I’m Jealous of My Daughter’s New Training Chopsticks

My wife is from the Philippines, so every once in a while, we make a trip to the nearest medium-sized city where she can go to an Asian market and find some of the products she likes.

We’d been talking about getting our daughter some training chopsticks, which come with a hinge at the top and a guide for where to place the fingers. Chopsticks are not commonly used in the Philippines, but I like to use them, and our daughter always snatches them from me and gets upset when she struggles to use them.

This weekend, while we were at the Asian market, she toddled off to explore—and immediately came upon a rack of training chopsticks. I bought her the pink, girlish-looking ones that she grabbed first, and which came with a matching spoon.

The chopsticks are decorated with a computer-generated image of a blond girl in a fancy gown, labeled “Secret Jouju.” After a little searching, I discovered that this is a Korean magical-girl title created by a brand called Young Toys. I’ve found only a little information about it: There are some minimal descriptions on the magical girl wikis, and there’s an English-language site, but it looks to have been written with a meaningless string of buzzwords its writers probably think English-speaking parents want to hear.

There is an official YouTube channel, but it’s entirely in Korean. It’s also on Netflix but unavailable in my country.

Near as I can make out, the protagonist of this cartoon, Jouju, was originally a fairy who could grant girls the power to become princesses. However, contrary to fairy law, she uses her power on herself in order to rescue a prince she loves and is thus banished to the human world where she has to restore the balance of magic while also singing in a rock band. Or something like that—with so little info available in English, I’m fuzzy on the details.

Out of curiosity, I loaded up an episode when we got home and watched it even though it had no subtitles. It’s obviously a glorified toy ad, as the characters wield magical smartphones and watches (collect them all!) and play plasticky-looking instruments (collect them all!).

My daughter was entranced and reacted with enthusiasm to the characters’ actions, though I know for certain she understood none of it—since I understood almost none of it. She swiftly picked up the main character’s name and was calling for “Choochoo” while waving her new pink spoon. My wife laughed and said I now have somebody to watch magical girl shows with.

Ironically, I’ve become less interested in magical girl shows since marrying and having kids, but I suppose I could rekindle my hobby. We’ll need to make it only an occasional thing, though: We try to keep the little girl’s screen time to a minimum, and I believe that’s why she has an enormous vocabulary, excellent fine motor skills, and a well-developed imagination for someone still under two, because she gets books, Montessori toys, wooden animal figurines, and practice gardening instead of television and computer tablets.

Book Interior Formatting: $45

I’m not yet planning to advertise this on other platforms yet because I’m hoping to get one or two takers to see how it goes, but I’m offering professional-grade book formatting for only forty-five dollars, a considerably lower price than you will find anywhere else.

I own the latest version of Vellum book-formatting software. I will use Vellum on your book to give you a professional-looking product for considerably less than you would pay either to buy Vellum yourself or hire a designer.

My novels Jake and the Dynamo and Rags and Muffin are formatted with Vellum. Follow the links and check out the See Inside option to observe their interior layouts. These are relatively simple designs, but numerous others are available, including ones that are more flashy or complex.

I will format nonfiction or fiction. Print versions are available in black-and-white only, but eBooks can feature full color. I can fit the book to any measurements required or allowed by your preferred print-on-demand platform. I will format any kind of book except erotica.

I need:

  • Word Document (or similar) containing the full text of your work. Authors who submit a document with both a semantic heading structure and triple asterisks (***) for section breaks get a $5 discount.
  • Any interior illustrations with directions for placement (optional). See your preferred publishing platform for instructions on size or file type.
  • Any images to be used as chapter headings or section breaks (optional).
  • Cover image (for eBooks), preferably measuring 1800 x 2700 pixels (optional but strongly recommended).

I will provide:

  • Basic typographical formatting (EM dashes, proper ellipses, and correctly oriented apostrophes, if needed). Tell me explicitly if you don’t want this.
  • An attractive, professional layout using Vellum’s templates. I will provide samples for your approval so you can pick the layout and fonts that work best for you.
  • Up to three free template alterations if you decide you need a different layout.
  • Free corrections of any compatibility issues (such as margins not matching a print-on-demand service’s requirements).
  • One free revision if you edit your manuscript or add cover art after submitting to me (additional revisions will require another submission with the same $45 price tag).

I will produce:

  • All eBook formats for all platforms, including optimally sized cover thumbnails if you provided cover art.
  • A PDF suitable for paperback or hardcover print books. (Interior only; all platforms will require you to upload the cover as a separate file.)

Bonus:

  • Additional, smaller documents, such as PDFs of short stories or sample chapters for use in promotion, are $10 each.

Contact me at dgddavidson@hotmail.com.

A Commentary on ‘Jake and the Dynamo’

Over on my Facebook page, a reader has left an interesting comment. Admittedly, I don’t interact with my Facebook page as much as I should because I’ve had a heck of a time figuring out the interface. Every time I try to see reader comments, it kicks me to a different part of the site … it makes me want to strangle Zuckerberg in Minecraft.

Anyway, regarding Jake and the Dynamo, a reader writes:

I’ve been rereading the book, and you have got some horror fantasy gold here. Your stuff is like Stephen King’s—American culture is built out of trash, and while his trash is b-movies and comic books, yours is anime and kid videos. That’s a good thing. We’ve had a lot of pop culture lately with comic books being elevated into the status of the a new Western or Cowboy genre, but your stuff, and King’s, recognizes that superpowers and fantasy adventure would be less like a Saturday morning cereal fest and more like a living nightmare.

Of course, magical girls are a Japanese riff on a specific type of all-American fantasy to begin with—the magical wife, whether she is a witch, or a genie, or what have you. Now, there are writers, like Fritz Leiber, who dialed in on the fearsome possibilities of how supernatural powers could distort a relationship, in his Conjure Wife. But you’ve opened the magical girl genre up to horror in many, many ways. It’s a real treat. Take body horror—adolescence is disturbing enough for a normal child, but what if the steel hard hide and augmented strength your contract gave you has the effect of not only protecting you from harm, but also making it possible to hurt people you love, or keep love and friendship, ironically, forever at bay, shielded by terrible powers?

The magical girls close up are terrifying. Are they children wearing costumes that give them powers? You get the impression that they are actually costumes that wear children—a demonic concept indeed! The competent arrogance of Pretty Dynamo becomes grotesque because it is inhuman. The brash neediness of Sukeban becomes a behavioral loop that traps a youngster in a state of arrested development. Rifle Maiden is compelled to become a cartoonish mass murderer, which may have begun as a fantasy of unconquerable strength. Not to mention the nightmarish depiction of Kaiju destruction your narration supplies—in some way, the magical girls are implicated in the mayhem, because they and not armies, are participants in the carnage. (Incidentally, the best descriptions of the trauma inflicted by falling buildings that I’ve read is in Pietro di Donato’s Christ in Concrete, which I recommend.)

The horror of nightmare is especially strong in your writing, with the reality of the fact that the magical girls are all witches who have sold their souls to demonic powers, and who face a reckoning of some sort, whether it is from the Kronos-like spaghetti monster en route to make the universe a tomb, or God, who is forgotten in the crush of trying to survive in a universe bent on humankind’s demise. The irony of this spiritual ignorance is deeply rewarding to the reader. In a world of cheap heroics, what will true heroism be? I’ve never read anything like this before.

My comments:

I am humbled and flattered. I also admit to being perplexed: This is the second reader who has informed me that Jake and the Dynamo and its sequel are horror novels. I was honestly unaware of that, and it makes me think I need to redirect my marketing plan. I have always thought of these books as action-comedy.

Part of my confusion may simply stem from the way I see the magical-girl genre. This reader flatters me by attributing to me things that I thought I was merely borrowing. The idea that the magical girls are “costumes that wear the children,” for example, is not unique to me. That magical-girl transformation entails a loss of self is already hinted in Sailor Moon, which first introduced the concept of the reluctant magical girl, and it is further developed in titles like Princess Tutu and Shugo Chara, the latter of which was Jake and the Dynamo’s immediate inspiration. When I depict the girls as uncertain about their true identities and as having distinct personalities when in their magical forms, I am (to my own mind) merely following the formula. I am also doing that for my own convenience: In my head, Dana acts differently when in and out of costume, so I wrote her that way.

The hint of demonic contract and Faustian bargain does, I admit, deviate from the norm, in which the bargain between a girl and her talking animal is benign. Phantom Thief Jeanne first proposed the idea that magical-girl contracts were dangerous and potentially diabolical, but it was of course Puella Magi Madoka Magica that finally developed it. To me, it seems obvious in part because the magical girl’s animal mascot resembles the familiar of the classic witch. That’s why I use the word familiar in Jake and the Dynamo.

My most original contribution to the genre may be the antagonist of the series, whose true nature has not yet been revealed. Though one may find him lurking behind the arch-nemeses of some anime titles such as Neon Genesis Evangelion or Gurren Lagan, the resemblance is coincidental: Those anime deal with some Stapledonian concepts that I already had churning in my mind for a long time, long before I became interested in anime. In fact, “Lord Shadow” is a version of a villain (if he can really be called a villain, or a he for that matter) that I invented for another work, and whom I will undoubtedly use again in a different guise.

(This post contains affiliate links.)

The Ice Ball Cometh

For a couple of years now, I have been passionate about making clear ice for my drinks, especially in the form of large “whiskey balls,” which are superior to crushed or cubed ice because they melt slowly.

There are a lot of videos online on how to make clear whiskey balls, and I tried a few methods, but most of them were messy and took a lot of room in the freezer. Finally, for simplicity’s sake, I bought a whiskey ball mold from Corkcicle. Their mold comes in an insulated mug, which causes the ice to freeze from the top down and squeeze out air and impurities. It consistently makes clear, crack-free balls, though they do occasionally have minor imperfections, and I’ve been very happy with it.

Anyway, an orange peel is the normal garnish for an old fashioned, and I recently had the idea of combining the ice and garnish by spiral-cutting a mandarin orange and then placing the orange peel in the ice mold in such a way that it comes out frozen into but attractively enwrapping the ice. These balls have come out looking quite good overall, though they for some reason develop a large imperfection at the top. I’ve made a few of these, and now that I’m over my cold, I decided today to test one.

To get an impression of how well this works, I mixed an old fashioned as simply as possible: I took a cube of sugar, soaked it in Angostura bitters, added a teaspoon of filtered water, and stirred until it dissolved. Then I added two ounces of Woodford Reserve bourbon and poured the whole over the ice ball in a chilled rocks glass.

Appearance-wise, it looks very sharp, and I don’t think the photo does it justice. The drink tastes fine but, as described has no bells and whistles: It is bourbon-forward with just a touch of sweetness and bitters to make it more drinkable. I personally prefer a bit more citrus in my old fashioned, so on my next attempt, I might add one splash of orange bitters for extra flavor. I suspect a lot of the oils in the peel disappeared during the freezing process: The water in the bottom of the insulated mug has a yellowish appearance, suggesting that a lot of flavor got squeezed out.

Still, these peel-wrapped ice balls look cool. They’d make a good complement to drinks at a party.

Why Men Don’t Read Books by Women: Addendum

A few days ago, I wrote a post explaining why I think men don’t read books by women. Judging by my traffic, it’s one of my most popular posts ever and might even beat out my wild-eyed rant about Cardcaptor Sakura.

Oh man, this doing numbers.

So I want to follow up with further commentary and an illustration.

To demonstrate the point I made, I walked into our “New Releases” collection and picked up a book from the display. It happened to be Danielle Steel’s All that Glitters. I opened the dust jacket to read the blurb, and it ran as follows. Please forgive the length:

Nicole “Coco” Martin is destined to have it all. As the only child of doting and successful parents, she has been given every opportunity in life. Having inherited her mother’s stunning beauty and creativity, along with her father’s work ethic and diligence, she has the world at her feet. Her graduation from Columbia is fast approaching, and with it the summer job of her dreams working at a magazine. Between work, leisurely weekends at her family’s home in Southampton, and spending as much time as possible with her best friend, Sam, life couldn’t be better—until tragedy strikes. Coco’s beloved parents are killed in a terrorist attack while on vacation in France.

Now devastated and alone, Coco must find a way to move forward and make her way in the world without the family she loved. Determined to forge her own path and make her parents proud, Coco pursues her dreams, dazzled by exciting opportunities that come her way. Her goals are to think outside the box—and always play by her own rules. As she finds herself drawn to charismatic, fascinating men, each relationship will teach Coco new lessons, some delightful, some painful. She will come to realize what matters, and how strong she trul is—and in the end, she will discover herself.

Richly exploring one woman’s poignant journey thorugh life, All That Glitters is a compelling tale of challenges, heartbreak, discovery, and triumph, a powerful reminder that all that glitters is not the essence of life.And what is truly worth having was right there in our hands all along

It ought to be obvious why men would be uninterested in—or even repulsed by—a novel with a description like that. But it is not obvious to the likes of M. A. Sieghart because she’s convinced herself that men are just defective women.

In fact, I have a hard time believing even a woman would respond to that blurb with anything but an eye roll. Most of the women I know would, but this book is not designed to appeal to me or the crowd I run with. It’s designed to appeal to New York editors. Indeed, I can just picture Steel’s editor patting tears from her cheeks as she whispers, “Yass, kween. Even with one major adversity in the midst of luxury, you were still a girlboss who slept around and learned it’s all about you. You go, girl.”

There’s a lot I could say about this blurb. I could say that it’s too damn long. I could note that it gives away the whole damn plot. I could also note that it doesn’t even mention any plot until the end of the first paragraph. I could point out the wince-inducing clichès (“world at her feet,” “play by her own rules,” “think outside the box”), and I could describe how typing it out made me throw up in my mouth just a little bit. But none of that would matter because Danielle Steel is going to use the proceeds from this book to buy another summer home. She has carved out her audience already, a quite sizable one, with decades’ worth of best-sellers, and she doesn’t need advice from me or anyone else.

But let me amuse myself. How would I rewrite this blurb to make it halfway interesting?

I might go the honest route:

Coco’s parents were dead, slaughtered by terrorists in France. “Screw them anyway,” said Coco. “Now I can be a total crack whore without any lectures from Mom.”

With the help of Daddy’s money and a slew of unorthodox business decisions, Coco ran her magazine into the ground. But she got a lot of hot boy-on-girl action in the process. Read about her narcissistic journey of self-destruction in Danielle Steel’s most explosive novel yet, All That Glitters, a sordid tale of wealth, corruption, and lust.

Or perhaps we could even dare to improve the story somewhat—by, you know, actually giving it a story:

Fresh out of high school, Coco thought the world had handed her everything—wealth and talent were hers, and even fame was within her grasp. But everything changed when terrorists murdered her parents.

Now Coco has only one thing in mind: Revenge. And she’ll do whatever it takes to get it, even use her father’s estate to become an arms dealer and work her way up through the sleazy Parisian underworld. She may be young, but she has focus, commitment, and sheer fucking will.

I wrote these in a few minutes, and I’m sure anyone could pick them apart. But you must admit they have one advantage: They’re short.

‘Magical Girl Friendship Squad’ and the State of Western Animation

I have not previously discussed Magical Girl Friendship Squad, a cartoon with a woefully generic title, because, although I was vaguely aware of its existence, it looked horribly uninteresting.

Magical Girl Friendship Squad is drawn more-or-less in the “Cal Arts style,” which originally referred to a specific school of art and animation but which has become a shorthand for the flat, slovenly-looking designs now typical of “adult” American cartoons. The few previews that I came across featured excrutiatingly bad Millennial jokes about sex and lattes, and there was a villain who (already dated at the time the show aired) resembled a cross between Donald Trump and Pepe the frog.

Anyway, I ignored it. Most American attempts at the magical-girl genre stem from a belligerent unwillingness to understand what the genre is about: It’s about girls growing up, about the uncertainty but limitless potential of adolescence. In Japan, that means sparkles and elaborate transformation sequences and enormous powers, but to American feminists, that means undirected anger, broken homes, and lots and lots of sex, preferably perverted. Naturally, when combined with the degenerate state of American animation, this translates into an inability to make magical-girl shows worth watching.

Magical Girl Friendship Squad, which aired in , is about some aimless Millennials who live in the city and hover around coffee shops and end up with a talking cat that gives them powers. The show consists of six eleven-minute episodes, which aired late at night on SyFy; in other words, almost nobody was watching it anyway. I am bringing it up, however, first because it is (like it or not) a magical-girl show of sorts but also because it highlights the striking difference between audiences and critics, something we’ve seen repeatedly at the movies, where some big-budget, mega-corp film will often get slobbered over by “official” reviewers while audiences call it dreck.

According to Wikipedia, Magical Girl Friendship Squad received “mostly positive critical reception.” Those of us who are cynical about professional critics can easily see why: In the same Wikipedia article, the series has an entire section on “LGBTQ representation,” which points out glowingly that, and I quote, “Daisy is unambiguously queer as she has slept with ‘every barista’ at the local coffee shop”—because being a lesbian apparently means being a whore, at least in the minds of Wikipedia editors.

We already know that putting gayness in a cartoon is a sure way to make the tastemakers prostrate themselves in front of it: Simply witness Legend of Korra, which critics roundly mocked right up until its ambiguously lesbian ending—at which point they suddenly reversed course and heaped praise on it. For anyone paying attention, that was the moment when professional reviews ceased to have any worth.

I’m bringing this up because we can see the same thing here, a stark constrast between the critical reception and the audience reaction in the case of Magical Girl Friendship Squad. The reviews on IMDB are almost universally negative, and I think it worthwhile to quote a few:

Overall I tried watching it twice and its easy to say It’s very vague and it exagerates the humor which honestly comes out as just bland and unfunny and it tries to be random just for the sake of random. This show tries to make these characters be “spontaneous” but honestly it comes out more of just irritating.

After watching this show I’m not sure what confuses me more, the fact that someone thought that this story worked the way it is written, or the story having been written by anybody to begin with. Nothing flows into the next scene and the art style is incredibly lazy.

Seriously, by this point, the attempt of making another “deconstruction” (Curse you, Derrida. And curse you, Gen Urobuchi. And also curse all the people who keeps misusing this term) of magical girl cartoons is just as dull, unoriginal, lazy and stale as making “gritty” superhero deconstructions or “subversive” fairy tales where the prince charming is a jerk and the princess is a badass action hero.

Not funny or clever. More than anything it’s preachy and unappealing to anyone that’s not “woke”

Badly written, terribly animated, unimaginative, and so irritatingly dull that despite its short length it feels like nearly a whole hour has gone by once its finished. The people behind this series clearly happened to know the right people to get this greenlit and hot in development, because I am sorry but I cannot imagine a reality where somebody worked that hard to create this kind of concept and spent weeks preparing to create an effective pitch to an executive.

To be honest, this is so bad it makes the German invasion of Poland in September 1939 look like a good idea for a peaceful picnic.

I really tried… but what… what are we doing here? Phoning in pop culture jokes that will age like 3 day old yak milk? Making characters that are supposed to appeal to a specific demographic while also making them as bland as possible? This is a shining example of ‘edgy cartoon by boardroom’. There are better ways to waste your time, trust me.

I should add that there is a handful of positive reviews on IMDB; what is striking, however, is that the reviews, with few exceptions, rate the show with only one star or with a full ten stars—this strongly indicates that its defenders are defending it on purely ideological rather than artistic grounds. Indeed, just the screenshot at the top of this post is enough to deride it on artistic grounds.

Sipping and Editing

I Drink

This is an excerpt from one of my favorite “poems.” I put that in quotation marks because I discovered, after the fact, that these are actually song lyrics. They are probably under copyright, so I quote only in part:

I drink to drive away all the years I have hated,
The ambitions frustrated that no longer survive.
I drink day after day to the chaos behind me,
Yes, I drink to remind me that I still am alive.

So I give you a toast to the endless confusions,
To the lies and delusions that have swallowed my life.
Yes, I give you a toast to the wine and the roses,
To the deadly cirrhosis that can cut like a knife.

For the children unborn, for their dead, phantom faces,
For our sterile embraces in the tomb of your bed.
I drink, and I mourn for the harvest that failed,
For the ship that has sailed, for the hope that is dead.

Yes, I drink till I burst in my own degradation,
To the edge of damnation that is waiting below.
Yes, I drink with a thirst that destroys and depraves me
And cuffs and enslaves me, and will never let go.

To me, these lyrics are so stark, so raw, that they deserve to be read in a muted tone, surrounded by dead silence. I was shocked not only to learn that they come from a song, but also that the song sounds … well, in my opinion, too upbeat. The song is by Charles Aznavour, a Frenchman who had mastered several languages and produced a wide range of music. He also has a great voice and clearly writes pretty good poetry in English.

Here he is:

With all due respect, I just don’t find that crushing enough. The music and the voice are too beautiful for the ugly content. These lyrics, by themselves, are one of the poems I turn to from time to time for catharsis, but the song, I admit, I don’t care for. Of course, my knowledge of music is limited, so there may be something here I’m missing.

On Lolicon: An Addendum

My series of essays, Why I Hate Cardcaptor Sakura, is probably still my magnum opus in the world of blogging. Recently, I noticed a comment, though now almost a year old, that I think deserves some discussion.

For obvious reasons, I’m not linking the comment or stating the author’s name, and let me say clearly that this is not an invitation to dox, harass, or otherwise act like an ass.

Here is the comment:

That’s the issue with people like you today. You focus on too much on what is bad instead of why it’s bad. Why do you find th3 “pedophilia” relationship bad? It’s immoral, it’s disgusting it’s whatever. But please realize why it is bad to begin with. Pedophilia is bad not because a person likes a child, but because a child isn’t mentally prepared enough for any sexual relationships. They are also prone being exploited. Imagine a world where these negatives doesn’t exist, where every person is just borned matured and so on. Naturally in that world, pedophilia is not considered bad. That’s why in my opinion, we should never immediately see fictional pedophilia as some disgusting, evil, ugly, horrible things alone, but also by their context. I’m not saying the context in this is anywhere justified since I didn’t look too deep into it. But I really hope people learn not think so simply.

Curiously, this reinforces the point I was making with that over-long series of essays. “Imagine a world where pedophilia is good, akshually,” is, I agree, the entire premise of Cardcaptor Sakura—which is why I loathe it.

However, having said that, I will admit that the commenter makes a statement that, like the argument of a Sophist, takes some time to think over before we can understand exactly what’s wrong with it. Our instinct is to recoil in disgust, certainly, but instinct isn’t enough.

So here is my best attempt at a rebuttal:

First, I seriously doubt pedophiles’ good will; that is, I am not convinced they will be willing to keep it in the fictional world. “They’re just drawings” is the constant refrain of lolicons, something I have addressed previously. The problem with that is that, although they are indeed drawings, they are nonetheless drawings that represent something, in this case children. If those drawings of children are treated as sexually desirable for adults, that will naturally lead their viewers toward the opinion that children are sexually desirable for adults. This will hold true regardless of whether those child-drawings have a fantasy setting or a realistic one.

Second, the technical term for the detrimental effect to children when they are sexually exploited is “scandal.” Unfortunately, within the last two centuries or so, that word has lost both its original meaning and its original severity. To “scandalize” someone is to drag him into evil and thus into hell. Exploitation of children is particularly heinous because of scandal. That is why it is needful to tread with extreme care in this area, and I speak as one who has sweated and fretted over this subject, since I am myself a writer of coming-of-age magical-girl stories.

Third, although this is not well understood today, a thorough understanding of sexual ethics (indeed, of all ethics) requires an understanding of final cause, that is, that toward which things tend or that for which they exist. The primary final cause of sex is reproduction; there is much effort to deny this nowadays, but it is obvious to everyone and requires no defense. The sex act can of course have secondary ends such as pleasure or health or mutual good, but reproduction is still primary. As such, any sex act that necessarily precludes reproduction falls outside the category of the morally permissible, and this includes sex with sexually immature children even if the reality of scandal is denied or ignored as it is in Cardcaptor Sakura.

It is mainly for these second and third reasons that consent has become primary in today’s discussions of sexual ethics. It was around the eighth century that Christian theologians recognized that, because Christian marriage is a sacrament and not merely a natural institution, it requires the full consent of both spouses. From there, theologians refined their position, determining that, as a natural institution ordered toward child-rearing, marriage requires its participants to be of reproductive age and, as a sacrament, also requires that they be mature enough to consent to it.

Like it or not, these theological conclusions underpin all current discussions of this touchy subject.

Prepare Yourselves: I’m Going to Hate on ‘Chobits’

My nine-part series, “Why I Hate Cardcaptor Sakura,” is consistently the most popular thing on this blog. In the last essay of that series, I promised a similar discussion of the insanely popular and bestselling Chobits, which is CLAMP’s homage to—or possibly their sly takedown of—the magical girlfriend/robot girl genre.

I hadn’t got around to this for several reasons, the main one being that, due to life circumstances, I did not until recently have access to my two-volume omnibus set of Chobits. The other reason was that I detested the story so much that I was loathe to pick it up again. I couldn’t even bring myself to finish it on my first attempt.

Of course, as an author, I’m not above swiping stuff even from things I hate. Readers familiar with my novel Jake and the Dynamo may have recognized that I borrowed from Chobits—or mocked it, rather—in my depiction of Grease Pencil Marionette.

This essay may take me some time to complete, not because it’s hard to express my hate (that part’s easy), but because it will take a lot of time to explain, thoroughly and carefully, exactly what’s wrong with Chobits, exactly why it is a failure as a story, a failure as a hamfisted and amateurish attempt at philosophy, and generally loathsome.

As I stated before, my hate for Cardcaptor Sakura is fanboyish hatred, the kind of melodramatic grousing that fans do about things they like. But my hatred for Chobits is the real deal. It is disgusting, wretched, and more importantly, stupid, in every possible way.

One thing about it, though, is easy to point out and mock, and I have done so in the little meme I put together above. The story is actually, I kid you not, about a girl robot with a reboot switch capable of reformatting her drive, located in her nether regions. And this isn’t some dirty little gag created for a cheap laugh, either: it is actually the centerpiece of the plot, leading to the burning question of whether the protagonist will be able to shag his computer console because of her stupid switch. The whole damn story centers around where this robo-chick has her on/off button.

And even though at least three of the characters are computer experts, brilliant enough to build their own hyper-realistic girl robots, not a single one of them, not one, suggests the simple solution of disconnecting or moving the damn switch.

I friggin’ hate Chobits, man.