>There is in fact a dakimakura of Ritsu in that exact pose.

That doesn't surprise me.

>The freaky part is that there are dakimakuras of her in that pose in
>multiple states of undress, ranging from "shirt is slightly
>more unbuttoned than it is now" to "the person buying this pillow
>cannot even pretend they're not intending to have sex with it."

That actually doesn't surprise me either, although it does surprise me slightly that (if I read your implication correctly) they are all official products. I was already well aware that the show had a pretty pervy subfandom. More on this in a moment.

>K-On! is a fantastic series, but like a lot of anime it was
>financially dependent on a certain species of pervert while it was in
>production.

Hmm. That reminds me of something, but I'm not sure it's a story I want to share with the class.

Well, what the hell, it's not like you people don't already know I'm a member of the Royal Pornographic Society.* When I first started watching K-On! I had the strangest feeling that I'd met these girls before somewhere, and in the course of the second episode I suddenly realized where. A couple of years ago I downloaded scans of one of those compilations of smutty fan comics looking for I don't even remember what, and one of the segments in it, as it turns out, was based on K-On! The dōjin wasn't translated and I can't read Japanese, so I didn't know what that bit was; I only recognized them later because they have such distinctive character designs, and the artist did a good job of keeping them on-model.

I couldn't figure out what the hell was supposed to be going on, either, although now that I've seen the show it's fairly obvious. In the second episode of the series, the girls of the Light Music Club take a series of temp jobs in order to raise money so Yui can buy the preposterously expensive guitar she's become obsessed with (despite the fact that it's too big and heavy for her and she doesn't know how to play the guitar). That fan comic was evidently a tie-in to that episode; one in which - inevitably - one of the jobs they take is enjo kōsai (that is to say, freelance schoolgirl prostitution).

So yeah. Like I said, I can believe that.

(I don't often feel shame about what the late Bill Hicks described as "that porno wing I've been working on," but I'm actually retroactively ashamed I read that. Those characters deserve better treatment, although at least, unlike some I could name, they mostly got it from their official creators and didn't have to depend on the fandom for it.)

>How dependent, you ask? When they produced a series about
>the girls going off to college, the manga artists were forced to
>continue to draw them as short, barely pubescent girls.

I'm not sure I buy that the "forced" part was literally true, but it is a fact that the main characters' designs don't change at all over the course of the TV series, despite the fact that it covers all three (Japan, you know) of their high school years, and, well, I don't know about you, but I recall the girls at my high school doing quite a lot of growing between the tenth and twelfth grades. Indeed, there's a moment in the movie that I initially thought was a joke, in which their junior bandmate Azusa tells a British immigration official at Heathrow that she's 17, until I realized that she is 17, she's just finished her junior year of high school. Then again, the fact that Azusa is tiny and doll-like is a running joke even within the context of the show, so.

>(Oh, and that brilliant subversion of panty shots you mention, Ben? If
>I recall correctly, Japanese fandom was so outraged by the fact that
>it was played up and then never happened that the studio needed to
>apologize for not showing a young girls underwear on TV.)

Snort.

Well, it was still brilliant. Props to them for resisting. And for only showing the characters in swimsuits when they're, you know, swimming, and such-like.

--G.
* Not a real organization, obviously, but it would be kind of great if it was. My friend Josh and I thought of it years ago. Our image of it was of one of the great Victorian learned societies, except about smut instead of geography, geology, or what have you. "I say, Sir Reginald, have you seen Caswell-Smythe's new monograph on trends in pubic topiary? It's a cracking good read."
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.