I'm still thinking about I Love Boosters, like where do I even start with how delightful it is?
I love the way unions are framed as love for your community, and how community is the moral of the story but also showing the dangers of the media preying on people who want that sense of community. I love the friendship between the two main leads and how their personalities realistically clash but how they love each other at the end of the day and are willing to go to hell and back for each other.
I love the examination on how everyone loses in the system, from the people making the clothes for dirt cheap in other countries to the shipment drivers who don't get jobs because the company would rather invest in scifi technology then pay and wait to the store employees who see a fraction of the overall cut to the creative visionaries whose work goes taken and uncredited because of a figurehead and even to the assistant who is putting up with it all for the chance at being a boss.
I see the blatant commentary with making the main antagonist a wealthy white woman and a minor antagonist a white gay man who uses "progressive" language to talk down to his employees of color (or the figurehead of the union eventually being a light skinned woman of color). I love this too, especially paired with the backstory made for the wealthy white woman with implications of her being an underage victim of a white man but still doing massive amounts of harm as soon as she is the one in power.
There is probably a lot more I could be talking about but I don't want to spoil too much for those who want to see the movie plus I know there are things which flew over my head.
It is just a sheer delight with a lot of heart and a really good script with so much blink and you miss it commentary. I hope to own it on DVD.
do non bay area people know that the slanted apartment in i love boosters is a dramatization of an actual (super expensive) building that started sinking and tilting in san francisco. i hope you all know this it makes it 10x funnier and more apt
a. i feel called out abt "look at collage art zines" bc it means the inverse for me, i do that every day so i have to look at this movie on opening night even if it's only showing really late
b. i know nothing about the movie other than hot talented people in monochrome and like, shoplifting? this will be fun
c. it's been a while since i saw 'sorry to bother you', i enjoyed it but need to rewatch. and then 'i'm a virgo' came out and i binged it and it was strangely good. i guess all of Boots Riley's projects imagine people fighting white supremacy together but with very poppy imagery. so i wonder what this will be like!
d. i just want to see a movie in theaters again, i haven't been since seeing 'keeper' and got a panic attack from it
UPDATE: i can't see the movie because it's not playing on Saturday night :(((. i leave this town before they play it again. i was on the phone with an employee and was like i really want to yell at someone but i won't yell at you you're being helpful thank you have a good night. fuck this
that man has been trying to climb this tower since he was 16. he has asked multiple times, and every time they said no, but now he’s famous enough & variety was able to convince them to do a shoot on the tower. it all led here. it was all for this.
the thing is that for all its supposed faults, i would take this brand of 90s utopian globalism over whatever the fuck we’ve been doing for the last 10 years in a heartbeat
bro, i desperately need people to learn that romance is an actual, literal genre of fiction. if you do not like a complete focus on romance and only like romantic plotlines incorporated into various other plots - you do not like the romance genre and you are not interested in romance fiction. simple as that. and it's fine if you don't like it, but pretending like the entire genre doesn't exist and is actually all badly written fiction of other genres which is overly focused on romance is asinine. yet somehow continues being a sentiment i see all the time. romance fiction is not lacking in plot or over-concerned with romantic relationships - it's literally doing what it was designed to do: centers mostly or even exclusively around romance.
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??
