Category: NERDING DAY

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NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: The King’s Daughter

The King’s Daughter is a new movie starring Pierce Brosnan. That sentence is almost not true, for reasons I will explain. But here’s what’s true: Pierce Brosnan plays France’s King Louis XIV, on a quest to gain immortality by killing a mermaid during an eclipse. You know: the standard plot of a film called “The King’s Daughter”.

Why did I watch this? Especially after I showed the trailer to Brockway and Seanbaby, and they both told me it put them to sleep? I watched this because I’m a perma-fan of Pierce Brosnan. He played James Bond while I was impressionable. That role imprinted him on me. I was a duckling, and he was my mother duck, outrunning a space laser. After taking a look back at Brosnan’s pre-Bond action movie about terrorist spontaneous human combustions, I wondered what he is up to lately. IMDb said this movie came out in January of 2022. That date is the doorway to an astoundingly cursed production history.

But let’s start with the regular-bad stuff. This is a movie about King Louis XIV trying to murder a mermaid because that will give him immortality powers. In real life, King Louis XIV was famous, influential, father of at least a dozen kids, and the longest-reigning monarch in world history. That’s a fascinating person! In real life! This movie takes that fascinating Frenchy, casts Irish James Bond to play him, and makes fake mermaid-murder his whole deal. That’s ridiculous! It’s like if the people making Lincoln (2012) threw out their history books, and depicted Abraham Lincoln as… oh I dunno, what would be cryptozoological and make no sense? Oh I know! A vampire hunter. Yeah, a vampire hunter. (Okay between you and me, I do know about Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter (also 2012!), because I saw it opening week in a theater. But please don’t tell anyone I did that.) 

Anyway The King’s Daughter should be titled something wilder. Sort of like how Twilight should be Sparkly Sexy Vampire Teens! with a third movie called SSVT!3: The Hyper-Baby. Once you go as fantastical/silly as these movies do, it doesn’t matter how famous your cast is or how competently somebody held the camera. It’s a B-movie about monster-love. And in The King’s Daughter, his daughter is the least interesting character.

Here’s the exciting stuff: King Brosnan commands a sea captain to catch a mermaid. The captain does that, and stores her in a Disneyland boat ride-lookin’ cave, situated under the Palace of Versailles. The movie’s cast proceeds to rave about the incredibleness of said mermaid…

…in between making plans to de-bone that sucker, because if they kill her during a solar eclipse, her golden healing powers will burst out of her and something something something. 

King Louis XIV and his science flunky believe this will turn Louis immortal. And you know what? I’m open to it! As a story, anyway. The dark, hardcore version of that might be good. The dark, hardcore version is an award-winning novel. This movie adapted The Moon And The Sun, a novel by Vonda N. McIntyre that won the 1997 Nebula Award, beating a field that included George R.R. Martin’s A Game Of Thrones. According to skimming its Wikipedia, McIntyre’s book features the mermaid vowing vengeance on humanity, the Pope being an asshole, and a clever scheming dwarf becoming a key adviser to the king. I know that last thing sounds like Tyrion Lannister from Game Of Thrones. Frankly the whole thing sounds like Game Of Thrones, in a good way. It sounds better than this glossy movie about a perky princess who’s obsessed with her cello.

Background: they almost turned this book into a movie back in 1999, starring Natalie Portman (!) and made by Jim Henson (!!!!). Henson’s name reminds me this type of premise can work, if you go full Labyrinth with your vision and creativity. This movie lacks Labyrinth-itude… except for one scene they kind of stole from Labyrinth. There’s a big set piece where our unhinged nobleman does seductive ballroom dancing with the much much younger lead actress.

That’s way creepier here, though, because the male nobleman is the girl’s *father*. That’s creepy! That’s obviously creepy to everyone, right? Wrong. The makers of this film packed this thing with scenes where Pierce Brosnan has ~chemistry~ with The King’s Daughter Who Is His Daughter. Which is…a choice! For example, they could meet all kinds of ways. Their first meeting is her falling into a fountain, coming out soaking wet, and him giving her Bond Eyes about it.

After that, he makes her his royal composer, which means she sits outside his bedchamber window in a gown every morning.

He also hand-draws a portrait of her, while telling her he sent his agents to investigate what she likes.

Then they do the aforementioned sexy waltzing. Then he summons her to his sitting room, and dictates her entrance with step-by-quivering-step rules. It’s kind of royal and kind of ‘Fifty Shades’.

Then when he arranges her marriage to a rich guy, he lets her burst into his bedroom… 

…so he can tell her the news while one inch away from her earlobe.

I thiiiink I know what they’re going for here? They’re going for “she reminds him a lot of her mom, who he used to boink.” Our Greatest Living Thespian (Pierce Brosnan) does a slight variation on this, playing it as “he’s gonna boink his own daughter, boink boink boink, all nuit long.” It ends up becoming kind of the main thing in this movie – even though this is a movie where King Louis XIV of France hunts a mermaid. Also I see how Pierce got there! He got there because he read the script, and saw lines like this:

She says that to a priest! Anyway, there are a ton of other scenes where The King’s Daughter pursues the movie’s on-purpose romance. She falls in love with a sea pirate guy. It’s boring. There is one funny element, which is that the sea pirate guy lives in a lighthouse, with a roommate.

Also they walk to this lighthouse from Versailles. If I’m mapping that right, his lighthouse is more than 100 miles from the sea. Now that you know the one funny geography thing, you can skip these scenes. No sparks. She has less chemistry with the sea pirate than with her father. And who can blame her? Her father is played by Pierce Brosnan. Surprise: I can blame her. The sea pirate actor is played by her future real-life husband.

Meanwhile, holy moly, there’s a friggin’ mermaid under the Palace of Versailles. You would think more of the movie would be about that. This mermaid movie does not know what to do with its mermaid. So they keep her in the movie by making The King’s Daughter take sudden, unmotivated dives into her pool.

One dive is because The King’s Daughter has a Horse Injury, and the mermaid heals it. Other dives are for funsies, I think. Honestly, I can’t remember all the specifics of this movie. It’s got a spazzy flow to it, in a way I can’t screencap. It hops from scene to scene without letting anything matter. Example: midway through, The King’s Daughter is being kept in her room by a guard. She laments that she’s as much of a prisoner as the mermaid. She laments this half a moment before climbing out a window and escaping easily.

This feeling maxes out in the movie’s climax. King Pierce is on a cliff overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. Below him: the mermaid, who swam to the ocean from Versailles (116 miles), because the King’s Daughter spun a big wooden wheel that messed with the palace plumbing and funneled her out. Don’t worry about it. Point is, she says King Pierce only cares about himself, because his guys are lined up to kill the mermaid with their guns once the eclipse starts. He begs her to notice that he’s changed. He is no longer the selfish immortality-seeking king he once was.

Then, twenty-eight seconds later, he tells his guys to kill the mermaid.

Is this a devilish switcheroo? Did he do this after obtaining something or other, by being crafty? No. The movie just kind of does both personalities in one scene. On the issue of mermaid murder, he “Duck Season! / Wabbit Season!”s himself. Oops! Oh well. Then he doesn’t shoot the mermaid and everyone lives happily ever after. Also, the final scene of the movie is The King’s Daughter in an ocean rowboat. She jumps into the ocean, reaches a depth of maybe eight feet, and discovers The Entire City Of Atlantis. This event gets described by a pop song’s lyrics, and by a narrator who is (no joke) Dame Julie Andrews.

I would talk about the scenes of the movie more, but there’s a much more cursed lore awaiting us in reality. The mere release date of this movie is a nightmare. Because this came out in 2022… and this got filmed in 2014. Your math is correct: this film was released eight years after they shot it. Eight years of aging, on a secluded shelf, like a pretty alright wine or an almost-Laphroaig. As a Brosnan Freak, I noticed this time warp immediately. I know Pierce’s face like the back of my own hand – and to me, Pierce looked way too freakin’ great for [uses Google to triple-check Pierce Brosnan’s 2022 age, because it sounds like a joke, but is not a joke, it’s the actual age number I’m working with here] sixty-nine.

This time warp is even weirder for other cast members. Such as William Hurt. Here he is, in this movie, playing King Brosnan’s favorite priest.

Within the eight year limbo of not releasing this movie, Hurt made four Marvel movies, four TV shows, and other stuff. A couple months after it released, he died. Guess what ended up on the top of his IMDb page, forever?

On the other end of the death/life spectrum, let’s take another gander at this film’s (legal) romantic leads:

These randos get most of the non-Brosnan screen time. You may know Kaya Scodelario from Skins or The Maze Runner. Let’s pretend I don’t know Benjamin Walker, the male lead, from his title role in Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. Let’s pretend I spend my time super well, actually. Anyway, according to IMDb’s trivia section, these two sweeties had their first real-life kiss in their pretend scenes for this movie. According to People.com, they’re now a married couple with two children. That means they made *a family* faster than this movie made its debut.

Why did this movie take so long to come out? We all know the usual reason: badness! That is one reason here. But this movie is more than bad. It’s also two significant financial crimes. Any bad movie with famous-ish cast members still plops onto VOD within a couple years. This movie decayed far longer, because in two separate ways, it defrauded the country of China. Surprise! This story involves China, a lot.

Sorry, China. You are a large country that Hollywood wants to reach. Some movies do that by thoughtfully incorporating China’s fascinating culture, lengthy history, or talented artists. This movie cast one Chinese actor as a trick to score Chinese financing for half their budget. This is who they cast, and who they played.

That last screencap contains all of Fan Bingbing’s dialogue in this movie. I’m not joking. I wish I were joking! She plays a mermaid who communicates with THE KING’S DAUGHTER through telepathic made-up mermaid words and telepathic music-noises. Which is bonkers, because holy cow, they booked Fan Bingbing! The most famous actress in China! A performer who Vanity Fair calls China’s equivalent of Nicole Kidman plus Julia Roberts plus Jennifer Lawrence plus Sandra Bullock. She’s so famous, I’ve only ever seen one Chinese TV drama, and it co-stars Fan Bingbing. But she’s so CGI’d up, I didn’t even recognize her. And she spends this movie trapped in a cave under the Palace of Versailles, in a non-speaking role, because the producers wanted to swindle enough Chinese cash to rent out The Actual Palace Of Versailles.

They wasted Fan Bingbing to scam foreign funding. To me, that is fraud! And to the Chinese public, Fan Bingbing is a different fraud. Because apparently this movie shot in 2014 was set for release in 2015. It got delayed for normal reasons (lamenting its badness, finishing special effects). It got extra delayed because they recut the whole thing and hired Julie Andrews to tack on narration. Then this got mega-delayed by the biggest scandal in Chinese entertainment history. Because the producers were going to cash in on this movie, and pay for Julie Andrews’s diamond-encrusted Blue Yeti or whatever, by doing a massive release in China in 2018. But in 2018, a talk show host accused Fan Bingbing of tax evasion. That snowballed into house arrest, government surveillance, an order to pay $131 million in back taxes, and new national laws capping the pay of all Chinese movie actors. And China is different from the United States. Its people do not celebrate tax evasion as life’s greatest IQ test. The furor about this meant no one in China wanted to see a Fan Bingbing movie. The next best sales pitch of “mermaid period drama starring Pierce Brosnan?” did not work in any country. I’m pretty sure this only came out at all because COVID shut down the production of better movies for a while. Without that pipeline gap, I doubt we’d ever have seen this boring, confusing movie where a French lady does a cello jam session with a scam mermaid.

So there you have it. This movie stinks and its stinkiness achieved layers. And if there’s one thing I’m surer of than ever, it’s that my main man Pierce will entertain me, one way or another. Because this movie/story sure did. Entertainment! That’s the Brosnan Guarantee(™)! Use promo code “DDOGGZZONNEZ” for a 10% stronger Brosnantee when you pre-order tickets to Mamma Mia 3. I know I will!*

*I might not.

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Nerding Day: i tell c

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Nerding Day: The Legend of Zelda Commercial

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NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: 101 Hamburger Jokes 🌭

Perfection. I’m speaking, of course, about the title of the 1978 book by Phil Hirsch and Don Orehek, 101 HAMBURGER JOKES.

101 HAMBURGER JOKES. There are no other three words so descriptive and fun, and I will say that right to an Aliens Versus Predator poster. If I was trying to come up with a funny name for a fake book and my brain landed on “101 Hamburger Jokes,” I would take the rest of the day off to buy trophies. 101 Hamburger Jokes is what we should have called this website. It’s a careless shrug from an accidental genius. It says both “keep your expectations reasonable” and “I’m from a better world, where Zany is the only language.” It is both a wink from a magical comedy pixie and a tired sales pitch from a man holding 70 hamburger jokes.

Betrayal. What is this? Phil Hirsch dressed a burger up like a cat. Then he asked you what he had done. Then he explains, yes, you guessed right: cat-burger, but not some kind of burger-cat like you’re thinking. He’s a cat-burger (burglar), because the burger part is a pun on a concept we didn’t establish. And how dare he. This is many things –many things– but a hamburger joke is not one of them.

Well, yeah. Sure. I mean, what else would it be? This isn’t a hamburger joke. It’s not even a hamburger riddle. This is what you would draw if you were playing a sad Pictionary game by yourself. Sorry, let me translate that into burger. This is a Pictionary clue Veal Armstrong would draw if Bun Aldrin abandoned him on the moon!

Phil published this the year “Cheeseburger in Paradise” was the 32nd most popular song. The song “I’m Your Boogie Man” was literally the number one hit while he was writing it. And there he was in a world of burger and burger soundalike songs expecting readers to think, “A hamburger’s most familiar song? Oh, oh! It’s got to one about range! Something about range, come on, think.” Get the fuck out of here, Phil.

They feel at home on the ra– oh, god damn it, Phil. So even the “101” part of 101 HAMBURGER JOKES was a lie!? Fuck you.

I really wanted to love this book. Let me see if I can find a good one…

No. This feels like the world’s greatest lawyer making a case for why puns should carry the death penalty. Someone really thought they could turn 40% of all words into forced meat references and simply carry on communicating like a human. Oh, and it looks like Phil tried cat-burger (burglar) again, somehow not making a reference to burglary a second time. Phil, if cat-burger (burglar) is your punchline, the set up is either “What kind of a burger steals?” or “What’s the most popular food (and most common occupation) in Cincinnati?”

Phil, you son of a bitch. Don’t make this about meat type.

Oh, very funny, Phil. You’ve made the hot dog the ugliest girl at the meat ball, over in the corner talking to ham. I’m not going to go back and forth like this with you. You know you were wrong for “cat-burger (burglar)” and for trying that desperate “Home on the Range” bullshit two different times. Can we get back to a normal article where we just enjoy your perfectly-named book, 101 HAMBURGER JOKES?

I’ll take that as a yes. Thank you, Phil.

Now that we’re being civil, I want to try to understand what’s happening here. There seems to be a way of things in this hamburger joke world. Is that a human priest marrying those food monsters? If so, it implies they live among us and we legally recognize their love. We share a God and can break His laws together. Maybe if we can understand this universe the jokes will start to make sense?

First off, let’s verify the scale of things. Is that really a full-size priest, or did these snacks climb to the top of a wedding cake to play make-believe with the topper? Is it a world where humans are burger-sized? Let me find one with some hard numbers.

Okay, this is great. I’m not sure what anyone would do with this in any other context. Not laugh, probably, but it does establish the burgers in this book are roughly human-sized and have combat sports. Does that mean a person can box a cheeseburger? If they get hurt do they go to a human doctor or are there meat medical scho– wait, hold on. In this world, do man and meat fuck?

Whoa, that’s closer to a definitive yes than I was expecting. You might notice there is no pun or wordplay in this one. Phil just changed an entire unrelated word to hamburgers, which is cheating even by his loose code of joke ethics. He had to keep those patty holes in his book at all costs. He wanted us to know they were there. Because a kid’s joke book could never come right out and say, “Human men sexually dominate these burger people, and here’s a picture of it.”

I was wrong. I’m so happy I was wrong!

This one is troubling. I think it’s a nightmare Phil has about falling and realizing everyone can see his tampon string (plus he’s a burger dog). We’re offered six (6!!!) choices for the “punchline,” and not a single one of them describes what is plainly a dog burger. If that thing walked onto a cartoon, you wouldn’t have to introduce it. That’s fucking Dog Burger, maybe Puppy With-Cheese. If anything looks at this and says, “Wow, a football stadium with the seats removed,” hit it in the head with a hammer. But forget all that. It’s frustrating and I hate it, but forget it. This one tells us these burgers have smaller, animal burgers as pets! And, maybe more importantly, you leash a burger by shoving one end of the leash inside them where an “asshole” might be found on you or me.

We’re learning a lot. Not about comedy, but about what it takes to build a world where meat can walk and love. Today, if someone started up a discussion about defining burger gender you’d brace yourself for something worse than shitty wordplay, but remember, these burgers live in 1978. And maybe a darker one than ours, because here’s one about blackface:

Let’s give as much credit to a man making blackface burger puns as we can– that picture of hamburger Al Jolson could have been a lot worse. Now, for a lot of reasons, I want to get back to burger fucking.

“Draw me a burger who fucks people,” said Phil, right before Don Orehek won nothing less than the Nobel Prize for Pervert Burger Illustration. Why do they sign headshots afterward? Patty, if you have to ask… look, the point is, anything goes in this world. All burgers are men, horny fuck-champion men, and they don’t care if you’re hot dogs or people.

Or barely lega– wait, oh no. I know how this question is going to sound, but what is the age of consent in a world where you can have sex with cheeseburgers? Because, and again I know how this is going to sound, I’m not going to fuck a burger more than 3 years old. 

Let’s ignore Phil’s sloppy reach for a pun here. Phil Hirsch couldn’t write a joke with a burger and a dick hole, and he’s proven specifically that. But he can offer up fascinating ideas. Does this hamburger joke mean the buns are women? How does that work? Is there penetration, or is their reproductive process more like hermit crabs changing shells? How do these living, working, sentient burgers make more of themselves?

Oh my god. Are the burgers made from the remains of the humans? I need to know if that hamburger is going to grind up meat that can beg him to stop or if being ground up is a normal part of a meat’s work day. Is this a ritualized death ceremony? You can’t casually draw a picture of a hamburger walking into a slaughterhouse.

So they’re meat made from flesh, but their blood is catsup!? And some hamburgers rise from the dead to feed on it? And they feed by freaking out at Burger King until someone gives them a medical ketchup transfusion! To think Phil created all of this, a sudden world of hungry burger vampires terrorizing fast food restaurants, just for that gasping beached whale of a punchline… it’s almost beautiful in its tragedy. It’s like lovingly nursing a sick tiger back to health only to sell it to Mike Tyson.

The rules of the hamburger world seem mostly defined by the whims of Phil’s strained puns. So burgers go to school, but either for 1800 years or just to get grilled alive for a few minutes. Their flesh comes from cows, but they have sex with teen humans named Patty. And speaking of, if you live in this world, know this about the burgers, and still name your daughter Patty, what are you doing? No, answer me. Why’d you name her Patty, meat fucker?

I guess the problem with a world built around a dumb idiot’s dumbest wordplay is that Phil keeps squashing meat into words where it doesn’t make sense.

See, look at this stupid son of a bitch. He added the word “meat” to a word but didn’t change its meaning or function. This is like saying “What kind of ball of meat did the meat become? A meatball (meatball)!” A regular thermometer will tell you the temperature of your burger, you fucking dumbshi– oh wait, I just now realized we haven’t established whether or not these burgers are still food.

They are food! But they don’t want to be!? Dear god, when people go through the buffet line, does that baby burger beg for his life? You might think I’m doing a bit where I’m overthinking 101 HAMBURGER JOKES, but I’m not. I genuinely think you need to establish the basic hamburger rules of life and death before it’s funny to kill them. Or maybe not, because look at this fun mess:

So that burger dressed up like a rooster to have sex with chickens, or maybe dressed up like a rooster for another reason and this is a happy accident, but then, in addition to that, a man is stalking him with an axe. To kill the intruder in his chicken coop? Or is he also fooled by the disguise and his intention is to eat what he thinks is a rooster? And if you do kill a chicken who happens to be a burger in disguise, are you disappointed? Do you say, “Oh, gross! It’s not a raw chicken, but a fully cooked cheeseburger! Aww man, and his balls are absolutely drained.”

Jesus Christ! So in the 101 HAMBURGER JOKES world everyone is food, including the reader?  This is… fuck. I don’t know what to do with this. It’s like a dad joke you’d tell if you and your son were eating a hitchhiker. Let’s maybe change gears and do a desperate overreaching pun one…

Unidentified? Phil, you have identified hamburgers twice a joke for over fifty jokes! And UFOs don’t “fry” unless… oh damn it, is this more racism? It was a bad idea to try to figure out Phil’s comedy. I’m going back to trying to figure out his worldbuilding. 

So hamburgers watch human entertainment, but weirdly translate actor names into their own language? Like Spanish class? What happens if someone has a name that can’t be meat punned like Mads Mikkelsen? Never mind, Meats MikkelSous-vide. One second, though; what happens if a different burger names him Wads Meatelbun?

Now I’m confused. This burger has a human name, but plays baseball in a burger-pun town, and he only throws fastballs? I’m never going to figure this out. Let’s skip to the last hamburger joke and see how Phil wraps this up.

I have to hand it to Phil. This has a clunky set up, but would not get you fired from a mid-tier popsicle stick copywriting job. And what’s this? Some kind of final hamburger joke quiz? Oh, hell yeah.

It’s pretty bold to open a quiz with a repeat of a joke the reader saw one page ago, but it’s even bolder to make the answer to every multiple choice question the write-in option of “I’m a fucking stupid meatball.” Phil Hirsch is an anti-comedy golem built from the sadness of a thousand war crimes, but I can’t remember the last time I read a book with this many surprises.

…
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Chris Brower, the real meat broilwer who, lettuce say, char beefins the range-iest pickle hams we know!

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NERDING DAY

Anime Week: How to Draw Sexy Anime Girls! 🌭

There are only two things I appreciate about anime– the high effort line art and the effortless horniness. So I’m very excited to learn about both from the 188 page art manual, the Sexy Anime DRAWING BOOK: EASY TECHNIQUES AND STEP-BY-STEP ON HOW TO DRAW 29 SEXY ANIME GIRLS by Melody Love (2020).

With that title and that cover, I imagine you have very specific expectations of this book: Melody is going to teach us how to make our own pornography at home. You’re not wrong, but I think there’s also a mystery story here. I looked up the author and despite her talent and shameless  love of thigh gaps, she’s not among the top four most popular Melody Loves. The first is a porn actress, the second is a Puerto Rican activist in Rhode Island, the third is a cosmetics company, and the fourth is a different artist named Melody Love. As far as I can tell, this Melody Love dropped from the stars two years ago to write this book and then went into hiding. Maybe we can learn more from the book’s weirdly long introduction?

This is a lot to go on. In only the first sentence we learn Melody hates drawing which is a strange revelation in a drawing book. Still in the first sentence, we also learn Melody doesn’t have a problem associating her sexy anime pictures with childhood development. Imagine if someone walked up to you and said, “Kids hate to draw, even sexy, writhing ladies, so you need to beg them. Now that I’ve established my deal, here is some parenting advice.” You don’t have to imagine it! Because that’s what happened!

This might be nothing more than poor phrasing. Let’s keep reading to see if Melody corrects herself.

No, Melody is in fact very specific that it is this book, The Sexy Anime Drawing Book, she wants you to give your child. And she assumes your child is a boy, specifically an insecure boy who really needs a win, even if it means you throwing the big titty drawing competition the two of you are having.

I have to be honest– this book’s introduction is so close to an unformed joke I would make about it that it feels like a prank. If I was sleepy and cranky and you handed me The Sexy Anime Drawing Book, I might actually say, “Ha ha what’s the book’s intro? Something like, ‘remember, perverts, to draw the little girl’s vagina bones wrong so you don’t discourage any nearby underage pornographers!’ Jesus, I went dark, sorry. I hate this anime shit.” And yet here it is. Melody Love sincerely said it.

Speaking of Melody Love, I’m starting to think the person named after a porn star who draws male gaze smut for little boys and uses “he” as the default term for people might not be who “she” says they are. And there are more clues found in the titty physics. These drawings are based around a lonely Playstation owner’s understanding of how boobs work, not someone who has successfully strapped and unstrapped them from a bra.

“Melody” continues “her” long sales pitch on why you should give topless girl drawing lessons to children. She admits some kids will defy you and draw “a flower and tree, etc” rather than a dirty shaved teen who needs it now. “Don’t scold him over this,” she says. Every boy goes through a phase where he prefers not to work in his father’s pornography sweatshop. She all but comes out and says, “Be patient with him, because that boy was me, dripping hole artist Melody Love.”

“Melody Love” isn’t done. She is at the point of every crazy person’s manifesto where her unspeakable ideals actually make her a hero? And maybe this weird guy named after a woman he sometimes masturbates to is right. Maybe these drawings are how we bridge the communication gap between the perverted and the disabled. I hope not, but let’s keep in mind how much we’re helping the children as we learn how to draw these naked ladies.

Like her thoughts on preschool art, Melody’s style is a bit strange. She puts drawings together by building them out of perfect silhouettes, like an animator who has drawn the same girl showing you her panties thousands of times. Her instructions always begin the same way: first you draw the red lines, then the green, yellow, and blue lines. Since the book was printed in black and white, this advice is less helpful than you’d think. This is someone who can do one thing right, draw children in underpants, and literally nothing fucking else.

Across steps 1 through 8, two full pages of text, Melody offers no useful advice. She has told us to copy six different colors of lines, five of which don’t exist, complimented herself on her great drawing, and told us to color it following the example provided which, of course, has no color. It’s like this guy heard there were a hundred ways a How to Draw Sexy Anime Girls book could go wrong and he thought, “I’ll triple it.“

Let’s take a look at some more of the other 29 sexy anime gi– hold on, these steps are exactly the same for every drawing! Look at this:

So this one is a busty girl in an American flag bikini with the body language and eyes of someone unable to move because of some paralytic agent. But instead of expert tips on adding fear to your subject, it’s the exact same steps, like almost word-for-word. Melody did 29 porno drawings and then slightly rewrote one set of instructions for all of them. Which means 58 pages of this book are basically identical. I don’t even know how to review something like thi– hold on, there’s an About the Author!

Ha ha ha this book was self-published in 2020 and “Melody Love,” the natural talent, thought she could create a backstory where she was “a world-known artist” who sold so many paintings she opened her own gallery. This is a huge accomplishment for a pervert flaunting their sex crimes. By the way, I couldn’t find any of her art online, but I did find a mention of her gallery after the words “boy long penis feet” on a dot mom website for business mothers.

Let’s read more about Melody Love’s very real origin story.

Melody, despite achieving all her dreams easily, wanted more. She wanted to share her talent with horny boys of all ages. To educate not t(h)rough lessons, but with step-by-step instru– hold on, that’s what lessons are, you fucking idiot. You goddamn fucking idiot, did you think spacing titty drawings out across several steps was an invention!? A beautiful dream to be pursued by an idle millionaire!?

Here’s my feedback: your book is fucking insane and terrible, you maniac pervert! Plus, your name is fake and you forgot to include an email, address, or website! It’s a true achievement in failure that you’re a hopeful child predator and yet most people will remember you for your stupidity. In the make-believe autobiography you wrote where you could be and do anything, you spent an entire paragraph begging to hear from parents who draw naked women with their kids. And thanks to your spectacular idiocy, you won’t.

I guess that’s it for this book? Is there something on the back cover that can help make sense of it?

No, just more stuff about drawing nude ladies with kids. Jesus Christ, do they ever shut up about this?

No! In fact, this person is so obsessed with children learning how to draw naked women they add “actually adults love them too” as a last minute sales pitch. Yes, Melody! We know! Normal people consider adults the default audience for “adult material.” This is nuts. It’s like if a  Pampers commercial said, “Eating cat food out of a wet diaper isn’t just for Naughty Andy anymore. Pampers are now available for… babies?”

I feel like this book was too troubling to be fun. Luckily, I predicted an anime drawing manual would be exactly that so I bought a backup. Let’s read THE BEST GUIDE BOOK TO DRAWING Sexy Anime: The How to Draw Book You’ll Ever Need to Learn Drawing Sexy Anime by Vivian Ice.

This seems more like it. It’s got the broken English I want in my manga lesson, and a bunch of fleshy shapes my brain recognizes as anime and thus ignores. The author’s name, Vivian Ice, is a little suspicious. She sounds like she should be catching Melody Love with her stepson in a movie called What Her Name FFM Boy Long Penis Feet, but let’s give her the benefit of the doubt and assume she’s a real person giving real perversion instructions. Let’s skip the Googling and Introduction and get straight to the art:

Vivian takes a much different approach to her art lessons. She wants you to construct your porn girl out of crop circles for the first several steps. It helps to think of the female form as a very fussy BattleTech encounter. Vivian suggests drawing your lady’s bikini at this point, somewhere near the center of one of the larger circles. In both anime illustration and interplanetary travel, this moist gap is called the mons pubis sector.

After five more steps, you’ll see how your circles have turned into a cartoon girl, with more circles used to add terror to her eyes. Wait a second. This is going to sound crazy, but I feel like I know this girl.

Oh, that’s how I know her! This is the terrified American flag bikini girl from The Sexy Anime Drawing Book by Melody Love! Both books were published in 2020, so I’m not sure which anime author with a fake pornstar name stole this drawing from the other. Unless… no. No. I need to check this book’s introduction.

Oh my god, this guy made up a second fake name to write a second book for children about drawing naked women!? Wait, okay, let’s not jump to any conclusions. Maybe Vivian Ice is just a lady who loved drawing this porn book but wouldn’t want you to, like, use it with your son.

Okay, she does. Vivian Ice wants you to draw topless girls with your son, and she carefully mentions it several times during the intro and on the back cover.

Vivian/Melody even gives the same tip to let your son feel better about his pornographic illustrations by making sure yours are a little bit worse. I have literally never seen anyone lay out their criminal perversion like this. Vivian Ice is the kind of person who would get caught stealing your clothes at the laundromat and say, “It’s not what it looks like! Eating toddler underpants is the only thing that excites me!”

I’m bailing on this book too. Let’s never think about Melody Love and/or Vivian Ice again. Luckily, I have many more books in my How to Draw Only Fucked Up section of my library, so I’m going to pick one and do a whole new article starting now. It’s not a great time for this, but I want to thank beloved Internet artist Rusty Shackles for his amazing Anime Week art.

Welcome to Anime Week! Thank you, Rusty Shackles, for the custom header art! This book seems close enough to anime: How to Draw Sexy Women: Step-by-Step Guide (2019) by Andy Hopper.

Wait, what’s the fucking rest of that fucking title, Andy?

Best Sexy Women Drawing Book for You and Your Kids!? What the fucking fuck!? If this is Melody and Vivian again I’m going to fucking scream. Sigh, let’s look at the back cover. Of this titty drawing book:

Aiiieeeeee!!!! This is the exact same copy from Melody and Vivian’s books! Only sort of re-written to babble in different directions about how important drawing pornography is to kids!? If this wasn’t written from prison, why do we even have laws?

As if you didn’t know, the introduction is the same too, but also not quite. And sure enough, this is exactly what it looks like. “Andy Hopper,” sometimes known as “Vivian Ice,” once known as “Melody Love,” self-publishes hundreds of kids books on everything from Star Wars knockoffs to Disney knockoffs to porn illustrating. Andy, or a team of “Andys” blast online bookstores with painstakingly illustrated word diarrhea on the thinnest of profit margins. Ethically and financially, it’s the same business model as going door-to-door and offering to eat the tiniest underwear in the house for $11.74.

So it’s possible Andy is only a forgetful pervert, not a child predator. These strange intros about nude women being fun for kids might just be the generic boilerplate he puts in the front of all his books, right? No! NO! If that was the case, why would Andy rewrite it every time!? He has made at least three books about erotic art and written original copy explicitly stating they were for children at every conceivable opportunity. He did it on the front cover of this one!

Another funny thing Andy rewrites in every book (many of which are filled with stolen intellectual property) is his “Copyright Notes.” This one “hereto refers” to itself as The Book, a good idea when The Book’s full title is How to Draw Sexy Women Step-by-Step Guide Best Sexy Women Drawing Book for You and Your Kids. Andy makes it extremely clear that while he is trying to sell pornography to children, you assume all the risk and responsibility found or contained therein, penis feet thusly. Best of luck, Andy!

What the hell, let’s look inside:

In Chapter 2, “How to Draw Sexy Woman 2,” Andy shows us the proper way to build a dayshift stripper three weeks from retirement using mostly tubes.

She’s looking a little rough there, but wait until you see the colored version! And by “colored version,” Andy means the same black and white drawing from 16 pages earlier.

“She looks sad, daddy.”

“She is sad, sweetheart.”

“I want to stop drawing her now, dad.”

“I know, son, but look how ugly my naughty nurse is. You’re winning the naughty nurse drawing competition! You’re the best pornographer in the family!”

“And there it is. All units move in.”

“W-what? Son? You were wearing a wire!?”

Categories
NERDING DAY

Anime Week: JoJo’s Ape Episode! 🌭

Confession: I am kind of a dick about anime. I rarely follow up on recommendations from my anime-loving friends and never stick with a series long enough to give it a chance. I find the art style off-putting and the structure is often so haphazard that I swear some episodes end where they do because the end credits took them by surprise. I recognize this is partially due to my old, white midwestern narrow-mindedness and I’ll own that. 

Above: One of the first Google Image Search results for the word “anime”

But all of those are mere annoyances that I could in theory overcome, in the sense that I  enjoyed the last Spider-Man even though I believe depictions of a multiverse are in direct contradiction of the Bible’s teachings. No, what really turns me off is the fact that watching any anime I haven’t carefully vetted in advance is playing a game of Sexualized Child Roulette. 

“But Jason,” you might say, “all you have to do is avoid the shows set in high school or, even worse, middle school! Those are for horny teenagers anyway, not adult sex predators!”

See, you’d think that would work, wouldn’t you? 

Note: Jason’s next novel is called If This Book Exists, You’re in the Wrong Universe and it’s available for pre-order now, wherever books are sold. It’s the next book in the John Dies at the End series! The movie is on HBO Max!

For example, let’s talk about JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, currently on Netflix. No schoolgirls in sight: it’s a show about a crew of superhuman adults saying anime shit while doing anime shit while wearing anime shit.

JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure is, in fact, one of the most popular franchises ever, of any kind, in the whole world. The manga has sold over 120 million copies over the last 35 years and it’s been adapted into so many different movies/shows/games that the series name requires a disambiguation page on Wikipedia. Memes from one of its two hugely popular subreddits hit the front page of reddit daily, each more incomprehensible than the last. This one has over 50,000 upvotes:

Statistically, this means there are probably JoJo fans reading this right now, and every single one of them is saying, “Oh, fuck, he’s going to talk about that episode, isn’t he?”

Yep! We’re discussing Episode 7 of the Stardust Crusaders part of the 2014 JoJo series. From here on out, please imagine you’re a new fan making your way through the series and, in order to help the people around you understand your fandom, you have invited all of your friends, family and co-workers to come watch this episode with you.

We begin with our protagonists adrift in rowboats with a pack of nameless sailors, having survived a shipwreck in the previous episode. Along with them is a frightened little girl in overalls named Anne. She’s drawn the size of a toddler but seems to be 10-11 years old.

JoJo (in the hat) and his crew stumble across an abandoned, clearly-haunted ocean liner and, with no other choice, climb on board. Here it’s obvious from a storytelling perspective what the child’s presence brings to the plot: This crew of superhuman monster-fighters now has the additional burden of protecting a kid who’s only as tall as the protagonist’s belt buckle. 

Instantly the clearly-possessed ship begins attacking the protagonists and one of the disposable sailors dies in gruesome fashion. Meanwhile, Anne goes off exploring on her own and immediately runs across an orangutan in a cage — the only living thing they’ve encountered on the ship so far. 

Via hand signals and grunts, he attempts to convince Anne to let him out and, when she refuses, he instead lights a cigarette and browses an issue of Playboy he had on hand.

It’s all goofy, imaginative, silly fun. All of the loved ones and acquaintances who’ve packed into your bedroom are probably having a good time. It’s even paced well! Just 11 minutes into the 25-minute episode, we’ve set up a mystery with a trail of delightfully intriguing elements: The protagonists have now searched every corner of the ship — no crew, no passengers, or any sign they were there. They try the radio — nothing. What happened to everyone? Why is this orangutan acting like a horny human? You know the answer is going to be some kind of silly anime nonsense, but hey, that’s what we signed up for! What could go wrong?

From a writer’s point of view, the challenge at this point is doing something the audience truly doesn’t expect. Ghost pirates, sea monsters and even time travel would all feel like cliches; this isn’t anybody’s first fictional haunted ship. Whatever happens here needs to truly take the audience by surprise. Let’s see what JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure has up its sleeve!

(CONTENT WARNING: References to child sexual assault ahead)

We check in on Anne, who is alone again. She decides she is sticky from the salt water…

…and, with the lack of forethought that comes with being ten years old, decides then and there that she needs a shower. Fortunately for her, she finds a working shower with hot water and right about here, our hypothetical viewer is getting a sinking feeling in the pit of their stomach. 

“Oh…no…”

Look. I’m not here to “cancel” JoJo or anime in general, I’m not in the habit of trying to generate outrage clicks and I’m definitely not out to make our anime-loving fans feel bad about themselves. If I’m the one being weird here, just tell me. But it really, really seems to me like the following sequence is framed, shot and edited in exactly the way you’d do it if your goal was to titillate the audience. But, hey, maybe I’m just a prude, or maybe something is lost in the cultural translation or… I don’t know. 

Anyway, the camera stays on the child as she slowly undresses one layer at a time…

…then tracks her bare feet into the shower…

…at which point we cut to an oddly adult-shaped “hourglass” nude silhouette behind the shower curtain…

…and here you think, well, it’s still being tasteful, it’s granting the little girl her privacy and if that shadow on the curtain makes you imagine a naked child in your head, you’re the pervert! You glance over at your parents, who have been fairly into the episode up to now, but are beginning to have doubts. “Don’t worry,” you say to them, “this is JoJo, not one of those shows!” You didn’t mean for it to rhyme.

Then you turn back to the screen to find that in the very next shot, we’ve cut back inside the shower and, yeah, the camera just lovingly moves up across Anne’s naked, wet, completely uncensored ass. And while I’m not going to screenshot it because I think that would be against the law(?), I’ll say that the artist (both here and in the manga it’s adapted from) went out of their way to give Anne an adult’s woman’s figure, complete with sideboob, the nipples coyly covered with one arm. It’s basically this…

…only if it turned out that artist had been commissioned to draw a typical ten year-old girl and came back with the above. 

Side note: In the previous episode, Anne pretended to be a little boy, with her hair stuffed up under her cap. So upon seeing this the first time, I actually thought the whole point was to reveal that Anne was, in fact, an adult woman pretending to be a child. But, no, that’s just how they chose to draw her.

And now, things in your bedroom have become very awkward. “Did you… find this video on the deep web?” asks your grandfather, who’s squinting at the screen. “I think this is what Q was trying to warn us about!”

You just stay silent, hoping the scene will pass and the episode will move on to something else. 

It very much does not.

Instead, the orangutan breaks out of his cage, slaughters the rest of the nameless sailors, then enters the shower with the intention of raping little Anne. The cowering child is reflected in the animal’s eyes, a predatory glint tastefully positioned to hide her bare breasts.

The heroes intervene, at which point they are attacked and restrained by the ship itself, which has seemingly come to life. The orangutan now seems poised to rape the child in front of the helpless protagonists while they watch, but a clever scheme from JoJo, which I still do not fully understand, overcomes the beast. I would show some screen grabs of that action sequence, but I would have to carefully crop them because Anne remains naked for the rest of the episode, clutching a towel to her front but leaving her bare butt exposed. And it really does feel like they go out of their way to make sure said butt is in the frame, over and over. 

And that’s the episode. It ends with the status quo restored, the heroes back in their rowboats, having learned and accomplished nothing. A cynical viewer would suggest that the entire episode exists for exactly one reason, to serve a certain segment of the anime-watching audience.

So.

Here’s the thing:

Sexualization of kids is a very sensitive subject among anime fans (and a very bitter subject in Japan). They’ve been hearing the same complaints for decades, it’s not going to change, it’s baked into the medium. For example, the comic this episode was adapted from was published in 1990, this episode came out 24 years later and the only change they made to this scene was to increase the amount of child nudity. It’s a cultural thing, some fans insist, no children are being harmed (“it’s just a drawing!”) and if you think it’s wrong, you don’t have to look at it. 

In fact, loyal JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure fans are probably more annoyed than anyone right now, because they’ll say that this is the only time we see anything like this in the series. But that is my entire point. Weirdly sexualized depictions of children are just scattered around the medium like dog turds in a park. And when it comes to anime, that is what I can’t get past. 

I know it’s not just me, because I’ve spent my adult life on message boards and have seen the same thread over and over: A fan asks for anime recommendations and then has to specify that they only want shows that don’t sexualize children. Respondents often find that somewhat difficult, with someone recommending a show, then someone else having to come in and say, “Well, there is that one story arc you’ll want to avoid, but remember the age of consent is lower in Japan…”

Here’s a random example from Something Awful years ago. JoJo is recommended as a safe choice multiple times (and since it’s on Netflix, readily available) and later someone has to point out that, quote, “The Jojo ape episode has a scene where the 11-yo girl is showering seductively for the camera lens” and notes that the show is “not perfect.” That’s a common sentiment among fans — here’s another message board comment: 

“I don’t really watch any anime but got into JoJo because it’s awesome, and that episode in Stardust Crusaders where a 10 year old girl is naked for most of the episode with a bunch of shots of her ass and sideboob almost made me drop the series entirely. Luckily there hasn’t been anything at all like that since. It’s kind of weird though that if I were to recommend the series to anyone that is put off by anime I’d have to be like ‘oh no, it’s not weird and pervy, there’s only one episode that fetishises a child.’”

“This!” would be my single-word reply to that post, if I was a certain kind of obnoxious message board poster. I mean, this is a sprawling franchise spanning every type of media, should this one episode really ruin the entire series for me? Because it totally does!

And what bothers me about it (aside from, you know, the obvious) is that it seems like there’s a real pressure on anime creators to throw this shit in there, a little nod-and-wink fanservice to that certain segment of the audience. But… why? I mean, how is that even good for business? For every one viewer who wants to ogle a child, aren’t there far more who are forever turned off by it? Or is it like the weird, lingering bare feet shots in Tarantino films, where fans just roll their eyes and decide it’s just something they have to put up with? “Yes, I know certain pervs are cranking off to this bit, but that’s none of my business.”

So, sure, feel free to recommend me some anime that doesn’t sexualize children or — and please also read this part of the sentence — any canonically immortal characters who happen to look and act like children. Put your recommendations in the comments, or send them directly to Brockway. Don’t email me. I’ll be too busy trying to unfuck my Netflix recommendations. Happy Anime Week, everybody!

Jason also writes columns at his Substack, his next novel is called If This Book Exists, You’re in the Wrong Universe and it’s available for pre-order now, wherever books are sold. It’s the next book in the John Dies at the End series! The movie is on HBO Max!