Category: NERDING DAY

Categories
NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: Revolutionary Girl Utena 🌭

Sean has promised me that this won’t be one of our public columns, so I feel safe admitting this only to you, our loyal patrons: I have always wanted to be a magical girl. 

I want to spin around as pop music plays, yelling random entries from a bootleg thesaurus while spotlights explode out of my head and my clothes disappear piece by piece, to be replaced by heart-themed armor which leaves nothing to the imagination. I want to defeat a giant robot snake with the power of love. I want to join my soul together with all of my friends to fire a huge pink spirit arrow into the moon, which has become sentient and wants to destroy romance. I want to do all of these things, but I have no idea how to start. 

So on this Nerding Day, in which we unabashedly engage in our twerpiest fantasies, I’m going to watch magical girl anime and try to learn how to unlock the Transcendably Mule Pluto Kick that I know lies within me. Let’s get to the very first installment of…

BROCKWAY’S MAGICAL GIRL HOLE (PLEASE RENAME BEFORE PUBLICATION)

We’ll start with Revolutionary Girl Utena, because just the title makes me laugh. It sounds like you translated ‘pro-life terrorist’ into Chinese and back. As we can see from the opening credits, this show, like most magical girl anime, is about two middle-school girls almost kissing and spinning around in roses.

I don’t mean to freak out any of our proudly square readers, but I think this show might be a little gay. Of course, this being Japan in the 1990s, they couldn’t outright say that. To get across the message that homosexuality is natural, they couldn’t just show two Fiona Apple fans making out in the back of a minivan — they had to write an epic about tweens pulling phallic objects out of the black holes in their foreheads to unlock interdimensional portals shaped like vaginas. We basically wouldn’t have anime if Japan just let gay people hold hands on TV, so I guess… thank you for the oppression? 

Let’s see if you can spot the main character of this show:

Oh, is it the only girl with hot pink hair? The girl whose outfit is 1400 times more ornate than anyone around them? The girl whose introduction is framed by baroque ironwork and giant spinning flowers? If you’re ten inches taller than everyone around you, dressed in a complicated outfit and sporting a bright pink mohawk, congratulations: You are the main character of an anime. 

Or you’re… Seanbaby?! Shit, I just realized I’m the inept sidekick in Seanbaby’s anime.

I’d better put down all these dishes before I’m surprised by a half-naked lady and fall out a window. 

So anyway, that’s our main character, Utena, and she’s facing off against the most dire of villains… the student council. You know how student councils are: A bunch of petty, pedantic teenagers LARPing bureaucracy. Always tweaking the theme of the school dance and receiving letters from the apocalypse telling them to break the egg of the world:

“Yeah, hey that’s awesome Chris — but for today’s meeting I think we’re gonna backburner the request from Armageddon to C-section the Earth Chicken, and really focus on getting Monster put back in the vending machine by the gym.”

Here’s the president of the student council, a man far prettier than any of the women in this show, introducing himself in a perfectly acceptable manner:

If one of your wishes goes terribly awry and you find yourself trapped in an anime while Fabio’s disappointing son introduces himself as a “totally normal boy,” you need to take several steps back, because he is about to turn into a winged robot knight cursed by Aphrodite to fly into a rage at the sight of panties — and also look down: you are now wearing panties and they are visible.

Instead of denying A.V. club an Oculus Quest, this student council spends their afterschool hours having sword fights in the abandoned forest arena behind the school.

Behind my school there was a dumpster where kids smoked cigarettes because they weren’t getting enough attention at home, but the alternate universe forest arena with the spiral staircase to a cloud platform that hosts battles under the inverted sky casino seems like a pretty sweet place to burn a Lucky Strike, too.

Whenever somebody ascends those stairs in Utena, the craziest fucking music you have ever heard starts playing. And listen: I am familiar with anime. I get that the songs are wacky. I am telling you this is not that. This is a Girl Group backed by the Trans-Siberian orchestra, singing lyrics written by Danzig’s increasingly terrified translator as Glenn tries to argue his way out of a Japanese prison.

This isn’t one of my wacky ‘I’ve swapped the subtitle file’ experiments. The subtitles on this show are great. That means this band is saying exactly what they mean to say:

I should specify that these aren’t all lyrics from one super insane ballad. It’s the same band playing a different, exponentially more crazy song every single episode.  

There are 39 episodes of Revolutionary Girl Utena. Damn near 40 songs where Japanese opera singers try to read a Welsh science textbook with every third word removed. It is a staggering accomplishment in lunacy.

And it’s even weirder because these songs pulled from the Hellraiser dimension’s Top 40 Station accompany very brief, boring sword fights that always play out the same way. A shy girl appears dressed like a member of the Rhythm Nation:

Our heroine pulls a sword from the exploding sun between her tits:

And then she fights a member of the student council, exchanging catty banter as a news ticker tuned to a raving hobo crawls above them.

Utena inevitability gets in trouble, at which point a ghost prince comes down from the space castle to merge with her soul while the Japanese Evanescence describes their trip to Seaworld:

Then Utena powers up and slices off her opponent’s flower, which is how you win a fight in the Budding Lesbian’s Fencing School For Lunatics.

Oh, and it turns out that all these duels are for ownership of the shy girl with the sword-tits. Yes, as is the way with all afterschool activities in Japan, we were competing for the deed to a young girl’s sexual agency this whole time.

Somewhere between the Upside Down Space Castle and the Apocalypse Chick, I have lost the metaphor. Is this a sub/dom thing? Is it about the commoditization of women? I don’t know. But I do know that the shy girl is basically just a storage bin for slaps. 

And nobody slaps like anime. The characters spend most of the runtime of this show just palming her smile halfway across the room. Every once in a while somebody steps up to suggest that this demure, quiet, book of a girl is perhaps not the best place to practice your open-handed fighting technique:

But let’s see how Saionji feels about that:

And it just wouldn’t be a magical girl anime without a cute animal companion to break up the screaming and visual metaphors for genitals. Unfortunately, Utena has Chu-Chu:

Look at this piece of shit. This is the avatar that child predators use in chat rooms when they want a challenge. 

His fucking scribble eyes speak only of darkness. Madness. Apocalyptic ammonia. Bensonite. I understand what those crazy songs are about — they’re trying to describe how hard Chu-Chu should go fuck himself and they’re running up against the limits of human language. 

His old-man eyebrows and rosy cheeks are how anime artists depict naughty uncle touches.

Eat shit forever, Chu-chu. Devour feces in the baptism of the universe. We need new words of hate! Unspool the birth certificate fuck backwards on the resolution! God damn it! 

Categories
NERDING DAY

Star Roars: The Goddamn Outer Space Joke Book 🌭

In 2002, three years on the heels of Star Wars prequel mania, nutty cutup John Byrne released Star Roars: The Outer Space Joke Book. It’s riddles and desperate Star Wars puns along with some generic astronomy and robot stuff, but it’s mainly adapted from the day he watched his family drown as they said, “This is what all joy turns into. Never let go of this terrible suffering for even a moment.” It was a terrible mistake to read.

This is an example of one of John’s better puns. He bet on you finding it funny how turnips have a syllable in common with a different word, and sure, that’s a bad bet and a miserable way to live your life, but there was no outrageous stretch of linguistics to make the pun work. As you’ll soon see, he often changes five or six syllables in a word to squeeze one last pun from his tired mind. He has no problem making many more space vegetable stews out of Celerybacca or R2Rosemary2 and Jabba the IDon’tKnowFuckinPotatoIGuess. He writes jokes like it’s a game of Boggle and you can just add an “s” to the last one and it counts. Each sad variation of the same pun is a view into the witless struggle of his writing process. It is the children’s joke book equivalent of adding slightly different toilets to a 1,001 Best Places to Fuck guide.

This isn’t really fun; it’s more like a touching thing to say to your dying robot whom you’ve never called “friend” before. It shoots way past humorless to be truly sad. This man, John Byrne, sat down to write cute Star Wars jokes and ended up just pouring his loneliness onto the page. It’s nothing but violent, unexpected grief, like a wedding singer pulling the pin out of a grenade and saying, “No one will remember u–.”

John… I mean, we’re sort of splitting hairs, but the 4th is three days away from the practical joke day in April. Why not say “On April Force day?” It’s bad and wrong still, yes, but it’s pretty much the same number of incorrect letters and it could really punch this joke up from a “huh?” to a “go fuck yourself.” I get you’re going for disappointed groans, but this is just the least funny way to ask your audience to explain calendars.

C3-Hoho and Laugh2D2 describe themselves as, and I quote, “the funniest robots in outer space (although we don’t actually spend much time in space – most of our time is spent in the repair shop, ‘cos we’ve split our sides laughing!)”. They never interact or play off each other. They are merely names pasted in front of 8 or 9 of the standard riddle structure jokes that make up most of the book. Neither of them are the straight man or known for any personality traits. They add less than nothing. C3-Hoho and Laugh2D2 are a stop sign writer’s idea of zany characters.

An as-droid? Motherfucker did you just write “ass droid” as a punchline and expect the joke recipient to think it was funny not because the moon is home to some kind of droid for your ass but because the word “asteroid” was missing a “ter?” This is criminal comedic negligence. Your wife could show this to a judge to demonstrate your children are in an unsafely joyless environment. And when the stenographer giggles, the judge will stop the proceedings to say, “No, Gladys. The defendant meant A-S-dash-droid, like an asteroid without a ter. Not a butt robot.” And poor Gladys will spend the rest of the day, the rest of her life, scowling at you, you fuck. You as-droid fuck.

Who can forget the hilarious connection vampires have to full moons? Like the great Martin Scorsese said while making Apocalypse Now, “An apple away keeps the dentist gay– take it from me, Steven Speilberg!”

I get this zaniness was built backwards from a simple man going, “Let’s see… Empire Strikes… Black? Banana? Bank? Bok-bok-bakaw? Wait, bok? Bach! Like the musician!!!” But why bother writing a full movie treatment? This asshole is perfectly content asking you to jump right into a bizarre premise like a Jedi making vegetable stew or a moon rock fucking a robot, but in this case he needed to establish a plot line for his film about space hunters going after Johann Sebastian Bach? Don’t mistake this constructive criticism, though; John. You should burn this joke, John. There’s no salvaging “The Empire Strikes Bach.” You have the comedic instincts of a dusty skeleton being ignored by vultures and the self-editing skills of one of the vultures saying, “I’ve got a bone to pick with this chef!”

I… holy shit, I don’t hate this one.

From the writer of “as-droid” comes a joke hoping to find that sweet spot of cognitive development between “able to talk” and “old enough to learn contempt.” If a policeman asked, “What’s the smelliest planet in space?” he’d get a bigger laugh if the punchline was, “I can’t do this. We found your wife dead.”

A hoarse-tronaut? What the shit is a hoarse-tronaut? If you’re going to cheat at your wordplay, why not just GeeIFeelSick-onaut or NoneOfThisMattersI’mBankingOnYouBeingFour-onaut. Plus, they’re in space. You get a cold in space, you’re not a cute pun. You’re Robitussor, The Virus Who Walks As a Man. And I don’t want to keep telling you how to be a shitty asshole, John, but astroSNOT was right there, and it wouldn’t have required you to shatter your spine stretching for the pun.

Well, sure, the six-eared alien probably has good hearing, but you’re still calling him, John. There’s no circumstances where this joke lands, John. The dumbest child on the first day knowing what an ear is would respond to this with, “Aren’t you… I mean, that’s just calling him. Jesus Christ, man, what are you doing here. Why are you doing this to yourself? You know you can get rid of some of these ideas when they don’t pan out, right? You want a joke? Here’s one:  this book reminds me of your mother– tired, but still incoherently sucking.”

Are you sure that’s what he had, John? A Darth attack? In what Illuminati-conspiracy-rotted brain does the word “Darth” seem like a play on the word “Heart?” A Sith lord is in critical space condition and you’re sitting around inventing some new kind of pun that doesn’t use similar letters, sounds, or themes? This isn’t a pun or a zany wisecrack. This is the only incorrect response to the phrase, “Someone here is a shapeshifter. Say something in coherent Earth or I shoot you in the face.”

You know how the robot from Luke Skywalker’s pottery class knew this article was done? Just Luke-y, I dress! Thanks for everything, space!

Categories
NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: Guardians of the ‘Hood 🌭

I first encountered Guardians of the ‘Hood when I was 13 years old, and thought gay jokes were the height of sophistication. Implying that my friends might enjoy penis was my Frasier, and even I knew something was wrong with Guardians of the ‘Hood. I played my first game, turned to Soccer Scottie and, after first assuring him that he might enjoy balls if only he tasted them, then asked: “Is this exploitative, or at best, problematic?”

I knew neither of those words. It was not my voice that I spoke with. Soccer Scottie fled in terror and I endured six long years being vigorously exorcised by the Catholic Church. Guardians of the ‘Hood destroyed my life. It is time to revisit the source of my trauma.

Guardians of the ‘Hood existed in that fraught time where we knew video games should look more realistic, but had zero clue how to accomplish that. Some games tried FMV, some tried pre-rendered backgrounds, I’m pretty sure Guardians of the ‘Hood tried Santeria and nothing else. They sacrificed two cats to a picture of El Chapo and were mystified when the game still looked like garbage.

It looks like you blurred a better fighting game to protect its identity.

It looks like the store-brand version of Mortal Kombat, Kortal Mombat.

It looks like security footage of a hate crime.

But looks aren’t everything – it also controls like an abused child. It hates you, but it cannot fully escape your influence. Button presses are obeyed in only the most passive aggressive of ways. You requested a punch; you’ll get a punch. It might not be who you want to punch, when you want to punch, or even how you want to punch — you might press the jab button, then fully turn around and uppercut a homeless man instead of the racist caricature you intended, and you will forever wonder which option was worse. You’ll get a better fighting game experience making uncomfortable requests of Russian camgirls.

Poetry Interlude:

A Better Fighting Game Than Guardians of the ‘Hood

“Nadia, slap Katya”

…the silence of donation, impending

Limp-wristed slap. In the eyes a distance, a regret.

Here’s your cast of characters, each of which come with a set of unique abilities and one unique part of a shirt.

Clockwise from top, we’ve got your uncle trying to fix the air conditioner, the porn parody of Lisa from Saved by the Bell, a man using suspenders to keep his tits up, and the human equivalent of an IROC-Z.

We are next treated to an introduction of each character in stunning 2FPS video.

Connor and Chief look like separate camera angles of the same bootleg pornography, while Javier looks like you’ve only glimpsed a prediction of him in coffee grounds. Tanya, as with all women in ‘90s video games, is both the least and most developed. We are informed she is “cat-tall” and the screen desperately tries to advance before we can question that insane descriptor. She takes up eight inches on all fours? That is wildly disrespectful, Guardians of the ‘Hood.   

The central plot of this game is “you guys work out together, might as well fight crime together.” That is sorely overestimating the bond between gym buddies. The closest I’ve ever felt to a fellow gym-goer is when I’m making hard eye contact with them on the Hip Abductor.

What could possibly stop these gangs?! The police? Systemic social reforms? A breakdancing competition where the true prize is brotherhood? No! Tanya has a bike and is cat-tall: She’s the hero we need right now.

And you know what? It’s a fair fight, because our central villain is a white female Michael Jackson impersonator. 

But for my first playthrough, I’m going with Chief.

Listen: Somebody is going to get strugglefucked in this game. The opening cinematic guaranteed that. And it is my philosophy that if one must choose, it is best to be the strugglefucker, rather than the strugglefuckee.

My first mission is to ‘Beat the Dreads’ who are, of course, Jamaican. They’re named things like Nigel and Toots, and their lo-fi dialogue ranges from “hey mon” to “we be jammin” — that’s so basically racist it’s almost cute. It’s like grandma racist. That’s the example a kindly teacher uses to explain racism to first graders. But don’t take them lightly…

We are four seconds into the game and a purple Jamaican has already thrown a homeless man at me. This is how lunatics tell you to wear a hardhat.

And I’m already worried that Chief is not up to this challenge. He kicks like ghosts are trying to steal his shoes…

And he punches like he’s trying to show his girlfriend a weird growth on the inside of his elbow.

You do get special attacks, but only the enemies know when you’re actually going to do them. Your inputs are like desperate prayers to an unloving god. He might indulge you one of these times, and the hope of it is almost worse than its absence.

But all of these moves are irrelevant, because neither you, nor the AI want to be in this game. I spent the next five minutes chasing this guy around the car like two sexual predators reenacting a Bugs Bunny cartoon. 

The only people in Central City are gangs organized around racial stereotypes, gym-rats who love justice as much as they hate sleeves, homeless people, and prostitutes. Here I am trying to throw a hooker — which is frankly insane but I learned it from watching you, game — and getting exactly what I deserve.

When you’ve finally assaulted enough spandex-clad dreadlocks to populate a hot yoga class, you get this guy:

My building superintendent on his day off, demanding that you Hunger Games your friend to continue.

I don’t have any friends, so I have to beat up a woman. I was prepared for the shitty graphics. I was not prepared for the cutting social commentary.

If you lose this mandatory match to your friend, then it’s game over. They continue on, you have to pay start again. The game actually stops just to spit on your relationships. Guardians of the ‘Hood hates friendship more than No Heart from the Care Bears, and it loves capitalism like a tech bro just discovering The Fountainhead.

Continue on and the levels are more of exactly the same. Really, the only thing that changes is the dinginess of the alley, which is the kind of revelation I’d expect to hear from a gutshot detective in a noir novel, not a ‘90s Beat ‘Em Up from Atari. You do get new enemies, but they get less visually coherent with every screen advance.

I believe what I’m looking at here is two fat skinheads having simultaneous coronaries, only to realize their souls are neon punk rock girls, while a Greek bodybuilder pulls the very spirit of business out of himself, for he is done with the workaday world. 

Guardians does throw you for a loop once in a while. I found myself in a porno theater for one boss fight, albeit one that only catered to the niche fetish of blurry women turning to look at you with disdain.

I give the film 2 stars (very tough to masturbate to), but the audience gets top marks. I beat several minorities to death in that theater — our silhouettes blocking the screen the entire time — and at one point a shirtless man in chef pants burst through the screen to spin-kick me, and nobody even turned around to shush us.

Anyway, the game ends here, because I met Boris. He beat me like he was on his way to see his dying mother and I stole his bus fare.

He strangled me…

He punched my head into the ground…

He shot some kind of magic worm at me…

I tried to leap out of Boris’s sweat-lubricated orgy of fists, and the motherfucker jumped with me like his boot had lived in my crotch for so long the two couldn’t bear to separate.

When I finally, mercifully died, he apparently felt bad and tried to revive me…

Only to strangle me to death again.

Seriously, Boris fights like he might earn a promotion out of this game for it. This is what it’s like to survive a skinhead attack with such severe brain damage that your memories only come in 4p resolution. This was an excellent simulation of what it’s like to be mauled to death by a Russian superhuman overcompensating for impotence problems.

Guardians of the ‘Hood did have one killer mechanic: When you defeat a gang boss, they join your crew and become a playable character. It’s some kind of corrupted Dragon Ball Z logic: The only thing separating your enemies from your friends is one fist, liberally applied. Try it at home, kids! A bully is just a friend you haven’t hurled a hobo at yet!