Today’s deck is the Folklore Tarot.
Super stylish and easy to read, one of those where I would recommend it even if it’s not my thing.
Today’s reading points out that sometimes alone time is both a necessity and to be celebrated.
I woke up with a weird sense of paranoia for some reason, like there was someone or something lurking nearby. It’s probably a remnant from whatever the fuck I dreamed and can’t remember, though.
I had to drag myself to do some officework stuff. It’s that kind of “this is easy but I hate doing it and resent being made to do it” scenario so I decided I was done for the day after it.
ANYWAY more manga and such and let’s open with a funny one.
妹尾尻尾 is an author that I would describe as my “fetish doppleganger”. You see all those light novels on top? I got every single one of them thinking “oh hey, that’s an illustrator I really like, let’s get the thing!” and all four times, without my knowledge, turns out they were written by the same author. In fact, it’s even more than that because for reasons I don’t get just yet the fourth one has had TWO illustrators, both of which I like.
In fact, it got to the point that when I saw that Panda Ookuma of Shinmai Maou no Testament fame was working on a new light novel I was spooked if 妹尾尻尾 was the writer in that one again.
They weren’t but the fear was real.
Today I was sorting through the bunko-sized books and I wanna highlight this specific subcategory of “it’s a released game but transcribed into text”, where they even add the fucking screenshots.
Congrats everyone! Visual Novels are officially Just Books, that solves the problem right? Oh? What do you mean gamers don’t read anyways?
I mentioned Shinmai Maou no Testament, I do have both the light novel and manga versions around. I also did for Mayo Chiki but I decided to keep only the Light Novel.
If that’s not enough of a throwback I also found my copies of Yoku Wakaru Gendai Mahou (which I love by the way, especially the soundtrack), Ladies Vs Butlers, and motherfucking Magician’s Academy.
For those that have never seen it, Magician’s Academy is one of the ultimate early 2000s “being a nerd is cool” stories. The sort of thing where having a verbal tic was seen as trendy, where moe was still a wild and unexplored concept. The Light Novel is contemporary with motherfucking Genshiken, to give you an idea.
I do NOT miss that specific element of that era at all, that’s like saying I miss Gamer Culture of the 90s conveniently ignoring the ArE YOu FuCKINg STUpID? meme.
I literally had, while growing up, a cutout of a magazine ad of some unfazed dude with a dog biting his crotch for some game I don’t remember.
Back to Magician’s Academy, I do have a certain sentimental attachment to it, because I remember in my first ever anime con that I went to I was kinda lost looking at the booths and one of the booth clerks directly recommended it to me saying it was a recent one. Though I knew it as Macademi Wasshoi, but I think that’s just the name of the opening.
It was a bootleg DVD with subs, obviously. But it WAS, in hindsight, when it was new AND it was one of my first proper exposures to the whole otaku culture thing at the time.
It wasn’t my first bootleg anime DVD mind you, that one was a 4-episode one of Bleach that just so happened to cover the Aizen reveal and while my opinions on that whole thing is… mixed at best, 14 year old me seeing that went “well, I NEED to see what came before this though” and started reading the manga religiously (and even at one point up-to-day) from then on.
Realizing years later (not this time around mind you) that BLADE made the illustrations for it felt like a less flashbang-y version of learning that the illustrator of Humanity Must Be Destroyed (the MTG manga) also illustrated Onani Master Kurosawa.
I went through a lot of Bunko-sized manga. Some Mitsuteru Yokoyama classics (still collecting them bit by bit in my endless plea to understand Giant Robo properly), Saint Seiya, one of the Guilty Gear novels, the two novels Kirome-sensei released (another illustrator I love), Volume 1 of the Wild Arms 3 novel (still looking for the others), an SD Gundam superguide, books about horses, Transfer Student of Fire (another classic), and the Dokidoki Precure novel that I’ll go through calmly one day to see if I can finally get some closure in that mess.
Other highlights and throwbacks here include Franken Fran, which is yet another case of “the magazine closed so they had to rebrand” hence its current iteration as Franken Fran Frantic.
By the way, my favorite Franken Fran chapters are the mini-arc that’s a Kamen Rider parody where some dudes find that some charity has long-term plans to conquer the world by making life easier and better until there’s world peace and THEN they can sweep in and dominate everyone.
Criminal Girls and Valkyrie Drive are some blasts of the Vita era and with Valkyrie Drive specifically I do want to make a longer, proper writeup looking back at the… specific mess it was in the grand scheme of things. The writeup in the obi kills me though.
For those that weren’t there, “Tits are life, ass is hometown” was basically a meme in… not even just 4chan really, it was A Thing repeated in Senran Kagura-adjacent circles. So seeing it here has the same energy as seeing the “Top Nep” hat (basically an edit of Workaholics’ Top Gun hat that was used a lot with Neptunia reaction images) in official art. Something that I can just describe as “unreasonable unwarranted hate”.
The manga right in the middle is something I wrote about elsewhere ages ago by the by.
There’s another Maid Dragon spin off about Fafnir. For those curious, one about Ilulu WAS announced a while back.
There’s the two Giant Robo manga. The Day The Earth Burned is basically a rethread of the OVA but it also starts from way earlier letting you see things from an earlier point. It actually continues into the part with Babel II that the OVA stops at but if you’re hoping for a proper resolution here… don’t. Imagawa’s version of Giant Robo is designed to be like you’re catching a glimpse into the climax of some fictional epic that’s been going on for a while, so it’s gonna stop in a similar “every thread is closed except not really” point as the OVAs.
There’s a manga about the history of the world that I’m putting in the sales box, but I wanna highlight it because it does a cool thing of showing events happening around the world at the same time. It’s like the joke that Lincoln could’ve telegraphed a samurai. Really, it’s only problem is that it’s so on the educational side that I went through it once, learned, and saw no further need to read it again. It’s not like I had homework to make.
Mousou Sensei is basically about a teacher and students with a dirty mind and it’s amusing enough for me, at least.
Speaking of dirty mind, Mashiro-chan is about a horny student constantly teasing the boy she likes.
I’ve already mentioned in the past that I like 2.5D temptation so not much to add there.
Doll Ojiisan is fun because it’s not just about exploring the hobby of dolls and the many kinds of people in it, but it’s also about a middle-aged man finally getting a hobby and the benefits that come with that.
Nonbiri Murano Yakubaneko is a horror comedy where the format is that someone does something rude and the eponymous cat mayor does some horrific body modification on them. For example, someone uses books in a library as platform to get books higher up so the mayor replaces their legs with horrific mechanical legs. It doesn’t get repetitive despite the repeated scenario because part of the fun is seeing what punishment will be dealt specifically.
Of course I ahve the Kikuri spin-off, if I’m honest I like it better than the regular bocchi manga (not to say the Bocchi manga is BAD mind you).
Out of all these, I’d highlight first and foremost Oshikatsu Legend Yoshio, though. It’s basically a throwback to late-Showa early-Heisei delinquent manga but the delinquents are Otaku obsessed with specific characters and their fights are more often than not fueled by shenanigans involving said characters.
Oh also, today was one of those days where the weather goes “heavy rain warning” and before I’m able to process what’s going on I see out the window a fucking tropical storm that lasts like 10 seconds so the rest of the day looks like there was a flood while being midly overcast.
Just like my home country!