I know everyone is dying to hear what I think about the GameStop stocks fiasco and the fact that old Shit Shorts Joe has already conspired to give us only $1400 of pandemic relief but the sad truth of it is that I don’t understand the former and don’t have anything interesting to say about the latter that won’t get me immediately gunned down by a SWAT team.
Honestly though I haven’t actually been paying that much attention because I’ve pretty much been watching this YouTube video from the Persona 5 anime on repeat:
I wanted to pick this answer so bad in my playthrough I couldn’t fucking see straight but if you don’t pick the right answers you have to wait longer in between each step of the confidant quest fucking bullshit
I don’t know what it is: the slide whistle? The flustered mumbling at the top? The fact that “I’m a dad” doesn’t actually answer the question “how old are you"? Whatever it is, it got me straight hooting for days on end in spite of this scene coming from what I largely consider to be one of the game’s most radioactive storylines.
The broad strokes are that in Persona 5, your dickhead protagonist gets roped into calling a sexy maid service by his idiot friend Ryuji while the best track in the whole game plays which is the one that plays whenever your idiot friend Ryuji is gassing you up to get horny. Whatever rejoinder you’re crafting in your head just stow it, honestly fuCKING stow it, I don’t give a shit, “My Homie” is the best track in the game.
When someone asks me to deny point blank that Kawakami is “exactly in my Q Zone”
So anyway you call the sexy maid service and oopsie doopsie, who shows up but your frumpy homeroom teacher, a woman named Sayado Kawakami, in a little outfit going spouting off all this catgirl shit like, “nyah master, welcome home…what can I do for you~?” before immediately sussing out that she’s talking to a literal child (even if you don’t pick “I’m a dad,” strangely enough) and is like “hey let’s…forget this ever happened.”
Anyway if you finish out her storyline—which involves just continuing to make her dress up like a maid to visit your ugly room above your uncle’s coffee shop in a very “dudes posting their Ls online” move—you learn that she used to tutor a student who was a lot like you *lowering my sunglasses to imply the stakes are real* Who Died, By The Way and is currently being extorted by this student’s relatives for money. Then if you help get her out of debt so she doesn’t have to be a maid anymore the game rewards you by giving you the option to engage in a romantic student/teacher relationship with her. Gross!
I almost wrote a big thinkpiece about this when I had a job In The Industry but I’m kind of glad I got laid off before I was able to because I probably would have titled it some cornball shit like “We Need To Talk About What’s Wrong With The Temperance Confidant Questline In Persona 5” instead of now just admitting that I just personally think it’s kind of a sleazy beat in a game I never ended up finishing.
The Manga Zone: Eden: It’s an Endless World! by Hiroki Endo
CW: There’s a pretty gnarly illustration of a dead guy turning into a big crystal in this one
There’s a really incredible short essay in the back of Eden: It’s an Endless World! volume 12 where the mangaka, Hiroki Endo, divides his own life into roughly two periods: an AM radio period and an FM radio period.
Childhood, he concludes, is like listening to AM radio. He likens the fuzziness and low fidelity of AM radio being a stand-in for youth because you’re stuck in a sort of constant psychic agony because everything is so ill-defined and confusing and because you can’t even conceive of how you’re ever going to touch a breast (yes, he really says this).
Despite being a weird, horny dude Endo consistently throws absolute heaters in his end-of-volume essays
In spite of, or perhaps because of this, however, the “AM” period of your life ends up being the font of all the creativity a person develops for their lifetime, because your mind isn’t yet set in what is, but instead seeks to envision what might be, even if (as appears to be the case for Endo), “what might be” involves wanting to touch a breast so badly that your stomach hurts all the time.
By contrast, once you are an adult, you enter into the FM period of your life, where you engage in romantic pursuits, develop opinions on fashion and generally clear away the fog of your adolescence into a clear, slick and cosmopolitan FM broadcast. But as crystal clear as everything becomes once you put away your childish things and get to second base, it’s a creatively bankrupt era of your life. “Even if you were to mistakenly try to seek inspiration from the FM era,” Endo writes, “the fact is there is nothing there. A bunch of guys sitting around snacking in a fancy cafe cannot move a person.”
I mention this essay because “good ideas, delivered in the most horny way possible” is about as good of a description for Eden: It’s an Endless World! as I can muster.
The basic gist of Eden is that after global pandemic called the Closure virus that hardens your external cells to the point of petrification while your insides turn to goop and leak out of every orifice you have, wipes out 15% of the Earth’s population, inequalities between the global north and global south become much worse.
There are a weird number of conversations in Eden: It’s an Endless World! that discuss topics like this
This imbalance is spurred on by Propater Federation, a rigid global Christian theocracy that has absorbed the governments of much of the United States, Europe and parts of Asia. Opposing the Propater Federation is an insurgency group called Nomad, aided by Ennoia Ballard, a powerful South American drug lord who killed his father, one of Propater’s founders.
Well after this happens, Ennoia’s son, Elijah, while on the run from Propater forces, finds a dead body in a field with some data discs that contain a genetic blueprint for creating the Gnostic Savior (listen, I know), unites with some Nomad soldiers and eventually makes his way to Lima, Peru where he walks the dangerous path of becoming a man outside the law in order to rescue his mother and sister, who are being held captive by vicious Propater cyborgs and genetic soldiers.
While doing this he also lives in a brothel, falls in love with a sex worker who calls him “nine seconds boy” and routinely cooks breakfast for women he likes while wearing nothing but a frilly apron. It’s…a lot.
Additionally, in the background, the Closure virus mutates into the Disclosure virus, which instead of turning you into a goop-leaking statue, actually crystalizes your entire body and surrounding inorganic material and basically turns your consciousness into data, with the final twist of the story being that once this virus has collected enough composite thoughts of humanity it’s going to blast them through a wormhole into a different universe to trigger a second Big Bang.
It’s also a metaphor for suicide? I didn’t really get this in my reading but the Disclosure virus is described as self-selecting people who have lost faith in God or that a better world is possible and at the manga’s end a villain Endo introduces at the 11th hour incorporates himself into the Colloid (which is what they call the big mass of people crystals) and is driven mega-insane by the condensed blast of human misery it shows him. So I guess it makes sense. I’m also pretty dumb so maybe I just didn’t see it.
You buy ONE too many black tourmalines to ward off bad vibes and this is what happens
Endo is very obviously thinking a lot about the topics the story broaches—hell, he even devotes multiple chapters in the middle of the series to the failed struggle of a Uyghur separatist cell fighting against Propater and Chinese oppression—but as you might figure from a guy who self-describes his technical abilities as “I can sorta surf my way around porn sites on the ‘net,” there’s uhh…some wild stuff in this one as well.
At one point about a quarter way through the series, one of the volumes ends with the disclaimer that you’re going to start seeing a lot of depictions of sex and boy they are not lying. Endo just like…loves drawing people getting their back walls blown out? Apparently? I’m posturing but it’s also like…why would you spend so much time to it otherwise?
To add to the tonal whiplash, these are often sandwiched between action sequences that show people getting absolutely ripped to shreds by high caliber gunfire, sliced up like deli meat by cyborg claws and all manner of horrific shit that is well-drafted but tough to look at.
From the jump, Endo’s composition and sense of dynamic action are really good, if you can stomach the violence, whether robot on robot, cyborg on human or some combination thereof
This feels nuts to say but I haven’t even scratched the surface of all the interlocking plots and themes Endo weaves into Eden: It’s an Endless World! Despite all the gratuitous horniness, violence and general weirdness that I wouldn’t wish seeing upon my worst enemy, I still absolutely devoured this 18-volume series over the course of about a week, just because I wanted to see what the hell he was going to cook up next.
The Documentary Zone: Heaven’s Gate: The Cult of Cults (2020)
To this documentary’s credit, it treats the people who were taken in by Heaven’s Gate with an impressive amount of pathos, sadness and understanding that we are all of us at risk of being swept up by bad actors in our search for meaning, purpose and community in this life or the next. That said, I felt at times while watching this that it overcorrected for the rather flippant treatment of Heaven’s Gate in popular culture by sort of sanding off the rough edges of how fucking weird Heaven’s Gate was?
That face when you promise people via VHS tape that they’re going to become toothless aliens without genitals in the next life
Watching the Heaven’s Gate exit interviews is of course extremely heartbreaking when you know how it ends, especially when you see these very tired, strange-looking cultists juxtaposed with the vibrant people they were before joining, but also the initiation videos are free to watch on Youtube and Marshall Applewhite literally promises that they’re going to be turned into sexless aliens without teeth? Like that’s not buried; he comes right out and says that.
Really though, all this made me want to do was re-watch Jonni Philips’s The Final Exit of the Disciples of Ascensia (2019) which I can’t recommend enough if you’d like to enjoy some more melancholy cult shit.
The Digestif: “Catabolic Seed,” The Scary Jokes
A lot of parallels in the themes of this week’s discussion topics—horniness, cults, transubstantiation of the human form into a higher state of being—and I wish I could say that was all intentional but this is all jazz to me, baby!!! I’m improvising my little heart out here.
Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you next week with something inoffensive and sexually inert. Maybe. If you’re lucky.
Luv ya,
Da No. 1 Creep