MA in sociology with a focus on games • Wannabe literary critic • Independent scholar • I have a lot of interests so I apologise for a distinct lack of theme
it's actually so crazy how much the simpsons would fucking suck if it didn't have any of the simpsons characters. just a bunch of shots of empty houses and streets for half an hour while nothing happens. that would be so badddd lol
yeah that tends to happen when you remove characters from media. without characters its all just background. i guess movies set in scenic locations would still land as kinda nature docs but even then
Predictions for Dungeons & Dragons under Hasbro's management in the coming years:
Uma Musume style horsegirls introduced to the Forgotten Realms; setting's lore revised so that they've always been there.
Advancement rules now stipulate per-session XP bonus based on lifetime D&D Beyond purchase history.
Compendium of exclusive feat trees for specific gender and sexual identities. Bisexuality receives no feats of its own, being mechanically implemented as "half gay"; the resulting synergies are disgusting.
Editorial error in revised Dungeon Master's Guide accidentally refers to Dungeon Masters as Hasbro's employees.
"Noble savage" coding of barbarian class walked back, refocused on European folkloric touchstones such as the Ulster Cycle; all barbarian characters become Irish stereotypes.
AI-based DM service trained exclusively on work of Ed Greenwood launched; withdrawn a week later citing "guiderail issues".
Expanded discussion of navigating player expectations frames "not showing up at all" as a valid playstyle.
Dragon-blooded sorcerer subclass revised to state that one of the character's ancestors was "very good friends" with a dragon.
I'm very very glad that my knee-jerk, gut-feeling, primal-instinct reaction to seeing a Default Influencer is embarrassment. I think this saves me from a lot of bullshit.
Some lip-filler lady on enough Ozempic to euthanize a horse: "The sad truth is an elite lifestyle takes money and discipline. Buy these brands on credit if you have to. Skip meals."
Me: "Oh. Oh I'm physically experiencing the effects of secondhand embarrassment. You live like this? This is your life? Your interiority? If I was anything like this I'd kill myself I think."
To be clear ☝️, absolutely not gender-exclusive. Some broccoli-haired shirtless 23-year-old man on enough trenbolone to euthanize a different horse starts talking about how to be a high-value male and I start thinking instantly about how I'd have 4,000 slugs use me as a jungle-gym before I'd want this man within cootie-contagion distance of me.
but im talking like low down ditch weed. just schwag. grade A ass weed. garbàge. because the shit they smoking nowadays is toxic. i brush past someone walking out of a dispo and 10 minutes later im couchlocked. in my day I would buy an eighth of capital B Boof pack and that shit had me k'ed for a week. the certified reginald. that oregano 10 sack. placebo kush. joe biden diesel. but they don't make it like that no more
"'I don't know' isn't an answer" alright man then I'll just. Fuckin. Enter my philosophical mind-palace and check the fuckin akashic records. Real quick lemme just catch and cook and eat the Salmon of All Knowledge. Tell me ur question again so I can real quick climb to the highest branches of the Yggdrasil and lay it at the feet of Freda the all-wise Queen of Heaven. Dickhead.
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??
"onee-chan". "unni". "jiejie". all meritorious terms deserving of their reputation. meanwhile, what does the yankee dialect have? "older sister"? an utterly graceless dud of a word befitting the tongue of sexually repressed catholics
it goes without saying that it is in no small part this issue that the mommy monopoly exists. in this thesis I shall
Cybernetic Games Theory Research Society @summonee - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
