Archive for February, 2011


Lesbian Novel: Super Otome Taisen

February 3rd, 2011

Mori Natsuko-sensei a master of the craft of writing. The fact that her writing is pornographic does not diminish this fact one bit.

Super Otome Taisen (スーパー乙女大戦) is a collection of short stories that were published over a period of several years to create an epic whole.

It is Christmas Eve at St. Anna’s private Catholic school. In the Teresa dorm, a minature Angel named Lilith tells seven girls that they have been chosen by God to save the Earth.

The “senshi” are third-years Mikiko – honor student, former president of the Student Council;  Makoto – out lesbian, and “Casanova” of the school; second-years Karen – a half-Japanese supermodel; Sasa – the school bad girl; Fuyuko – otaku and president of the SF/Fantasy club and; first-years Goth-Loli Yumeno and…Mana. I’ll get to Mana in a bit.

The “senshi” gig isn’t quite what one might expect – they are told that their sexual energy will power the giant robot guardian Super Gaia as she fights off equally giant monsters that attack the planet. This requires them to either masturbate or have sex with one another to free Super Gaia from the tentacle-y clutches of the monsters.

During the course of their adventures, the senshi undergo some awakenings. Mikiko discovers a sadistic streak, while Sasa learns that she’s a masochist. Yumeno – who yearns for Karen –  also learns she has a mean streak, School Casanova Makoto is summarily rejected or ignored by almost every one of the others, Karen and Fuyuko discover a mutual love of tentacle play and fall in love and Mana develops a kind of telepathy with Lucretia, the giant sea anemone tentacle monster they keep in the dorm and Lucretia’s baby tentacle monster, Koro-chan.

Right from the beginning, there’s a few things that are not right about the situation and it’s otaku Fuyuko who notices them first. For one thing, the monster design is inconsistent (and she can identify which anime and live-action designers they remind her of.) She also comments on the set design. And, as she points out, the Angel that is their contact has the name Lilith, which doesn’t sound like someone that the Christian God would chose to save the Earth. Fuyuko comments that Lilith’s wings are more like an insect’s than an angel’s and calmly mentions that for all they know, the God they are serving is Beezelbub, Lord of Flies.

Karen, discovers something’s up when she overhears Lilith talking to “God” who has a very high-pitched voice and whom Lilith refers to as “Director.” To keep Karen quiet, Lilith imprisons her with Lucretia. Karen doesn’t really mind that much and Lucretia is very gentle with Karen – even going so far as to feed her. Nonetheless, I had a really hard time being comfortable knowing Karen was involved in “tentacle play” for three days straight.

It’s Mana who saves the day. Mana is a really weird character. She’s totally asexual and never involves herself at all with any of the other senshi. When she discovers Lucretia’s baby, she puts Koro in a bowl and raises it. From there, she develops empathy that evolves into telepathy. When Mana realizes that Koro-chan misses her mommy, she gets the locked door open by asking Lucretia politely to open it. Ultimately, this frees Karen (who, mind you, asks to go back after a bath and a meal.)

The climax (herhn herhn) of the book comes when Yumeno, disgusted at what Karen has become, blames Lilith and concocts a plan to punish her. She engages the help of Mana (to whom she had always been kind) and Koro-chan. The little tentacle monster is just the right size to detain and “play with” Lilith. The senshi gather and force Lilith to tell them what’s up. It turns out that the role of “God” has been played by an alien AV director who wanted to create a reality show for the human fetishists in the universe. And it was a big success, she admits. I really felt that Mori-sensei dropped the ball here – she needed to have had Mikiko demand royalties for them all. Oh well, can’t have everything. Oh and Earth? Never really in danger…

The senshi are returned back to their lives which, amazingly, they slip right back into. They gather together one last time to say goodbye to the graduating third-years. You get one guess as to how that turns out.

In the final scene, Mikiko and Makoto are walking the campus and they see a beautiful woman, with perfect proportions and a very western face. They go running up to her…it can’t be…Super Gaia? I won’t spoil the ending. You’ll just have to read the book to find out. ^_^

In the same way that Sempai to Watashi takes the idea of BDSM and kind of beats it to death and then still runs with it until it stops being sexy, sort of normalizes and then becomes both more profound and more silly than ever before, Super Otome Taisen does the same with tentacle rape.

While Mikiko is the leader of the team, it’s Fuyuko who is protagonist for most of the book. Her open otaku-ness allows Mori-sensei to really trot out some serious sci-fi/fantasy obscura. Now I too know about “Stalingrad Fuyu Keshiki.” You can tell that Fuyuko is the protagonist, too, because she is the only one who gets the girl in the end. Makoto remains a court fool and Sasa is the group whipping girl, but Fuyuko and Karen find true love. Mana gets a new baby tentacle monster to raise. And they all live happily ever after….

…

Ratings:

Overall – 8





Houkago no Pleiades Anime

February 1st, 2011

When I first started writing about anime, I can absolutely guarantee that I never expected to be writing about an anime created by the company Subaru. But here I am, doing that very thing.

Subaru (the car company, yes) has teamed up with Gainax to create a short 4-part anime called Houkago no Pleiades (放課後のプレアデス). All four episodes are available on Youtube. The channel design is cute and astronomical in theme, which fits the anime and the sponsor. Subaru is Japanese for what we call the Pleiades.

The story is a simple one – a schoolgirl named Subaru uses a key to get into a rooftop garden where she meets Minato, a boyish girl. The run-down garden has been magically transformed into a paradise.

The same magic accompanies Subaru when she finds her best friend Aoi with a number of other girls, all in “magical” attire, in a sumptuous club room – with an alien creature as club president.

Subaru joins the club, has her magical transformation, but flubs her first mission and gives up the star they gathered to the baddy…who is clearly Minato. Subaru and Aoi have an argument about Subaru’s membership in the group, but they make up with confessions of like.

In a final confrontation, Subaru defeats Minato, but promises to look for her. Minato bequeaths her ugly grey cardigan (c.p., Panic, Strawberry; Shizuma’s ugly grey cardigan) to Subaru who we later see wearing it.

The final credits include still art from a variety of artists that really drive the point home that the club is composed of one of each “type” required by moe fans these days. ^_^ And Subaru is color-coded pink so the girls watching will naturally like it, as we all know girls react on a cellular level to pink.

I want to thank 16_nikki on Twitter for the heads up about this series. I was told that it is 60% Yuri in order to motivate me to watch it – I think that might be a fair estimate. It’s short, but there’s still plenty of space to fill in a relationship between Subaru and Minato and a best-friend-y thing with Aoi. I’m sure at least *one* doujinshi circle will pair them all up, since we all know that twin-tail tsunderes and Nadesico beauties can’t resist the competent leader and the genki forward.

As a magical girl series, Houkago no Pleiades hits all the typical notes. The costume and accouterments designs by Gainax are cute, familiar and ever so slightly innovative. There’s nothing in the series a little kid couldn’t watch, but the lingering looks at thighs reminds one that Gainax is still a male gaze kind of shop. Aside from the shot of the Pleiades at the beginning of each episode and the car key Subaru uses to unlock the garden, the company has kept themselves out of the way of the story.

Ratings:

Art – 8
Story – 7
Characters – 7
Yuri – 4
Service  – 1

Overall – 7

This anime isn’t going to ring chimes all over the world, but I’m betting you’re gonna see more of this kind of thing as time goes on. If two of Japan’s major exports – anime and cars – team up, we could see a whole new “soft power” wave headed at us in the days ahead.





Black Rock Shooter OVA

February 1st, 2011

Okay, before I start this review, I think it’s important to have a disclaimer. This is a review of the OVA for Black Rock Shooter ( ブラック★ロックシューター ) as a standalone. I know very little about the history or the proposed game – if you play it and would like to write up a review for Okazu, I’d love to host it! Send me an email. If you’ve never reviewed here before, include a paragraph or so of who you and are and a synopsis of the game. If you’ve  guested here, then no need, I’m glad to have you back. ^_^

Black Rock Shooter starts with a girl entering high school that finds herself taken with another new student. Mato introduces herself to Yomi and they quickly become good friends, then best friends.

Interspersed between scenes of their growing friendship are scenes of battle between what are apparently Mato’s and Yomi’s alter egos in the game world. The battle is somewhat non-linear, but it’s not really relevant to the narrative.

In our world, Mato and Yomi are as close as friends can be, until they move into their second year of high school. No longer in the same class, Yomi watches helplessly as Mato appears to be moving away from her. Cluelessly, Mato invites her new “Lunch friend” to join Yomi and herself during their together time. (“Lunch friend” is a designation I use to describe the kind of person you hang with in class, at lunch, at work, at club but don’t really make any attempt to see outside that space.)

Yomi grieves for the private world she shared with Mato and then one day… she disappears. Mato has no idea what has happened to her. We see Mato’s avatar in the game world being rejected by Yomi’s avatar, and their fight renews.

When Mato makes the trip to a private place she had shared with Yomi, she finds the charm she had given the other girl. The charm begins to glow, and one of the two fighters appear. She says that her name is Black Rock Shooter, and she and Mato merge. Meanwhile, in the game world, Black Rock Shooter defeats Yomi’s avatar and manages to free her. (I later learned that Yomi had been absorbed by Dead Master, but that name is never used in the OVA.)

The end of the OVA is ambiguous, as you might expect. Yomi is gone, Mato is absorbed into Black Rock Shooter, ostensibly to look for Yomi.

Yuu, the third character in the triangle, is simply left behind, but it’s pretty obvious that she’ll be part of the story again – there is a third game character that we see during the long, lingering shots of perspective splashed throughout. The cover art also shows two other characters that are not obvious in the OVA.

Extras included are trailers, including the stop-motion version made in Hollywood and a making of the stop motion trailer. Another special shows the making of the cover art – a process I find absolutely fascinating. The set includes a DVD and a Blu-Ray disk. This review is based only on the DVD, I haven’t yet watched it on Blu-Ray.

There are several physical extras, a booklet about the anime and a much thicker book which somewhat oddly contains the entire storyboard for the anime. And lastly there was a box of nendroids of Black Rock Shooter and Dead Master.

Yuri? Well…not really. Mato and Yomi are best friends. In so many ways, relationships with our closest friends mimic romantic relationships. Feeling a best friend has betrayed you by having another friend isn’t exactly uncommon. It’s not surprising that some people see this as Yuri, but to me, it’s friendship, not love.

The biggest problem I had with the OVA was that it was filled with a sense of “meaning” that it didn’t actually have. My overall impression is that it’s a pilot without a TV series. (So far. I vaguely remember news of a BRS TV series already. If I hallucinated that, I still expect it to be made any day.)

The animation was very game-y in the fight sequences, with the vertiginous movement and textured CGI backgrounds of so many video games. Surprisingly, the 2-D animation was kind of meh. I expected 2-D to match the quality of the CGI, but I guess you gotta save your money somehow.

So, did it hold up as a standalone? Yes, in terms of having a beginning and a middle and enough of an end that I was able to follow the thing. There were a few things I felt I had to go look up, which was kind of inevitable, considering its origin as a “thing.” As a OVA, I felt that Black Rock Shooter was pretty good.

Ratings:

Art – 6
Story – 6
Characters – 6
Yuri – 1
Service – 3 Mostly for the game costumes and the overall setup

Overall – 6

It wasn’t world-shaking but it definitely was not awful. It held together pretty well. I’d like to see a conclusion to the story released one day.

It is my very great pleasure to thank Okazu Superhero Laurel K for her sponsorship of today’s review from the Amazon JP Yuri Wishlist!