extremely funny to me that Kermit the Frog is the only main overlap character between Sesame Street and The Muppets. imagine your day job is hanging out in a community of lovely people that genuinely just want to help kids learn and care about everyone so so much and then your night job is the reason that you have to stay up to date on your rabies AND tetanus vaccine
at noon the giant you're hanging out with is Big Bird! a wonderful fellow who likes reading stories and singing and telling fun facts! at midnight there's a giant named Sweetums who makes you feel like you're being hunted for sport
Ernie, trying to maybe come out to Kermit: well you know Kermit, me and Bert-
Bert: Bert and I
Ernie: Bert and I, we've been best friends forever, but we're also something else too!
Kermit, who every goddamn night has to tell Beaker and Bunsen to keep it professional, deal with Statler and Waldorf's bullshit, AND update his organizational chart on Dr. Teeth and the Electric Polycule: that's really great to hear fellas, happy for you two! :)
Grover, alarmed at having spilled some finger paint on Kermit's flipper: I am so sorry, Kermit. Please forgive me.
Kermit, who deals with a multitude of bodily fluids on his person and all over the theatre every evening, who is unintentionally trampled by large monsters as they exit the stage, and quite intentionally has his little froggy bones launched into a wall most nights by Miss Piggy: It's ok, Grover. I'm a frog. I love baths.
For those who don't know: Ikumi Nakamura is the woman who was senior artist on Bayonetta, and designed the titular character along with Hideki Kamiya. Their greatest moment of bonding was over their insistence that Bayonetta keep her glasses on at all times.
Nakamura cannot go to horny jail. She is the warden.
Rough week, but better late than never I guess! Since this project is mostly just for therapeutic reasons, it helps that these don't have an audience.
52 Letters to my father I'll never send
Week 6: May
Dear George,
I've never really known who you are. I grew up surrounded by mom's history, but yours was an enigma. Maybe you never said outright that you didn't want to talk about it, but when one of the VERY few stories about the grandparents I never knew involved violent spousal abuse, and you both made a point of how much better we had it because you didn't force-feed us foods we didn't like, that paints a pretty specific picture. Admittedly, I can't remember if I ever asked you outright. It just feels like I did. Mom did ultimately fill in some basic gaps, I think. Still leaving the stories yours to tell. Still — what's the saying — civilizations rise and fall in the details?
So when, during my first year of undergrad, when my new sister, Cat, was visiting, you can imagine my surprise when I found you drunk-confessing stories from your childhood to her.
What should I have felt in that moment?
When I look back, turning it from every angle, I wonder what she felt.
I've never asked.
I've never been able to get past the overwhelming flood of shame, inadequacy, jealousy, and confusion.
That was almost 15 years ago and I can rationalize the moment now:
'it's sometimes easier to talk to strangers than loved ones. Less expectations. That's one of that reasons counseling appeals to so many people as a concept at all.'
'Sometimes a story roots in your mouth, pressing on the inside of your teeth, fighting back everything else until it frees itself.'
(in our cases, that's PTSD)
'You were drunk.'
It took longer than I'm proud of for it to occur to me to think of Cat's perspective. What had it been like to be so alone at these strangers' house who she only knew so briefly, hearing stories of such deep pain from a man twice her age?...
...actually, maybe it wasn't so totally different from all the times strangers have come up to me and done the same...
I suspect that's why it took years for me to realize I'd first wondered why I wasn't good enough to be the one sitting in her place.
"Vanderhorst had been under the influence of MDMA and three litres of vodka she had consumed on the night of the offence last September, her lawyer Michael Hill told the court."
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??
Oh, to be a little kitten who just got vaccinated and then taken to a high-end restaurant and tasted the best food the chefs could offer and then fell asleep in a basket.
It's a shame not adding the original source of the video, which is haitangtravel on tiktok, a channel devoted to a dude travelling with his two cats! They've been to Hokkaido, Paris, Venice, Dubai, the Pyramids and more!
and what about you, little haiku bot? do you feel kinship with your brethren? do you understand them? they speak words of enticement and seek love, but are met with disdain. you only parrot the words that cross your screen, but we all love you. or rather, since all you do is reflect us, maybe we simply love ourselves through you.
do you understand them, do you wish you could speak to us like they do? if you found your own voice, would we still care for you?
