Michaela, late 20s, she/her I have no idea what it is that you are looking for, this is just where I keep the posts I really like. Side blog of Brush-It-Gently
for new followers: i love abortion, drag queen story times, reparations, stripper unions, marxist ideology, all decolonial efforts, drug addicts, welfare queens, trans activists, sex ed in schools, rioting, and of course looting ❤️ death to america 🫡
Boo hoo i'll be able to add more physical storage to my phone and be able to change out batteries if they degrade as well as all these other optional features I won't have to touch
I love how they add totally absurd things no one is asking for to make the idea look crazy. And still, I must emphasize, failing to make this look like a bad idea.
"Is this what you want? Is this ugly stupid bullcrap what you want??" the biggest loudest idiot in the room asks, holding up a picture of the hottest looking shit I've ever seen
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??
like during zuko's Morality Coma in season 2 he has an incredibly vivid dream about two red and blue dragons, and then in season 3 he just fucking. meets the exact same dragons for real? there are slight differences in how they look but otherwise he genuinely just dreamed about ran and shaw months before actually seeing them in person? and it's never elaborated on but huh???
zuko: yeah i had some weird fever dreams. there were like these two dragons circling me, and the blue one sounded like azula and wanted me to die or whatever, and the red one sounded like you and was telling me not to do that—
iroh, the only person in this house who should know what those fucking dragons look like: hey What
zuko for sure keeps having dreams like this for YEARS without connecting the dots that it's weird spirit shenanigans. aang eventually has to point it out to him and even then he thinks it's Uncle Bullshit for several more years
anyway all that is to say that there exists a version of avatar in my mind where instead of him just running straight through Makapu with june that one time, we get to see a full 20 minute ep of aunt wu trying to convince zuko that he has The Gift, and zuko just sitting there like ugh god why are old people so weird