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MYSTERIOUS_GIRLFRIEND_X

                                             November 9, 2013

"Mysterious Girlfriend X" the
anime made (faithfully) from
the manga:
   
A story with fantastic premises left     
unstated, where the the real point of the        OPENENDED
story is to use these fantastic premises 
as a vehicle for a peculiar kind of-- you
might say "sex comedy", but one that only
a Japanese brain could produce.          
                                             
  The Mysterious Girlfriend of the title
  is a middle-school girl who at the
  outset of the story sleeps constantly.
  She is, for example in the habit of
  skipping lunch and going to sleep with
  head down on her desk.

  The male viewpoint character of the
  story wakes her up one afternoon to                        OTAKU_DUSK
  tell her it's time to go home-- and
  after she leaves, he looks at a           I sometimes call 
  puddle of saliva she's left behind        this show "Drool
  on her desk, and on impulse dips a        Maiden of Narcolepsy"
  finger in it and tastes it.

     This strikes me as completely
     brilliant, the kind of warped
     detail only someone with a deep
     understanding of teenage boys       (I remember once licking
     (and a really good memory of        a girl's abandoned pen.)
     being one) could come up with.


  As the story progresses, they
  develop an odd romance involving
  spit-swapping-- literally, in this         A side-note in the collected
  case: they slurp it up off of a            manga has the author mention
  proferred finger.                          that a middle-school setting
                                             was chosen to make the main
      Does there exist another               characters relatively chaste
      culture that could've                  relationship seem more plausible.
      produced a work like this?
                                             The translator adds that this
                                             is a reference to a "sexual
      The closing sequence of the            revolution" going on among
      show, while the ending theme           Japanese teenagers.
      plays, shows scenes of every           A present day reader, just a
      one of the female characters           few years later, might be
      asleep under different                 puzzled by these young
      circumstances, all of them             teenagers just *talking*
      drooling away.                         about having sex some day.


                                                 In general, I think anime is
                                                 struggling with the necessity
                                                 of avoiding explicit sex to
                                                 comply with the standards of
                                                 mainstream television, though
                                                 the audience has no such
                                                 inhibition.

                                                 Stories abound about young
                                                 boys who avoid having sex with
                                                 the pretty young women they're
                                                 involved with.
                      HENTAI_PRINCE
                                                 Why is rarely adequately
                                                 explained: it's just a
                                                 genre convention.

                                                 But *without* this
                                                 convention, much of
                                                 the tension that
                                                 makes the stories
                                                 work would evaporate.





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