…congratulations to Richard and Katy, the supreme rulers of the Spwugniverse!!!!!

They are the essence of everything that is Spwug.  Without either of them, this site wouldn’t be here to bring you a daily dose of all things geek.

It was an honor and a privilege to witness the joining of these two forces of good.  They are my friends.  They are my family.  I am proud to be the head writer of something they envisioned, and I am proud to be a part of their lives.

My best wishes to both of you, Pocky Rich and Katy.  Here’s to bigger and greater things.  With your powers combined, anything is possible.

If you follow anime fandom, you probably heard about the Kannagi brouhaha – the revelation of thousand-year-old Nagi’s previous romantic history set off a storm of otaku protests at having a 中古 (”used”) wife.  While the countless nico videos and pictures of burnt, torn, or otherwise destroyed manga and Kannagi goods are mostly behind us, I’d like to take this opportunity to look at how the 2D-marrying crowd thinks.

You might be surprised, but the Kannagi firestorm was not an isolated incident of fan backlash: back in 2004, well-known ero-game maker Elf released Kakyuusei 2 (Link not safe for work).  However, shortly after the game’s release, there was a huge wave of fan outrage over the main heroine, Tamaki.  You see, before the player could do the digital nasty with the childhood friend, there was a plot revelation that Tamaki was not a virgin.  And so there was fury on the Internet – pictures were posted on 2ch of Kakyuusei 2 game CDs being burned, stomped, scratched, and otherwise mutilated.  Many of these CDs were sent back to Elf in protest -which seems strange to many spectators. Who cares if a PC game character is a virgin, since she’s almost certainly going to lose that virginity by the time the credits roll?

This is the madonna/whore dichotomy at its finest: many of the repressed souls who escape into the 2D world of these games cling to the image of the “pure and chaste” virgin as the feminine ideal. Some even go so far as to proclaim  these fictional women to be superior to all “real” women, who they find to be distant and hard to understand. However, due to the constraints of the PC game media, where the reality is that sex sells, no matter what the fantasy is, the girls must also be whores for the men whose fantasies they fulfill.

For this reason, the standard progression for a character in an ero-game is madonna -> first sexual encounter -> whore (but YOUR whore, so she’s still okay!).  It’s a very repressed way of looking at relationships, but it’s the reality for many of these fans, and without that madonna stage, their fantasy concept of the world shatters, leading to the two great “she’s NOT a virgin?!”backlashes mentioned above.

In the case of Nagi from Kannagi, the pure, virginal image was even more important to the fans because in the non-adult manga format, there is no opportunity for that transformational, self-insertable sexual event. In the meantime, they could – and did! – create their own fantasies of making Nagi their own personal sexual object, pure of the corrupting touch of another.  This kind of thinking is pretty explicitly encouraged by the people who make money off of these fans, and you can take a look at the Kannagi pillow (also NS4W) and see it all laid out there.

What are your thoughts on the Kannagi and Kakyuusei kerfuffles?  Sad reflection of a repressed subsociety, product of exploitation, or something else?

Hello again, folks, and welcome back to the weekly moe report.  I’ll be taking Thursdays again, and if I miss any Thursdays, the tastefully named Richard Kim will tastefully take a baseball bat to my knees.  Hurray for deadlines! This week, I’d like to talk about memory loss and anime – specifically, how you forget a lot of anime these days as soon as you’re done watching.

My theory about this phenomenon points squarely at the writers, who have taken to building popular character archetypes and merchandising them rather than crafting charaters you can empathize with as they grow and change.  Part of this comes from episode counts – it’s difficult to build a cast of likeable characters from scratch when you only have twelve or thirteen episodes to work with, when the “classic” anime romances like Maison Ikkoku (96 episodes) and Kimagure Orange Road (48 episodes) had plenty of time to develop their leads from weak-willed do-nothings into the kind of people you really could fall in love with.

The greatest example of this is Tatsuya from Touch (101 episodes), who starts off the series as a young man so lazy and unmotivated that you just can’t see what Minami, the female lead who matures far more quickly than Tatsuya, sees in him. But, after “Tacchan” spends dozens of episodes rebuilding himself from the ground up into an ace pitcher, a dedicated teammate, and a reliable friend, you can finally see what Minami has seen all along.  I still sniffle every time that picture of his brother falls out of his pants as he slides into first, even though sliding into first doesn’t make much baseball sense.  His character becomes so strong and so memorable that Japanese TV still plays the clip of his plain, heartfelt confession to Minami – “Uesugi Tatsuya loves Asakura Minami… more than anyone else in the world.” That’s how you build a believeable romance.

Compare that kind of development to today’s milquetoast protagonists.  Are we supposed to believe that the main character of Shuffle! is a sexy piece of man-meat because he said a few nice things when he was five? Or that the boilerplate whatshisnames from Akikan or Sekirei have any worthwhile qualities whatsoever?  No – the focuses for those shows are on how sprouting-moe the girls are.  You’re supposed to like the girl, buy her merchandise (for the low, low price of 9900 yen, you can buy your favorite tsundere on a body-sized pillow!) and move on to the next character after twelve or thirteen weeks have passed.

All that said, there are still a few recent shows that stick out to me because they have  main characters you can believe in.  The foremost example in my mind is Clannad and its After Story, which have the luxury of 48 episodes to transform Tomoya from a misanthropic punk into a decent human being.  It helps that he’s pretty likeable though worthless to begin with, but it’s very, very easy to root for him as he changes himself into the kind of romantic lead you can get behind.

What about the rest of you romance fans out there?  Do you think that the anime romance landscape is as dire as I do, or do you think that there are a few recent gems that I’ve missed that could join the Pantheon?

Today, a friend of mine asked me “Hey, is Tears to Tiara any good?  I saw one of the figures from that game and was curious.”  It was all I could do to hold back the flow of bile in my throat as I explained, as calmly as I could, that Tears to Tiara was a flaming piece of crap when it came out for the PC, and in its shiny new PS3 version, is a good-looking piece of crap.

I could spend hours talking about the many flaws of Tears to Tiara, but that would be ignoring the larger issue at hand here: using moe to push the merchandise of a crappy product on people.  Tears to Tiara is but the latest example of this. Shining Tears and Shining Wind have also lured friends of mine into playing execrable games with drool-inducing character designs and exquisitely crafted merchandise.  It’s a tale of woe often repeated in fan circles: “I started watching [X series] because [Y image] was really cute, but I might as well have stabbed myself in the eyes with a cattle prod and saved myself some pain.”

The phenomenon extends to music, too.  With the boom in seiyuu fan clubs these days, companies know they can make their money back if they attach a popular voice actor/actress to the project and pump out some halfway decent singles.  Mizuki Nana (a wonderful, wonderful lady whose voice can pierce the heavens) and Hirano Aya (who belches her way through songs and really needs to take a few years off so she can learn how to sing) exemplify the moe music industry, releasing hit single after hit single to the delight of everyone who rakes in the royalties.  Companies will use any excuse possible to try and attach these two ladies to their projects so they can write music and guarantee sales.

Amusingly enough, an upcoming anime called White Album, based on a 10-year-old visual novel from the same company that made Tears to Tiara, casts Mizuki and Hirano as the idol singing heroines.  It’s guaranteed to make oodles of cash from whatever CD singles are released, no matter how good or bad the show is.  The funny part is, it’s from the same company that produced Tears to Tiara.  Draw your own conclusions on remake milking.

So anyway, the point of this little Statement of the Obvious is: Be Careful.  The moe industry is ready and willing to sink its claws into your wallet through any avenue it can, and if you want to avoid wasting your time, you need to start being a smarter consumer.  Read reviews.  Ask your friends.  Use them as cat’s paws (God knows I use the tastefully named Richard Kim to gauge the relative quality of products often enough).

And above all, remember that you can enjoy the merchandise without feeling obligated to waste your time and money!   You can save yourself a lot of grief if you can learn to say “hey, that’s a nice toy” without attaching an “I wonder if the source material is any good” to it all the time.

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!

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!

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…

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!

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.

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?