Wis[s]e Words – Ceci N'est pas Un Blog

A Guilt Free Harem — Giji Harem — First Impressions

Published on July 6, 2024Leave a comment

I like harem romcoms but is a bit of a guilty pleasure. It’s hardly mature to enjoy the idea of multiple cute girls (or boys) fighting over the protagonist, right? Not to mention that either you have to keep the battle going forever or somebody has to win and that always makes me feel sorry for the losing heroines. But what if you could have a guilt harem? A harem is which all the girls fighting over protag-kun are actually the same person:

Rin in all her personas surrounding a flustered looking Eiji

Giji Harem (Pseudo-Harem) starts with Nanakura Rin, a first year high school student who likes acting and is looking for the school’s theatre club when she asks Kitahama Eiji, a second year for directions to the club room. He tells her he’s actually the club president but also the sole member of it, only to guide her to a room full of club members and the real president. She thinks he’s a bit weird but he must have made a good impression as after the opening has played, we see them sitting together as he complains about wanting a harem. Which is when Rin launches into her first persona, a devilish flirty girl, followed by tsundere-chan. For this she actually puts her hair into the traditional twin tails. More characters debut in the next few sketches, the quiet, capable but standoffish cool-chan and the big eyed, baby talking spoiled-chan. Apart from the pre-opening scene throughout these sketches we see that Rin and Eiji are already incredibly comfortable with each other, that Rin enjoys doing these skits as much as Eiji enjoys the flirting from all these characters.

Rin shouts that she cannot do her act in front of other people as it's embarassing

In one of the stories this episode Rin has to actually choose which cooking is better between Eiji’s and another club member, who already won the club president’s vote. She’s very happy when the dish she prefers is indeed his, but gets embarassed when Eiji asks her to have spoiled-chan vote as well because now it’s a draw. The president then explains to the other member that’s just a little act Nanakura does sometimes. Just one of the hints dropped that their little play acting is noticed and recognised for what it is.

Rin needs an excellent voice actor to pull all these quick character switches off convincingly. Fortunately, Hayami Saori is more than up to the job. Her opposite number, Okamoto Nobuhiko is no slouch either. In a series that stands or falls with the quality of voice acting, to have the leads played by such distinguished veterans is excellent. I do feel sorry for whoever is doing the translating, having to get the flavour of Rin’s various personas into the subtitles. I had been a bit worried about how the animation would stack up compared to the manga, with the trailers not being that encouraging, but so far it has worked well.

The Rest Is Indeed Noise

Published on July 5, 2024Leave a comment

For the past few months I’ve been mostly been listening to classical music in its broadest possible definition, everything from 17th century baroque pieces to the work of 20th century composers like Bernd Alois Zimmermann here.

Listening to his Intercomunicazione today it struck me that this is Zimmerman doing in 1967 something not too dissimilar from what bands like Throbbing Gristle, Einstürzende Neubauten or Nurse with Wound would be doing roughly a decade later, just with classic instruments rather than electronic ones. It activates the same neurons as their music in my head. A far cry perhaps from a Mozart or Beethoven or even a Mahler of Schoenberg, but even Beethoven’s Ninth was said to be deliberately unplayeable when it was published. Apparantly it’s only due to the improved skills of musicians today that we even stand a chance of hearing it in its intended form. Not that different in intent perhaps from what Zimmermann does here.

La jeunesse emmerde le Front national

Published on June 28, 2024Leave a comment

How can it be that this song and this slogan from it is once again relevant, forty years after it was first sung?

I love Bérurier Noir and this song, but it’s fucking frustrating that the same issues they sang against back in 1985 are still alive and kicking now in 2024. François Guillemot gets it exactly right her in this interview in The Guardian:

Because it comes at a really dangerous point in French history. It feels like we are at the turning point, and I don’t want people like Bardella and Le Pen take power because they will be dangerous.

It was easy to chant against Jean-Marie Le Pen because he was almost a caricature of a far-right politician: he was very bourgeois, very racist and that made it easy to stand up to him. His daughter, by contrast, changed her looks and has been very strategic in detoxifying the party’s image, for example by condemning antisemitism.

She and Bardella have managed to attract voters who are not ideologically formatted like the skinheads of the 1980s. These voters are ras-le-bol, fed up with the old way of doing things. They want to topple the system. I see it in a place like Lyon, where I now teach history at the university: inside the city, most people vote left or centre, but on the outskirts it’s mostly the National Rally.

I think Macron has to shoulder most of the blame. He had everything in his hands to create real change, but his arrogant management of the state managed to turn a lot of people against him. And with his unpopular pension reforms and the new immigration law he opened the door for the National Rally, because he normalised their ideas. The media, who have helped de-demonise the National Rally and played up Bardella as a pop star, have not helped.

The past four decades all through Europe and America we’ve seen our political choices being steadily reduced to one between cynical centrists slowly destroying the world to enrich their friends and literal fascists promoted as their main opposition as they’re less dangerous to the status quo than anything even vaguely leftist. Whenever anything on the left has had even a small change of getting near power it is stomped to death (cf. Corbyn) while people like Trump, Farage and Le Pen are activily promoted. So now in France you have a choice between Macron, already executing the sort of policies Le Pen would kill for and Le Pen, but at least there there still is a leftist movement to oppose both. In the UK meanwhile the only thing you can chose is the colour of the tie the leader of the crackdowns and austerity party will wear, while in the US it’s between genocide Joe and cheeseburger Nazi Trump. Forty years of neoliberal centrism really has achieved a lot.

Dumb fucks doing comics criticism

Published on June 24, 2024Leave a comment

This asshole really thought he was qualified to critique Haus of Decline’s comics for having too much text, so he crossed out everything he thought was unnecessary so it would make a better meme:

A Haus of Decline four panel comic in which Basil crossed out most of the text

To add insult to injury, he then said that notorious Nazi Stonetoss makes better comics. Various other numbnuts then jumped on the bandwagon and one of them produced the ‘improved’ comic:

The same comic with all the text removed

Which I’m grateful for because it clearly shows that without the original text, this cartoon is neither funny nor coherent, but is just a collection of random images. You only know what it is saying if you read the original.

This whole episode is yet another example of the eternal centrist need to hand it to the Nazis (Stonetoss in this case) and desire to attack trans women, as Haus has recently come out as one. (Fun activity: check the thread and quote tweets to see how many people suddenly are able to use they/them pronouns to misgender Haus.) Lurking in the background, the idea that all art should be propaganda and should only be judged on how effective it is according to cretins. And you wonder why the US is sliding into fascism even without Trump being elected yet…

I never knew Guido Crepax did history illustrations

Published on June 17, 2024Leave a comment

Because my mother volunteers there, I have been frequenting the local church’s charity bookshop. One of the books I bought there the last time was a pop history volume I remember from my parents’ bookcases, about the ancient Greeks, which I literally read until it fell apart as a child. Browsing through it to sate my nostalgia I found something surprising, a familiar looking signature in the two page illustration of Createan bull jumping:

An illustration by Guido Crepax which shows the ancient Cretean sport of jumping over bulls

Tucked away on the bottom left there it was: “G. Crepax”. In case you’re not as familiar with European comics, that’s Guido Crepax, the Italian cartoonist who is best known for, as the Lambiek Comiclopedia linked above calls it, “his depictions of elaborate and aesthetic erotic fantasies”. Once I noticed it was him it was quite obvious: compare the illustration above with the Shell advertisement shown on the Comiclopedia e.g. I bought two volumenes of the series (7000 Jaar Wereldgeschiedenis) and both have his illustrations. No actual credits are given in either but the style is unmistakeable. A really fun thing to discover some four decades later.