Flattened Ears

This week Nicole is on break for Christmas, so enjoy this guest post by DC Kurtz, who can be followed here.   You can read Merry Box here A common thread among people who watch Neon Genesis Evangelion for the first time is "Why don't these people just go to therapy?" That's not a bad question, but I think there's a better one: why don't they just fuck? I mean come on: Evangelion is dripping with sexual tension, even on a surface level symbolic analysis. The imagery of penetration is present in virtually every single episode: The insertion of the entry plug requires penetrating a hole in the back of the Eva's neck and defeating an Angel relies on penetrating its AT field, which is referred to as "the light of the soul" and is intrinsically tied to the individual ego. Now let’s go a little deeper, past the levels of Freud, and we see that NGE goes above and beyond into the realm of Georges Bataille. See, Bataille posits that during penetrat

We're in kind of an interesting place right now; VR is finally starting to look viable as gaming platform, but it hasn't hit a point where it can properly saturate the market, so at this point all we've really got are a bunch of early experiments with the format. Despite this, the directions that it pushes things in are pretty interesting. Of course there are the obvious things; I don't think anyone's going to be shocked that most of the VR porn videos out there are shot from a POV perspective with a dude sitting or laying on his back. There are subtle differences, however, in the acting and, at times, framing of the scenes. I don't want to oversell this, it's usually still very much a traditional porn video, which is to say decidedly not the best that the art form has to offer; There's a reason I haven't reviewed any live-action porn videos on this blog, and that reason is that I don't know how many ways I can say "This [is/is not] hot an

Rise Sexualis can be read here The Persona series from the third entry onward is particular ripe for pornographic tie-ins; the games put players in the role of very loosely characterized male lead in the midst of a group of attractive and (mostly) likable side characters, and game progression is to some degree dependent on the player socializing and becoming close with these characters, learning more about them, and in some cases pursuing romantic relationships. All an h-doujin artist needs to do from there is carry the groundwork laid by the game a little bit further; every character has fans, and they'll be more than willing to shell out for prints at the next comicket. Some artists carry this opportunity further than others, however, and it's one such example that we're looking at today; Okazaki Takeshi's excellent doujin, Rise Sexualis. The book centers around Rise Kujikawa, a character from Persona 4 who, due to her career as a successful idol under the name

Content warning: molestation, rape, sexual violence Last week I spoke pretty positively about one of Asanagi's VictimGirls doujins, and this week I thought it might be interesting to provide a counterpoint with an entry in the series which I find it difficult to enjoy, primarily on moral and cultural grounds. VictimGirls 21 took place in a clearly fantastical setting and involved the use of magical garments and mind control, which made it very easy to compartmentalize the morality of the scenario and simply to project onto whatever participant most appealed to your desires; VictimGirls R: Molestation Eradication Campaign , however, takes a... different approach. The book portrays a feminist movement against molestation in which young girls appoint themselves as unofficial anti-molestation activists and publicly call out molesters on trains. Said movement is almost immediately revealed to be comprise primarily of self-serving, sadistic, or suggestible girls partaking in spurious

Content warning: References to politically- and racially-motivated violence, and quite a bit of coarse language directed toward gay and transgender people, including a slur which you can probably guess pretty easily. One of the biggest talking points online among all segments of the liberal political population, be they liberal in the modern american political sense, centrist, or conservative, is free speech. So much so in fact that it's become something of a meme among people who either don't know or don't care how terrible making fun of "freeze peach" looks to people who don't have a particular theoretical background to contextualize such statements. I say this as someone who was myself one of those centrists who would always get really conspicuously upset at anything I perceived to be a danger to freedom of speech, and get really annoyed at people who ridiculed these concerns. (It doesn't help that a lot of the arguments posted in response were infu

I feel like writing about DOOM, to relax a bit in between bitching at Ayn Rand's work. Let's go through The Ultimate DOOM and DOOM II, and review each level along the way, shall we? In the proper order, of course; DOOM Episodes 1-3, then DOOM II, then Thy Flesh Consumed. No Final DOOM because fuck Final DOOM. Playing on UV -fast. (I feel like Ultraviolence is the best difficulty to review DOOM on because it feels like the most intended way to play, and I want to use the -fast tag because I just recently ran through all these games on Ultraviolence and don't want to get bored. It should be noted that -fast does arguably fuck up the balance in places but whatever, I like it.) Oh, and I'll be using the GZDOOM sourceport with the software renderer, running at 1080p, full mouselook, no graphical bells and whistles. TEXTURE FILTER PLAYERS PLEASE LEAVE. With that out of the way, let's tuck in to one of the greatest games ever made, starting with the shareware: Knee Deep

If it wasn't clear from the views I've already espoused on this blog in regard to politics and culture, at this point in my life I consider myself a great many things which can broadly be categorized as "leftist." Specifically, I'm currently a big fan of Pyotr Kropotkin's anarchist communism. But this wasn't always the case, in fact it's a pretty recent development. Prior to this I had a period where I considered myself a "left-leaning centrist" and avoided politics most of the time, and before that (back in and immediately after high school) I was outright conservative. Not just conservative, in fact, but a Randian Objectivist. I know, I know, a goth phase would've been preferable, but that would've required me to go out and buy clothes, whereas all I had to do to get into objectivism was grab a couple books off my (mostly politically-illiterate) mom's shelf. (I was also pretty well primed to accept objectivism due to a lifetime

Content warning: rape, bestiality, degradation, fantasy racism The artist Asanagi, publishing h-doujins through the group Fatalpulse, has acquired something of a reputation on the portions of the english-speaking internet that read eastern pornography, and for good reason; they make masterfully-crafted comics in which absolutely awful things happen to the "victim girls" mentioned in the title of their longest-running series, and for a lot of people this is understandably off-putting. That said, a lot of people tend to overlook the nuance of how this is presented; it's generally not just straight up misery porn, at least not the way it's often handled. Usually the situation is presented as something the "victim" actually likes quite a lot, and simply didn't want to admit, generally because of societal factors. Now don't misunderstand, obviously the scenarios portrayed in these works would be absolutely immoral in a real-world setting; "Sh

If you care enough about stupid irrelevant internet writers to be reading my stupid irrelevant internet blog right now, you're almost certainly familiar with Bob "Moviebob" Chipman, a stupid irrelevant internet writer of somewhat greater note than myself, both for having some moderately successful movie review and cultural criticism series published via The Escapist, and for being a hilariously petty, self-aggrandizing technofascist. Indeed, everyone's acutely aware of the underpinnings and implications of Bob's political statements except, seemingly, Bob himself. And this particular aspect of denialism and self-delusion about one's own political beliefs is hardly unique to Bob, indeed it's endemic to the political landscape, in which the vast majority of participants will never truly engage with criticism of their viewpoint and will simply go on believing that whatever they currently believe is the "sensible," "default" viewpoint, an

Today's subject is a comic by furry artist Chinpo, which has very little in the way of writing, comprising almost exclusively of filthy filthy sex. And this time around I'm not even being quite so ironic as usual in calling it "filthy," as the actions portrayed here consist of public exhibitionism, which aside from being illegal in most places is also a generally not-okay thing to do in real life since it means involving third parties into your sexual activity without their foreknowledge or consent. Early in the comic the two participants are simply getting it on in a technically "public" place, but one in which nobody else is immediately present and where they're trying to avoid being actually seen; this changes toward the end, when one creampies the other while facing her toward an open door, on the other side of which stand several commuters. The intent is clear Furthermore, the girl knows all this, she's clearly reluctant to get into sexu