7. Celty Sturluson – Durarara!!

Seiyuu: Sawashiro Miyuki (Performance: 5/5)

Character Design: (Designed by Kishida Takahiro, based on designs by Yasuda Suzuhito). Celty is flat-out sexy in her black jumpsuit and on her badass motorcyle. She’s one of the few characters with a full figure that I still find completely hot. Doesn’t bother me one bit that there’s a black mist where her head’s supposed to be – gotta say, I’m with Dr. Shinra on that one! Celty has the greatest helmet of all time, and I’m sure it’s no accident that the vents on top resemble cat ears. She completes the ‘badass babe’ image to a tee, and then has a great enough personality to deserve it.

Personal Bias/Moe Traits: I’m a huge sucker for ‘cool’ chicks. I dream of dating a girl who rides a motorcycle, and no one rides a motorcycle like Celty (whose bike, incidentally, looks like something fucking Batman would use). But Celty’s a whole lot more than just a badass – she has a surprisingly sensitive side, and really acts just like a woman her (ostensible) age. She’s a bit bashful, a bit shy, but very strong and unwilling to put up with bullshit. She does give in to Shinra’s advances from time to time, but it’s more because he’s ruthless in his ambition and not incorrect than because of any weakness on her own part.

I think a big part of how I came to adore Celty stemmed from Miyuki Sawashiro’s vocal performance, which is ironic in that Celty can’t actually speak. Sawashiro was able to convey a personality that let me always respect and admire the character, even in her major moments of weakness – I could appreciate that Celty was always a strong person who’s troubles were just that frustrating, which made her easy to emotionally connect with; and that’s saying something for a character with no god damn head! Celty also had a number of cute, sexy, and badass moments, which all rounded her out as a lovable character.

Distortions of My Imagination: Celty is pretty straightforward, with her emotions usually laid bare on the table, and its pretty clear where her relationship with Shinra is headed, so I can’t say that I’ve done much mental transforming to her. Picturing her naked doesn’t count.

Crowning Moment of Love: I loved all of Celty’s cute moments with Shinra, especially in the second half of the show, but of course, you can’t really talk about Celty without bringing up her big moment in episode 11. Frustrated that the long search for her head has reached a dead end, Celty finally takes Shinra’s advice and says fuck it, I am who I am, and I don’t need a god damn head! She then proceeds to ride her bike straight down the side of a building and then beat down about 20 mercenaries, all while screaming out her pain and cleaning herself a fresh slate on which to etch her name into the city.

Title: Dullahan

8. T.K. – Angel Beats!

Seiyuu: Michael Rivas (Performance: 5/5)

Character Design: (Designed by Hirata Katsuzo, based on designs by Na-Ga). Angel Beats has some decent-looking school uniforms, but no one wears them with more style than T.K., who brings his urban stylings to the design. He’s known for his trademark red bandana that casts a permanent shadow over his eyes and the funky blonde hair beneath, and his gangsta look is completed by a necklace that appears to have handcuffs hanging from it. Rather than the design itself, though, what truly makes T.K. badass are his poses and moves, wherein he seems to be permanently stuck in a break-dance video.

Personal Bias/Moe Traits: T.K. is a comedy character through and through, which wouldn’t ordinarily qualify for a spot on this list; T.K. is special because his act is legendary. His only dialog comes in random, hilarious English song titles and phrases, and he spends most of his time dancing somewhere in the background of scenes. Whereas the other guys in Angel Beats are usually some form of idiot, T.K. seems to be brilliant in his own way, although dense in his constant need to dance through any situation. His general badassery was one of the most memorable and lasting features of Angel Beats, and he’s the kind of character that you just have to love.

Distortions of My Imagination: Because of the scene I’ll be talking about below, I actually think that T.K. might secretly be a deep character. His presence is almost always played for laughs or randomness in the show, but it’s after this moment of apparent introspection that T.K. finally appears to be human and, perhaps, emotional. Was this sudden onset of depth also meant to be comedic? Perhaps, and if so, it was successful, but it really does make me think of T.K. as a more lovable and interesting character because of it.

Crowning Moment of Love: The aforementioned scene comes during episode 11, after Yurippe, Otonashi, and Kanade tell everyone else about their last-ditch plan to leave this world. They tell the group that its up to themselves to decide if they want to find peace and go beyond, or stay and fight; and afterwards, we see all of the major characters on their own, being introspective and thinking hard about the upcoming battle. In this introspection montage, we get a 10-second clip of T.K. in a large, dark, empty hall at night, shoes squeaking like crazy as he dances his fucking heart out with as much intensity as possible. It was the ultimate moment of gratification regarding T.K. to see him use his dancing to work himself through frustration and think about the heavy things going on. After that, T.K. was officially a real character.

Title: GET CHANCE AND LUCK!

It’s easy to see why FullMetal Alchemist: Brotherhood was given the insane budget that it got – the show was created with Western success in mind. The original FMA has been one of the most successful anime to hit in the US since it came out, with a throng of rabid fans who would definitely eat up another installment. The decision to remake the series made perfect sense, considering that there’s almost laughably little similarity between the plots of the manga and the first anime; therefor, it wouldn’t be too annoying having to rewatch things you may have already seen before, and then you’d launch off into a whole new direction. Besides, manga fans have been bitching about the original show for years, so there was already bound to be a hungry group of people that wanted this show badly.

Because of this almighty budget, Studio Bones could pretty much do whatever the fuck they wanted with the show. Whereas another anime adaption might’ve cut out and condensed the manga to fit into the amount of episodes they were given to fill, Brotherhood ran for however God-damn long it needed to, clocking in at 64 episodes. And I don’t think there’s ever been a series of this length to have such consistently high-quality animation throughout. Even in the few episodes where eagle-eyed viewers can see animation shortcuts here and there, Bones never, ever allows the show to look poor, and more often than not, it looks amazing.

Take, for one, the action sequences. I’ve been convinced that in the past three years or so, Bones has been perfecting action choreography through series like Soul Eater and X’amd and, most importantly, in the movie Sword of the Stranger (which contains the single greatest fight scene I’ve ever witnessed, anime or otherwise.) This training is put to use all throughout Brotherhood, which also contains probably more high-tension action sequences than any other anime that I’ve seen. (This is no doubt also a part of being sponsored by Square Enix, which always means that a series will have some kick-ass fights.)

You'll be able to read my thoughts on the characters in my ongoing Digiboy's Character Database of Love series. Kimblee was one of my favorites, and I intend to cosplay him in the future.

Personally, I’ve always hated both anime and live-action movies that try to depict fights between super-powered characters, because it never feels like the character do as much with their powers as they could. There were a couple of fights in Brotherhood that had this problem (basically all the ones with Pride), but in others, I was impressed by some incredible choreography that combined fist-fighting and alchemy seamlessly with constant new and creative ways for the alchemy to be used. (I think the high-point of alchemy integration was in the fight between Ed, Al, and Scar in episode 20-something.) But even without the alchemy powers, the series had some unforgettable fights. Every scene that involved Wrath was fucking badass, especially all of his fights with Greed, such as one in the 40-ep range inside Wrath’s house with some truly eye-popping visuals.

Leaving aside animation, Brotherhood was one of the most well and carefully thought-out anime I’ve seen. After all, it’s not often that such a big adventure series with a huge cast and an in-depth world manages to keep making sense throughout the show, and doesn’t resort to explaining everything through last-minute bullshit. I’ll admit that one of my problems with Brotherhood was how the heroes sometimes guessed the one true answer out of infinite possibilities with relative ease, but it doesn’t really matter if the plot moves along smoothly, and it’s not exactly like I haven’t come to expect this in any kind of story. Brotherhood’s pacing was pretty tight, never really boring me in the 64-episode run, though there were a couple of episodes I didn’t like (the big fight against Pride in the forest for 2 eps being the low point of the series for me.)

But the level of thought goes beyond just the plot; mangaka Hiromu Arakawa really poured everything into this series, creating her characters until she knew them as people. (Do a little digging outside the main series, and you’ll learn a lot of side crap about most of the characters that comes from fan books and interviews.) There are many little touches of finesse to the story that make it all the more meaningful; for instance, how each of the homunculi is killed in a way that reflects the punishment of their sin in Dante’s Inferno, and how the ones killed by humans were killed by whoever most held that sin. Or on a smaller level, how almost every military officer in the series is named after weapons or combat vehicles used during the first World War. Little things like this are what I love to see, because it shows the level that the creator’s heart was poured into the story.

I couldn't have predicted how badass Van Hohenheim would turn out to be.

Perhaps what struck me as Brotherhood’s most important element was it’s ending. Anime as a whole is so known for terrible and disappointing endings that many fans don’t even go into a show expecting a decent ending, and take whatever they can get. It’s very rare for the climax and resolution of an anime to last more than three episodes at most, and they’re almost always regarded as ‘rushed’. Bones is actually known for this themselves, with the rushed climax of Eureka Seven often being cited as it’s deepest flaw.

The FullMetal Alchemist manga had an extremely long climax, and it was animated with just as much care and time taken; it lasts twelve whole episodes – the length of your entire average anime series. It takes it’s damn good time to tie up every loose end, give every character the final battle that they deserve, and wrap things up with a shiny bow. But more than just being such a long and amazing climax, the series had the single most satisfying ending that I’ve yet to witness in an anime. It was the first time that an ending gave me exactly what I wanted throughout the entirety of the show. I wanted Ed and Al to get their bodies back and finally fucking live in peace; I wanted them to settle down with the women they love and raise families; I wanted Roy Mustang to realize his ambition to be the new leader of the country; and all the smaller resolutions worked to put a huge grin on my face. In a word, the ending was perfect.

The reason I say this element was the most important is that much more than myself, the rest of the Western anime audience has been begging for an ending like this for as long as I’ve been in the community. Years and years of people complaining that ‘the ending to X show ruined the series for them,’ or that ‘what they wanted to happen wasn’t fulfilled,’ or XYZetc, have finally been put to rest.

Pure Badass.

There’re more reasons that this show appeals heavily to the Western audience: It’s a fairly dark series, with many character deaths (something which always seems to be appreciated), a consistent and interesting plot, and many cool characters (plenty of pretty boys that guys can still love, and hot women that girls can still enjoy) – all of this in combination with the stellar fights and a perfect ending create a true anime juggernaut that deserves it’s place at the top of Western fandom.

FullMetal Alchemist: Brotherhood – Completed (9.8)

Brotherhood also contained most of what I look for in a series. It doesn’t quite reach the upper echelons of my favorites list, because it doesn’t touch me on that mysterious personal level that a show has to reach to get there, but it’s very, very close to what I’d consider ‘perfection.’ I think I would consider Brotherhood to be the second or third most well-made anime series I’ve seen, with the top chair being taken by Infinite Ryvius, and Eureka Seven competing for second place. I want to say that Brotherhood wins for it’s spectacular ending, but I also think that Eureka Seven more thoroughly developed it’s characters, so I can’t really choose.

5. Sakata Gintoki – Gintama

Seiyuu: Sugita Tomokazu (Performance: 5/5)

Character Design: (Designed by Takeuchi Shinji, based on designs by Sorachi Hideaki). On an ordinary basis, most of the character designs in Gintama aren’t very attractive – they only become such when the animators decide to make it so. Gintoki is, if nothing else, the most recognizable, and probably the coolest character in the show. He’s known most for his naturally wavy silver hair and the way that he wears his strange outfit (the logic of which is made apparent in an episode where Gintoki explains to Sorachi-sensei that a shounen hero must be recognizable by his silhouette alone). His black-on white clothes with red trim on the black part and blue wavy designs on the white part is a striking and cool outfit that I could see looking good even in real life.

Personal Bias/Moe Traits: Of every character I’ve seen, Gintoki is the one I relate to most (especially since the cast of Gintama is a parallel for my family and friends). For the most part, he’s an irritating guy. He’s lazy, stubborn, disrespectful, mean-spirited, and is trapped somewhere between acting like an old man and a small child. He has an obsession with all things sugary and unhealthy, and his doctor is always warning him about the onset of diabetes – not that it stops him. Gintoki is fully willing to lie and cheat in order to win, an always tries to save his own ass first and foremost.

But even with all that said, Gintoki is still a great guy at heart, and a very reliable friend. When it comes time to get the job done, he gets it done right. He knows how and when to get serious, and he has powerful ideals and codes that he holds himself to. Gintoki is a mentor to several other characters, and there’s no denying that he helps them to grow as people. Kagura and Shinpachi look up to and respect him in spite of his many flaws that they have to put up with, and Kagura in particular tends to pick up all of his traits (good and bad). Watching him and the family of Gintama’s characters, I’m always reminded of my own life.

Distortions of My Imagination: Honestly, Gintama doesn’t leave much to the imagination; not because the characters aren’t intricate enough, but because the show covers everything imaginable in the course of its run. I suppose if there’s one thing I impose on Gintoki, it’s that I create his life more fully to reflect my own. There’s not much that we don’t learn about him, but if I had to fill in the blanks, I’d use myself.

Crowning Moment of Love: There’re no shortage of great Gintoki moments, be they comedic, dramatic, or just heartwarming, but the one that sticks out the most in my mind is from a very early episode; in fact, the moment is actually quite legendary as an introduction to Gintoki’s ways. Towards the end of the episode, and after a long series of funny events, things wind down to a duel between Gintoki and the captain of the Shinsengumi, Kondo Isao.

Gintoki shows up with his usual wooden blade against Kondo’s real katana, and when Kondo asks if he’s trying to make a fool of him, Gintoki says some manly stuff about being able to lay down his own life, but not the life of his opponent. Impressed by him, Kondo tosses his sword aside and asks Shinpachi to throw a wooden sword down to him, but before he can, Gintoki tosses his own sword to Kondo, saying that he’ll let him use his favorite weapon, and then takes Shinpachi’s sword himself. Kondo is moved by his spirit and the duel begins… and when Kondo goes to swing the wooden sword, it suddenly breaks in half. After spectacularly owning Kondo, Gintoki reveals that he’d spent the time before the duel scoring a deep cut into his blade and makes fun of Kondo for accepting a weapon from his enemy. This is so fucked up that even his friends view it as a moral event horizon and lose all faith in him. I, for one, was so impressed that a main character could be such a bastard that I knew he’d become one of my favorites.

Title: Ichigo Gyunyu

6. Kobayakawa Yutaka – Lucky Star

Seiyuu: Hasegawa Shizuka (Performance: 4/5)

Character Design: (Designed by Horiguchi Yukiko, based on designs by Yoshimizu Kagami). Lucky Star is my second-favorite show for character designs, but my thoughts are usually centered on Kagami, Konata, and Tsukasa. Yutaka is less attractive than them from a sexual standpoint, but she’s ultra-cute to make up for it. Her wide eyes, innocent expression, and even her uniform that seems a bit to big for her combine with her small stature to create a total image of purity moe. I’m not entirely sure how I feel about her hair, because it’s cute, but it’s also really big (and I am an enemy of big hair), however, I think she pulls it off well enough.

Personal Bias/Moe Traits: As Konata puts it, Yutaka is a “walking pillar of moe.” She’s tiny, cute, sickly, innocent, and adorable, which is nothing that I’m opposed to, but at the same time, it’s not ordinarily something that I’d find myself attached to. Actually, Yutaka didn’t leave a big impression on me the first two times I watched Lucky Star, but on my recent rewatch, I grew fond of her. I guess it’s because Yutaka is cute and innocent but never annoying or ignorant. Oblivious-moe is my least favorite kind of moe (with Yui Hirasawa being one notable exception), but Yutaka is smart and fun enough that it works for her. She’s ignorant of many things and a bit naive, but she’s able to understand things once she finds out about them. I think she’s definitely what you’d call a ‘late bloomer,’ but I think she’ll manage to do fine as an adult.

Essentially, then, you could say that I love Yutaka just for being a really cute, smart, and uber-moe loli, and that’s probably as true as it gets. But there’s one more big thing…

Distortions of My Imagination: I want Yutaka to be gay for Iwasaki Minami. The show plays around a lot with the potential misunderstandings about their relationship, especially when their fujoshi manga-ka buddy starts using them as inspirations to draw yuri porn. Sure, Yutaka’s utter desire to be close to Minami at all times could be considered in the vein of your average magical girl’s friendship with anyone, but I think there’s more to it then that, even if it goes over Yutaka’s own head. Yutaka is pretty aggressive about making time to spend with Minami and keeping close to her. I can’t exactly picture Yutaka nor Minami with a guy, but picturing them together is almost too easy. I don’t doubt that Yutaka *does* have the tenacity to initiate a relationship if it seemed to be appropriate, and as for Minami, she seems like the type who’d go with the flow into the situation and manage to be happy with it. They make such a cute couple~

Crowning Moment of Love: I don’t have any single awesome Yutaka moments, but if I had to chose, it’s a scene from later in the series wherein Yutaka asks Hiyori where she gets the inspirations for her manga. (You can watch the clip here). When Hiyori answers that she mostly finds inspiration from personal experience, Yutaka gets embarrassed, revealing that Konata had let her read Hiyori’s yuri manga. She even compliments that the story was quite good. This scene was a little surprising, because I expected the joke on Yutaka’s obliviousness to keep going (well, she does remain oblivious to the fact that the manga’s based on her and Minami). Instead, Yutaka has read the story and enjoyed it, which I felt was the first time that the anime wasn’t treating Yutaka like a child, in a way. It was that scene which convinced me that Yutaka’s relationship with Minami was a real possibility.

Title: Minimum Tempo

Looking pretty Ginko there, Natsume.

I decided to watch Natsume Yuujinchou as part of my current plot to watch everything Takahiro Omori has directed (with the exceptions of his kids shows and Hell Girl.) No Name and I sat on the couch and watched both seasons over the course of 2 days, but it didn’t so much feel like watching anime as it did just letting the anime wash over us.

NatsuYuujin is very relaxing – sometimes, maybe too relaxing, as my mind would wander off in the middle of an episode if I wasn’t careful. I got a  sensation of ‘waking up’ after each episode, wherein I’d feel like all of my blood had coagulated in the back of my head, and my eyes were out of focus (actually, my eyes were out of focus, but that’s because my eyes are broken, and had nothing to do with the show.) No Name stated before we began that he’d probably cry at various points during the show, since he’d remembered doing so before, and indeed, I’d seen others report the same back when the show was airing, but he surprisingly didn’t cry at all. Even when the series got emotional, it was less of a pressuring emotion, and more of a soothing emotion.

NatsuYuujin has a thick layer of melancholy and loneliness about it, like sitting in a windowsill on a rainy day when you wanted to go outside. It’s not a bad feeling persay, but it made me reflect on my own brand of loneliness, and made me want, like Natsume does, to make connections. Which is also why it’s so satisfying when Natsume spends the whole of the show forging connections and friendships and coming out of his shell.

Reiko kicked ass, too. Total GMILF.

Natsume has a hard time making friends because he’s been traumatized by people in general throughout his life, but it’s easy to see that everyone cares about him beyond just trying to protect him like he tries to do for them, and over time, it becomes clear that he can really create those mutual relationships.

Natsume is an excellent male lead, because he’s able to be emotional without being useless. He’s a great kid and would be an awesome friend, but he hasn’t learned to trust people, and he shields himself off completely – it’s up to the rest of the cast to help him through it, but that also brings us to another great part of the show, in that Natsume really isn’t ‘close’ to anyone. There’s a certain level of distance between him and the people who would probably call him their friend.

Nyanko-sensei (voiced superbly by Kazuhiko Inoue), his would-be partner, tries to act like they aren’t friends, and like he’s just waiting for a chance to eat Natsume and take the book of friends, but in truth, he’s fallen for Natsume, and really does care about him as a friend. There’s a point in the second season where Natsume realizes that in Nyanko-sensei’s long life, he must’ve seen all the humans that he tried to get close to die, and probably doesn’t try to get close to humans anymore because of it. One of the coolest moments at the end of the show is when Nyanko-sensei stops being tsundere for a moment and tells Natsume that he’ll do his best to enjoy this ‘brief moment’ that is Natsume’s life.

Oh God, here come the traps~ <3

NatsuYuujin has a great cast of supporting characters who, by the way, are Gay Beyond All Reason (Or ‘GayBAR,’ as I like to say). Natori Shuuichi was the most frequently re-appearing character, the self-proclaimed “fabulous” actor/exorcist. Natori made a lot of unmistakable passes at Natsume, and it’s all the more believably gay when he’s voiced by Akira Ishida, the ultimate ambiguously-gay voice. I watched this right after Gakuen Alice, wherein he played the even-more-fabulous Narumi-sensei, and I couldn’t stop thinking about the connection while I watched the show (I will say, however, that Natori wasn’t as charming as Narumi-sensei). I also enjoyed Natori’s Satsuki Yukino-voiced vassal, but I don’t have a further comment on her.

The straightest character in the show was the Miyuki Sawashiro-voiced Iinchou, but her many attempts to ride Natsume’s Yuujinchou were thwarted as Natsume counted on his friends to find every way of getting rid of her. The high-point of gayness in the series was when Natsume’s friend Tanuma (I think?) spends most of episode 13 (S1) getting rid of the Iinchou at the summer festival so that Natsume could handle his youkai issues/spend all of his time with Tanuma. Which, in some roundabout fashion, brings me to my favorite character in the series.

And by 'youkai issues' I mean 'shota love'~

Which was the Yajima Akiko-voiced kitsune (I don’t believe he had a name), who was put in the series as a terrorist plot to make me into a shotacon. There’s really no excuse here – regardless of dressing, acting, and having the voice of a girl, I knew that the kitsune was a boy from the first minute he was on-screen, and then I spent the rest of that episode and the last one ‘squeeing’ over him. If that wasn’t bad enough, there’re at least two more adorable shotas who get attached to Natsume in the course of the series (thankfully all of them are centuries-old youkai, though), but kitsune was still my favorite. It’s amazing how this show managed to turn the moe up to 11 when it came to the traps, and there was also a ridiculously-adorable little girl who showed up briefly in a couple of first-season episodes. However, nothing even compares to the ‘baby dragon’ from season 2, for whom No Name and I both cried “SO MOE I COULD DIIIIIIEEEE!”

SO MOE I COULD-

Natsume Yuujinchou (+Zoku) – Finished (8.4)

I don’t think there’s much more to say. There were great episodes and moments and characters all throughout the show, but it’s just so iyashikei that I can’t do them real justice by talking about them instead of urging you to watch the show. If I could describe my feelings towards the series in one word, it’d be ‘yukkurishiteitene!’

(By the way, this post title is a reference to one of Ben Yahtzee Croshaw’s Zero Punctuation videos. I can’t remember which, though.)

If you’ve already seen this episode, you can skip down to the parenthesis below or skim the summary to refresh your memory.

In this episode, Sakura Mikan is upset because in the time that she’s been attending Alice Academy (where she’s not permitted to leave), she hasn’t received any mail from her grandpa, despite having sent him letters every day. The letters had gone through her teacher, Narumi-sensei, who’d been her primary help and trust source since entering the academy. Thanks to the special powers of the other students in her class, Mikan is able to observe her grandpa, and finds him arguing with a mailman that he should’ve received some letters from his granddaughter, but hadn’t. What’s more, Mikan notices that his health seems to be on the decline, most likely out of worry for her well-being.

Upset greatly by this, especially because her grandpa doesn’t actually know that she’s attending the academy at all, Mikan tries to find out why her mail isn’t reaching it’s destination. Once again, the other students’ powers come to her aid, and she finds out the shocking truth that Narumi-sensei has been hiding the letters in a drawer at his desk. Evidently, Mikan isn’t allowed to send mail out of the school, and what’s more, the ‘higher-ups’ of the academy are keeping close watch on her for unknown reasons. Mikan goes into a fit over this and accuses Narumi-sensei of being a traitor. Because of her hysterics, one of the other teachers punishes her to seclusion in her room for the rest of the night, but her friends easily bypass the robotic guard to see her.

Mikan teams up with friend Ruka-pyon, who’s a master of animals, and plans to have a huge eagle fly Mikan over the school gate (they can go no further, as an electric fence surrounds the school that would shock the bird.) Mikan successfully escapes, but within minutes, she’s nearly captured by some yakuza-looking men who imply that they plan to sell her into slave labor, as well as that they probably hang out around this school just waiting for someone they can take. Thankfully, Narumi-sensei comes to her rescue, beats up the bad guys, and gets her back into the school, although he gets grazed by a thug’s bullet in the process.

Back inside the school, Narumi-sensei reassures Mikan that he’s sorry for deceiving her, and that he wants to be her ally and help to make the school a better place, but there are mysterious rules binding him which he can’t really discuss. Once Mikan has calmed down, she goes to bed, but can’t get to sleep. Which leads us to this scene…

(Sadly, I fail hard and don’t know how to rip audio. Instead, I set the clip to Memory Past from the Casshern Sins OST by Kaoru Wada.)

The first point of interest in this scene is Mikan’s hair. This is the first time we’ve seen Mikan with braids, and those in combination with her pink pajamas, tired eyes, and the pillow clutched in her hands create an unmistakable image of childishness. Mikan is only about 11 years-old, but because of her manic energy, it can be hard to consider her age. In this scene, she’s showing a lot of her childish vulnerability and reliance, and the appearance is the first thing to sell it home.

The way that Mikan talks about her grandpa and how she slept with him when she was afraid of ghosts and how he snored like a vacuum cleaner does a better job of expressing her homesickness than any amount of flat-out begging to go home. She talks about him almost as if he’s died already, as the level on which she misses him has reached the point of grief. Note also how she’s clinging tightly to the blanket – an addition to the appearance of vulnerability and desperation for security.

This all culminates into Mikan straight-up asking Narumi-sensei if she can call him ‘grandpa’ (jii-chan). She’s come around full-circle to trusting him the most again, but more importantly, she’s desperate for someone to trust and cling to. She needs a parental figure of some kind, and since her grandpa is the only one she’s ever had, there’s no greater title of trust in her mind.

Narumi-sensei’s reaction that he’s only 20 years old is exactly what I expected, but he turns around and completely defies expectation when he doesn’t tell Mikan to call him ‘nii-chan’ (older brother/young man), but instead to call him ‘otou-san’ (dad). Talk about a reliable answer! Narumi-sensei knows that what Mikan needs is a parental figure, not just someone she can trust. He appoints himself as her dad for now, and there’s no doubt that this is a bond of trust on the highest level.

It’s a shame that I couldn’t get the audio for this as well, because I love Ishida Akira‘s performance as Narumi-sensei. His voice is very soothing and cool, sort of sexy without being perverse. In this scene, the way he says ‘hai, hai’ after Mikan repeats ‘otou-san’ brings a smile to my face. I guess it’s to be expected from the guy who plays Nagisa Kaworu.

Of course, this post will be full of appropriate imagery~ art by shirokuro http://gelbooru.com/index.php?page=post&s=list&tags=shirokuro

Let me clarify some things here and now: I do not have sources to cite. That’s not to say that these are all my ideas – actually, I couldn’t have come to these conclusions if not for the readings of many people in many places. Part of why I’m not citing is because I’m lazy, but also part of it is because I don’t really want to get other people involved in what I have to say. There’s a reason that you’re reading this paper – to understand. It wouldn’t do you any good to read advanced writings if you don’t even know the basics. I’m not going to give you training wheels – today, you take my word for it, and tomorrow, you do your own god damn research, confirm what I’ve said, and develop your own ideas. Ordinarily, I’d save a long, messy, and personal post like this for my side-blog, but I think this post might just be a little bit too important for that.

Also, I don’t mind if you disagree with stuff and want to leave a comment about it, but please don’t give me too much shit in doing so. If I read something like “Wow, talk about missing the point,” at the start of a comment, then that comment will either be deleted or that part of it replaced by some immature joke.

Starting off, before we even talk about otaku sexuality, let’s talk about sexuality in general. It’s accepted fact that the drive to have sex and produce offspring is inherent in human beings. In order for humans to determine what other humans they’re capable of mating with, they have an instinctual ‘sex drive.’ Millennia of evolution have taught us what humans are capable of producing strong offspring, and therefor our sex drive is attuned to seeking those kinds of people.

Or so you’d think, but there’s a complication in that equation, which is society and thought. The psychology of a human being is dependent on a combination of their instincts, which keep them alive on a base level, and their experiences, which allow them to adapt to an environment and better succeed at staying alive. Because the best way to stay alive is to work with other humans in a group, societies have been developed. However, not all human beings are united in one society, and therefor those differ depending on certain factors.

Societies develop rules in order for humans to coexist with minimal conflict, but rules in and of themselves are just concepts – they aren’t actual laws of existence, but conceptual laws thought up by a group. Because laws are not instinctual, they must be taught to humans, so that those humans can adapt to the society containing those rules and fit in with it, bettering their chance at staying alive. In order for humans to accept laws, there must be an incentive to obey, so as to prevent disputes on what laws a society should be held to. That incentive most prominently exists in the form of religion.

art by ecocube http://gelbooru.com/index.php?page=post&s=list&tags=ecocube&pid=0

Using religion, humans can be persuaded into following a set of rules. This is accomplished by the threat of death for non-compliance, and in some religions, the promise of immortality for compliance. Once humans have been tricked into believing that they must follow the rules, they will do so, and furthermore raise children that know from birth that they must hold to those rules. Religion isn’t the only way to go about establishing a set of rules, but it’s the most prominent and powerfully effective.

Because humans want to follow rules and fit in with society to better their chances of survival, they develop things like ‘taste’ to trick their mind into disobeying it’s instincts to conform with societal norms. This is where I finally bring up sexuality: we have seen throughout history and different cultures how the sexual desires of humans have changed to fit in line with society. For instance, a woman is capable of having children safely at as early as 16 years-old (shooting high), and in some cultures, past or present, it would’ve been socially acceptable for a 16 year-old female to have sex. In our society, the bar is set at age 18 for social acceptability. As such, humans in our society have had their minds trained to find persons above the age of 18 more attractive, because by doing so, they can continue to fit in with society.

However, the people of our society are far from fully-trained. Evolutionarily and culturally speaking, it hasn’t been that long since our society still found it acceptable to have sex at a younger age. Depending on a person’s mental situation, they may or may not still find younger persons attractive. If a person were to see, let’s say, a 15 year-old who appeared to be in peak mating condition in accordance with either their base instincts or trained mentality, then they’ll find that person to be sexually attractive, regardless of social acceptance.

Besides their evolutionary base instincts, a human being can never develop thought that does not comply with their experiences throughout their lifetime. The root of psychology is to explore how the experiences of a person will effect the way that they think. In these modern days, psychology is arguably one of the most important studies to be undertaken, as the nature of our society has produced far more psychological variants than ever before. The United States in particular is known to house many more mentally challenged, psychopathic, and mentally disordered people than any other country. The reason for this is that our society is, for lack of a better phrase, all over the place. (And this isn’t to say that other countries aren’t in the exact same boat, but I think that the US is the most torn of us all.)

The sisters Remilia and Flandre Scarlet: Approximately 500 years old. Art by takahero http://gelbooru.com/index.php?page=post&s=list&tags=takahero

The framework of the US denies communication. Our country is extremely large, and even getting down to the level of our cities, our infrastructure and ways of life prevent communication and trust between people in a community. Our country is instead divided into millions of micro-communities which may or may not have anything to do with one-another – their training may be different from that of any other community, making each one an effectively individual society. Some of these societies may associate themselves on a larger level (political communities and social communities. ex. “the gay community,” or more general groupings such as “rednecks”). Being made up of so many different unique societies is not necessarily the reason that our country has so many mentally challenged individuals – rather, it is because we try and define all of these communities as a collective.

Our country is all placed under a certain set of laws and trained as a whole to view itself as a single community. It’s the separation between the expectations of our country-wide community and our individual communities that causes problems, and perhaps on an even bigger scale, our lack of communities in many places, puts the country-wide community into conflict with an individual person’s training. People in a defined community, regardless of how the country-wide community sees them, would not be considered abnormal within their own community. Those people would have been trained to fit in with that community and therefor be capable of more easily sustaining life. Psychological issues begin when a person is separated from society altogether, and yet still judged under that society’s rules.

As I mentioned earlier, a person cannot think beyond what their experiences have trained them to think of. If a human were born into this world and left alone, they would not grow up with the same knowledge that others have (obviously). Now we’re starting to get to where otaku come in (finally!)

Before, I stated that our society (and I’ll add in, any of the ‘advanced’ societies in the world) is ‘all over the place.’ That isn’t just because of infrastructure – in today’s world, it’s also because of technology. Technology has created a fjord between human beings on a physical level. I could say a lot about this, but let’s focus on one general and mostly-encompassing example – the internet. What the internet has done is create tightly-knit communities which exist regardless of their members’ locations. Because these communities are scattered all over their place, most of the people therein also belong to another community, whose laws may not coincide with the training that someone receives from their online community.

Dat Ass: several centuries old, I think? Art by kokoro http://gelbooru.com/index.php?page=post&s=list&tags=kokoro_%28artist%29

If you picked up all of the members of an online community and put them together as an independent society, then it would function just like any other, however, instead, internet communities tend to exist below several layers of society. For instance, I am a member of the otaku community, which only exists to me through the internet and some of my close friends. Physically, however, I am a member of the Viginia Beach city community by default, which also puts me within the Virginia community which, regardless of the city’s ideals, governs them (VA beach is a highly liberal city, and yet Virginia state is a highly conservative unit), and then the Virginia community exists within the umbrella of the United States community, and if you want to take it even further, there are a number of laws that many nations have agreed to hold themselves under, which you can call the world community.

So you can see how, regardless of the mentality of my own community and self, I am forced to adhere to many layers of ideals from other communities that I’m not necessarily a part of on a mental level. Outside of the otaku community, I could be seen as mentally unstable or psychologically challenged, even though I am considered perfectly normal within my own community. That said, most people in my community don’t understand themselves as primarily a part of that unit. Rather, before they could be trained by the otaku community, they were already trained by the others that they were born into, and therefor understand what it means to be a functioning member of their society. Because they did not follow through on that training, however, and broke off in another direction, they can easily be confused about what they’re ‘supposed’ to be. Many think that there’s something wrong with them for thinking the way that they do, and the other layers of society that they belong to may also outcast them.

The truth, though, is once again that a human being cannot think beyond their experience. Merely understanding one’s society does not necessarily mean that one is able to think like the other people in that society, because they’ve been trained on a different path. I myself am the classic example of this. I fully understand how one must think in order to be in-line with society, but I am incapable of thinking that way myself, because my upbringing was too far removed from social acceptability. The reverse is allowed to be said as well – there are plenty of people in society that understand why someone cannot think in-line with society, but that knowledgement doesn’t change the fact that the person doesn’t fit into their society.

Oni demon: likely ancient. art by x6suke http://gelbooru.com/index.php?page=post&s=list&tags=x6suke

Where we are right now, society is going through a major evolutionary stage. The number of people that wouldn’t have been considered normal in yesterdays society are rapidly outnumbering that old society itself, and will eventually overturn it and rebuild it into whatever comes to be. It could end up with several community layers left in shambles – but I’m not here to predict the future. For now, even though our society is evolving to where someone like an otaku might belong to a community that considers them normal one day, the fact of the matter is that today, otaku are still abnormal in our society, and even more dangerously, they are barely understood. The community and it’s psychology are so brand new that they haven’t had time to be explored yet, and in the split, we face rampant persecution of our kind due to misunderstandings. That’s why, just like any other community would do, I’m making it my business to spread awareness throughout the world and hopefully not only help my community to escape persecution, but also help them to understand and accept themselves as human beings who are normal, functioning members of our community.

Okay! 2000 word introduction! I guess this is where I move to the juicy stuff~

What we must first establish is that otaku are a group of people that think differently from everyone else, and then clarify how they *do* think. This is also where I clarify the definition of otaku. The easiest way to get it is by reading this article from the highly controversial “Otaku Elimination Game”, a group of people who tried to enforce proper use of the term by deciding which bloggers were using it correctly, as well as trying to discern who among them were otaku themselves. While their identities are mysterious and their existence controversial, their definition is based on clearly-defined fact. (As a pompous aside, I was one of the only people that the game decided not only used the term properly, but was, in fact, an otaku.)

For those too lazy to read OEG’s post, here’s a summary: An “otaku” is defined as a person with an overwhelming obsession towards something, to the point that is doesn’t just absorb their existence, but defines their existence. While the word is technically applicable to any obsession, it’s almost solely used to refer to those obsessed with Japanese nerd culture (anime, manga, video games, figures, doujinshi, etc.), and in the English-speaking community is clearly defined as someone with an interest towards anime.

To be very clear, though, in this study, I’m *not* talking about ‘anime fans’. I’m not even talking about ‘big’ anime fans. Just because someone has seen hundreds of shows, bought tons of merchandise, and run an anime-focused blog does *not* mean they’re an otaku. Otaku is a state of being – it *must* define your existence. That is to say, if the word ‘otaku’ could be removed from you, then you were never an otaku to begin with. My best friend in the anime fan community is blogger ghostlightning – he’s no doubt a big-time anime fan, dedicating an exceptional amount of thought, money, and time to the hobby. However, he could live without it – he’s a father, a husband, a businessman, a tennis player, and more. He’d lose a part of him if you took away anime, but you would not cease to be talking about ghostlightning. If you removed the otaku from Digital Boy, there’d be nothing left of me, except, perhaps, a ‘human being.’

Art by Rakkyou http://gelbooru.com/index.php?page=post&s=list&tags=rakkyou

What you should take from this is that being an otaku isn’t something you can turn on and turn off. That’d be no different from a straight man suddenly deciding one day that women are unattractive and men are where it’s at. Just as a gay person can’t suddenly be straight, an otaku can’t suddenly be normal. You can’t think of them as ‘a member of society who’s misguided and can be led back’ – you must think of them as ‘members of another society.’ (This of course doesn’t only apply to otaku, but to all of the subsets of persons being born in this age; otaku are just the ones I’ve decided to talk about, because they’re the one that I know best, being one myself.)

I’ve been seeing a psychologist and taking medication (welbutrin) since February because it was decided that I had mental instabilities which wouldn’t allow me to perform the functions necessary to live in my society (namely, I entirely lack productivity, and before starting on the medication, was severely depressed. I’ve since cured my depression, and am heading towards productivity.) What my psychologist is trying to do is *not* to make me a ‘normal’ person – it’s to help me learn the skills that can keep me alive within my society. Remember, the true purpose of a community is for people to help one-another have a better chance at living and reproducing. It’d be to my benefit to function within society because it’d greatly enhance my chances of survival.

However, I can’t just cast aside one way of thinking for another that I haven’t experienced. I’m being trained to develop a manner of thinking that can exist within society, but that manner of thinking isn’t divorced from the rest of my life’s experiences which govern my thoughts. The only way that I or anyone could completely disown their experiences and be retrained to think a different way would be by brainwashing them. I’m sure you get the point by now – I’m an otaku, and nothing this side of spy-movie conspiracy is gonna change that.

So what’s the deal with otaku sexuality? As I’m sure you’re aware, sexuality and otakudom are as intrinsically integrated as any other mindset would provoke. But why do otaku seem to debunk their base instincts and find non-existent women attractive, often over real women? I, for one, find real women attractive plenty of the time, but would be lying if I said I ‘preferred’ them; there are many others, however, who have a “2-D Complex”, meaning that they’re completely unattracted to real women.

Art by naporu http://gelbooru.com/index.php?page=post&s=list&tags=naporu

I’ve had a lot of time to study this phenomenon, because my best friend, and otaku of the highest caliber, has a 2D Complex. This isn’t a joke and it’s not bullshit – my friend has never shown any signs of arousal when confronted with the female form in any way, be that just seeing hot girls around or watching actual live-action porn, none of it does anything for him. How is that possible? Doesn’t that completely shoot the idea that sex and repreduction are the primary instincts of humans in the foot? No; this is simply an extremely high form of the training that my friend’s experiences in life have taught him.

Just as any psychological condition is analyzed by recounting a person’s life, the 2D complex and otakudom of my friend are easily explainable. While his childhood had a role in his personality, having come from a turbulent family situation (though not nearly as bad as what you’d probably consider most people to go through; albeit stranger), what clearly defined my friend’s transition was when, towards the end of middle school, he suddenly started getting cluster headaches. For those unfamiliar with the condition, it’s when a person undergoes severe migraines in a set pattern that can take any form. These headaches can range anywhere from ‘severe’ to ‘give me that fucking gun right now,’ and my friend experienced them every morning around the same time, lasting often for several hours.

Because of his condition, my friend could no longer attend school, and had to be homeschooled by himself. He suffered this condition through all of what would’ve been his high school life and was finally cured of it some time ago thanks to experimental medication being developed for the condition (however, it’s not known how long this will hold up). During the early days of his condition, my friend became a hardcore recluse, closing himself off in his room and never leaving. He had people leave meals at the foot of the door and would only go to the bathroom when he knew that everyone was asleep.

This lifestyle was identical to that of the Japanese hikkikomori phenomenon, wherein people close themselves off either in their room or an apartment and live off of whatever dime their parents or relatives are willing to spare to not see them die. This phenomenon is very frequently related to the otaku community, and is a product of the very societal clash that I mentioned before. While it’s true that nerds and the like are treated unkindly in my society, the condition is a lot more severe in Japan, where people called otaku are widely reviled, feared, and outcast. Hikkikomori are people who develop an overwhelming paranoia that everyone is trying to judge them, that everyone hates them, and that they are incapable of living successfully, and they lack a way to rationalize these thoughts. A lot of the time, hikkikomori become extreme forms of otaku because their being closed off from the world leaves them with nothing but time to consume their obsessions. I could go on about hikkikomori, but if you’re really interested, check out the novel “Welcome to the NHK!”, a famous fictional story about a hikkikomori written by a man who was (and possibly still is) one. It’s very much a Fear and Loathing in Los Vegas type of deal, and it’s published in English (look in the manga section, make sure you don’t actually buy the manga adaption).

Demonic entity: likely ancient. Art by Harada Takehito http://gelbooru.com/index.php?page=post&s=list&tags=harada_takehito

As he was between being a hikkikomori and a slightly less extreme shut-in for the better part of four years, my friend lacked human interaction altogether and spent his time devouring literally un-fucking-believable amounts of otaku culture. After that sheer amount of consumption and time, it’s not even surprising that his brain would’ve given up on real women altogether and resigned to satisfying itself with 2-dimensional women. Moreover, my friend underwent this whole scenario right at the peak of his puberty and through his teenage years, so it was some of his first serious sexual exposure as a mature male – to him, it would feel less natural to be attracted to real women than it would be to be attracted to 2D women.

As I’ve stated before, people can be trained to evolve their thinking, but they can’t discard their experiences, even if they want to and try as hard as they can. My friend has changed a lot since I forced my way into his life (we’re talking offline here) and even more since his condition was cured. He’s able to handle being out in public and is even going to be attending college in the upcoming semester. He’s changed himself into someone who can do those things, but that doesn’t mean it’s changed the way he thinks. It doesn’t mean that he trusts people, or that he doesn’t still feel their judgmental glances on him – it just means that he’s learned to deal with it. Just as I’ve been taught that I must streamline the way I think in order to get past my ADD, it doesn’t mean that I’ll actually stop being ADD, but just that I’ll learn how to control it.

And so we turn again to sexuality, as that’s our god damned goal here anyway. While it’s easy to generally understand how my friend came to have a 2-D complex, I’d now like to use myself as a way to follow the actual trail.

I have no memories of any period in my life wherein I was accepted by society. I was outcast and occasionally bullied from the time that I started school all the way until I entered high school; so from the beginning, you can’t expect that the things I learned would match the rest of society, as I was never a member of the societal community. Of course, I nonetheless had great parents who raised me to be intelligent far beyond my years throughout my life, and I had enough common sense to understand how I could function in society.

Besides being excluded from society throughout my childhood, I also had almost no encounters with females up until high school. I don’t know what it was that initially triggered it, but my brother and I grew up with this constant phobia of girls and all things girly. We never portrayed it as fear, but rather disgust, however, I know the truth. It’s a fear that neither of us has completely gotten over, even though my brother has made far more progress than I have.

Art by Nardack http://gelbooru.com/index.php?page=post&s=list&tags=nardack

This doesn’t mean that we lacked a sexual drive, however. By the time I was 7 years old, my older cousin (11 then) introduced me to my dad’s porn collection, and to put it non-graphically, I liked what I saw. However, sex was always a taboo and naughty thing to me. I had no understanding or knowledge of it, and I never got to talk to anyone about it. I always viewed it as something frightening, even as I understood my own sex drive and, to put it non-graphically, expressed it often. The people around me at school were as perverted as any young men, but they were all nerds as well – none of them really understood what sex was either, and I assure you we were all too straight-laced to watch porn.

This is where we branch into how I combined my 2D-complex into my sexuality. From late middle school on into early high school, I was still afraid to look at any porn (my dad had gotten rid of his stash soon after finding out we’d gotten into it years before. I’ve combed down every house we lived in since then and never found anything) but I also still found girls attractive – this is where anime comes into play. I was about 11 when I discovered anime, obsessed with it by 12, and attracted to it by 13. Consider that while I didn’t ever see girls outside of school, I was always watching and researching anime at home. Therefor, the hot girls in anime were what I had to go on for an everyday basis (and mind you, I didn’t look at any anime with nudity in it, either. It’s just that girls were there.)

From then on, it was a combination of 2D and 3D that pulled me through, until I finally started looking at (and more prominently, reading and writing) porn at 14 – but I didn’t have the courage to look at real porn. I only looked at anime. I don’t think I started watching real porn until I was at least 16; but you see now how this happened. Ironically, between about when I was 13 to just before when I turned 16, I wasn’t even that into anime – I’d taken to video games for a while and then gotten addicted to nothing but music and writing.

You’ve seen the seeds sewn, so now I’ll talk about ‘taste.’ Everyone has their own tastes in women. Often, they’re traits that come from important women in their lives, or that they came to appreciate after a lot of exposure. I tend to like short, small-breasted women, which I can relate to my mom being 5 feet tall and, well, yeah. But besides this prominent taste, I’ve developed many other tastes through consistent exposure (or ‘training’ as I’ve been saying.)

Art by mirre http://gelbooru.com/index.php?page=post&s=list&tags=mirre

By early 2007, at the time when I began to regain interest in anime, it’s safe to say that I found 2D women as attractive as I did real women. However, at that time, I’d finally found my way into the hardcore anime and otaku community, which I’d never been able to find before. What I quickly learned throughout that year about otaku is that sexuality is a very prominent feature of their culture, and that most 2D-cons have incredibly specific anime fetishes. Now, I’ve always been one to research every aspect of anything I get into, so naturally, I looked into otaku fetishes both through discussion and experience, and before long, I’d developed many of them for myself.

First and most prominently, from about the ages of 14 to 16 I’d dealt a lot with my sexual identity, and at the end of it all had decided that I didn’t care about men in the slightest and only wanted to see porn of women. As in, as I used to put it, “no dicks.” So the first major fetish I developed was for “yuri,” the Japanese term for lesbians. This was actually an easy connect because it’s the only major anime fetish that I also have towards 3D women. These two things, however, developed separately from one another, and are not intrinsically related. So for a good while, I looked almost exclusively at images that either featured a woman alone or two women together. This refusal to look at porn with men in it was pushed away as I finally came to terms with my sexual identity moving into 2008, but because experiences stack rather than replacing one another, my love of yuri has never died in the slightest, and is still probably my most powerful fetish.

The next one that I developed is the most controversial of anime-related fetishes: lolicon or ‘lolita complex’, applying to depictions of what appear to be little girls. You may have noticed how I walked on eggshells through that description, and it’s both because I don’t want to give you the wrong idea, and because I’m about to segue into the most important statement of this article.

What someone finds attractive in 2D images and what they find attractive in the real world are not intrinsically related. Remember what I keep telling you – a human is not capable of thinking about something beyond their experience. A human being can only stack it’s experiences. 2D complex is a unique sexuality. What someone learns to find attractive in 2D and what they learn to find attractive in 3D are set on their own paths. I learned to find ‘lolis’ attractive because of the nature of my community and obsession. Anime is full of what could be considered lolis (the exact characteristics of a loli are entirely subjective), and the community that I developed my fandom within had a lot of lolicons who were good friends of mine, and who took a lot of foolhardy pride in their fetish. I do not find little girls attractive in the real world, because nothing in my life’s experience has taught me to feel that way. Whereas in the case of lesbians, I both learned to love them in the real world and in the 2D world independently, my attraction to lolis has no correlation to the real world.

Once again, the Scarlet sisters, in their early 500s. Art by Fujisaki Hikari http://gelbooru.com/index.php?page=post&s=list&tags=fujisaki_hikari

After all, my sexuality with regards to the real world and the 2D one have almost no resemblance to one-another. In the real world, I like girls who are short and have small breasts. Besides that, I have particulars about face and hair and fashion that all amounts to me being ridiculously picky about real women. In anime, however, I’ve learned more fetishes than almost anyone else. Like I said before: I’m a researcher. I’m also a gonzo journalist. It’s my life to explore my nature and the nature of those in my community. As such, I’ve explored every avenue that I could find in the 2D world, and I trained myself to love everything.

My current fetishes include, but are not limited to: yuri, loli, goth-loli, incest (particularly brother-sister and sister-sister, sometimes father-daughter – bonus points for twins), short hair, androgyny, ponytails, neckties, torture, rape (including tentacle-rape), big breasts (limited to the scope of realism, though I’ve been training myself to go larger recently), any sort of ornate or fashionable clothing, masturbation (female), guro (meaning ‘gruesome’ – basically, one or more parties being horribly maimed in some way), blood, striking colors (esp red, black, and white, and yes, this is really a fetish), breast sucking/general play, bestiality, monster-on-girl, futanari (girls with dicks, exclusively when with other girls), happy sex (yes, it’s a legitimate fetish), and a long list of sexual positions and art styles.

None of this carries into the real world at all. There are real-world fetishes I have that happen to be the same as some of those (androgyny, short hair, cool clothes), but that’s because they developed on their own (most likely in those cases because most of the girls I’ve actually befriended were tomboyish, and because I’m all about ‘cool’ women.)

So, tl;dr, now you should understand that an individual’s sexuality is controlled by tricking their brain into being attracted to things that would be socially acceptable to them. However, if one defects from social acceptability to begin with, they may develop sexual interests that are considered abnormal. This could lead to any possibility you care to name, but one of those possibilities is the unique class of the 2D-complex. An individual may develop an attraction both to 2D and 3D, but they are not intrinsically connected, even if some of their fetishes are the same in both cases. Furthermore, a 2D complex does not equate to attraction to all 2D characters, but only to the ones which the individual learns to appreciate. Just as some people will never get into loli because they won’t allow themselves to experience it, others will only find lolis attractive, because it’s the only thing they allow themselves to experience. In other words, a human being cannot think beyond their experiences.

Flandre will deal with all hecklers~

I hope this has been somehow informative, or at least interesting. I know it’s a fucking enormous and ridiculous mess, so I don’t expect many to trudge all the way through, but I offer my thanks to those of you who did. I don’t know that this is so much a primer on ‘otaku sexuality’ as it is on sexuality in general, but what’s important is that these things are taken into account when discussing otaku sexuality.

I expect some truly scary and over-my-head comments lol.

More writing on otaku sexuality:

The Otaku Sex-Help Hotline: A newly established and yet not really running blog that tries to ask and tell about how otaku’s love of 2D effects the ways that they get off.

Harunobu Madarame Once Said “I Do Not Have a Single Piece of Regular Porn,” and He Was Not Joking: A post about the way 2D porn is actually more ‘real’ than regular porn in that the characters have real emotions, while actors are just acting.

Fapping is Serious Business, Because You Can’t Spell ‘Otaku’ Without ‘Masturbation’: A post about how it’s easier to discuss masturbation openly with otaku because it’s impossible to be an otaku and not masturbate.

Finish or Fail 6 – Saki – The Meaning of Moe: Not a post about sexuality, but it’s the post wherein I defined ‘moe’, in far more than one damn sentence.

For deep insights onto very specific anime fetishes, I DEEPLY recommend 8C’s amazing, newly-created Ero Database Animal.

COMING SOON: Look forward to an upcoming survey by CCY to be announced sometime soon that will ask many fans a series of questions about their sexuality and sexual history, similar to the Reverse Thieves Otaku Diaries project, but focused on sex.

3. Uiharu~n Kazari – To Aru Kagaku no Railgun

Seiyuu: Toyosaki Aki (Performance: 4/5)

Character Design: (Designed by Tanaka Yuichi, based on designs by Haimura Kiyotaka). Most of the designs in Raildex are very attractive, and the main girls of Railgun are the cream of the crop. Uiharu is the wide-eyed girl with an innocent look about her, but this look is actually somewhat deceiving. Uiharu shows herself to be perhaps the most mature of the four leading ladies, and her face can transform when she’s angry, frustrated, or embarrassed into unexpectedly harsh expressions. However, what her face always conveys is her honesty, wherein her moments of anger or frustration also show a calm and cool heart that knows what it feels. The most noticeable aspect of Uiharu’s design is her flower tiara that always makes her presence sunny and calming.

Personal Bias/Moe Traits: Uiharu is a rare breed of peaceful character, largely in that she isn’t any form of idiot. She’s neither a character who’s sunny all the time nor a passive individual with no sense of anger, and she certainly isn’t oblivious. The more common expressions of Uiharu’s seriousness are her moments of getting mad at Saten’s loose nature, but the real money comes from situations wherein she’s genuinely offended. Uiharu isn’t afraid to speak her mind and state her problems, especially to her partner in Judgement, Shirai Kuroko.

That seriousness is balanced effectively by her ordinarily laid-back and peaceful nature. She’s easy to please and doesn’t waste her anger on trivial matters the way that Kuroko and Misaka tend to do, and she also doesn’t hide her problems within herself as Saten does. She’s totally open about her hobbies and could probably be called an ‘ojou-sama otaku’ because of her obsessive fascination with rich people. As a matter of fact, I think that with her ability to be happy and calm with ease and only get mad when she needs to, Uiharu~n would be top-quality wife material.

Distortions of My Imagination: I totally think Uiharu is gay for Saten, and vice-versa. Saten seems a lot more likely to be in love with her friend, and with Uiharu’s frequent complaints towards Saten, it could look like she’s not even a particularly close friend of hers (after all, I think they mentioned having met pretty recently.) However, it’s not that I don’t think Uiharu could be in a relationship with Saten; it’s just that I imagine Uiharu taking a very mature approach to the relationship. She’s not the romantic type who would shower her lover with affection at all times – more likely, she’s the type who would set very clear boundaries and manage the relationship professionally, not letting it get in the way of the rest of her life. I have this vision of Saten often trying to fool around with her while she’s working, and of her reacting strictly most times, but then, every once in a while, she’ll just be in the right mood, and would transition so perfectly into the lovemaking that it’ll look like she planned it all along.

Crowning Moment of Love: Some of my favorite pieces from Uiharu~n were her convictions in the final arc and her fanaticism during the maid festival episode. However, the singular moment that made me realize how awesome she was came from her argument with Kuroko at the beginning of episode five. Kuroko had a pompous attitude, acting as if the failure of her situation didn’t mean that her methods were flawed – Uiharu doesn’t take that shit, and tells Kuroko outright that she should’ve listened to her and taken the situation into better consideration before rushing in over-confidently. Uiharu doesn’t submit nor quickly forgive Kuroko – she’s honestly upset and wants Kuroko to know it, and I didn’t expect that strength of will to come from her.

Title: Ivysaur

4. “Minnie” May Hopkins – Gunsmith Cats

Seiyuu: Kae Araki (Performance: 2.5/5)

Character Design: (Designed by Kenichi Sonoda – this entry is for the character in the manga, rather than the anime adaption). Kenichi Sonoda’s designs are a perfect way to mark the transition from the 80s into the 90s. Girls are getting cuter, their hair is getting more stylishly ridiculous than ridiculously ridiculous, and their clothes are more contemporary. Minnie-May’s design was based on one very obvious intent – lolicon fanservice – and there’s a shit-ton of it in the manga, considering May’s high level of sexual activity (she’s legal, by the way). May got her nickname when Rally told her she was ‘as cute as Minnie Mouse’, and she is damn cute, but also sexy as hell when she wants to be. Her eyes are full of vigor and tenacity, and in combination with her explosive personality, she literally seems like a bomb that’s ready to pop at any moment.

Personal Bias/Moe Traits: On an analytical level, I don’t have anything ‘deep’ to say about Minnie-May – she’s violent, energetic, perverse, naive, and attractive, and that about sums her up. However, beyond the mere attractiveness of her design, she also appeals to my sexual interests. Minnie-May grew up on the streets and gave her virginity to an older lover at about thirteen, before circumstances had her going to work in a Chinatown brothel (the “Purple Pussy”) for three years. As a result, she’s highly sexually experienced, and it’s commonly remarked that she’s incredible in bed (to where some can barely handle it.) She’s constantly horny and raring to go, especially when her lover, Ken Taki, is involved; but she also doesn’t hesitate to use her body and sexual prowess for the sake of missions.

So basically, she’s a nymphomaniac, and I dig that. I love openly sexual characters, and all the more if they greatly enjoy and even take pride in their sexual prowess and experience. Minnie-May is always honest with her feelings and urges, which is something I celebrate in any character who can claim to be such.

Distortions of My Imagination: Honestly, there’s not much to distort with Minnie-May. She’s already a walking fantasy, even if I couldn’t get along with her personality at all. I guess you could consider my deep reading of her sexuality to be somewhat of a personal slant. May isn’t the type who’d say anything deep about her hobby (the closest thing is accusing Rally of dishonesty for not embracing her own sexuality). Who knows what Sonoda thinks about it – all I know is, regardless of how much thought was put into May’s psychology, my own examination of her psyche produces an enjoyable result.

Crowning Moment of Love: Mind you, I’ve only read the first two (massive) volumes of Gunsmith Cats so far, but my favorite scenes of her probably came from her backstory with lover Ken Taki. She fell in love with him and wouldn’t take no for an answer, making it clear that feelings were more important than age, and then reaffirming those sentiments in the present story. It probably doesn’t say all that much about her as a character, but I enjoyed it as someone who shares the ideals that feelings are what really matters, and that limiting oneself to be socially acceptable is a waste of time.

Title: I Get Wet

This post will be very hard to read if you don’t keep this in mind: I have two younger brothers. One is 17, and one is 12. I refer to the 17yo one as ‘bro’ or ‘brother’, and I refer to the 12yo one as ‘baby bro’ or ‘baby brother’. If you do not see the word ‘baby’, then I’m not referring to the 12 yo.

Us about to leave. From right to left: Funeral, brother, dumbass, baby bro

Day One: The Longest Day Ever

Having written my day 0 post at 12 AM after the only 6 hours of sleep I could manage to get, I didn’t go back to sleep, and instead explored the hotel and surrounding area, much as I’d done at the same hotel in 2008, and I even took my also-unable-to-sleep baby bro around with me until the sun came up and it was time to wake the others.

We’d planned to get to the con early and see Otaku no Video, since we’d have to miss it on Sunday for the Home Made Kazoku show, and it was a yearly tradition to watch it at the end of the con. In that interest, we were in line at a little after 8 AM, but the doors didn’t open until 9:20 (as opposed to 8:30, when they’re supposed to, which I’d suspected might happen), so instead, we headed to the Japanese Mahjong panel run by sdshamshel of Ogiue Maniax and David Cabrera of Subatomic Brainfreeze and ANN’s Astro Toy (all of which I recommend reading.) The panel was pretty fun, especially because sds and David are funny guys, and they used a lot of awesome clips from Akagi, Saki, and others. My baby bro happens to be a fan of Saki, so he actually managed to enjoy the panel, even if he didn’t get most of what was being discussed.

After that, we didn’t have any plans, but I noticed that Gakuen Alice was going to come on in one of the video rooms, and I’d been meaning to watch it, so we went and checked it out. The first two eps actually far exceeded my expectations, and we all had good fun and laughs with it. Both myself and my baby brother expressed a desire to continue the series, which I may do when we get back. [Afterword: We did.]

It was then about 12 PM and time for the Dealer’s Room to open, so we headed that way, but it was hopeless – no one was gonna get in there for at least another hour or so, and we therefor made our way back to catch the tail end of the Madhouse panel (which was horribly boring, because as much as I love Masao Maruyama, he only ever wants to talk about upcoming projects, and frankly, I have a hard time caring about something I haven’t seen yet!)

At 1 PM I’d planned to hit up the Opening Ceremonies and I knew that my brothers wanted to see the Vocaloid panel (youngest especially, since he’s a diehard Vocaloid fan) which was coming on at 1:30 and luckily was in the same room as Madhouse, so I left the two of them there and headed to the opening ceremonies.

Black Rock Shooter and Dead Master, re-enacting a scene from the OVA for a pro photographer - there might be more of these if he posted them anywhere.

I wanted to see the opening animation by Production I.G., but more importantly, I knew I’d find omo and TheBigN there, with whom I could discuss the whens and hows of our karaoke performance of Someone Else. I did indeed meet them there and got things settled before the panel began, helped by it starting about 20 minutes late. I’d have enjoyed staying to hang out with TBN and omo, but then wah showed up and sat between them. Hard as it is to believe, wah is actually more annoying in real life than he is online (if that’s possible) and made me uneasy. I also heard mention of “that dickshit” Link being on his way, so I quickly felt like I didn’t need to be there. The ceremony started and was incredibly lame anyway, so I took off.

I fled back to the Vocaloid panel which was, well, it was a Vocaloid panel. They talked about each Vocaloid, played some song clips, etc., but none of it was stuff I didn’t already know about, so it was kind of boring. Once that was through, I was finally ready to hit the Dealer’s Room.

This is where, if they hadn’t already, things started to go downhill because of my baby brother. While he’d enjoyed the Dealer’s Room at Nekokon (which is about a tenth of the size of Otakon’s, for what it’s worth), he was quickly overwhelmed and disappointed by the Otakon Dealer’s Room. This perplexed me, largely because his favorite series, the likes of which include K-On!, Lucky Star, Clannad, and all things Vocaloid, are the most abundant items at the con, and yet he showed no interest in products from any of those series (I thought for sure he’d walk out of there with a Yui figma, but the only K-On! thing he bought was a random box which gave him comedy-face Mio).

As for me, the Dealer’s Room is my zone. It’s the biggest part of my love for Otakon. At first, things went great, as I sent my bro to explore a designated area of the room while I hit up Hen Da Ne for the doujins (I wanted to get in early this year so that they couldn’t sell out of anything I wanted.) I was there for at least half an hour having a complete blast, because the guys there are awesome and the crowd there is awesome, and the atmosphere is everything that I love about Otakon. I bought two Railgun doujins and a Touhou yuri doujin that starts off with RemixSakuya and then transitions into SakuyaxChina.

But anyway, upon reclaiming my brother, we began exploration, and he just seemed angry and uninterested the entire time. I like to go very slowly and erratically through the Dealer’s Room looking for what I want, but I felt like I couldn’t take my time with him being so impatient. Instead, I just scan-searched everywhere for anything Canaan, Railgun/Index, Kara no Kyoukai, or Touhou related (my four big fandoms at the moment, evidently) and wasn’t having any luck. I also wanted to find MangaGamer so I could buy the Higurashi visual novel, but they were unfindable (as their ad put them on the opposite side of the room of where they actually were).

Bored of having to drag my baby brother around the Dealer’s Room, we met back with my bro and headed out. I didn’t really have any plans for the time, having intended to spend about three hours in the Dealer’s Room (and instead only spent one and a half or so), but my bro wanted to watch the first Zeta Gundam movie, so we went to that.

Space Pirate from Metroid. He stood there being 2D and moving his arms up and down for something like an hour.

While we were there, I told my bros to hang out and watch the movie while I took care of other things. First things first, I went to the Dealer’s Room in search of MangaGamer (now possessing a Dealer’s Room map, also incorrectly labelled) and had no luck. So then, I decided to flee to the car and drop off my doujins (whose bag was ripping) but only halfway there realized that Funeral had the key. I then made several failed attempts to call him on my brother’s phone (mine’s battery had died) and missed his several attempts to return my calls.

After having walked all the way to the locked car and then walked all the way back (the entire length of the con), I was utterly bushed, and plopped back down in the video room where I promply passed out through 40 minutes of Zeta Gundam. After this point, my tiredness began to really take some out of me.

After Zeta Gundam, we had no plans for a couple of hours, so we headed to the karaoke room, where I signed up to do my first performance. Here, I really began to think about how karaoke and the Dealer’s Room are truly my favorite parts of Otakon. It’s because of those things that I think I could’ve still had a great time if the stressor of my baby bro hadn’t weighed me down all the while.

It was actually on the way to the karaoke room, however, that I had one of the most surreal and interesting experiences of the con. I was suddenly approached by this guy (a young-looking, skinny Asian dude that I didn’t recognize) whom asked if I was Digital Boy. I replied that I was, and he asked to have a photo with me. When I asked who he was, he told me that he had no account name and was a lurker, but was apparently a reader of my blog. I was floored that this guy had found me and knew me, and even took a picture with me (hope he doesn’t mind the funny face I made, seeing as he didn’t stop to check back and see how it came out lol).

(Read about the karaoke experiences in the karaoke post)

Feeling pretty good after karaoke, we lined up for the Yoshida Brothers concert, and it was here more than ever that I realized just how much my baby bro was the thorn in this con’s side. My brother and I were totally absorbed in the show, which was amazing and had a terrific crowd. The Bros. played an even mix of technically brilliant and emotionally moving songs with as much passion and manliness as anything I’ve ever heard. However, my baby bro was totally bored by it and on the verge of passing out the whole time. This wouldn’t have bothered me if he hadn’t kept making sure I knew this. I told him ‘dude, just go to sleep, but don’t keep bitching to me about it’ because there’s nothing I hate more than a companion ruining the fun, but he nonetheless continued to act exaggeratedly bored and kept asking when the show would end, which pissed me off and distracted and detracted a lot from the otherwise amazing show.

After Yoshida Bros., I got my 18+ armband for later, and then we headed over to wait for sds’ Portrait of a Fujoshi (The Psychology of Ogiue Chika) panel. This was another fun and interesting panel, once again largely due to the personalities of sds and his co-panelist (who does podcasts for theotagal.com, which I’ve never heard of) and once again actually managed to be somewhat relevant to my baby bro’s interest, as he’d just marathoned the first season of Genshiken two nights before.

Following this panel, I had plans to immediately rush over to the 18+ How To Draw Yuri panel, which I’d been pretty greatly looking forward to, partly because I love yuri, and partly because it would be my first 18+ panel. However, when I got to the door, the Otakon staffer there basically explained to me that the panel was apparently very terrible (I guess a lot of people had left in the first hour of it’s two-hour run) and didn’t advise that I enter. Heeding his warning, I thought it would be best to just get the others and leave. Earlier, my brother had contacted Funeral, who was finishing up the 18+ movie Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl, and I was pretty sure that we’d all be leaving thereafter.

But it’s then that I faced the worst nightmare of that first day – I got completely fucking lost in trying to find them. Somehow, my brothers had gotten way ahead of me, and I didn’t manage to catch up with them. I also got confused trying to find Funeral, and didn’t manage to locate him – and I’d seen that when I entered the video room he was supposed to be in, the movie’s credits were already rolling, so I figured he’d have left and found my brothers and gone somewhere to wait for me.

I couldn’t find them, though. I looked around, saw nothing. Then I went all the way to the car to see if they’d gone that far, but didn’t find them. I came back into the con, and I searched it from end to end three or four times, with no sign of them – I searched for almost an hour, exceeding even the amount of time that I would’ve been in the workshop. After searching and searching, I finally found my brothers, and got filled in.

Apparently, they’d gone to the karaoke room to wait, as when they told Funeral that I’d gone to a panel, he decided to stay in the video room and watch Urotsukidouji, which was coming on next. So they sent me in to go get him. I went in and told him that we were all ready to leave and such, but he gave no sign at all of intending to leave the room. So I headed back out to sit with my brothers. At this time, it was about 1 AM – my baby bro and I had been up for about 25 hours, I was completely exhausted from searching, and Urotsukidouji wasn’t going to end for another hour.

So I said ‘fuck it, you guys can stay waiting here, I’m going to go watch Mnemosyne’, which happened to be airing at the time in the HD Theater (incidentally, convincing me not to buy Mnemosyne on Funimation’s shitty blu-rays.) At the very least, I felt pretty satisfied watching most of Mnemosyne episode three, and remembered how awesome the show was in spite of having largely forgotten about it. The show ended before 2, though, so I had to go into Urotsukidouji and get the car keys from Funeral to take my brothers to the car. My bro was quite pissed since apparently Funeral had come out earlier and gotten my message to come get me as soon as he came out, but said ‘fuck that’, and went back in to finish the movie. He told me it wouldn’t have been so bad if he hadn’t had our baby bro with him, and that the thing which really set him off was when the two of them tried to sleep and were antagonized by some Otakon staff who laughed as they told him no to do so.

All in all, the day was very long and tiring and heavily marred by my little brother’s lack of enthusiasm. At the end of the day, I felt pretty good about it all, having lifted my spirits with anisons and flipping through my purchases, and I was confident that day two would be much better. I figured that the mild disappointment probably came from the Fridays of the last two years having been the days when all the big stuff happened, and this year, well, there wasn’t any big stuff. But I was still pretty satisfied with thoughts of Day 2 when I finally passed out at 3 AM, setting my alarm for 8:30 and hoping to show up at the con around 9:30.

Triela from Gunslinger Girl

Day 2: I Searched For the Path to Alsatia, but I Didn’t Arrive

My hopes for Day 2 began to fall apart from the moment I was woken up – at 11:30. Somehow, all of us had managed to sleep in and the alarm had never gone off, leading to a very late arrival. I hadn’t that much planned for Saturday, wanting to spend a lot of time in the Dealer’s Room, but one of my biggest plans was crushed right off the bat – I’d wanted to see the premiere of Welcome to the Space Show, which ran from 11:30 to 2:30, but we were already too late for that. I didn’t take this too hard at first, since I’d had no set of expectations for the film (except the knowledge that the team making it was the same who made R.O.D. and Kamichu!, two of the highest-quality anime I’ve ever seen, and both among my favorites), but when I later saw a lengthy trailer for it, I was instantly full of regret for missing it.

Instead, I went straight for the Dealer’s Room as soon as we arrived, and had a great time spending two hours in there – like I’d thought, the Dealer’s Room is really my favorite part of Otakon, and this time I’d told my baby bro to stick with my brother in the Dealer’s Room, since my pace was too slow for him. I scoped out every last booth, trying to make careful decisions on how I’d spend my money. I’d come to the con with 250 bucks and had gotten down to 170 or so after finally finding MangaGamer and buying the Higurashi game.

It was hard, but I managed to keep from buying anything that I strongly suspected was fake, such as an attractive but less-than-durable-looking Toradora backpack, a similar Toradora clock, some supposedly-imported T-shirts, and various barely passable figures that were being sold everywhere. This, however, left my options limited to high-end prices. Among the things I debated over were a $40 Vita Figma (the face and ugly elbows kept me from buying it, though) an $80 Taiga Aisaka figure (attractive, but just not cool enough to be worth it), the Supercell album (I just can’t justify paying Japanese prices for music – shit is ridiculous), various artbooks (most notably the Strike Witches artbook that Yi blogged about a little while ago, which I’m still hoping to get [afterword: got it]), some other nice figures, such as a Manabi and Mutsuki pairing and a Chiri Kitsu and Fuura Kafuka pairing, among others (by the way, every worthwhile figure was at the same booth. They were the only ones carrying the good stuff, which is perhaps why their prices were pretty high.) But what ended up winning my cash was a $130 Good Smile figure of Alphard from Canaan. I would’ve preferred Canaan herself, but this was the only piece of Canaan merchandise I could find in the entire con (and there were no good (nor real) Railgun figures, no Kara no Kyoukai figures or merchandise, no Touhou figures that were relevant enough to my interest to be worth their price, and I didn’t want to spend another $100 on another Black Rock Shooter or Hatsune Miku figure so soon), so after much deliberation, Alphard won my lust.

Otakon Evacuation 1

I didn’t, however, have time to buy her immediately, as at 2 PM, the fire alarms went off. No one was taking them very seriously at first, but before too long, the entire convention was literally evacuated. This, while terrible, was actually quite exciting and chaotic in it’s own ways, as you can only imagine what an entire 30,000-member anime convention suddenly dumped en-masse onto the streets of Baltimore looked like. Pics abound, and with the number of cameras I saw flying around, I’m sure you can find plenty of youtube vids on the event. In spite of the apparent chaos, though, the Otakon staff handled it like champs, and we were all inside the con again within an hour and made it to the 3 PM Space Show Creator’s Panel on time and orderly.

The Space Show Creator’s Panel was very interesting, even if it mostly served to make me depressed about missing the Space Show, but it was still cool to meet the men behind Kamichu and Read or Die and hear their thoughts. Those were sadly the only guests at the entire con that were of any interest to me whatsoever, but at least they were worthwhile.

After the Space Show panel, I headed to The Phenomology of Shinji Ikari, which wasn’t actually about Eva, but about existential anime in general, and then wasn’t actually about anime at all really, and was instead an hour of one big room full of philosophically-minded intellectuals randomly discussing all sorts of massive, masturbatory philosophical constructs and having a blast doing it, totally aware of how masturbatory it was. This panel was unexpectedly fun (and I was quite vocal), even if it didn’t really go anywhere at all.

After that, we migrated to the karaoke room where we spent about two hours until my bro and I performed Ai Senshi from Mobile Suit Gundam II. Our performance was, I daresay, amazing, and the crowd loved it in spite of the obvious fact that not one of them knew the song. It felt really great, but that feeling was almost completely destroyed when we found out that Funeral’s dumb ass, who’d shown up and been entrusted with the camera, entirely forgot to film the fucking thing (in line with a tradition he has of doing something radically stupid or aggravating at least once a year at Otakon.)

Very disappointed, and now planning to repeat the performance tomorrow, my brothers and I headed off to blow the last hour or so until it was time for the Touhou panel. We headed to one of the video rooms where they happened to be playing Genshiken 2, which was relevant to all of our interests at the moment, and had some fun watching that. After a a little while, it was time to head off to the Touhou panel.

Which in turn produced the biggest, most night-ruining disappointment yet. We were in line for the panel, but the room filled up with literally five or six people in front of us. They told us that we wouldn’t be able to get in unless other people left, and that they could only let in amounts of people equal to the amounts being let out at the same time. Extremely frustrated and disappointed, I decided to lead the group back to Genshiken 2, which the schedule had down to run for another half-hour – but when we arrived, the fourth episode was ending, and rather than play the fifth, the staff was instead clearing the room so that they could do sound testing in prep for the Saturday Night Fan Parodies videos. Way to fucking label that on the schedule, Otakon!

I saw at least 1 fight that almost broke out, when some guy pissed off some angry driver, and he got out of his car and into a screaming match. Luckily, someone was there to calm them down.

To make matters worse, as we passed by the Touhou line again, it looked like a number of people actually had left and a number of others had in fact gone in, which just made us look pretty stupid and disappointed me even further. It didn’t help either that Touhou panel was literally all I had planned for the night. I was hoping to do karaoke afterward with Omo and co., but Omo said that TheBigN would be busy all night and we’d be doing it Sunday morning – so we had literally nothing left to do. Defeated, we finally headed to the game room to burn time while Funeral was doing whatever he was doing.

I got a little bit of my groove back in the game room when me and some guy played a Fate/Stay Night fighting game for upwards of half an hour uninterrupted (he kicked my ass 95% of the time, though) and then Funeral finally offered to leave, having cancelled his plan to watch Robogeisha because he had a headache. And so with that, we headed back to the hotel.

Once again, it’s not that the day was bad. The things that we actually did were a lot of fun, but it was hugely disappointing to miss out on the only things I was actually looking forward to from that day, and once again, the utter lack of enthusiasm on the part of my baby brother was incredibly draining. Especially because tomorrow, the only thing going on is the Home Made Kazoku show, which I’ll sadly have to miss the second panel with the Kamichu guys to attend. Actually, to be honest, I’m not even sure that I want to see the show as much as I want to see the panel, considering that I don’t know any HMK songs beyond Shounen Heart, and haven’t cared for much of what I’ve heard – that said, I’ll probably go because hearing Shounen Heart could be very very special. Besides that, I plan to spend the whole day between karaoke and the Dealer’s Room – and hey, those are my favorite parts of Otakon anyway, so maybe they can cheer me up enough to end on a high note.

No matter what, this year’s con can’t live up to the last two years’, nor did I expect it to, but it doesn’t have to leave a bad taste in my mouth. It won’t be the life changing/affirming event that the last two were, but it’s fun, restful in some ways, and the time spent afterward is what ‘ll really count. My room is clean at home and waiting to be filled with my new stuff, I’ve got things to do and shows to watch, and I’ve got a whole 20 days or so before school starts, plus my parents will be gone for a week starting in a few days, so I can have some friends over and perhaps marathon anime all week in the living room – plus, I’m going to start back on my novel with a whole new sense of inspiration and a well-rested and rounded mind. So all in all, I think this con will be very good for where I am in life – it’s just that right now, I can’t help but be a little sad about the way things have gone down. But I’m very optimistic for the future.

Gundams, apparently from Wing. Interestingly, both female.

Day 3: At Least I Have Cirno (note: I didn’t write about this day on the actual day as I did the last 2, so my memory’s not as awesome.)

On the morning of Day 3, we packed up and cleaned up our hotel room (which we’d thrashed like old-school rock stars) and headed off to the con. Today, everyone seemed to be in pretty high spirits, like it’d taken too long, but we were finally in the groove. Literally the entire day, my baby bro pretended to be Cirno, and kept calling himself ‘the strongest’ while pretending to freeze things that didn’t need to be frozen – he was having a lot of fun with this, and has since proclaimed Cirno his second-favorite character (after Hatsune Miku).

On Sunday morning, we were there right when the doors opened, and headed straight to the karaoke room, where omo and TheBigN soon followed, and the Ai Senshi redo and Someone Else performances were filmed. After karaoke, we went to the Dealer’s Room. My baby bro had been eyeballing this katana since the day before, and using professional stealth techniques, I got him to point it out for me so I could go buy it for him. With the sword purchased, we re-convened with my brother, who’d had to save his money till the third day for various reasons and was now buying everything on his carefully-calculated list. I think he purchased something like $350-400 worth of mecha, and I got him to give me $25 of ‘birthday money’ so that I could buy the Shimada Humikane artbook I’d been eyeing.

I left my baby bro with my bro to continue shopping while I went and picked up his sword, since the Otakon staff would only let me claim it if I was going to be leaving the Dealer’s Room. I headed out and phoned/waited for Funeral and my brothers to be done with the Dealer’s Room, and then we all went back to the car and packed in our purchases. Then there was only one thing left to do – see Home Made Kazoku.

It was a pretty boss show. HMK opened up with Shounen Heart, unexpectedly, and they played their songs from Naruto and Bleach (the latter as an encore) along with a myriad of other things that few people in the audience seemed to know, myself included. It was a very fun and energetic show, and the crowd was into it, but it was funny, because I could tell that HMK was used to crowds who knew their stuff. Their songs involved a lot of instructions and motions that HMK seemed to expect us to know, and then had to double-take when they realized they’d need to show us what to do (thankfully, both MCs spoke very fluent English, so communication wasn’t too much of an issue.) It was an overall fun show, and my brother and I both realized was our first rap show. I had ‘thank you’ stuck in my head like all damn day afterward lol.

With that show over, our time with Otakon was at an end. As we left, I felt pretty good about the whole experience. Having just read all these notes from the con, it sounds like I could’ve taken it a lot worse than I did, but Otakon has always been my personal paradise, and even if you find yourself bored in paradise and saddled with a burden that mars your stay, it’s still paradise, and there’s still some good to come of it.

I definitely feel that in the next year, I owe it to myself to attend more big cons than just Otakon. I think part of the disappointment came from it being a once-a-year event, and it wouldn’t be such a blow if I actually got to experience (good) cons more often.

And that does it. Now I can stop worrying about this damn post lol.

For eight months now, I’ve seen Chii of Oishii Anime run her ‘365 Days of Anime Characters‘ series, which is very admirable, even if I wouldn’t personally want to talk about characters that I dislike alongside those I love. I’ve also been jealous of Glothelegend’s character page on Eye Sedso, wherein he selects his favorite character from every anime that he’s watched and talks about them.

I can’t do what either of them have done, because I only want to talk about my favorite characters, and I want to do more than one per show. Of course, a post series like this would get boring if I didn’t liven it up and innovate somehow, so I hope you’ll enjoy the formula I’ve come up with for these posts. I’m setting them to go up once a week, indefinitely.

Each post will contain two characters selected randomly off the top of my head. The numbers are just for archiving purposes. If you don’t know the character, you can click on their names to get some basic information.

1. Orihara Izaya – Durarara!!

Seiyuu: Kamiya Hiroshi (Performance: 5/5)

Character Design: (Designed by Kishida Takahiro, based on designs by Yasuda Suzuhito). I’m a big fan of Kishida’s designs; he always brings this sort of sleekness to the characters, which lends itself to the badassery that most of them are likely to spring forward with. Izaya doesn’t immediately scream ‘badass’ – actually, his fuzzy coat borders on looking silly, and in combination with the smirk he always wears, he can come off as a pompous jackass. Which he is! But when he gets on a roll, his face and demeanor make both the awesomeness and the sadism of his attitude pop.

Personal Bias/Moe Traits: Izaya is like an extreme version of how I view myself (and to a greater extent, how I’m viewed by those around me). He’s completely full of himself, and only interested in his own benefit; if others will be helped in the course of his current ambitions, then he’ll help them, but he might decide to take from them shortly thereafter. One could call him a sore loser, because he’s the type who always views himself as ‘the man on top’ – if his plans are foiled, then it’s not that he was wrong, but that his plan became whatever the situation called for.

I’m routinely and deservedly considered a ‘manipulative bastard’ by the people around me (to the point that whenever I offer a deal to someone, they call it ‘a deal with the devil.’) It’s not that I’m uncaring – I love my friends, but I love them for my own sake, and I’ll manipulate them into doing things the way I want them to. Many see manipulation as evil, but much in the way that I think Izaya’s manipulation was ultimately helpful to Kida Masaomi, Ryuugamine Mikado, and others, I think that my manipulation has had as many positive effects for others as it’s had for myself.

Distortions of My Imagination: It’s never clear in Durarara how Izaya views his position in comparison to other characters. He may actually view himself as ruling over everyone’s fate, but that’s not the assumption I want to make, nor one that I have to. Instead, I’d like to think that Izaya considers himself just as much a piece on his crazy-ass game board as anyone else, and gets his feelings of utter confidence not out of a sense that he’s in total control, but out of a sense that he’s able to bend whatever situation comes about to his will.

Crowning Moment of Love: My favorite Izaya scene was his first one in the show, at the end of episode 2. He meets with a young woman on the roof of a building that is a popular suicide spot, having told her through email conversations that they’d both kill themselves to escape their terrible lives. Instead, Izaya gives her a speech and essentially informs her that her life is nothing special or unique and that she doesn’t honestly have the force of will to commit suicide. He makes her feel as though he’s somehow ‘won’ by convincing her not to jump, and out of a desire to shove it back in his face, the girl goes to do just that – the truth, however, is that it didn’t matter either way to Izaya. He merely wanted to see what she would decide to do after being confronted with his speech. Whether she jumped or not, he’d already won.

Title: The Great Deceiver

2. Kuhouin Murasaki – Kure-nai

Seiyuu: Yuuki Aoi (Performance: 4.5/5)

Character Design: (Designed by Ishii Kumi, loosely based on shitty designs by Yamamoto Yamato) Murasaki is an adorable loli and it doesn’t take much for me to love one of those, but she’s also a unique design. She’s got a round face and a bit of baby fat, which makes her look her age (7) more than your average loli (and the original design). I think my favorite design aspect is her big, purple, expressive eyes, which are complemented perfectly by the cut of her very long hair. The couple of outfits that Murasaki gets to wear in the show are hilariously mismatched or pastel, but they also serve to emphasize both her childishness and her alienation from the outside world (and she still looks cute in them). The kimono is cute, too, and it’s interesting in the way that it doesn’t seem to fit her age, but also serves to pronounce her maturity in certain situations.

Personal Bias/Moe Traits: Murasaki plays straight to two of my biggest fascinations – exploring the psychology of children from strange home situations, and observing how children grow and learn to interact with a world that they don’t recognize. In a way, Murasaki was lucky to not have stepped foot into the normal world until she was seven years old, because it allowed the things she learned to have a bigger impact and deeper meaning to her. Things that are usually considered common sense and not often thought about are put into consideration by her, and she in turn gains a deeper understanding of those thing than the average person. This is perhaps expressed best in the many lessons that perverted collegiate woman Tamaki gives her about love and relationships, through which she gains important abilities to understand the ways that other people think.

Towards the end of the series, Murasaki shows a maturity that no normal seven-year-old girl would have, but this isn’t a mistake – it’s the point. Murasaki grew up in an environment that prevented free thought or action and carefully trained her to understand her place in life as it would be even in adulthood. When Murasaki learns many things about the outside world, her knowledge and personality evolve, but the sense of knowing the world of adults that she was always being trained for remains and takes new form with her gain in worldliness.

Distortions of My Imagination: Actually, some of what I said above could be considered the result of my perspective take on the show more than a message it was trying to give. That said, I know writer-director Kou Matsuo’s work pretty well, and one common theme in his work is learning to look at one’s situation in a mature light (not necessarily the same as coming-of-age). I have enough reason to believe that my thoughts on her personality and development aren’t off-mark, but whether or not her upbringing was considered the immediate connection to her maturity, I cannot say.

Crowning Moment of Love: This is difficult, because the true culmination of Murasaki’s appeal comes from her dialog in the final episode, but I really don’t want to use endings for this section. Instead, I pick the last scenes of episode 8, wherein Murasaki explains to Shinkurou that she’s happy with him and that she loves him, but that it frustrates her that she isn’t old and mature enough to become his woman. The dialog could in part be considered Murasaki’s misunderstanding of Tamaki’s perverse lessons about love, but ultimately, Tamaki’s lessons aren’t wrong or anything, and they mean the same things to Murasaki that they’d mean to an adult, so as I see it, the scene is as meaningful as it appears. I like to imagine that in the future, when Murasaki grows up and comes to reclaim Shinkurou, she’ll give a speech exactly like this, as if to say that understanding the connotations of her words hasn’t changed the way she feels.

Title: When I Grow Up

I’ve tried to beat this problem by constantly evolving and changing my favorites list to always reflect my current emotions, and the biggest way I did this was the creation of my ‘heart’ and ‘head’ scores. These scores were basically made to account for ‘obsession.’ When I watched Infinite Ryvius, I reacted in the way described above, but I instantly knew that I wouldn’t be ‘obsessed’ with it. I created the heart/head split so I could still express how amazed I was by Infinite Ryvius and give it a ’10′ without having to compromise the fact that the show didn’t hold the same standing in my heart that, say, Toradora did.

Now I’m looking at this on another new front, and I’m starting to think that maybe all of these favorites shouldn’t be on the same list at all. Now, I’m thinking of a divide not between ‘head’ and ‘heart’, but a divide between ‘favorite’ and ‘obsession.’

How come *I* must know where obsession needs to go?

It’s not a matter of which ones I actually *like* more than the others. Rather, doesn’t it seem like there are some series that just get into your head the way that even your favorite anime don’t ever do? The best way I can really explain this is with my own examples.

The shows I would consider myself most obsessed with are the likes of End of Evangelion, Lucky Star, Higurashi no Naku Koro ni, and non-shows like Hatsune Miku and Touhou. These are series and franchises that always seem to be on my mind. They’re the sorts of shows that interact with my everyday life, and that I rewatch frequently or buy tons of merchandise related to.

Some of my *favorite* shows don’t get this level of obsession from me, nor much obsession at all from some. Toradora, for instance, is a show that I have undying love for – it touched me pretty deeply and inspired no shortage of fanboying on my part for quite some time; and yet, it’s not a series that’s always on my mind. It’s not something that I go out of my way to look for on a daily basis or something. That’s not to say I don’t shower it with fandom – I’ve read plenty of Toradora doujins and bought some related merchandise, but it simply doesn’t compare to the level on which Lucky Star is a part of my life. Even though Aisaka Taiga is perhaps my favorite anime character, she doesn’t appear in my mind nearly as often as the likes of Konata and Kagami~n.

I definitely have an 'obsession' with this pairing. Art by Tatsuno Ryou http://gelbooru.com/index.php?page=post&s=list&tags=tatsuno_ryou

I began to recognize and define this divide while I was at this year’s Otakon. At each Otakon, I’ve gone in with a level of intent to buy things from each of my favorite series. The first year, I bought something from every favorite of importance – Gunslinger Girl (favorite manga) merch, Eureka Seven (favorite anime) merch, tons of Yoshitoshi ABe (favorite artist)-related stuff, Boogiepop (favorite franchise) books, etc. This year, however, I really broke it down and said ‘what are the series I’ve been the most *obsessed* with this past year?’

What I came up with was not a list of my ‘favorite shows’ from the past year. In the time since the last Otakon, I’d added Kara no Kyoukai, Gintama, Infinite Ryvius, the Gurren Lagann movies, Canaan, the Utena movie, The Sky Crawlers, Raildex, Durarara!!, Bakemonogatari, Utawarerumono, Neo Ranga, and Saki to my favorites list. However, even with Kara no Kyoukai and Gintama occupying two of my top 3 slots, and both having as much of my love and admiration as Eureka Seven and Toradora from years before, they didn’t stand out as ‘obsessions.’ Instead, the things I found myself most obsessed with from the past year weer Canaan, Raildex, and all things pertaining to the Scarlet Devil Mansion from Touhou. It was with that in mind that I made the purchases I did.

I don’t think being obsessed with a series rather than just admiring it as a favorite is something that simply ‘happens’, though it does involve personal inclinations. I don’t think I’ll ever be as obsessed with Infinite Ryvius as the other things in my favorites list, because even if I respect it as one of my favorite anime ever, I’m not inclined to think of it in the same manner. I do, however, think that there’re series which I could learn to be as obsessed with as I am others.

The easiest way to become obsessed is when there’s plenty of culture to consume. Lucky Star never would’ve become such a huge deal for me if I hadn’t been almost constantly surrounded by it’s culture. The same goes for Raildex, and obviously for the Scarlet Devil Mansion (considering that it only exists through fan culture). But that culture isn’t absolutely necessary – just having things in everyday life that’re easily applied back to favorite series can create an obsession.

Obsession in development

One series that I’ve felt myself becoming obsessed with is Baccano, which doesn’t really have much culture surrounding it. However, it’s a very big influence on my fiction writing, and it’s characters are both an influence on my own characters and on my personal life. The show also features many of my favorite roles by many of my favorite voice actors, which means that the show tends to come to mind whenever I think about those actors. Things like this make the series appear in my mind a lot, which makes me care for it more and more, as well as drives me to rewatch it more frequently than I would most series. That’s why, even though Infinite Ryvius is on an equal, if not higher level of importance than Baccano on my favorites list, it doesn’t earn as much of my obsession.

“Building” my obsessions is something that I really feel a desire to do, because at the end of the day, the shows I’m obsessed with have more impact on my life than anything else. When I recently watched Lucky Star for the fourth time, I was thinking that I wanted to move it further up my favorites list because I felt that the show had so much impact on me; but when I looked at the list, I couldn’t do it, because it wasn’t true that I liked Lucky Star more than the other shows on the list – it was only true that Lucky Star occupied a bigger part of my brain. Because of that, I will instead divide my list into series that are ‘my favorites,’ and series that are ‘my obsessions’.

(as if my favorites list really needed to get more complicated.)