Partly because of this phenomenon and partly just at random, I've been watching and/or reading a few new-to-me things over the last few weeks, which I might make my own posts about at some point. I'm always at least a little wary about doing this, because there's always the terrible risk that I'll end up with another project and I already have way, way, way too many projects, but lately I seem to be in the mood to roll those dice.

Some impressions, in no particular order:

- Komi Can't Communicate

Shōko Komi is the most beautiful girl in her high school class. Ask anyone! Except Komi, because she won't answer you. Well, can't answer you. She has a communication disorder and can barely bring herself to speak to anyone under any circumstances. She's not a loner--she loves the company of others and wishes she were part of the gang--but that's hard to get across when you can't talk to people. Worse, her schoolmates misinterpret her silence as aloof superiority and... worship her for it, because it's that kind of school. She finds that kind of mortifying, but can't tell anyone off for it, because, well, Komi can't communicate.

I'm a few volumes into the manga version of this (an anime exists, but it's on a streaming service I'm not presently in a position to pay for), and I'm rather taken with its utter silliness. Komi's school is full of lunatics, and as she starts doggedly trying to befriend them with the help of Tadano, her first friend and the one relatively normal schoolmate who has the curious knack of understanding her without her having to say anything, she basically just ends up surrounded by people who are her devoted followers without ever actually comprehending anything that has just happened.

My personal favorite among the supporting cast at this juncture is Katai, a burly kid with an intense gaze who everyone thinks is a terrifying delinquent, but who is in fact just incredibly anxious and has resting murder face, so that his anxious expression looks to everyone else like he's going to kill them in six seconds if he doesn't get their lunch money. He's so bad at communicating with people that Komi is his role model for what he views as her incredibly subtle and effective way with people. She finds that, and him, absolutely baffling, but what the hell. Tadano, on the other hand, reacts to Katai as though the latter were behaving normally, even though he never does, for which Katai seems to be rather in love with him.

Oh yeah, honorable mention to Komi's dad, who seems to have the same problem she has, and mom, who interacts with him more or less like Tadano interacts with Komi. Komi and her father never speak to each other, obviously, but they also never need to in the first place, being attuned on a level that everyone else around them finds completely mystifying.

It's a very long-running series that I haven't yet read most of, but I'm assuming that by volume 20 or so, Komi will have become world president without ever quite understanding how the hell she did that or having any idea what to do with the office now that she has it.

- Laid-Back Camp

This was a recommendation from Peter Eng, and it's cute as heck, but it has a slightly weird effect on me. Because it's such an intensely chill and relaxed show, it makes me paradoxically anxious. When the cute camping girls are camping all by their lonesome in some remote spot, I know nothing bad's going to happen to them, because it's Not That Kind of Show, but man, that's such a horror movie starting scenario, I can never quite stop looking over their shoulders for them, metaphorically speaking.

It reminds me of how I felt watching the episode of K-On!! where they went to the huge music festival. Again in that instance, I knew nothing was going to happen other than the cast having a lot of fun, but, I mean, five teenage girls roaming around mostly unsupervised at night at a giant outdoor rock festival? That gives me the Fear on a totally instinctive level.

Beyond that, which is far more my problem than the show's, it's an adorable show with an adorable cast, and its most troublesome aspect is its intense focus on food, which always makes me hungry when I'm watching it. It also has one of my favorite things in anime, a fourth-wall narrator (who is occasionally interrupted by happenings on screen).

Supporting cast member shoutout: Ena Saitou, solo camper Rin's friend, who seems like the normal one until you look more closely at her interactions with Rin and realize that she's a complete weirdo. In a good way!

- Do It Yourself!!

Stumbled across this one completely at random. Imagine the clumsiest, most accident-prone person you know, with the worst physical luck. Like, I had a friend at WPI who once broke both of her thumbs by sitting down with her hands in her jeans back pockets. Now imagine that that person takes up carpentry. With power tools.

Admittedly, there's some nominative determinism at work here, which even the characters themselves acknowledge, because the clumsy girl who joins the Do It Yourself Club is named Yua Serufu. This is an interesting case of an English pun that only works in Japanese, since in English her name would be Serufu Yua and that totally doesn't work. It's kind of like the converse of Iona Maruichi in that regard. (I'm still a bit proud of that. She's just called Iona in the source. :)

I've only watched the establishing episode of this so far, but I intend to go back and watch some more, because it's cute, and it ticks the usual boxes that finding-your-place shows like this do for me. There's some odd subtext happening that's obvious even in the first episode, though, which I don't know quite what to make of. The show seems to be set in the near future as envisioned by techbros—there are drones making deliveries and the school bus Serufu's next door neighbor rides every day is driverless—but there's a slightly ironic edge to it which feels out of place in a slice-of-life found-niche show like this.

The aforementioned neighbor goes to a fancy high-tech school for elite students, while Serufu barely passed the entrance exams for the cheapest, smallest, implied-to-be-worst school in town—which is actually on the same block as the fancy one, in a tiny building that's utterly dwarfed by the other school. So Serufu's neighbor and her classmates literally as well as figuratively look down on her school all day, every day. After school, she rides her bicycle laboriously home up the hill, and her neighbor's automatic bus passes her partway up. She and her neighbor are childhood friends, but since Serufu didn't get into the fancy school, the neighbor girl is perpetually angry at her, which goes straight over her head because Serufu has the Yui Hirasawa love-is-the-answer gene.

Anyway, it's a very weird social (but evidently not economic? they live right next door to each other in houses that are in different styles, but the same size) dynamic that feels out-of-place against the rest of the show, but it seems like it's there to be developed into something else later on, which may make it retroactively less awkward. I suppose we'll see.

- Chainsaw Man

What... the fuck?!

- Lycoris Recoil

Cute girls doing cute things, if you think extrajudicial assassinations to Prevent Crimes is cute. I'm really bemused by this one. It's the kind of thing that I would have been "aw hell yeah"-level totally on board with at 19, but at 49 my immediate reaction to the first few minutes of episode 1 was "due process, motherfuckers? Jesus wept." Also, it's so painfully obvious that the agency the protagonists work for is really the Bad Guys, I mean, that cab is coming down Broadway with its doors open, like the FLAG heel turn in that crappy Knight Rider remake, and I'm so, so tired of that trope. I dunno, I wanted to be into this, but I don't think I can with it. Would make a cool MMO premise, though. Kind of like The Secret World without the supernatural stuff.

- My Dress-Up Darling

I ran across this at random on the Amazon Kindle app, probably as a recommendation after I started reading Komi Can't Communicate, and it's gloriously bizarre in a completely different way. Like Komi, the main characters are an odd couple who stumbled together by fate, but instead of a girl with a communication problem and a guy whose fondest, most unattainable wish is to have a normal life, they're an awkward dude who is into an extremely archaic artisan craft and a girl who you automatically assume is going to be one of Those Girls and who kind of is, except that she totally isn't.

Wakana Gojo is the orphaned grandson of a kindly old guy who makes hina dolls, those elaborately dressed traditional dolls used in the elaborate wedding dioramas on the Shinto Hinamatsuri holiday. He wants to succeed his grandfather in this increasingly esoteric craft and has basically no other interests. He makes no attempt at socializing, even though he'd like to, because he's convinced that his interests are too weird and narrow for normal people and he'd just bring everybody down if he tried to get involved in the Social World of High School.

One day he's in the home ec classroom after hours, using one of the sewing machines to finish a piece of doll clothing he couldn't finish at home because his ancient treadle-powered machine broke down, when a classmate comes in and catches him at it. It's Marin Kitagawa, one of the Popular Girls in his class--very stylish, constantly flirting with the ragged edge of the dress code, has her hair done in a blonde-to-red gradient like Yūdachi Kai Ni. Gojo figures he's in for some massive ridicule now that this queen-of-the-class type has caught him making doll clothes...

... but she is, in fact, amazed. Just, like, hugely impressed. So impressed that she reveals why she's there, which was for a similar purpose to his own. It turns out Marin is a massive nerd who wants to take up cosplay, but she's terrible at handicrafts. On the spur of the moment, she asks Gojo to make her cosplay clothes for her, and his life goes straight off the rails and into outer space.

I don't know if I can put the right words in the right order to convey how much I love these two characters. They're exactly the right pair of idiots for each other in a way that romcoms often aspire to and miss. Gojo is earnest, honest and honorable to a fault, constantly berating himself for any perceived failure to act in the most respectful manner, and he finds himself confronted with an incredibly beautiful young woman who has pretty much no filter, little sense of personal space, and no trace of social anxiety. He's terrified that if he's seen with her at school, it'll hurt her standing with the other Popular Kids, but Marin gives zero fucks about that, introducing him to her friends (who are baffled by the whole business but, to give credit where it's due, not stereotypically mean about it), and pals around with him in public like it ain't no thing.

Also, although he proves to have a sharp eye for extrapolating character designs and designing costumes for other people, he has no sense of personal style whatsoever. Apart from his school uniforms, all his clothes are identical dark blue jinbei. Left to his own devices, he dresses like a janitor from the 1930s.

As for Marin, she's not what it says on the tin in the most refreshing way. She somehow manages to be intensely stylish without pretense, giving the impression that she looks so fashionable because she actually likes the look rather than because it's popular. She talks like a stereotypical teenage airhead (the manga translation and the anime subtitles both give her a sort of third-generation valley-girl accent, the kind of girl who says things like "totes" and pronounces online abbreviations verbatim, e.g., "oh-em-gee"), but so unselfconsciously it's not even annoying. Probably her most appealing trait, though, after her complete lack of filter, is that she's straight-up savage to people who make fun of other people's interests, even when she's not into those things herself. "It's important to have things you won't compromise about," she tells Gojo in one of their first real conversations.

Gojo's parents died when he was young, and the one female cousin of his we see is several years older, so it's likely that he had never really spoken to a woman his own age before that moment in the home ec classroom. He was not prepared for Typhoon Marin to blow into his life.

Also, the first character whose costume she wants him to make is from an X-rated video game called Saint Slippery's Humiliation Academy for Girls 2.

Yep.

So anyway, a few scattered impressions of some things I've been looking at recently. Probably not going to do anything with any of them. Hopefully not going to do anything with them, because I'm already doing more things than I can ever hope to actually get done. But it's been nice to just get a feel for some of what's going on in the world lately.

--G.
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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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