Geek Out!

Dear Nerd,

You may call yourself an ‘otaku’ in a vain attempt to link yourself with the culture you desperately wish to be a part of, but the rest of the Western world still just sees you as an ordinary nerd. And I’m pretty sure the culture you want to be a part of will never see you as anything other than a foreigner. As fan of Japanese anime who has also spent some time living in Japan, I know this may seem somewhat hypocritical, but please bear with me as I explain what it is about you that makes my blood boil.

I have never, in my entire life, met anyone with the same interests in anime that I have. I have not decided whether this is a credit to the anime industry itself or a blight on my own personal world, but it is the reason I have been trawling the Internet looking, not for people with the exact same likes and dislikes, but people of a similar opinion to myself that I could strike up some kind of camaraderie with. And do you know what I have found? I have a sneaking suspicion that you do.

The majority of you ‘anime-bloggers’ seem to think it’s best to write as if you are the most abrasive, offensive, utterly incomprehensible uber-anime-fan that you could possibly be. You pepper your posts with a number of frustrating elements which I will attempt to understand and explain in order of annoyance.

First of all, the pigeon-Japanese. This must be a vain attempt to appear connected to the culture you so desperately wish to have been born into. The over-use of words such as kawaii, tsundere, otaku and so on is very occasionally (though never in the case of kawaii) warranted and generally offensive to both the anime and the reader who, judging from the fact that the majority of the posts are in English, is also of English-speaking background and thus may not actually have a snowball’s chance in hell of understanding your confusing hybrid language.

Second is the endless self-referential diatribing. Now, I would hate for you to think that I dislike a good diatribe because in fact I love one, but incomprehensible mentions at machine-gun speed of other anime character’s names in order to illustrate your opinion on the anime under review does little to affirm your qualifications to review, does absolutely nothing to impress me in regards to the amount of anime that you claim to have watched and does everything in its (in this case considerable) power to (pardon my French) piss me the fuck off. If I wanted to listen to someone recite a list of random Japanese names, I would.. I would.. Well at this point in time I’m at a loss as to what I would do, but I doubt very much I would actually ever want to listen to that, so it seems irrelevant what I would rather do than read your post.

Third is the underlying tone of mockery. This is one of the more subtle (I am similarly surprised that you can be anything other than blindingly obvious) aspects of your posts. In terms of fan-service, overly buxom female characters, yuri and yaoi and various other aspects of anime which may not sit well with your American standards, you tend to devolve into a three year old mentality, which is a far cry from your usual twelve, and giggle at the bouncing breasts, bleeding noses and same-sex love that is regularly displayed. I would suggest growing up, but I understand that you are in fact a tween, so that will hopefully come in time.

Finally, I would like to lampoon the over-use of emoticons, punctuation and Caps Lock in an attempt to create tone. I do not need to be accosted by your vast knowledge of how the Japanese convey emotion via text, nor do I need to read one thousand exclamation points when one would suffice. Nor, in fact, do I need to have every third word shouted at me for emphasis.

I will concede that the use of all four of these elements together is an excellent recipe for deflection. I am often so angry that I do not notice the lack of any actual opinion in your pieces or the fact that the majority of your post is screen-caps from the episode you managed to download before everyone else and I simply move on to the next painfully distancing blog about an anime I haven’t seen and therefore should not, it seems, be allowed the privilege of seeing.

This gauntlet, in honour of all the gauntletted heroes that you defile with your posts is aimed squarely at your tiny, no doubt pimple-ridden, greasy, wannabe heads.

Adrik

Run Out Of Steam! Please!

Dear Steam,

I understand you consider the use of yourself as a cooking method to be a healthy alternative to flavour. You are, in my opinion, also synonymous with some of the most offensive human diets including macrobiotics, raw-foodism and the CRON diet. But perhaps your most revolting incarnation is as a method for making dumplings.

Don’t get me wrong, I love dumplings. But I love them to be fried. I loathe with a passion similar to that of Christ, steamed dumplings. From the wet outer whiteness to the blanched, rubbery insides to the hot water that springs from between coils of meat strings, every part of them is offensive. And you are the reason for that. The SOLE reason.

I offer the concept of bathing for your consideration. We, that is to say, humanity, have a number of methods by which we clean ourselves. Medievally, we use public bathhouses and still pools of water. You’ll note you are not present as anything other than a by-product in this example, which is where you belong and should stay. Unfortunately, we invented the shower. A brilliant innovation which unfortunately leads to the mass production of, you guessed it, steam. Horrible, useless steam. Which brings me to the next ‘invention’ of humanity, the steam-room or sauna. As far as I can tell, these are torture chambers for the gradual wasting away of normal human beings into jockeys. You offend me with your insinuation into our cleaning practices, but perhaps the most offensive thing about it is that I can’t help, sometimes, to enjoy your presence. Which makes me sick with disgust inside.

Tangentially, you formed the basis of one of the simultaneously greatest and most over-hyped sub-genres in recent history, steampunk. Steampunk is about on level with emo in terms of how sick to death I am of it, yet I am, similarly to emo, drawn to it again and again. I ask you Steam, why do you do this to us? Why do you draw us to you like cake to an overweight child, then discard us, bloated and unsure of ourselves, alone and with cake on our chins? Why?

I’m thrashing around in a tiny bathroom full of you, fully gauntleted and barely gripping onto my sanity. I hope you’re happy, Steam, I hope you’re happy.

Adrik

Revolving whore!

Dear Revolving Door,

All rubbish things in this world are the namesake for something bad, be it a movie, a song or a person and you, revolving door are no exception. For proof of how hated you are, one needn’t look any further than the fact that you even have a syndrome named after you.

You boast some fine features – you keep out the elements, you cannot be blown open, you like to silently slay people at random. But you were a bit put out that the world did not revolve around you, weren’t you? So you decided to make the world revolve within you, where you could maim innocent rat-racers. You would have us believe that you are but a marionette, but you do not fool me. You even stoop to hop on the green bandwagon to save your rotten image.

You were originally the brainchild of a Mr H Bockhacker of Berlin, who was granted a German patent back in 1881. As a little aside I note that those crazy Germans also give us the less nimble revolving restaurant. These pointless gyrating eat-houses are allowed to function unchecked by the authorities in 52 countries. I say if you want a 360 degree view try craning your neck, or, and this is a really novel idea, get up and walk around. The award for the most offensively named revolving restaurant is a close call between “Revolving Restaurant” in Cairo and “Blacktown Workers Club” in Not-Sydney (oh the shame). The prize for the most affected hipster revolving restaurant name goes to “@mosphere” in Kota Kinabalu. Tossers. But I digress.

Dreaded by suits of just the one walk of life, you, revolving door have your humble beginnings in misogyny.  Seven years after Bockhacker was granted his patent, Theophilus van Kannel prepared to make his mark in the world. Van Kannel refused to accept that he was expected to open doors for women, hence you were a gift to all men to help them bypass chivalry. How tough life is for white men.

So death carousel, I want you to know that I know you recently made an attempt on my life, and so I throw this gauntlet at you and I dare you to try it again and then we’ll see who is boss.

Kyrani

Wind Me Up

Dear Wind,

I have been thinking about you a lot recently. In fact, I’ve even gone to the trouble of correctly defining you so that I can properly criticize absolutely everything about you.

I have found that you refer to a number of things, but I’d like to start with your most immature node as an anally excreted gas. To break wind (or to find the activity amusing in any way) is to be of a lower class of human, unless done in the privacy of one’s bathroom (and in some arguments home/company). It is an assault upon our olfactory senses and proper sensibility, and by relation, the same could be said of you.

Perhaps better known of your definitions is as a weather pattern. Apparently you are the flow of air or gas around Earth. In other words, you surround all things and are everywhere. You are not, however it may seem, anything remotely akin to a God. You are in fact an irritant upon the eye of the world and the only reason I can see for you staying here is that we would in fact perish without you, which may be preferable depending on who you consult.

As a weather pattern, you create havoc. You ruin hairstyles, spread our litter-piles around, rile up the crazies and generally create a hostile, unliveable environment for those whom you sustain, myself and fellow humans.

You have also been the subject of mythology and popular culture. I’m going to single out the X-Men for this. Wind Dancer. Possibly the most annoying character ever created, it was difficult for me to tell whether she was using wind as a weather power or as a gaseous outburst from her anus. On the other hand we have Storm who definitely uses her wind as a weather element and can even use it to fly, which I think involves filling her lungs with a heated oxygen compound. Both of these characters are now dead*, which I think says more than I could ever say on the matter.

In closing, I would like to express my frustration at your gaseousness as I am thus unable to reprimand you properly with a gauntlet, and advise that I will simply have to make do with making a fist and banging it on my table in barely suppressed rage.

Adrik

*may not be true

Dirty Hobbits

Dear John Ronald Reuel Tolkien,

I am livid. I’ve considered myself to be a fan of science fiction for many years now, watching, writing and reading constantly now, but as a child, I could never afford to buy new books, so I had to opt for second hand ones. For this reason, I was frequently presented with seemingly normal science fiction novels with a short blurb, an exciting drawing of whatever was popular in science fiction at the time of publication (unicorns, busty women, dragons, spaceships, aliens and the like) and a handy pencil price-tag on the inner front cover.

I would excitedly take these home with me and read them only to discover, at varying points of my literary journey, that they were in fact part of a series. A series I did not own, nor have the capacity to own. In some cases I would have stumbled across the first in a series, and have thoroughly enjoyed myself until the end, when I realised that the story did not in fact finish at all and that I was once abandoned by the characters and world that I had been a part of for the duration of the novel.

You may be wondering what this has to do with you, my post-humous friend, but I think you probably know. As the author of the ‘seminal’ science fiction series, I am holding you personally responsible for the reams of drivel being published in science fiction and for the broken dreams of my childhood. Big calls, I know, but you’re dead, you can handle it.

I cannot fathom why some authors feel the need to wring every last character and scenario from a world and/or idea until they end up with literally tens of books about the same thing. Ideas grow stale, characters grow boring and readers, well, they turn away. I can see it’s a money-making scheme, I mean, you wrote ‘The Hobbit’ and subsequently wrote the ‘Lord of the Rings’ trilogy, and I suppose I should thank you for leaving it at three, but you see, your influence has lead to such never-ending sagas as the ‘Dune’ series (Brian Herbert is arguably equally responsible for that farce, but then, citing the case of your own son, Christopher continuing your ‘legendarium’, I believe you are responsible for this too), ‘Twilight’ and whatever drivel Terry Pratchett has dreamed up.

What happened to the single novel? To the world you could lose yourself in, ride the rollercoaster (or spaceship, or worm, or whatever) of until such time (generally 200-600 pages) that the story comes to a believable conclusion. What happened to it, John? You did. And for that, I’m coming to your grave and digging you up with my gauntletted hands and I’m going to slap your skeleton silly. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Adrik