In my last post on SSRune, I talked about how both societies portrayed in the series have their own narrow expectations about how young women should behave, and how the Queen contest throws our heroines into conflict with those restrictive ideals. But this pressure to conform doesn’t just harm the girls individually; it also drives a rift in their friendship, as each feels jealousy for the other’s desirable traits. Vanilla in particular starts out admiring Chocolat’s courage, reminiscing about how Chocolat was her only friend back home and would always protect and stick up for her, but that admiration quickly turns to bitter envy, leading Vanilla to turn to the Dark Side in a desperate bid to gain the confidence she desires.

Vanilla: I’ve always envied Chocolat-chan, who acts like a real queen. I finally realize my hatred toward her. Things between us can never be the way they used to be. [...] Everyone loved Chocolat-chan. Pranks, jokes, and big laughs... I was never good at any of them. [...] I felt like I didn’t belong anywhere. So I can’t let anyone else have that position. To be the queen... that’s the only place I have left to belong.

Which leads into another big theme of Sugar Sugar Rune: Chocolat and Vanilla’s fight to maintain their friendship, even as the Queen contest does its best to tear them apart. This is a theme we see a lot in fiction and real life: in a patriarchal society, women learn to prioritize Getting A Man over everything else, which forces them to compete with other women (since desirable men are a finite resource), making it difficult to maintain any kind of female bonds or solidarity. In fact, you could interpret the Queen contest as a big metaphor for Life Under Patriarchy: In intensely male-dominated societies, the only way for a woman to gain power is by Getting A Man — seducing him, marrying him, being his mistress, or otherwise using sex to manipulate him into doing your bidding. Chocolat and Vanilla are competing for a position of power, but that power is only attainable by G-rated-ly seducing boys.

( Whoever wins, or whoever becomes the queen, we will be friends forever. )

Wherever there's a successful work of fiction, there will always be people in the audience saying "Man, that would have been a lot better if the characters spent more time fucking each other." Some of these people will acquire the money and resources to make their spooge-stained dreams a reality, and thus you have: the porno spoof.

The Magical Girl genre is no exception to this rule; over the years, Japan's porno-masters have brought us Venus 5 (94), Magical Woman M (96), Magical Kanan (00), Angel Blade (01), Beat Angel Escalayer (02), and the one we're looking at today, Lingerie Senshi Papillon Rose.

Papillon Rose started its existence as a metafictional website that described a tv show that didn't (yet) exist. There were episode summaries, screenshots made by photoshopping Sailor Moon screens, and even lyrics for the opening and ending credits. Interest for it grew as more and more people stumbled across the site and inquired as to where they could watch the (nonexistent) show, and eventually the property spawned a) a 24-minute OVA, which serves as the first episode to a nonexistent first season, and b) a 6-episode TV show, “New Season,” which serves as the full second season, with flashbacks to the nonexistent first season included to fill us in on the backstory.

The OVA follows closely in the website's footsteps, being a porno version of Sailor Moon, except that strictly speaking there’s no porn in it. The sex scenes are all R-rated and avoid explicit nudity, and most of the sexual content is of a more, er, metaphorical bent. For instance, the villain-of-the-week does the usual schtick of sucking energy out of hapless muggles, but she achieves this by attaching the end of her whip to the (male) victim’s (clothed) crotch and fellating the handle of the whip, while her “victim” makes orgasmy noises. It’s unmistakably a blowjob, but everyone’s clothes stay on and there’s no direct mouth-to-dick contact, so it’s not quite porn.

Since Papillon Rose is a porno spoof, the plot and characters are just the same ones as Sailor Moon, but after being put under the porn-ification ray. Sailor Moon dresses in slinky lingerie, her main weapon is a vibrator that she pulls from her crotch, and her finisher requires her to kiss its tip. Usagi works at a lingerie café, and she first meets Mamoru when they have a one-night stand together at a love motel. Tuxedo Mask no longer throws roses; instead he throws gobs of semen. Luna wears a condom on her tail and identifies Usagi by crawling up her leg and sniffing her crotch. The villain-of-the-week is a lesbian with a whip who reacts to Sailor Moon’s “In the name of the moon” speech by French-kissing her and later gives her a hearty butt-whipping, S&M-style. And the all-female mooks fight by spraying flammable white fluid from their nipples and firing missiles out of their boobs.

Honestly, I really enjoyed the Papillon Rose OVA. It's everything a porno spoof should be — gleefully perving up every aspect of the source material it can think of, all while being as ridiculous as possible. It also has a lot of fun nods to the classics of the genre: the title card is in the style of Cutey Honey, the right-hand-villain is named Sister Beene (à la Sister Jill), and when Rose first transforms, she yells "Honey Flash" and her clothes shred off before Luna scolds her and makes her do it properly. On the downside, the animation is very cheap in places, and the OVA ends with Luna giving Tuxedo Mask a blowjob. GROSS AND UNNECESSARY.

Three years after the OVA came out, the franchise made the jump to television with Papillon Rose: New Season, and a clean-up job ensued to make the story suitable for broadcast. Rose now works in a modestly-attired maid café in Akihabara, Luna's tail-condom is now a cute bow, Tuxedo Mask's jizz-tossing is gone, the attack names are no longer sex-themed, and there's a new trio of villains whose schtick has zilch to do with sex or fanservice. There's even a funny bit in the first episode where Rose reaches down to pull out her vibrator-of-doom, but Luna stops her, saying that her old attack is too raunchy for television; instead, Rose must pick up a random object and transform it into a weapon whenever she wants to fight. As for the plot, it continues on from the OVA: Rose is joined by two other Lingerie Senshi and later a third who serves as the Dark Magical Girl.

You might think that clearing away all the extraneous bouncing balloon-boobs, horny tentacle monsters, and CAT-ON-HUMAN BLOWJOBS from a gutter-minded titty-fest would make for an improvement. Unfortunately, in this case, it's like removing the PB&J from a PB&J sandwich — all you're left with is two slices of bland Wonder Bread. Papillon Rose's whole schtick was that it was a porny version of Sailor Moon. Take that away, and the show has no identity of its own. It just comes across as the most boring and derivative Magical Girl show imaginable.

To make matters worse, there is a metric ton of really humiliatingly blatant otaku-pandering in this show. I mentioned Rose's gig at the Akiba maid café, and that plot element is just an excuse to include a bunch of male otaku in the show's cast and make them vital to the plot. In particular, there's a trio of fanboys who are main characters, and when they aren't helping out the girls during the monster fights, they're watching the fights and chatting about them on not!2chan. In return, the heroines are very fond of their maid-café-patronizing hangers-on, leading the girls to say things like "Akiba is the sacred town of our beloved otaku! I will not allow you to desecrate it!” This is pure shameless wish-fulfillment for lonely basement-dweller guys who only wish they could meet bodacious lingerie-wearing magical girls, let alone have those girls talk to them, let alone let alone have them treasure them as invaluable allies and be inspired by their speechifying. I'm usually proud to be a nerd, but while watching this show, I frequently felt deeply embarrassed on behalf of my nerdly peers.

Bottom line: When a show's whole raison d'être is sex and fanservice, taking those elements out and failing to replace them with anything new is a stupid idea. Papillon Rose was at its best when it stayed true to its mission of porno-spoofing Sailor Moon.

The Magic Idol Singer genre is primarily a realm of lightweight escapism: It takes a career that only sounds great in theory (being a pop singer), scrubs away all the ugly, seedy, soulless, and exploitative elements of the job, and presents us with an idealized fantasy of what we wish pop stardom was like. For the first several episodes, Creamy Mami fits this bill; it's just a big ball of fluff. But then in Episode 13, it gets... interesting.

Okay, actually it gets creepy and gross, but it does so in a way that's very interesting to media over-analyzers like myself.

At the start of the episode, Yuu ducks into a House of Mirrors at the local amusement park, transforms into Creamy Mami, and runs off to her latest gig. What she doesn't yet realize is that her magic combined with those mirrors to create a doppelganger of her — an eeeeevil doppelganger. Soon enough, the evil fake Mami is wreaking all sorts of havoc and tarnishing the real Mami's good name.

What kind of devilish mischief is she getting up to you ask? Well, first she announces in an interview that she's in love with her production company's president, Shingo, and then she poses for a bunch of titillating semi-nude photos. You might be wondering what's so bad about that. Well my friends, it's time to talk about Contractual Purity.

Remember when Miley Cyrus posed for those semi-nude photos in Vanity Fair, and everyone freaked out because she's supposed to be this pure, wholesome Disney child? Well from what I've read, Japanese idol singers have it even worse than that, partially due to the whole moe aesthetic, which was a thing even back before the term "moe" was coined. The Japanese idol singer, in general, is supposed to be perfectly pure, innocent, and virginal. Some singers even have contracts that forbid them from dating, such as that chick from AKB48 who shaved her head and tearfully apologized to her fans after she was caught breaking the "no boyfriends" rule. That happened this year by the way. Why did she feel the need to grovel like that? Because she ruined her fans' ability to fantasize about her being an innocent virgin with not a single sex-related thought in her head; therefore she had utterly failed as an idol.

Of course, being a fluffy and conservative kids' show, Creamy Mami is not going to rock the boat on this issue. The show is very much in agreement that the fake Mami is eeeeeeevil for sullying her purity-sue image with hints of sexuality. Just look at this conversation between her and Toshio, the heroine's love interest who's smitten with Mami, at an autograph signing:

Toshio: If possible, I hope you don't appear on those [Playboy-esque] magazines again. I really don't like that.
Fake Mami: Oh that. I wondered if I should have gone halfway or not...
Toshio: Huh?
Fake Mami: That's right, I actually wanted to strip down even more. But the cameraman said this is the first time and so...
Toshio: It's not that. As a fan, I want to appreciate Mami-chan's innocent image.
Fake Mami: Oh jeeze! That's such an old way of thinking!
Toshio: It may be a little old but... we as fans...
Crowd of Male Fans: (loudly chanting) That's right, that's right.
Fake Mami: Could you all please behave. I'm not your doll.

She's right, she's not their doll. But the show clearly expects us to disagree with her and to sympathize with Toshio. We're supposed to agree that Mami owes it to Toshio and the other male fans to stay pure and not do anything that might shatter their fantasies of her. We're supposed to disagree with the fake Mami's (accurate) claims that contractual purity is an out-dated idea. And we're supposed to agree with the real Mami later on when she begs the fake Mami not to "destroy fans' dreams."

That last line — "I'm not your doll" — is especially telling, because fake Mami is asserting her independence, and the show clearly thinks this is a bad thing. That article from the Atlantic notes that in addition to being pure and innocent, idols are supposed to be submissive and obedient: the goal is to make each fan feel "like he or she has the power to make them more popular. To maintain this illusion of control, members of the group can't do anything to show they are independent from fans." The fake Mami isn't villainous just because she posed for cheesecake shots and admitted being attracted to a man; she's villainous because she acted of her own free will and refused to be bossed around by her fans' entitlement complexes.

Writing this post has made me realize: The whole "little girl uses magic to become an idol singer" concept is so fitting, and in such a twisted way. After all, what are idol singers but post-pubescent girls and women who pretend to behave like pre-pubescent children. What better way to create the perfect idol singer than to take an elementary-schooler and give her the body of a teenager? If she's still mentally at an age where she thinks boys have cooties, you won't even need those "no dating" clauses to keep her in line.

OH MY GOD THE HI8US IS OVER HOMESTUCK IS BACK OMG OMG OMG

ACTUALLY IT UPDATED LIKE THREE DAYS AGO AND I JUST DIDN'T NOTICE.

And surprise surprise, the comic is getting possibly even more meta than before, and Hussie is a huge tease. Business as usual.

Hello lovely readers, I have a poll!

Gotta clear some room on my harddrive, so it's time to watch some shitty anime that's been collecting dust in my to-watch folder.

Pretty Rhythm Aurora Dream: a few assorted eps including the season finale.

I could describe PRAD as a Magic Idol Singer show except with ice skating and dancing instead of singing, but that would be quite deceitful of me because this is not a show about ice skating or magic or teenage girls — it's a show about clothing and the sale thereof. Yes, PRAD is one of those "30-minute commercial masquerading as a tv show" deals that were so popular in the U.S. during the 80's. Much is made of the girls' outfits, with one's skill at assembling fashionable ensembles being an important factor in one's success as an ice skating idol, and the main trio of girls even compete in a big contest where the prize is (drumroll please) a pair of shoes. The show also features some award-winningly terrifying uncanny-valley CGI whenever the girls have a dance/skate number, which is frequently. Possibly this was done as a nod to the arcade games upon which the anime was based? Dear Japan: Stop basing your anime on pachinko and/or arcade games. STOP IT THIS INSTANT.

All that said, this show pleasantly surprised me in that I didn't completely hate it. It's very by-the-numbers and was clearly made by a "creative" team who were half-assing it all the way through, but it wasn't as soulless and materialistic as it could have been. Actually I think the show's attempts at being un-shallow and heartfelt, though admirable, were a big detriment to it, especially in the finale. I don't know how to properly describe the facepalm-worthy crescendo of stupid that is the finale, but basically it's what happens when a writing team realizes "Shit, our show's climax is an ice-dancing competition. That's not epic enough! Gotta make it more epic, even if the result makes no sense whatsoever!" Just.... so stupid, y'all.

Happy Seven: all eps except the last one.

Jeez and I thought PRAD was by-the-numbers. Happy Seven is what happens when a bunch of peeps collaborate to make a moe magical girl anime with absolutely no new ideas in it. We will hit every cliché, gentlemen, every goddamn one! Starting with the characters: The heroine is a clumsy ditzy lovestruck pigtailed blonde, and her cohort includes a cool big sis with a hefty rack, a pair of loli twins who speak in unison and fall asleep at random moments, a dog-girl instead of the usual cat-girl who says "-wan" after all her sentences, a Rei Ayanami clone who goes all dere-dere for fishes, a braids-and-glasses techno-whiz chick, and a shy crybaby who turns into a tough bifauxnen when she transforms. The villains are a purple-haired purple-wearing haughty sorceress with a fan and the silver-ponytailed bishie student council president, and the token dude of the heroine's posse is a bland squinty prince-charming type whom absolutely every female in the cast wants to bone. The heroine, her two muggle pals, all seven members of the magical girl posse, and the purple villainess are all hankering for this guy's dull flavorless sausage, to the point where it becomes a major subplot that takes up a huge chunk of the runtime. I'd almost call this a harem anime, except that Mr. Blanderson is clearly not the protagonist.

The plot is what you've come to expect: Team of magical girls and token dude fight monsters that possess angsty people, resulting in a Victim-of-the-Week/Monster-of-the-Week formula, with the villains showing up occasionally to vaguely foreshadow some impending doom. The only unusual element here is that the heroine spends most of the show's run as a muggle; she starts off as a Victim-of-the-Week, and when the team senses a weird power lying dormant within her, they let her become their manager. Her powers only awaken during the finale. This could have made for an interesting twist, but unfortunately this show, like most bottom-of-the-barrel moe shows, spends most of its time faffing about with dull slice-of-life nonsense and finding every available excuse to turn the castmembers into chibis. There's even one episode that has zero monsters or magic in it and is just unapologetically filler. In a 13-episode series.

Akahori Gedou Hour Rabuge: Gedou Otome Tai: a few assorted eps.

So this is a moe Cute Witch show about five witchy sisters who live amongst the muggles by day and fail miserably at being evil by night, blah blah slice-of-life and lulzy hijinks, but I really only have one thing to say about this show: WHAT THE FUCK IS UP WITH THE FANSERVICE?!?

I expect a dude-aimed magical girl show to have fanservice, but not quite this much and certainly not this, um, sleazy? Like, we're edging into Moetan territory here. The main source of creepy is the 2nd and 4th sisters, Maika and Kanashi. Kanashi's in elementary school but looks like a busty high-schooler. Maika's in high school but looks like a flat-chested braids-and-glasses elementary-schooler. I'm sure you can see where this is going. Maika has a part-time job modeling children's clothing for what I can only assume is some fetish magazine or website considering the way they have her pose (and yes, she even dons the stereotypical school swimsuit). Meanwhile Kanashi's whole shtick is that she looks like jailbait but is totally clueless about it, so she's constantly shown in male-gaze-o-vision and her male teacher repeatedly explodes into nosebleeds and then berates himself for having dirty thoughts about his pre-puberty students, har har what a knee-slapper. I guess it's okay to treat the ten-year-old like a Playboy bunny so long as she doesn't look like she's ten. /SARCASM

Jewelpet, Season 1: eps 1-4, unsubbed.

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Even if I'd had English subtitles to liven up the experience, I doubt I'd have been able to stay awake through this one. Mostly it strikes me as an extremely poor man's Onegai My Melody.

Magical Canan: assorted eps, Spanish subs (which I don't speak).

Another one where I don't need to hear the dialogue to know that it's shit. This is a suitable-for-broadcast adaptation of a porno OVA, which itself was adapted from a porno game, which I strongly suspect was meant as a porno spoof of Cardcaptor Sakura. Hence the series carries the stink of lazy ripoff. And what it doesn't rip from CCS, it swipes from Pretty Sammy. The visuals also look incredibly cheap, to the point where I started wondering if I was watching the porno version by mistake.

At one point, the heroine ends up at a cosplay café in Akiba where one of the waitresses is dressed up as Mew Mint from Tokyo Mew Mew. I guess the writers had never heard of "Don't mention a better anime in the middle of your crappy anime."

Welp, that's 1 GB freed up. Now to dig into the umpteen bazillion TMM/MerMelo/Sugar Sugar Rune/CCS episodes I've got squatting on here.

OKAY OKAY OKAY. There was that Magical Girl Project thing I was doing. And still am doing! I've just been lazy about posting.

Today it's time to take a voyage into the Magic Idol Singer subgenre, which is a distinct niche unto itself despite producing only about 8 shows over a 30-year period. Lately I've been reading Full Moon Wo Sagashite, which I've seen held up as the pinnacle of the subgenre. However, I've been holding off on talking about it, because Full Moon is one of the later entries in the genre, and I've heard that its approach is rather subversive. To understand the rebellious present, we must first examine the stodgy past, i.e.: Creamy Mami, the first Magic Idol Singer.

Creamy Mami was a 1983 original anime by Studio Pierrot; Full Moon was a 2002 manga by Arina Tanemura, adapted into a heavily cut-down and fillerized 2002 anime that I haven't seen. And right from the start, the journeys of their respective heroines are drastically different.

First off, Yuu winds up becoming Creamy Mami entirely by accident. She helps an alien, and he rewards her with the power to turn into a sixteen-year-old. In Episode 2, she's wandering around town in her older form, when she's spotted by a music exec and dragged into singing in a televised solo performance, filling in for an idol who's running late. By contrast, Mitsuki becomes Full Moon almost entirely by her own design. When she bumps into a couple of shinigami by chance, she interrogates them about their powers and asks them to make her older, specifically because she wants to attend a singing audition with an age limit. The shinigami grant her request, and she goes to the audition and blows everyone away. Then she gets an agent, releases a single, and quickly works her way towards fame in a (I assume) more conventional way than Yuu's serendipitous "discovered on the street" debut.

Second, and closely related to the above, Yuu has zero interest in singing prior to becoming an idol. In fact, when she first gets kicked out on stage, she uses her powers to summon a magic microphone which invents a signature song for her, teaches her the song, and gives her the talent to sing it, all in the blink of an eye. Mitsuki, on the other hand, has a lifelong passion for singing, to the point where she refuses lifesaving surgery for her throat cancer because she doesn't want to lose her voice. Her singing talent is all her own — all the shinigami do is remove the throat tumor when she's aged up, so that she can sing at full volume.

Third, both girls' powers are restricted by a one-year time-limit, but for completely different reasons. Yuu's time-limit is arbitrary; the alien just gave her a year's worth of powers. Mitsuki's time-limit exists because she's fated to die of throat cancer in one year, so her powers will only be relevant until then.

Fourth, while Mitsuki wants nothing more than to be a singer, the Creamy Mami writers made the bizarre choice of having Yuu dislike being a singer at first. After her debut performance, Yuu reflects that it was fun but she wouldn't want to do it again, and it's never made clear why. She spends most of Episode 3 avoiding the manager who discovered her and who is now searching for her Cinderella-style. In the end, he ignores her protests and basically badgers her into becoming one of his full-time singers. I'm guessing this was done as a cheap attempt at creating conflict and drama, but it doesn't make a lick of sense. The target audience of this show is little girls who are dying to become a glamorous idol singer; why make the heroine be a girl who rejects that life and has to be strong-armed into it? If you're going to make a shameless wish-fulfillment anime, you could at least have the protagonist appreciate her amazing good fortune.

As you've probably guessed by now, I infinitely prefer Mitsuki's origin story. I like that she has so much agency; she knows what she wants, and she pursues it. Even before getting powers, she's already plotting to sneak out of her grandma's house and go to that audition. When she happens to run into a pair of empowering entities, she seizes the opportunity and milks it for all it's worth. I also like that music and idol singing is woven into her character and her life pre-magic-empowerment, and even into her past (her dead father was an idol singer); it makes the magic idol singer gimmick feel more natural and in sync with the story, rather than just a random fantasy getting dumped on somebody with no interest in or connection to it. And most of all, I like that Mitsuki blatantly asks for her powers. Most Magic Idols and Magic Warriors either have to be wheedled and nagged into accepting powers, or they're just empowered automatically, without their consent or input. It's very rare and refreshing for a heroine to go "I want powers. Hey you, magical person, give me powers!"

The one area where Mitsuki's agency falters is in the individual transformations. Yuu (like most MGs) has a magic object with which she can trigger her transformation; she has total control. Mitsuki has no magic object; instead she must rely on her male love interest to trigger her transformation by snapping his fingers, and I'm sure there's a very interesting essay about gender politics somewhere in there. However, the only problem with this that Mitsuki encounters is when she needs to transform but her love interest is far away; to fix this, she has a magic whistle to summon him, and I don't recall Takuto ever ignoring the whistle or refusing to transform Mitsuki, although the author definitely could have explored that possibility if she wanted to.

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THINGS I LOVE ABOUT THE RECENT UPDATE:

( ASDJFKDSJ )

4/13 is tomorrow. Place your bets! (Pffft I bet Hussie will have something totally anticlimactic happen just to fuck with us.)

How bad has my Homestuck nerdery gotten?

I'm currently building a Minecraft version of the Alterniabound game. It's almost finished and it's gonna be SWEET AS FUCK.

Guys, I think I'm actually starting to ship Vriska/Hussie. :F

Okay but seriously, some commentary on the latest escapades of the pir8 crew.

( Scurvy nautical grog-stained spoilers; also, city planning and necromancy )