grows to like the character, but often only in private

Takabi

• Cold/mean/commanding in public to the main character
• Eventually grows to like the character
• Often rich or socially higher than the others in her group

Admittedly, there’s not much to the archetype. But still, that’s the kind of character that was prevalent in anime and such until the tsundere archetype came about.

So, do any of you like tsundere and/or takabi girls/boys? Who? And why do you like the archetype?

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(or, Fun with Tsundere)

During my trip to Japan last year, I walked by the convenience store and had to stop and laugh when I saw one of the gachapon (capsule toy) machines. The machine was merrily selling “tsundere voice keychains,” which, I seem to recall, spent a lot of time sounding blustery and embarrassed about holding your keys for you.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, here’s a brief overview of tsundere for those who aren’t willing to click on the overly informative wikipedia link. Tsundere is a type of sprouting-moe which involves a character who starts off being combative, argumentative, and sometimes outright hostile to the main character (the tsun), but finally gives in to the overwhelming feelings of love that have been just under the surface the whole time (the dere).  Well-known examples of tsundere include Kyou in Fruits Basket, Rukia in Bleach, and (this is my favorite example, for some reason) Vegita in Dragon Ball Z.

The tsundere archetype has become crazily popular since around 2005 or so - otaku have really latched onto the concept that all those people who have thrown spiteful comments and hateful looks their way over the years are secretly in love with them. And, as you may have guessed, various enterprising companies have tried capitalizing on this popularity with hilarious results.

Aside from the keychains I mentioned above, there’s Tomy’s SEGNITY,  a portable TV which spends a lot of time complaining at you whenever you turn the volume too high or the brightness too low, but when you get tired of it and try to turn it off, starts acting sad and lonely (a great video of it in action is on youtube).

Another personal favorite is the tsundere cafe, a variant of the maid cafe where the waitresses have to act like they don’t want to serve you (again, awesome youtube video available).  Japanese otaku eagerly gobble up cute girls telling them “God, you’re always late,  just sit down and don’t bother me,” and “hurry up, drink, and go home, okay?  Sheesh…” because as soon as they head for the door, that same girl will show her ‘true colors’ and eagerly ask “You’ll be back soon, right?  Because I’ll be waiting for you.”

Tsundere isn’t slowing down very noticeably, even in the face of its rival Yandere (more on this in a later column); there’s a lot of amusing merchandise still coming out, including tsundere karuta which plays a CD full of tsundere lines at you while you and your friends have to find the card that matches the overly cutesy dialogue.

I could go on for hours about all the stupid things the Japanese have created around the tsundere concept, but I’ll save that for another time - in the meantime, I’m curious.  How many of you actually like the tsundere thing, and how many people find it annoying and wish it would just go away?

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As we approach the end of the year, I’d like to step back and take stock of what’s going right and wrong with this column. I came in with no clear idea of what I wanted to do, so in the beginning, I just wrote about a few topics that I found amusing and tried to see if things flowed from there.

The problem with this format, in my mind, is that what I find amusing and what all of you find amusing is vastly different. I’m an old hand at the Japanese moe market, and things that you would find fascinating or fun, I barely think about in passing. So I’m really digging down into the niche stuff, while I’m sure there are a wealth of topics I haven’t delved into yet that would make better columns.

So, with a couple months of columns under my belt, I’d like to take this holiday break to find out what’s working and what isn’t. If any of you want to tell me what I’m doing right and what I’m doing wrong, I’m listening. Hopefully I’ll come back in 2008 with renewed purpose and another flood of random tidbits about moe-moe culture.

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