blog of a pan anarchopacifist feminist tree-hugging star wars-obsessed vegan weeb trash loser with a side of cosplay and other shit i like. and dogs. (she/her) (header by @whimsy-flags)
I am so utterly fascinated by “Saki”, the 18-year-running mahjong manga in which you, the reader, become gradually, frog-boilingly aware (over the course of nearly two decades’ worth of mahjong tournaments) that none of these girls are wearing underwear and most of their boobs are slowly expanding.
I need you to understand that I have, like, an anthropological level fascination with this comic. From the perspective of someone who is also a comic artist and writer, two things delight me about it:
the fact that I understand completely how an artist gets from “the fans can have a little hint of skirted asscheek” to “the pussy is completely out on center page” over the course of 18 years; and
the way in which the pussy being out is treated by the characters and diegesis as being utterly unremarkable.
Okay. Point 1. The frog-boiling.
Let me put this in perspective for you. There was already a meme about how the characters in “Saki” don’t wear underwear when I was in middle school. I am thirty now. Okay? And it’s still going.
In the time since, this has stopped being a joke. It is now indisputable canon. This is not because anyone outright says it at any point. It’s because the underwear ran out of places to hide. I’m obsessed with this thought: somewhere in the over 20 volumes of “Saki”, there is a panel in which underwear was objectively deconfirmed. And it would be so hard to figure out where that panel actually is. Maybe the artist didn’t even realize it when she drew it! The frog? Boiling!!
And of course there is also the breast expansion. I don’t know how to put a spin on this. They are just expanding. Like, this happens a lot with artists: you define a character as being, in your mind, “the one with the big boobs”, and over the years you emphasize that trait further and further so that the signal doesn’t get lost in the noise. It’s just that normally—in like a wildly popular manga series about mahjong published by literally Square Enix, for example—normally there would be a point at which the boobs stopped getting bigger. Like, an editor would step in or something. Or you would get to the point where you cannot draw the character in the same panel as her mahjong tiles without her breasts spilling over the tiles, and you’d go, “Well, this is now untenable.”
That did not happen. There is no ceiling. The frog is soup.
Point 2. The complete and utter mundanity of all of this.
It’s like this, okay: there’s no shortage of trashy ecchi manga out there. There’s a million other comics doing wildly bawdier things with wildly more improbable bishoujos.
The vibe with “Saki” is different.
It’s hard to explain this, but it feels like the world of the comic is fundamentally uninterested in the fanservice happening on the page. I cannot describe it as “leering”, because I cannot conceive of a person in the story from whose point of view one would leer. I think the artist is probably into it—I can’t imagine anyone is making her do this—but “Saki” the comic has no opinion on the matter.
There are essentially no male characters in “Saki”. Like, there was one guy? Kind of? At the very beginning? But he is gone now. They put him back in the toybox. He does not exist. It appears to be some level of canonical that in the world of “Saki”, almost all humans are women. Those women are sometimes romantically into each other. According to comments the artist has made on Twitter (which I cannot source), they have lesbian baby technology, so it’s no problem. It’s so much not a problem that the story is about mahjong, instead of any of that.
So, like, the fiction here appears to be this: this is the, like, meta-narrative of the fanservice of “Saki”, right: it’s just normal that they don’t wear underwear and their boobs are arbitrarily big. It’s been normal. It was normal before the story of the manga began. It’s just how things are. Nobody bats an eye about it, and if they do, it’s in sort of a lesbian kind of way so like what’s the problem, we love lesbians here. This is literally normal for girls.
The fanservice simply diffuses into this all-encompassing aura of disembodied, ambient sluttiness. The framing of the panels demands you acknowledge it, and the story demands you already be over it, because it’s mahjong time now, and we’re playing mahjong.
Do you get??? why I’m so fascinated??? Are you not a little enraptured???
Anyway, I have no idea how to end this weird post. I guess the conclusion is that women stay winning????
I have so many questions... How does one SUSPECT a manga character isn't wearing underwear? Like, sure, boobs are front and center amd you can see them get bigger panel by panel but how does this work for panties? Are there just that many upskirt shots?
Also how do you keep a manga about Mahjong going for 18 years, what??
did you know the cops once found a fully functioning movie theater with a well-stocked bar inside the catacombs and they when they tried to go back later to formally investigate it was completely emptied out save for a note that read "don't search for us"
my little bro is part of the catacombs community and yeah, it's basically a fully autonomous society! enough that when my bro goes in on a friday night, they don't come out until monday for work- sometimes longer if they took days off.
some of the rooms have fully stocked pantries with cooking equipment, some have movies like the one described above, some have books you're allowed to just take but people always put back- every day people bring things from the outside. artists often set up galleries there. there are rooms with mattresses and hammocks set up for people to sleep. one of the room is just a place where people leave shoes for the fun of it.
this is Known, it's not a secret by any means. the catacombs are as big as paris itself, and people live there just as people live above. it's wonderful when you think about it.
so "incubus" means someone who lies on top of something, and "succubus" means someone who lies underneath something, and the former also turns up in the word "incubate", which means to lie on top of an egg. To ensure closure we could therefore posit an analogous term "succubate", which would be something like this:
I played a small role in helping to produce the first estimate of carbon emissions from deportation flights in the Trump 2.0 era. Emissions from these flights rose 88% when Trump took office, and these deportations alone now produce as much pollution as a small island nation. From The Guardian this morning:
Trump campaign accelerating climate crisis as officials move migrants to detention jails and deport them from US
“When we try to inflict suffering on immigrants, it … inflicts a lot of suffering on them – it also inflicts suffering on ourselves, on everyone. There’s no one that escapes when we’re trying to increase human misery,” said Brett [Afloweroutofstone, who works at the] organization that shared its ICE flight emissions calculations with the Guardian.
He added: “The pollution that these flights cause is causing harms to every single family in the United States.”...
“Climate change is a driver of migration,” [he] said. “So the fact that the United States is accelerating climate change in [its] attempt to remove these immigrants seems like a vicious cycle in a very real way, where we are creating more undocumented immigrants through this pollution.”
I don't read as much fic as I used to but one "tell" for non Canadians writing us, besides the etransfer, is the units you use to describe us measuring something. I hate to tell you this but The Chart is real and it's completely subconscious. Please abide
i did not spend half an hour poorly editing an excerpt from the Soft Bodies chapter from Mira Bellwether's Fucking Trans Women onto that open book for people to make this post about the men in their lives. please respect hoshimi junna's flaccid cock.
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