Manga Review: ‘Teasing Master Takagi-san’

Teasing Master Takagi-san, written and illustrated by Soichiro Yamamoto. 11 volumes (ongoing). Yen Press, 2019–2021.

Over the past few months, my social-media feeds have been full of mentions of a manga called Don’t Toy with Me Miss Nagatoro, which recently saw an anime adaptation. There’s been a lot of controversy surrounding that title for various reasons I don’t care to get into in this post; suffice to say, the story is about a strong-willed girl who bullies a timid young man into being her boyfriend.

Today, I want to look at a title that has a similar premise but is considerably gentler in execution. Though less funny than Nagatoro, it’s also more pleasant.

Soichiro Yamamoto’s Teasing Master Takagi-san currently stands at eleven volumes in the English-language version, though the next two volumes are already listed as forthcoming. There is an anime series as well, currently with two seasons and rumors of a third, though it’s slightly difficult to find: The first season currently resides on Amazon Prime, and the second is on Netflix. More weirdly, there is also a virtual-reality anime that puts the viewer in the role of the harried male protagonist. I haven’t seen any of those, so I am here discussing only the manga.

Continue reading “Manga Review: ‘Teasing Master Takagi-san’”

Manga Review: ‘My Senpai Is Annoying’

My Senpai Is Annoying, written and illustrated by Shiromanta. Seven Seas Entertainment, . 4 volumes (ongoing). Full color.

There’s a change happening in manga, and I suspect most of us on this side of the Pacific are oblivious to it. I was, at least, until quite recently, though I’ve been out of the loop while working on my books and getting married and buying a house and stuff. But in any case, manga is becoming more social media-driven: Many artists are now getting discovered on Twitter or using it to promote their work.

We may also be seeing the rise of internet manga magazines: The title before us is published digitally in the online Comic POOL, and because it is online, it is published in color; although the coloring is fitful at first, My Senpai Is Annoying becomes a legitimate full-color comic as it develops.

It has also grown popular enough to earn an anime adaptation, which is set to debut in October of this year. At the time of writing, four volumes are available in English, and the fifth is set to release later this month.

Continue reading “Manga Review: ‘My Senpai Is Annoying’”

The Importance of Owning Physical Media: Amazon Censors Manga

Amazon has grown increasingly censorious in recent days. The online sales giant became huge by offering anything and everything, but over the past few years, it has, like the other tech giants, begun banning content.

Once a corporation gets a taste for censorship, it will steadily grow more censorious: As I previously discussed, Amazon in 2020 began banning light novels, apparently at random. Then, of course, they coordinated with Twitter, Google, and Apple to delete the microblogging platform Parler from the internet. More recently still, they banned Ryan Anderson’s book, When Harry Became Sally, because it criticized the new religion.

In recent days, I have taken to downloading manga on my Kindle because it’s convenient and cheaper than print. I have a few series I’ve followed that way. Recently, as I was looking over my digital copies of the harem manga We Never Learn, I noticed volume 3 was missing from my collection even though I had purchased and read it. So I checked the Amazon store; it is gone from Amazon entirely, both in print and digitally.

I contacted Amazon, and the tech to whom I spoke eventually told me the book was no longer available, and then he told me this gem:

Screenshot of chat conversation

I slightly regret my emotional incontinence, which I directed at a mere underpaid staffer who is not privy to the reason my property had been taken from me. He did not know why Amazon had deleted a book from my personal library without notice or explanation.

Screenshot of chat conversation

He told me that the availability of the book was up to the “author or content owner,” sidestepping the uncomfortable fact that it is also up to Amazon itself—which has considerably more power—and also sidestepping the fact that Amazon had not merely stopped selling the book but destroyed my copy.

The book, by the way, is still available on Barnes & Noble as of this writing, which indicates that this is an act of censorship on Amazon’s part. As with the previously censored light novels, we will probably never know the reason for sure, but it likely has to do with someone getting offended by the swimsuit on the cover.

We Never Learn Volume 3

This is not the first time Amazon has destroyed customers’ property. Back when the Kindle was new, Amazon revealed that it has the power to delete digital books from our possession without explanation: It famously deleted copies of 1984 right off people’s devices.

The guy I talked to didn’t know why my book had disappeared, nor is there any reason he should. The point of all this, however, is that, when you buy digital, you don’t assume the full control you have when you buy analog, especially in an age of streaming and constant internet connections, an age when our overlords want us to “own nothing and be happy.”

Had I spent the extra money for print copies of this manga, I would still have the whole series without gaps in it; Amazon can delete stuff off my device but can’t break into my house and raid my shelves—yet.

Given how censorious Amazon is becoming, buying print books is increasingly important. This little example of censorship involves a trivial work; its disappearance annoys me, but I won’t shed tears over it. There are, however, much more important and substantial books that will eventually be in our overlords’ crosshairs, and the day will come suddenly when, as with those six Dr. Seuss books, you simply won’t be able to get them at all, anywhere.

The United Nations Gets Something Right

I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if a million perverts cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.

The online anime community has been in an uproar since Valentine’s Day because the United Nations has proposed an expanded definition of child pornography. The “Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child,” currently in draft, defines child pornography as including “photographs, movies, drawings and cartoons” depicting “a child engaged in real or simulated sexually explicit conduct.” As usual, Know Your Meme has an impressively even-tempered write-up.

This has a lot of otaku and weeaboos in a tizzy because … well, because they want their sexually explicit depictions of children, and they’re not even trying to hide it anymore. Some have taken to referring to this as a “loli ban,” or in some cases, as in MaiOtaku, they’ve claimed the “United Nations is trying to ban anime,” which would be true only if anime and child pornography were synonymous.

Even calling it a loli ban is arguably disingenuous: Although the term loli is unquestionably of disreputable etymology (it ultimately derives from the novel Lolita), it is used by weebs as a generic term for any young girl characters, particularly ones who wear pseudo-Victorian dress, at least as often as it is used for child pornography. They’re trying to imply here that animators will no longer be allowed to depict children at all, which is simply not the case.

Taken in its literal meaning, this “loli ban” would actually ban only unambiguous child pornography, which means the creepers could still keep their panty shots and their suggestive transformation sequences and all the other things that manga and anime don’t need and would be better off without. In fact, it would probably have little effect at all anyway, since creators of this stuff long ago discovered that they could get around such rules by claiming that a clearly prepubescent character is actually eighteen or a robot or something.

And besides that, the U.N. is a joke and would have no actual power to enforce this anyway. I mean, what are they gonna do, invade Japan?


What is perhaps most dismaying to me personally about the whole affair is just how bad the arguments are against the U.N.’s proposed policy. Child pornography isn’t really defensible anyway, but jeez, it shows what a philosophical dark age we live in that these are the best defenses anyone can come up with.

The arguments against the policy, at least that I have seen, are two, and they go like this:

  1. Muh freedom. This argument is  that “free expression” is a good in itself and should not be impinged in any fashion. I live in the United States, which was at least formerly the world’s leading defender of free speech. Our First Amendment, in its phrasing and original context, was clearly meant to protect political and religious speech. In spite of some erroneous and disastrous Supreme Court interpretations, it was never meant to protect pornography, which once upon a time was as illegal here as in the rest of the civilized world.

    The error here is in treating free speech as a good in itself rather than as a means to a good end. Pornography, the disastrous effects of which are obvious to anyone honest with himself, has no possible good end and does not need to be protected as free speech. It is akin to the example of adultery that Aristotle uses in the Nichomachean Ethics: it is wrong in itself and cannot be done moderately or temperately, which places it in an entirely separate category from expressing one’s honest opinion on matters philosophical, political, or religious.

  2. No real children are involved so it doesn’t hurt anybody. This argument has popped up in various forms all over the place. It is an argument that derives from a degraded version of Utilitarian ethics.

    The Utilitarians have held to the view that ethical actions should seek to maximize the most good, or pleasure, for the largest number of people. Utilitarianism typically flounders in trying to determine how such a calculus could actually be done. Over time, it has degenerated into doing the least amount of harm, or “not hurting anybody,” rather than doing the most good. This enables people to get away with most anything simply by defining harm in such a narrow way as to excuse most any vice they want to indulge in. Animated or drawn child pornography may not harm a specific child directly, but it nonetheless harms children generally in that it normalizes the sexualization and sexual exploitation of children. It also harms, morally or spiritually, the artist who produces the work and the people who consume it.

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.

It’s Time Again for the Annual Re-Reading of ‘Maison Ikkoku’

Rumiko Takahashi is, after CLAMP, probably the most prolific woman in manga. In the U.S., she’s probably best known for Ranma 1/2 or Inuyasha, but I think her seinen comic Maison Ikkoku will always be her masterpiece.

I discovered this title several years ago while browsing the Shady Bookstore Down the Street, which was a short walk away from where I used to live in Utah. It was the kind of little store where you could pick up any number of unexpected literary gems, manga, Z-grade Kung fu movies, and Wiccan paraphernalia. It’s thanks to that bookstore that I own the first volume of the lovingly drawn and criminally obscure comic Cadillacs and Dinosaurs and the special edition of the uneven but fantastically imaginative comic The Sacred and the Profane, and have seen Super Dimension Fortress Macross in the original Japanese.

While I was hunting through the manga one day, I picked up an old, flopped volume of Maison Ikkoku that presented a selection of chapters out of order. I read that one volume probably a dozen times and knew I wouldn’t be satisfied until I had the whole series. The entire run was released, in the original right-to-left format, by Viz Media in 2003. I found the bulk of the series on Amazon and then acquired the missing volumes from questionable, don’t-call-us-we’ll-call-you booksellers.

I waited until I had all of it and then binge-read the entire thing on a Saturday in about thirteen hours. I laughed, I cried … it moved me, Bob.

The manga was originally published in 1984, which makes it ancient according to the short memories of weeaboos. It takes place in a run-down tenement house based on a real place where Takahashi lived while going to college. Her original plan was to make this a round of stories focusing in turn on the various quirky residents. However, she kicked off the manga with the tale of a luckless college student who falls hopelessly in love with the tenement’s widowed manager. Takahashi soon found that this was all her fans were interested in, so she retooled the series as a romantic comedy focusing on the fumbling Yusaku and the beautiful but hot-tempered Kyoko, with the rest of the residents as assisting characters.

The result is one of the best romantic comedies of all time, that happens to be a comic book. Yusaku Godai is a more-or-less standard loser hero, the kind who tries his darnedest and still ends up humiliated, in public with no pants (or similar). Kyoko is yet another version of one Takahashi-sensei’s favorite character types, the stubborn woman who won’t admit her feelings for the male lead but still goes ballistic if she sees him getting within ten feet of another girl. Takahashi’s huge body of work, which almost always contains some variation of this pairing, is probably largely responsible for shaping and popularizing the “tsundere” in manga and anime. Her romantic pairings are so consistent in formula that there is an entry for “Takahashi couple” over at TVTropes.

Maison Ikkoku showcases all of Takahashi’s strengths with none of her usual defects. She tends to pile on extra characters in her series and then forget about most of them, a frustrating habit that fans came to call “Takahashi character death,” where characters would disappear without explanation, their subplots forever unresolved. Although Maison Ikkoku has a large cast and a lot of subplots, Takahashi remembers everybody and wraps up everything, and she does it in only fifteen volumes—which is a very short series for her. Although there are a lot of over-the-top antics in this series, the real-world setting and the target audience of adults required Takashi to bring her A-game: The characters are more realistic and less cartoonish than her usual, and their motives more believable: Yusaku is immature and lazy; Kyoko is still in love with her late husband.

Personally, I usually enjoy a Takahashi title for about four volumes and then lose interest. This is because she sets up the main plot arc and the most important characters in the first four books, and then coasts. The first volume of Ranma 1/2 is almost perfect as a graphic novel, and after that I can take it or leave it … and then when Happosai shows up, I leave it for sure, because I can’t stand it anymore. Inuyasha starts as a beautiful, bloody epic, but eventually falls into the standard shounen rut of fight-powerup-repeat. Maison Ikkoku, however, maintains its initial energy through its entire run. If anything, it improves over time, growing more serious as Yusaku has to move from being a college slacker to a productive adult if he’s ever to make anything of himself and win the woman he loves.

The setting in the early ’80s also helps the plot a good deal. I sometimes believe that modern information technology is antithetical to drama—and comedy. Just as Hollywood used to make romantic comedies surrounding the inconveniences of party lines, many of the shenanigans in Maison Ikkoku are driven by the fact that the tenement building has only one phone, which happens to stand next to the apartment of the biggest gossip.

Anyway, I love it, and it’s just as poignant, just as gut-bustingly funny, on subsequent readings as on the first. In the world of manga, this is my all-time favorite.

Initial Notes on ‘Wedding Peach’

I managed to finish all of Saint Tail, but I have nothing to add to my earlier review. It’s an undemanding but sweet story, and I recommend it.

I’ve moved from there to some other mid-9os magical girl titles. I’m right now watching Magic User’s Club, which Nozomi Entertainment has kindly added to its YouTube channel. I am also reading the manga version of Wedding Peach, which I am having to gather slowly, piecemeal, much as I did with Saint Tail.

Wedding Peach is a title that a lot of magical girl fans love to hate, mostly because it appeared a mere three years after Sailor Moon and closely resembles it. Its creator, Sukehiro Tomita, was in fact a writer on the Sailor Moon anime. Wedding Peach has the same relation to Sailor Moon that Day Break Illusion has to Puella Magi Madoka Magica: it’s a little too obvious in its coattail-riding, so it provokes some ire.

That being said, I like what I’ve seen of it so far. The manga, at least, one-ups Sailor Moon in its art quality (not that that’s hard). The characters are likable, and the action is a tad gritty, with an unexpected amount of blood and bruising. Continue reading “Initial Notes on ‘Wedding Peach’”

‘Sugar Sugar Rune,’ Volumes 4-8

Sugar Sugar Rune, volumes 4-8. Story and art by Moyoco Anno. Translated by Kaya Laterman. Del Rey Manga (New York), 2007. Rated Y (Ages 10+).

I previously reviewed the first three volumes of this series. Because this was adapted and translated by Del Rey, I speculated that a re-release might come from Kodansha Comics, since Kodansha more-or-less replaced Del Rey Manga. I learned subsequently that the rights now actually belong to Udon Entertainment, which planned to begin releasing the series sometime in late 2016.

That didn’t happen, so the fate of the English translation of Sugar Sugar Rune is currently up in the air. Since the series has been released in Japanese as a colorized web comic, I’m hoping for a colorized English version, but that may be asking too much. Also still in need of a release in North America is the anime, the English version of which, as I understand it, only aired in the Philippines.

More than once, I have seen Sugar Sugar Rune touted as one of the greatest of the “cute witch” magical girl stories—a reputation it probably deserves. But, perhaps because the series was largely ignored during its original North American release, I think it’s also fair to say that some of its fans have over-sold it. Is it good? Yes, but it’s not that good. Is it “the greatest fantasy comic of the last five years,” as Anime News Network claimed? Well, I’d have to survey most of the fantasy comics from the five-year block before its publication to form an opinion on that, but I doubt it. Yes, it’s a fine little manga, but calm down. Continue reading “‘Sugar Sugar Rune,’ Volumes 4-8”

Jon Del Arroz on Passive Anime Protagonists

On his blog, author Jon Del Arroz has some interesting comments on the passive, weak male protagonists who often star in anime high school rom-coms. Excuse me while I quote him at length:

I had an interesting discussion with a friend last night as we were digging far too deeply into anime. Almost every anime show (especially those set in a high school environment, which is the majority of them), have male protagonists that are your classic gamma male archetype. They are socially awkward, especially around women. When encountered with women they go into a crazed frenzy, female worship, nosebleeds, slapstick failings. We’re supposed to root for them to get the girl in spite of their failures. And sometimes we do, but we can’t help but wince every time they enter the scene with their female counterparts, who are usually far more composed and cooler than they are. Continue reading “Jon Del Arroz on Passive Anime Protagonists”

Grape-kun Is with Harambe Now

Waifus out for Grape-kun.

Okay, I admit I’d never heard of Grape-kun before yesterday, but all of a sudden, my social media timelines were full of him.

The handy website Know Your Meme breaks down the facts. Grape-kun was an elderly Humboldt penguin in the Tobu Zoo in Japan. For a while, the zoo had placed cardboard cutouts of characters from the manga and anime series Kemono Friends in the pens of various animals as an advertising gimmick. I’ve never seen Kemono Friends, but it is apparently yet another of the innumerable manga/anime about random objects anthropomorphized as little girls; in this case, the random objects are animals. The anime series is on Crunchyroll.

Anyway, the zoo placed an image of a character named Hululu, an anthropomorphized penguin, in the pen of Grape-kun. Thereafter, people noticed the penguin frequently staring at the image.

He’s probably wondering what happened to Hululu’s pants.

Naturally, people leapt to conclusions, and Goboiano reported on April 27 with the headline, “Japan Puts Anime in Zoo and Penguin Adopts a Waifu.”

Grape-kun died yesterday, October 12th. The zoo reported that the cut-out of Hululu was with Grape-kun through his final moments.

Four months ago, this comic showed up on the Internet. I’ve been unable to figure out if this is from the manga version of Kemono Friends, or if this is someone’s fan art, but either way, it is now relevant:

Rest in peace, Grape-kun.