... Yes, I have to admit I can see how a group of adorable high school girls trying to start a band would be more entertaining in those circumstances than the usually-ill-advised adventures of a mildly-to-moderately-psychotic child soldier working for a questionably accountable mercenary outfit.

--G.
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... and then kick his feet up and watch a couple hours of Black Lagoon to unwind.

So when he told our mutual friend "hey, send me a few discs of things I like," well, he got a bunch of cute slice-of-life, and he also got a lot of guns and bombs.

(I'm redacting names because the guy in question is still in the active reserves and I'm unsure about if some of the stories he told us were strictly speaking stuff he should have been sharing. They're great stories, tho. Like the one about the Taliban commander in their zone who acquired the nickname "Captain America.")

-Merc
Keep Rat

I can see where that would work. From what I can recall of it, Black Lagoon doesn't attempt to be anything other than what it is, which is a hyperviolent mercenary crime saga. Full Metal Panic!, on the other hand, has no idea what it's trying to be most of the time - makes a selling point of it, in fact. Is it a lighthearted teenage romance comedy? Is it a hard-edged near-future military sci-fi drama? Is it a weirdass "newtype humanity" fantasy? It's a dessert topping and a floor wax! I could easily see where someone could get really frustrated with that and just want it to pick one. :)

K-On!, on the third hand, isn't trying to be anything other than what it is, and it does what it is really well. One of the things I like best about it - and I acknowledge that this seems like an odd thing to say about a slice-of-life high school comedy - is how subtly structured its world is. Sure, they have an insane teacher, but the show takes the time to explain how and why she's that way. Some of the characters' friendships pre-date the setting of the show by years, and the show never forgets which ones or how far back they go. Everyone has a backstory and a reason for doing what they do. It's a high-school comedy, so everyone has at least one exaggerated trait, but they aren't the only traits they have; nobody's just her schtick, and nobody's an outright cipher (even the Token Normal Girl, who is actually one of my favorites).

It's not just the world that the story takes place in, either, but the continuum in which it's presented. A lot of thought went into that. Take the ending credits sequences, for example, which is where this thread started. There are three different ones over the course of the series, and they don't seem to make any damn sense at all or connect with the show in any way... until you realize that they're Hokago Tea Time music videos, and then it all suddenly makes perfect sense. Of course they're wearing unusual costumes! Of course there's weird, unintuitive imagery! Of course Mio's suddenly all aggressive-rocker-chick - they're not performing live, so she can fool herself that no one can see her! It's all really cleverly done.

--G.
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As you might expect from five high-school rockers in a high-school rock comedy, they had a stonking good time, but throughout the episode - despite the fact that I know full well that it's not that kind of show - I kept thinking, Oh my God that's dangerous. Five adorable teenage girls loose at a three-day outdoor rock festival? And with only the one pathologically irresponsible teacher along? She'll be lucky if she gets back home with more than three of them.

Nothing of the kind occasioned, of course, and consciously I wasn't expecting it to, but that tension was always lurking just below the surface. I kind of hate that I live in a world where that's become a default expectation.

--G.
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Of all the characters in that show that I would least want to give even one match...

-----

"V, did you do something foolish?"

"Yes, and it was glorious."

Heh. On the other hand, I just noticed that Mio's eyes are grey...

--G.
She's pretty good at dodging things, too.
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So long as their name is not "Sawako Yamanaka."

--------------------------
CdrMike, Renegade Time Lord

Strike Witches makes me sad. Not because I didn't enjoy the show, which I did in spite of its flaws, but because of the way The Inescapable interferes with all the interesting historical in-jokes and the likeable characters and the actually-I'd-like-to-know-more that is whatever the heck is up with the Neuroi.

It's really a pity.

-----

"V, did you do something foolish?"

"Yes, and it was glorious."

There is in fact a dakimakura of Ritsu in that exact pose. That, in the grand scheme of WTFIWWJ¹, is so banal as to be nearly normal.

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."

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. 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.

If I have to know these things, you all do too.

(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.)

¹What The Fuck Is Wrong With Japan. The acronym was coined by Sean Gaffney, who reports on the manga industry in a professional manner and really, really needed it.

-Merc
Keep Rat

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."
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To be fair, that's more likely due to the added expense of doing new character designs for each season. At least they actually look like teenagers, as opposed to shows such as Lucky Star where they're closer to a SD plush doll than high school.

"This is probably a stupid question, but . . ."

I'm sure that's part of it. (Similarly, the people who have to pay for costume designs in anime must thank their stars every day that they live in a country where public school uniforms are a thing, although that said, the K-On! girls do have a respectable range of civvies over the course of the show.)

--G.
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Tangentially, it's a running joke around here that over in To Aru Kagaku no Railgun, most of the cast sank their entire budget into superpowers (some more effectively than others), while Ruiko Saten sank all of -hers- into the costume department. And thus is the only one to ever be a) seen in more than one outfit per episode, and b) seen in something other than her school uniform.

"Official" with air quotes might be a better word. A lot of the filthier stuff made for shows like this is ostensibly not affiliated with the actual media conglomerates producing the base show... until you trace the chain of corporate ownership backwards far enough. This is compounded by the fact that there is in fact a lot of completely unofficial stuff as well, of course; but usually you can tell the difference based on the production values.

> Those characters deserve better treatment,

I can one-up you on this. I've seen the doujin you describe, or at least I think I have; they all blur together after awhile. It was fairly tame as these things go.

The one that stuck with me is the one where after graduation Mio becomes a camwhore in order to make money and pay the rent. It's like "Okay, sure, whatever, Mister Doujin Artist sir, as excuses to draw Mio in varying states of deshabille I've heard worse ones."

Then it takes an odd turn where she gets incredibly depressed because of what she's doing and becomes a shut-in, which leads to her having to do progressively pervier stuff on-camera to pay the bills, but because she never leaves the apartment anymore her figure goes to hell, she loses her audience, and then she's kicked out onto the street and it ends with Yui finding her under a bridge.

That may not be the weirdest left turn I've ever seen porn take, but it was still really really weird. Especially since usually these things are just "characters violated by faceless men." I couldn't help but wonder if it was some sort of sly indictment of the genre, if the artist was trying to make the usual crop of people who would fork over money for what is, let's be honest here, a deeply misogynist genre of fan-product feel bad about what they'd done.

>>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,

Yeah, I may have stepped overly hard on that. Kakifly was forced in the sense that it was dictated by his editors. I have no idea if where on the continuum between "whatever, I'm still getting paid" and "men in suits patiently explained the nature of his contract and precisely what sort of living hell being in breach of it would bring on him" it lies. But from what I've heard, making them look their ages was considered and the decision to not do so came from corporate, not from creative.

-Merc
Keep Rat

(snip)

It wasn't a contest, and I kind of wish you hadn't. Glad I haven't seen that one, though!

>couldn't help but wonder if it was some sort of sly indictment of the
>genre, if the artist was trying to make the usual crop of people who
>would fork over money for what is, let's be honest here, a deeply
>misogynist genre of fan-product feel bad about what they'd done.

Could be. Shit, I stole the one I saw (technically), and it was entirely vanilla, and I still feel kind of bad about it. But then Rule 34 doesn't really work for me anyway unless it's still on-model and in-character, and, well, the K-On! girls whoring themselves out is just never going to tick box 2, particularly if Mio's involved. ... Although I could maybe see Mugi... that was a joke.

(She'd only do girls anyway.)

(That was also a joke.)

(Except it wasn't, because, well, Mugi.)

This went someplace strange! Much like anime fandom itself is wont to do, I suppose. It's like a reflection of the reality. So much for escapism!

>But from what I've heard, making them look their ages was
>considered and the decision to not do so came from corporate, not from
>creative.

In fairness, Mio looked like she's going to as an adult when she was 15 anyway. ... And probably so did Yui, just in the other direction. :)

(Seriously, when Yui and Ui are, say, 25 and 24? Ui's totally going to look like four years older than Yui, just because she's going to dress like a grown-up and Yui is going to dress like, well, Yui.)

--G.
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Someone with a stronger stomach than me and a sociology thesis to write could get more mileage out of this, but it seems like the nicer and sweeter the original property is, the darker the fandom decides to go with it. Take Kantai Collection for a recent example; in the game, you can scrap ships that aren't of any use in order to get more resources to build new ones, or refit a ship by consuming another ship in order to transfer some of Ship A's stats to Ship B. Fairly standard game mechanic, but there's a ton of fanart out there that goes into graphic detail of how this process works, and it generally looks like the deleted scenes from a Saw film.

"This is probably a stupid question, but . . ."

Mm-hmm. Similarly, the toughest and most capable characters are the most likely ones to have... things they plainly don't want to be happening to them... happen to them in R34-land. It's enough to make a man want to go out into the street and start punching strangers sometimes.

--G.
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Of course, there are those who genuinely do get off on this, particularly in Japan - and I'd put money on it being down to the censorship of more, ahem, conventional spank fodder. The tentacle thing, for instance, likely came about because you don't have to pixelate a tentacle when you must pixelate a throbbing purple-helmeted man-carrot. It's a vicious circle, too; people who are a little bit into the weird stuff get drawn deeper into the rabbit hole, and before you know it you're looking at bandaged stumps and so on.

I don't have a sociology degree, but I am quite monstrously pretentious, which has to count for something. =]

---
"She's old, she's lame, she's barren too, // "She's not worth feed or hay, // "But I'll give her this," - he blew smoke at me - // "She was something in her day." -- Garnet Rogers, Small Victory

FiMFiction.net: we might accept blatant porn involving the cast of My Little Pony but as God is my witness we have standards.

Japanese pornographers are in fact these days now required to censor tentacles and other penis-equivalents as well.

-Merc
Keep Rat

Oh, good grief. There needs to be some kind of Godwin's Law equivalent concerning discussions of anime inevitably ending up at tentacle porn.

--G.
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Easily enough coined, but sadly we can't name it after you as there's already a Gryphon's Law out there.

-- Bob
Maybe we can change it to Gryphon's First and Second Law, kind of like Clarke's...
-------------------
My race is pacifist and does not believe in war. We kill only out of personal spite.

To elaborate on this a bit now that I'm not posting from my phone in the bookstore parking lot: I had to go to Bangor today for my annual neurology check-in ("Hey, nothing to report." "Awesome. Put up your hands. Push. Pull. Follow my finger. What color is this? Great. See you next year!"), and when I was done there I decided I'd swing by the one chain bookstore left in the city, because what the hell, it's there.

Now, this is not a terribly good bookstore, it must be admitted. It is markedly inferior to the one that used to occupy the same premises (which was a Borders, just for the record). Its selection is fair-to-poor, and the shelves tend to be very poorly curated, particularly in the sections that don't get a lot of turnover. So I didn't have a lot of hope that I would find anything, but, like I say, it was there.

It happens that the English translation of the K-On! manga is being published by an imprint of the publisher with which Amazon is currently having an astonishingly bitchy little slap fight. You've probably heard of this. In a Wal-Martish effort to strongarm vendors into cutting their front-end prices on ebooks, they're making an example of this one outfit by sandbagging customers' orders for their books - not offering unreleased titles for pre-order, arbitrarily assigning the in-print ones to the "eh, maybe it'll ship in two or three weeks" category, and generally being dicks.

I don't want to get into a long discussion about the business models and/or ethics of online booksellers here, but the fact remains that the K-On! manga translations are affected by this state of affairs, so I figured since I was near a Real Bookstore anyway, I'd go in and see if they had any of them.

And, somewhat to my surprise, they had all six of them, all lined up in a neat little row, in the middle of what was, I have to say, a shockingly well-curated manga section (by comparison to the rest of the store).

So, what the hell, I bought them. And the first volume of Girls und Panzer, because G is near K and I happened to spot it while I was standing there trying to orient myself to the shelf and find the latter.

(As an aside, I only vaguely scanned the nearby titles; I've been out of that scene for a long time and have no idea what most of the current hot properties even are, and not much interest in many of the ones whose titles I do sort of recognize, like Attack on Titan, Bleach, and Naruto. However, while I was running my eye along the span between G and K, I ran across a row of volumes with the title Is This a Zombie?, which I have to say is an excellent title, even if I have zero interest in the zombie apocalypse trope at this time. It makes me think of a version of the "Is this a Jew? Is this a German?" section of Mein Kampf where Young Hitler's real beef is with zombies overrunning Vienna. I'm gonna guess that's not what Is This a Zombie? is actually about.)

Anyway, I went to the checkout, and the teenage register attendant said the usual thing, "Did you find everything you were looking for today?" And you know how usually you lie and say you did even if you didn't, or if you weren't looking for anything specific in the first place, but you don't think it's worth getting into it?

Well, today I actually had the opportunity to reply truthfully, "Do you know, I did. I didn't figure you'd actually have all six of these in stock," as I unloaded my purchases onto the counter...

... and her face lit up and she was suddenly all, "OMG I LOVE THIS SHOW HAVE YOU SEEN IT" and we were chatting away about what a charming program it is and who our favorite member of Hōkago Tea Time is (hers is Mio) and so forth. I was... kind of not expecting to have a ONE OF US! ONE OF US! moment today. It was very nice, and at the same time made me feel acutely out-of-demographic for a moment. Hence my post from the parking lot once I'd finished checking out. :)

--G.
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Feh. The true reader cares nothing for demographics.

-- Bob
-------------------
My race is pacifist and does not believe in war. We kill only out of personal spite.

>And, somewhat to my surprise, they had all six of them, all
>lined up in a neat little row, in the middle of what was, I have to
>say, a shockingly well-curated manga section (by comparison to
>the rest of the store).

This and the following statement are probably quite linked:

>... and her face lit up and she was suddenly all, "OMG I LOVE THIS
>SHOW HAVE YOU SEEN IT" and we were chatting away about what a charming
>program it is and who our favorite member of Hōkago Tea Time is

Most bookstores (including the chains) delegate to at least some degree the upkeep of a section to a single, or small group, of employees (not to say there isn't overlap, but). So, if generally the people working there are register biscuits, they'll follow the corporate advice to the letter (and poorly at that). But, if they're actually quite passionate about the subject, they'll give their bosses<1> a lot of advice about ordering, and will sort of go out of their way to make sure that the shelves look good and are well stocked.

That, or Bangor has a more thriving manga readership than I'm giving them credit for.

--
-Pasha <1> This, of course, assumes that their bosses will accept such advice and aren't morons.
"Don't change the subject"
"Too slow, already did."

>Most bookstores (including the chains) delegate to at least some
>degree the upkeep of a section to a single, or small group, of
>employees (not to say there isn't overlap, but).

Yep -- there's a good chance that that particular cashier was the same person responsible for getting that very same manga in stock. :)

1. "Elided" might be a better term -- in intro econ, we already teach simplified models and theory, but in this case I mean that key components are omitted, with the resulting product losing even basic pedagogical value, let alone any sort of predictive power.

She seemed surprised to discover that they had them, actually (and a little disappointed that I was taking them all away :).

--G.
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*you enter the music shop to discover the shopkeep hiding behind the counter, staring blankly into space and whimpering "my profit margin . . . my profit margin . . ."*
"Oh, so I see you've had the Tsumugi Kotobuki Experience, then?"

"This is probably a stupid question, but . . ."

Well, Mugi's a keyboardist, so canonically, her solo band (pleasantly oxymoronic, that) would be the Tsumugi Kotobuki Project, anyway. :)

The Mio Akiyama Experience, on the other hand, would presumably consist mainly of hiding.

--G.
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--G.
"Good heavens, Miss Akiyama, you're beautiful!" cries Yui at the appropriate moment, Mio nearly drops her pick, Ritchan discovers she can still play while giggling uncontrollably, and everyone wonders why Mugi blushes.
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Not only is Yui a musical prodigy, learning to play apparently by sheer osmosis...

But she is an instinctive master, it appears, at how to work a crowd. She is -darn good- at it.

This is true. She is, of course, helped enormously in this by the fact that she's so charming, even when she's obviously screwing up people just think it's cute. :)

--G.
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Not that I'm complaining, this is awesome. I am reminded of Azumanga Daioh, only with more music.

I... don't believe they ever ceased being a thing, actually. But, er, sorry about that. Disc region coding is the work of Satan. Even the Mandarin thinks so - I have it on excellent authority that one of his rings of power has a "defeat region coding" setting.

--G.
OK, Tony was almost certainly being facetious, but he does make that observation in an actual Iron Man comic. :)
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(You'd think that defeating the villainous powers of region coding would be more in the superhero line of work, but maybe there are just some things too terrible to let slide.)

Hey, wow, we're right back where this thread started; one of the first things I remarked on about this show was how, almost uniquely among anime I've watched, I always want to watch the credits. :) And the full-length versions of the songs are usually even better!

(There's a great joke in the volume of the manga that was coming out when the TV show was announced, about how Yui is concerned because she'll have to sing all the time during the musical numbers in the anime, as opposed to only when she and her speech balloon are actually visible in the panel. :)

One thing I particularly notice about "Cagayake! Girls" as I've listened to it is that, for someone who makes such a big deal about the bassist being the least obvious member of the band, Mio plays some awfully lead-guitary bass parts. Ritsu's the one who's an avowed Who fan, but Mio is often to be found getting seriously Entwistle-y on that action. :)

--G.
"Oooh - Yui! Azusa! Mio! Riiiiit! Mu, gi!"
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It's the first series in awhile where I enjoy sitting through the credits. Think the last series like that was Macross Frontier back in the day. On so many others I've watched, I got into the habit after the first couple episodes of skipping past the opening.

>(There's a great joke in the volume of the manga that was coming out
>when the TV show was announced, about how Yui is concerned because
>she'll have to sing all the time during the musical numbers in the
>anime, as opposed to only when she and her speech balloon are actually
>visible in the panel. :)

Well, it is a serious concern. After all, she may throw out her voice again. And then Mio will have to carry the whole show herself and...Mio, stop whimpering in the corner, it's going to be fine.

--------------------------
CdrMike, Renegade Time Lord

Upon reflection, I suspect the animators of the K-On! and K-On!! opening credits sequences specifically had John Entwistle's style in mind when they made the bits spotlighting Mio's lead-y bassline playing (there's one in each version; see here circa 1:03 for the one from the first season), because she's (unusually for Mio) not using a pick in any of the openings, and, well, compare here at 1:52.

I doubt anything else about Mio is particularly like the man. (She's certainly not very likely to be found dead of a cocaine-induced heart attack, in bed with a stripper, in a Vegas hotel room, at the age of 57.) But just as Ritsu (who is, similarly, unlikely to blow up a hotel bathroom with dynamite* or overdose on anti-alcoholism meds) has the musical spirit of Keith Moon, I'm pretty sure Mio's spirit animal is John Entwistle. :)

(N.B. They can't actually watch that clip all the way through as a band; the bit at the end where Townshend starts trying to break his Les Paul makes Yui huddle protectively around Gīta and cry. Even though by that point, I'm reasonably sure he's just miming it; I think they had stopped randomly breaking their stuff by 1978, except for Moonie's tendency to break cymbals and tom heads just by playing them too hard. That's why he has so many toms in his rig, btw - backups. :)

--G.
* At least if not sorely provoked.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
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Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Given Yui's hyperfocus, getting her addicted to anything besides Gīta may be financially unfeasible.

Peter Eng
--
"That's a lot of money to develop a designer drug for one person."