Today’s deck is the Rosebud Tarot
The Citizen Kane of Tarot… man, remember when people were twisting themselves into a knot to find “The Citizen Kane of Videogames”? Bad times, awful times…
(The deck is not Citizen Kane-related. There’s no Citizen Kane deck that I can find curiously enough).
Today’s reading advises that persistence is the way to push out of hardship while acknowledging that shit’s exhausting man.
BOY IS IT.
So the card arrived. I cannot activate it or recharge it until Monday but it arrived at least.
It arrived at 1PM after I asked them to deliver it in the morning and they also forwarded it to Sagawa meaning I couldn’t track it via DHL. It’s all small annoyances but hopefully you can understand why at this point I’m sore and this nonsense rubs me on inflammated skin.
I was also remembering how in the structions I put “Please deliver before 3PM” yesterday and I suspect I might’ve gotten it yesterday if I kept my mouth shut but I’m trying to not think too hard on the matter to not get too angry.
While waiting for THAT I sorted more manga so let’s talk about that!
In fact, let’s start with the one from the title.
Kiwotsunayo Onee-san is a four volume manga where the premise is this: Tae, a really petite woman is in a community pool’s swimming lesson when she meets Mai, a tall and stunning woman helping her… but cut to them leaving and turns out the tall woman is actually just an overdeveloped middleschooler.
What follows is a story about the messy topic of maturity, development, youth, and expectations both from time and from appearances. It’s also ostentably a light comedy so things don’t get too dark or messy by the end. Mai passes off as older while having moments that reveal her immaturity, Tae is youthful enough to hang out with middleschoolers but her maturity shows through despite her expectations to the contrary.
The ending is interesting and also very representative of the tone. Long story short, Mai confesses to Tae who is obviously conflicted not just because of the age gap but because whenever she forget the ages she’s also infatuated with Mai. So what’s the end result? Tae is distracted in swimming lesson thinking about the whole situation and starts crying like a baby when she realizes that when Mai becomes an adult she’ll be 32, and she’s crying specifically from that sense of not getting any younger, for the fact that she’ll be 32 one day.
As you might guess from this blog I’m not really a moralist when it comes to media, if I don’t agree with something morally I just go check something else and leave the other thing be because a world where art doesn’t let you explore things in peace no matter how reprehensible is a world where that energy is gonna overflow into the real world instead.
I bring this up specifically because my praise for the ending isn’t born from a sense of “phew the problematic situation was avoided” because… no, if you wanna be a cop about it the problematic thing already happened from chapter 1, but rather because the restraint is more indicative of the ultimate point of “there’s no good answer”. If the relationship was consumated in some way by the end that’s saying something completely different that’s less conducive to what’s been going on.
In case it wasn’t obvious I like this manga, the one on the right is the first edition from before they went “hey we can make more out of this” and reprinted it with a new cover. I got it when it first released too.
Speaking of, I introduce you to Oppai Yuri Anthology and I believe it needs no further explanation.
Crazy Food Truck is a nice post-apocalyptic romp about a food truck owner called Gordon that finds a mysterious and hungry girl. It’s cool and it escalates SUPER QUICK in three volumes.
Also, Riki-oh. No further comment, if you thought the movie was deranged, the page I showed there isn’t nearly the most insane thing that manga has to offer.
I also went through a couple of game guides. These are odd in the sense that most guides are in A5 size, but it also makes sense because being guides for kid-oriented games I can see them being like “these kids are going to have a single bookshelf in their room with a bunch of Shonen Jump, let’s make something that fits there”.
The current stage of the process is that I’ve got a couple of series left and they’re in two containers, one is for the ongoing ones that are waiting for me to build the next bookshelf (which arrived like half a week ago, incidentally), and the other is for manga that ended and I’m waiting for the final volumes of. For example, Kisekoi ended but the last volume is in preorder so I’m waiting for that.
In light of… all the nonsense, after the card arrived I decided to treat myself to JS Burger, distance be damned.
It was a worthy treat, made even better by the fact that I didn’t have to make a line.
But this is the part where I reveal to you that the waiting for the card and whatnot earlier meant I hadn’t eaten, so not only was I hungry as hell, but also my stomach went from no food to plenty and… yeah.
Long story short I ended the day going through I’m Gonna Fucking Die Syndrome.