alias_sqbr

Long list of stuff I have read and played etc!

Note that almost all the tv and movies are on Australian Netflix.
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Which is to say, things I am using to distract myself from stressing about our upcoming trip.
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Games:
Borderlands: Fun, cool first person shooter set in a post apocalyptic/wild west-ish planet. I've played like half an hour but it was fun and I wasn't totally bad at it! You choose one of four pre-generated characters: a white woman, a black dude, and two white dudes.

Remnants of Isolation: A cute rpg by someone I know, about people escaping a prison for magic users. Again, haven't played for long but it was cute and interesting with a diverse cast.

And for both I need to find out if you can grind to make the game arbitrarily easy, cos then I'll be safe from getting stuck and not seeing the end. Once I know that I'll feel more motivated to trek all the way to the windows machine to play them :)

Manga:
Genshiken (first two omnibuses): A slice of life comedy about a university club of anime/manga nerds who are all into porny doujinshi. Starts off very male dominated, ends up with more and more female yaoi fans. Fairly funny and charming and not as skeezy as it sounds, reminds me of both unisfa and fanfic fandom. Can be a bit...well, the author obviously respects his female characters, but it's written by, for, and about moderately conventional Japanese male nerds, talking a lot about sex. Also one of the characters cosplays as Hitler in a character title image WHY WHAT.

Anime:
Snow White of the Red Hair (first 4 episodes): well made, fluffy, fairytale-ish wish fulfillment about a Miyazaki-esque feisty, hard working, sweet natured girl with unique red hair who overcomes adversity to strike her own path. Adversity seems to often take the form of dudes who are struck by her beauty but don't respect her agency, and she's usually rescued by her male friend who is clearly secretly in love with her but not saying anything because he respects her desire for freedom. In the first two episodes there's threats of being forced to be a concubine, but it's free of explicit sexualised violence or creepiness.

Books:

A Season for Scandal by Theresa Romain: This is an arranged marriage regency romance which was mostly quite enjoyable but occasionally so annoying I had to give up. Spoilers for why below the cut:( spoilers for A Season for Scandal )

There is a yuri panel at Waicon tomorrow I hope to make it to, and I was thinking I should have my yuri recs post to hand but then I realised I dont seem to have one!

So! A quick list of anime and manga with canon f/f that I liked.

Manga:

Girlfriends by Morinaga Milk: Cute somewhat fanservicey high school romance.

Strawberry Shake Sweet by Shizuru Hayashiya: Cute less fanservicey romantic comedy between two idols.

Morishima Akiko does lots of really cute one shots, some about ACTUAL ADULTS.

Anime:

Revolutionary Girl Utena: Subverts gender roles, deeply weird and full of triggers but very interesting.

(qualified rec) Sakura Trick: blushing moe schoogirls kissing. Cute and happy but really obviously aimed at guys, with lots of closeups of their breasts and thighs. I kind of enjoyed it but feel dirty.

Websites/more recs

Lililicious: scanlations of SO MANY MANGA.

Shira’s Ginormous Shoujo-Ai and Yuri Manga Master Rec List

Kentsarrow's recs

Stuff I haven't seen but have been recced:

Simoun

Iono-sama Fanatics (I have since been strongly anti recced)

Stuff I didn't really like but others do:

Aoi Hana: A bittersweet well-written gentle highschool yuri romance, had too much angsty underage sex for me (afaict the main characters end up happy together, and it's often funny and heartwarming. I just have REALLY BIG underage sex squick)

Mai Hime: Magical girls with too much male gaze and heteronormativity for my tastes. I enjoyed it well enough as action/adventure, but the f/f was rapey and left a bad taste in my mouth.

Love DNA XX: in a world of only XX people, half are trans men (sort of). Lots of fanservice of people with boobs in men's clothes. Not my kind of crossdressing.

Pietà by Nanae Haruno: angsty Special Girls find comfort in each other.

Kashimashi: Girl Meets Girl by Satoru Akahori and Yukimaru Katsura: A girlish boy is turned into a girl by an alien. Shenanigans ensue. The main character's father kept "hilariously" hitting on her and it creeped me out.

Managed to drag myself to the local anime con Waicon today despite sleeping in until 9am. I had a lot of fun! The last time I went was pre wheelchair, so super tiring, and I was disappointed by how old and isolated I felt. So this time I put on my incredibly half arsed Jane Crocker "cosplay" (shirt plus printer transfer, blue jeans, red jewelry and random pretty shoes) and prepared myself to at best get a smile or two of recognition from other Homestuck fans and maybe bump into one or two people but mostly be surrounded by tiny adorable teenaged strangers, attend two panels, buy some stuff, and then go home.

Having set up such low expectations I was pleasantly surprised, but also tired out, by how things actually progressed.

The con seemed SUPER QUIET when I arrived, with no visible stalls, and my panel was cancelled. Not a good start. And then I discovered there was a whole second level with all the stalls and most of the people. And yes, most of them were much younger strangers, but there were plenty of people my age or older (not all of them acting as chaperones) and enough people I knew scattered throughout the con to keep things friendly. Anyway just looking at people's costumes was fun.

I chatted to several people from Swancon running stalls, got some money out, chatted to more people from Swancon, then went to my next panel about the computer game industry. Which turned out to be run by sonictail (who I met at JAFWA but also see at Swancon :)) It was quite interesting, even though I have no intention of moving beyond being a hobbyist.
Then I looked at the stalls some more, tried not to spend too much money on cute little things (SO MANY CUTE LITTLE THINGS) and played the demo of Freedom Fall, a fun little game being made by several people I know. Then I navigated the MASSIVE CROWDS lining up for the cosplay competition to get to the webcomics panel, also run by sonictail (as always) By the end it became the Homestuck panel, what with people in Homestuck outfits filling like half the room :) Afterwards some of them invited me to join the local Homestuck fan group Perthstuck, though when I said I felt a bit too old they said "Oh, but there's lots of people who are, like...twenty five". WOW, THAT OLD? (They do seem nice though. Also the Perthstuck tag on tumblr has lots of cool Waicon pics. I should upload the pic I took of the maid!girl!Equius. She was giving out chocolate!)

At this point I had well run out of social spoons so left. While I was eating soup in an interesting (and wheelchair accessible!) if overpriced new little Japanese place on Barrack street called Zen Saki I bumped into another friend. I had various disasters getting home: the Perth station lift was broken so I had to drive to McIver, and then when I was trying to leave the train my wheels got jammed in the gap and I had to be pushed out by some fellow passengers. Also I think I'm a little sunburned. So overall: TIRED. But it was fun :)

EDIT: Posted two photos and a little more description at tumblr.

Most anime and manga recced at Swancon tends to be aimed at men/boys and I thought it would be good to have a panel on geeky anime and manga aimed at women and girls. These are my initial thoughts. I am a long way from being an expert on anime/manga or Japanese culture in general, and haven't read as widely as I might have (a disproportionate number of these are about crossdressing :D), so other people's input would be very much appreciated! (EDIT: I am feeling too lazy to edit in people's suggestions, read the comments on both versions of the post for some great sounding anime/manga)
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I just finished the anime My Hime/Mai Hime. It's quite good, certainly much better than the very fluffy and fanservicey(*) first few episodes would indicate (though I enjoyed those too). It's a high school drama with magical girls/summons and it both subverts those genres and plays them straight. It reminded me a bit of Puella Magi Madoka Magica only with episodes like "Homura vs the underwear stealing demon" and with more of a kitchen sink approach to plotting and characters. Also, jokes. There's a huge well drawn cast with lots of interesting relationships, it's all about The Power of Love where the "love" is friendly, romantic, familial etc, focussing as much on relationships between female characters as between male and female. Lots of boys being saved by girls, too, which I'm always in favour of. I'm not sure the plot entirely makes sense, and there's a few jarring shifts in tone, and while there are lots of great female characters and even a little canonical f/f the depiction can slip into creepy male gaze-y heteronormativity. Still, overall, I liked it.

Speaking of fanservice (all of boys this time), I also finished the manga of Ouran High School Host Club. It was great. The main character Haruhi is ambivalent about gender and dresses as a boy, when she gets a scholarship to a fancy school she gets dragged into the world of the Host Club, which is pretty much wall to wall satire of romance manga tropes. The cast is mostly male apart from Haruhi (who one could read as genderqueer), but it treats it's few other female characters pretty well. Her father is a gay transvestite, and while the relationships we see onscreen are all straight and there's some quasi-evil lesbians I still mostly like the depiction of gender and sexuality. Also it's just fun, and very sweet.

I've just started Durara!, by the same exclamation mark loving guy who did Baccano!, it's pretty good so far, though I keep thinking of the two main characters as Dave and John from Homestuck.

(*)I've seen shows with more fanservice, but I was impressed by the variety of types. There's even a sexy nun. Be warned some of it crosses the line of consent, though nothing very explicit gets shown on screen.