Post a Comment On: Digitally Staving Off Boredom

Some motivation books describe the process of fighting procrastination as being like a jockey riding something bigger and more powerful than it.  Sometimes, the beast runs wild and all the jockey can do is hold on for dear life!  So it is that I lost my chance at making progress in development or The Witcher 3 to instead watching anime this week, trapped largely in a cycle of watching just one more episode until the time ran out.  I guess you could say I was on a Crunchyroll.

It probably began some time last week, when some vein of thought had me googling "waifu" and then seeing an 800-year-old demigod fox named Sanko-San featuring rather prominently in the image search results.  She looks like she's twelve, how is that a waifu?  (It should be noted that, in Japanese mythology, kitsune are magical shapeshifting foxes of legend, and some of those legends involve the kitsune marrying a human and bearing it children.)

[Image]As it turns out, The Helpful Fox Sanko-San is quite refreshingly upbeat and happy, I could not help but want to watch yet another episode. It centers on a young Japanese Salaryman protagonist, Kuroto Nakano, unexpectedly coming home to find warm meals and other (PG-rated at worst) pampering provided by the titular (albeit flat-chested) Sanko-San. 

Sanko-san comes to serve Kuroto because his suffering is real, to the point where it has been generating a dark miasma of bad karma.  Also, he reminds her of his ancestor who she once admired.  So she comes down from heaven to help him, and high jinks ensue among getting adapted to 21st-century life.  Of course, to help keep the ball rolling, a whole cast grows around this duo, including additional fox spirits and his slovenly female mangaka neighbor.

The series portrays a more authentic kind of love, not so very carnal nor selfishly codependent, just a strong appreciation between an exhausted worker and a selfless provider.  Some would say that such a relationship is hopelessly outdated, or exploitative towards women.  But, given the right circumstances, not necessarily.  Such is the case of a fox demigod coming to your aid.  I could see why some people would pine for that kind of waifu, someone who could simply provide a little slice of heaven after a hard day's work.

This week, I found myself going back to finish a series I had seen much earlier, the outrageous slice-of-life adventures of Squid Girl!

[Image] They call her Squid Girl; the series name is also the name she is known by.   She's a cute girl (about 10-14 years old by appearance) with a squid for the top of her head, and has unexpected (sometimes comical) superpowers begetting her hybrid nature.  Outraged by human pollution of the sea, and just a little mad with power, she decides to invade the surface world, only to quickly find that she had somewhat underestimated the difficulty of the task.  As is typical of people her age, she's prone to being energetic and having silly misunderstandings, even more so in a modern human world after she had lived in the sea by herself for most of her life.  High jinks ensue.

As it happens, Squid Girl is not particularly good at invading the surface world, but she is very good at invading peoples' hearts.  The very first building she encounters, a beach food stand with indoors seating known as Lemon Beach House, ends up being her final destination.  She is quickly put to work and adopted by the family that lives there: 17-year-old Eiko Aizawa, her superhuman older sister Eiko, and their little brother Takeru.  Being primarily centered on the beach, lots of bikinis and fun in the sun makes its way into the show.

Of course, this being an anime, additional lively characters are soon introduced.  Eiko's classmate, Sanae, who falls head over heels for Squid Girl and pursues her as a masochistic stalker (played for laughs) despite being an otherwise decent person.  Four Americans: three bumbling, lab-coat-wearing MIT graduates who largely invent dangerous plot devices ("The Three Stooges") supervised by their bikini-wearing boss, Cindy, who hangs around looking to prove Squid Girl must be an alien.  A hunky lifeguard who is in love with Eiko but is not brave enough to tell her.  And so on; everyone seems to bring a new layer of high jinks with them, and they are all fairly likable, embedding themselves into the show's mythos as recurrent characters.

Throughout it at all, Squid Girl (the show and the character) remains innocent, adorable, and often hilarious.  And yet, the intro sequence frequently shows her in cosplay for a cheerleader, police officer, and so on.  They knew what they were doing, there was definitely a bit of lolicon at play here, but they kept it moderated enough to avoid undermining the innocence of the show.  As an interesting aside, Squid Girl had a promotional crossover with the original Splatoon.  I wish I had been there.
[Image]
Currently, my anime binge is working its way through The Everyday Tales of a Cat God.  As with the other two entries, it's a lighthearted slice-of-life comedy that is a story about a supernatural being coming to live with everyday people, and high jinks ensue.  This time, the supernatural being is Mayu, a tomboyish cat god with the power to find lost or forgotten items.  Stripped of most of her divine powers by an angry mother and sent to Earth, she comes to live with Yuzu Komiya, a young woman trying to run an antiques shop that she inherited from her deceased parents.

More so than the other two mentioned here, this anime works because its primary character brings a number of interesting characters with them.  By themselves, Yuzu and Mayu are just a girl and a lazy videogame-addicted cat god cohabiting an antiques shop.  But Mayu attracts her fiance, the stoic cat warrior Sasana, betrothed largely because they both looked fairly boyish as children and their respective fathers did not bother checking their genders.  Sasana's rival for Mayu's affections (which are never really reciprocated) is Meiko, a stuck up princess deity for whom Mayu breached protocol during childhood to offer to play with, and it left an impression.  Another regular is the bubble-brained and busty pink Yoshino, a minor sakura blossom deity, who is generally as useless as she is sweet.  Another minor deity and frequent vistor, Gonta, is responsible for maintaining the town's prosperity seriously, but a running joke is his tendency to lose composure due to his crush on Yuzu (much to Mayu's annoyance and amusement).  Of course, there are others.

The individual parts of this anime are fairly mediocre: the characters are not very well fleshed out, the stories are half-baked, and even the animation is nothing to write home about.  However, taken together, something about his series just works, it's something I would probably watch far more than the 12 episodes that were made if they existed.  Perhaps, as with our ancestors, hanging around gods is reassuring, especially when they are being fallible knuckleheads, leading to a certain anthropomorphic validation as to the way of things, and the result is why The Everyday Tales of a Cat God feels so uplifting?

I guess I was just on a kick to watch uplifting things this weekend.  
I also caught an episode or two of Ms. Vampire Who Lives In My Neighborhood, which largely is an excuse to foist adolescent yuri, but is notable for the eponymous vampire, Sophie Twilight, being so amazingly normal.  She explains that vampires don't cross thresholds they are not invited over because it is rude, more than anything else, and she finds it ghastly to drink blood directly from a living thing, preferring to order it over the Internet and drink it politely from a cup.  Though not lacking vampire-based superpowers, she is otherwise quite normal, it's the humans around her who are strange.  I find the concept of a decent-minded vampire to be lovely uplifting thought, talk about overcoming your baser natures, and so it's sort of a shame that the series is largely about her warming up to the idea of romantic entanglement with a weird high school girl who is quite gung ho about shacking up with a vampire.

I also caught an episode Gabriel Dropout, and that was what I was hoping not to see.  It is about an angel who graduates top of her class from heaven and is sent to earth to study there, whereupon she succumbs to micro-transactions in MMORPGs and becomes a particularly slovenly hikikomori.  Add an angelic sadist, a very considerate demon, and a would-be tyrannical ruler of the underworld who balks at performing the slightest offense, and you have a cast of four girls, two angels and two demons, each of whom behave the opposite as you might expect of their stations.  From thereon out, it is basically any four high school girl comedy slice of life anime ever, except with a sacrilegious bent.  It's just a tad too edgy and naughty to be uplifting.