In fact, aggressively bad.
According to Anime News Network:
The story centers on Kana Nakamichi, a middle-school girl who had already lost her parents and just recently lost her only remaining relative, her grandmother. As a result, she ends up living and working at a newspaper delivery office. Everyone else living at the office are all charming, self-assertive bishōjo. The manga follows Kana’s daily life in the fast-paced yet joyous environment.
Sounds innocent right? Fuck this shit.
E Minor: what the fuck
Fin: goddamn
E Minor: insipid and perverted
Nope, you’re not imagining things.
Nyoro~n: wow
Fin: whoa
E Minor: holy shit
Fin: oh my god
Fin: Im honestly in awe of how bad this is
Fin: it’s neesan from ichigo mashimaro but ten times worse
Nyoro~n: omg this sucks so bad
E Minor: middle schoolers know how to cook all the time
Nyoro~n: of course
E Minor: glad she packed her apron
E Minor: she’s been trained well
Nyoro~n: so deska
E Minor: even when you’re homeless and orphaned
Nyoro~n: I CAN BE A GOOD HOUSEWIFE
E Minor: don’t forget your goddamn apron
E Minor: with the hiyoko
Fin: someday I hope to find my own loli w/ domestic skillz who has no choice but to live with and work for me even tho I am a detestable drunkard pedo pervert
Nyoro~n: oh god fin don’t kidnap me
Fin: too old for me heh
Nyoro~n: i am 3 tyvm
E Minor: this is worse than rapelay
Fin: I didnt think anything would top judenchan
E Minor: rapelay admits it’s doing something wrong
Fin: or bottom it
E Minor: this is hilarious to someone
E Minor: someone thinks this is just harmless
Fin: oh my goddddddddddddd
Seriously, fuck this shit.
Moe Sucks 
This is like Kodomo no Jikan, except with a cat for a barely-there censor and totally realistic lesbians. Good to know that all lesbians are lolicon rapists (oh I’m sorry, “charming, self-assertive bishoujo”)… It’s like I’m right there in the anime. :/ Getting really sick of the exploitative flesbians running amuk in anime for fanservice points.
Interesting blog. Thanks for the warning; the summary was so banal and vague, it just really sounded like every other slice-of-life yuri… Not THIS. I refuse to scroll back up. Egh.
Yeah, the “charming, self-assertive bishoujo” description made the show sound so innocent that we were all kinda blown away by how terrible it was. I guess the loli harem aspect was just lost in translation? And couldn’t agree with you more, the depiction of lesbianism in anime gets worse every season. It just isn’t yuri without pedophilia or incest apparently. The main character being forced to work for the creepy older woman who gets wasted and feels her up so she can have a place to live is a new low though.
It’s insane that something like that would get skipped over. There’s kind of a discrepancy between “typical slice-of-life setup” and “lesbian pedophile kiddy porn”. Either it really did somehow get lost in translation, they intentionally left the information out to get more viewers or they are so fucking twisted they see absolutely no problem with the whole idea – as E Minor pointed out, someone thinks this is funny/harmless.
God, don’t get me started. I’m not one of those crazy, chauvinistic feminists, but my senior thesis was on the portrayal of women in animation (conclusion: it pretty much sucks). I had to skirt around the issue of moe and hentai/ecchi/etc. because there was a length limit and it would have easily tripled the length of the paper (not that I could sit through the hentai, ugh). I couldn’t even get around to talking about yuri, but basically I think it’s a catalyst for promoting heteronormativity while still having the girl-on-girl fanservice. It’s always making excuses – either she’s going through a “phase”, or it’s an all-girls school, or she was raped, or her boyfriends didn’t work out… Or if she IS a lesbian, she runs around groping everything in sight (including straight girls), molesting people, etc. You’re right about the constant additions of incest and pedophilia, too. Anything to justify the slippery slope theory… :/ Yeah, I could blab about this for a long time, but I digress.
“The main character being forced to work for the creepy older woman who gets wasted and feels her up so she can have a place to live is a new low though.”
Augh, what?! How could anyone have possibly approved this (easy answer: pedophiles in the business like pediatricians in the FDA)? This is like one of those horror stories you read about in the news 20 years after the fact. I’d like to think that if the adults were male this would have never been approved, but that probably wouldn’t have been the case. Japan has a really loose leash on this shit. The fact that they draw attention to the taboo in the actual anime as a selling point makes it worse.
Will be adding you to my blogroll, by the way. :3 And you guys post a lot! :o
The sad fact is that there’s a market for this trash. If you click on the Kanamemo tag, you’ll see mostly “huu huu this is what I watch; that was cute and fuzzy.” What’s even more disgusting, however, is that the creators know what they’ve depicted on screen is wrong or (at the very least) taboo. After all, why not portray a man molesting the loli? Because they know that’s wrong. Instead, the vehicle for the child molesting gets to be a young and attractive (and self-assertive, laff) bishoujo, which anime fans summarily find harmless and no doubt identify with.
‘Lesbianism in anime’ is definitely on my shortlist of stuff to write about before shows that started in summer end and need recapping, I think you pretty much hit the nail on the head about it though. What kills me the most is how almost all yuri pairings have a clear division of dominant and submissive roles where the dominant partner is portrayed as being much more masculine, sometimes to the point of just being a guy with boobs (the same division found in yaoi as uke/seme). It’s like even when they try to show a homosexual relationship they end up making it a parody of a heteronormative one.
Ugh when you put it that way it does sound like a news article. The full story is that the girl’s grandmother dies and she runs away before she can be given to another guardian and ends up with the ‘self-assertive bishoujo’ because everywhere else she tries to find work requires her to have a parent’s permission. It definitely seems like the kind of thing that would end in an arrest and years of therapy and shocking photos of the secret basement dungeon. Every week Sankaku has another translated article about an older person molesting young girls, and you just know half of them never get reported on or even caught. It’s pretty fucked up that essentially the same story would be the plot for a TV anime.
And hey, thanks for the add. What’s your site by the way? Google returns a lot of hits for Devon + anime (and tineye says a lot of people have the same Konata av).
Oh hey I found it nevermind!
E Minor: Er, yeah. I clicked around and read a few blogs… I believe one person described it as lighthearted and enjoyable. Freaking pedophiles. I-I mean lolicon. Because getting a hard-on for 2D girls has NOTHING to do with real-life. Psh.
Of course. And of course they’re supposed to identify with her, because she’s just the lolicon everyman. Groping and drooling. :/
The Fin: Mm. That’s something that spans fairly widely across portrayals in fiction, anyway, but in anime it’s fairly egregious. And if it isn’t blatantly a femme/butch couple, one of them is weak and dependent on the other. Although that’s just a patricentric thing in general, the “woman” of the relationship automatically needing constant support. Geh.
I know, that was really what came across my mind, honest to god it sounds like something you’d hear about on the 11 o’clock news. I don’t read Sankaku, but you still hear about the molestation problem now and again without looking for it. I wouldn’t know enough about it or Japanese society to discuss it intelligently, though.
Ah, yeah. My Konata avatar is temporary since it’s not very distinctive at all. :P
Wow you guys suck