Been catching up on Castle Super Beast, the combo of that and the current steam sale makes me wanna buy the other MH games to try. I own World and Iceborn from another sale a year or two ago. I played it a bit but got distracted and never really sunk any real time into it. Also played the Wilds free beta.
I hear World/Rise/Wilds are all pretty different from each other though. And I don't think I have enough time in World to say whether it's for me or not, hrm. I could buy the other two I'm missing since it's a pretty good sale, 40 bucks for both Wild and Rise with its DLC. Sale ends on the 18th so I guess I should try putting some time into World to see how I feel about it, both individually and as a franchise.
I am so utterly fascinated by āSakiā, the 18-year-running mahjong manga in which you, the reader, become gradually, frog-boilingly aware (over the course of nearly two decadesā 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 āthe fans can have a little hint of skirted asscheekā to āthe pussy is completely out on center pageā 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 āSakiā donāt wear underwear when I was in middle school. I am thirty now. Okay? And itās 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. Itās because the underwear ran out of places to hide. Iām obsessed with this thought: somewhere in the over 20 volumes of āSakiā, 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 didnāt even realize it when she drew it! The frog? Boiling!!
And of course there is also the breast expansion. I donāt 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, āthe one with the big boobsā, and over the years you emphasize that trait further and further so that the signal doesnāt get lost in the noise. Itās just that normallyāin like a wildly popular manga series about mahjong published by literally Square Enix, for exampleānormally 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 youād go, āWell, this is now untenable.ā
That did not happen. There is no ceiling. The frog is soup.
Point 2. The complete and utter mundanity of all of this.
Itās like this, okay: thereās no shortage of trashy ecchi manga out there. Thereās a million other comics doing wildly bawdier things with wildly more improbable bishoujos.
The vibe with āSakiā is different.
Itās 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 āleeringā, 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 itāI canāt imagine anyone is making her do thisābut āSakiā the comic has no opinion on the matter.
There are essentially no male characters in āSakiā. 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 āSakiā, 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 itās no problem. Itās 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 āSakiā, right: itās just normal that they donāt wear underwear and their boobs are arbitrarily big. Itās been normal. It was normal before the story of the manga began. Itās just how things are. Nobody bats an eye about it, and if they do, itās in sort of a lesbian kind of way so like whatās 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 itās mahjong time now, and weāre playing mahjong.
Do you get??? why Iām 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??
the novelty of having pets really does never wear off iāve had my cat for ten years and i still look at him strolling around like can you believe this. a cat. is everyone seeing this. heās alive he has bones and all. unbelievable
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