gullybogan

Dear Reader,

If you’re like me, then you grew up – courtesy of the TV – under the moral and ethical influence of Tezuka Osamu. Your heroes were a flying robot boy, a group of curious alien bodysnatchers, and a white lion king who more than anything wanted everyone in the jungle to just stop fighting.

Tezuka’s dubbed anime was the basis of the social values that guide me even now through life: honour; duty; self-sacrifice.

Somehow, anime lately – post-Tezuka anime, that is – has become less about finding a way that we can all live together in harmony, and more about selling video games and swap cards; the values espoused by our googly-eyed heroes and heroines have crept unsettlingly farther from honour, duty, and self-sacrifice, and inexorably closer to the capitalist, exploitative Amexican Dream (where anyone can be a great Pokémon trainer, if he just Collects ‘em all™).

Which is sad.

I’m not ignorant of the fact that some of Tezuka’s work, such as Human Metamorphosis, was written in direct response to Japan’s fixation with becoming the number one GNP in the world, his central character therein being, as he himself puts it, as quoted in Tezuka: the marvel of manga,

a woman who is tough and who would do anything to get what she wants in … an ambivalent and irrational world.

But, for me, and for others of my generation, i daresay, those gorgeously stylised, pointy-chinned, googly-eyed creatures still have their original subtexts; they still mean the things we understood them to mean when we were five or six.

So, yes. Those TV shows and comic books are so deeply embedded in my psyche that i realise, now: i love anime and manga.

And when i say, “love”, i don’t mean i want to marry it (like that guy in Japan did recently), but i wouldn’t mind having sex with it.

Or some of it, anyway.

You’ll see where i’m going with this in a minute.

Bunny Hentai?

The first sexual crush i ever had – before i even understood that it *was* a sexual crush – was on the rabbit character in anime series Wonder 3, Team Leader Major Boko, or (as we knew her here) Bonnie Bunny.

A quick backstory on Wonder 3: three alien visitors arrive on Earth to study us hyu-monz, and they assume the shape of indigenous animals to allow their research to go undetected. They vacuum up a horse, a duck, and a rabbit, which they each then perform a body swap with.

The rabbit was the girl researcher. This onetime, she did this seductive little dance to distract some guard dudes away from whatever research mischief her horse and duck colleagues were up to, and it was clear to me, as she wiggled her succulent behind and flashed her voluptuous thighs at them, that she was offering herself to be eaten by these men.

As a result of that ten second sequence in a cartoon show that i saw when i was, like, five, for a long time afterward my prepubescent mind fused sexual availability and offering yourself to be eaten together. I’d seen, in real life, rabbits caught and prepared for eating, their skin torn off and only their pink, naked underflesh left. My pre-sexual mind incorporated that image, along with the bunny’s wiggle seduction, into my understanding of what i still didn’t realise was sexual desire.

So i would lie in bed at night, my pyjamas parts pulled up and pushed down respectively, fantasising about sharp-toothed foxes and waiting to be eaten.

“But you’re the guy,” you might say at this point. “You should be the fox eating the rabbit, not the rabbit being eaten by the fox.”

Well, yes. That *is* quite clear now. But back then, things were a bit more confused…

Gender Magic

Tezuka was often changing the genders of his characters. In fact, it was such a common motif in his work that he actually stipulated in his own Laws of Robotics that a robot was not allowed to change its gender. He no doubt did this in a bid to try to stop himself turning Astro Boy into Astro Girl.

In fact, i was certain that when i grew up, i was going to change from a boy into a girl. It was clear to me that this was a natural part of the maturation process, and i remember discussing it in some depth with a same-age female cousin onetime, the two of us sitting on the floor of her bedroom, surrounded by half naked Barbies and disjointed fairy wings. I told her all the great things i was going to do when i grew up and became a woman, and she told me all the marvellous things she was going to do when she grew up and became a man.

For her, standing up and pissing was one great goal she had set herself, as i remember it. Now, when we see each other at xmas parties and weddings, we smile, air kiss, and then i ask her how life as a man is going for her, and she asks me how life as a woman is turning out.

So yes, doctor, Tezuka’s gender-fluidity notwithstanding, i do realise that there is something profoundly wrong with my foundation understandings of gender and sexuality.

And it’s all thanks to anime!

These sessions are really coming along. I can feel myself making definite progress!

Why We’re Here

Fridays are the days i post about YouTube or Flickr stuff, or just some treasure trove of images i’ve found. And this week it’s a trove that appears to be the ultimate (there’s a challenge!) concordance of manga: Danbooru.

Not the ultimate collection, but the ultimate concordance.

Every image on the site is meticulously tagged with all the metadata you could hope for, allowing you to click through from one image to another by related commonalities, or to search for images based on aspects that you are interested in seeing.

So, for example, if you wanted to see what they have in the way of black haired, green eyed characters, you can put that in as a search. Enter “black_hair green_eyes” (without the quotes) into the search hole, and out will pop all they have that meets those criteria.

Sadly, the basic free account only allows you to search for two terms at a time, so you can’t search for black haired, green eyed vampires with massive cleavage looking up while holding a penguin and sitting in the bath.

Which is a severe limitation, but one i can live with.

If you do set up a basic free account, it lets you save favourites, which you can then link to for other people to enjoy. Hurrah! Bragware!

So off you go; explore to your heart’s content.

Be warned, though. Since manga’s stylisation makes characters so v.easy to reproduce, there’s a good chance there’ll be lots of fan-art images of your favourite anime/manga gals copping jizz in the face, being done up the arse, or being tied up and whipped.

And yes, that *was* a warning, *not* an endorsement.

Yours,
Gullybogan