#so either something is up and/or it is HORRIBLY mismanaged behind the scenes. which they have no excuse for.

[aroaceleovaldez]

So, in your last post about the Percy Jackson TV show, I felt you lacked a few pieces of information/points. While it is true that the CGI in the film is pore and not constructed well, please note that while they have a large budget Disney has made a lot of restrictions to the show. In the original scrips there was a significantly larger amount of violence that would have needed more CGI. This was latter edited out of the script due to both restrictions and budget cuts for other parts in the show(sadly). Also to bring into prospective Sea of monsters the movie was made 10 years ago. Inflation has juristically affected the way money is used in films. Another thing to note is typically movie budgets are less than TV shows because they only are filming for one larger block of time. TV however they can take years meaning the acters need to be paid even for the time off set. This is not to say movies cannot take years, but it is to show that TV shows are filmed longer. I would also like to say I am genuinely not trying to be rude or unkind about your opinion and thoughts on the subject. I am just someone who has a different insight into the topic because of the things I know about the topic (I myself, am an actor and for the most part I think this is why the CGI was not the best as well as some of the script work). 

I did actually calculate inflation for Sea of Monsters versus the PJO TV show. We know the PJO TV show allegedly had a budget of $12-15 million per episode. For comparison, this is the type of budget Disney+ usually uses for stuff like The Mandalorian. I was doing a generous underestimate for the entire season which comes out to $96mil (12mil per episode x 8 episodes). Sea of Monsters' budget was 90mil. Here's that inflation:

So lil over $120mil. Going for a top estimate for s1 of the show (15x8) that's $120mil. And as far as I'd heard that may also not include stuff like budget for casting for the show. They are still roughly in similar ballparks.

Regardless of this - as an animator, i can tell you there is no excuse for that wonky CGI trident other than it being extremely quickly done. That's literally a transform error, like ctrl+t type stuff. That is a lazy and cheap trident, probably because Disney notoriously overworks and cheaps out with their CGI. The CGI problems in the show are majority because Disney's being cheap about it. This shows in nearly all the CGI in every episode.

If they had to remove violence from the script and so remove CGI scenes with it, then theoretically they should have more room in the budget for more or better CGI where it already is in the show. That money doesn't just vanish. Changing that in the script gives them less of an excuse, actually.

Also, as i mentioned in my previous post - if you don't want to CGI hydrokinesis, don't pick the franchise where the main character's defining power is hydrokinesis. If you can't have much violence, DON'T PICK THE GREEK MYTHOLOGY SERIES WHERE THE MAIN CHARACTER BEHEADS TWO PEOPLE IN THE FIRST BOOK AND IT ONLY GETS BLOODIER FROM THERE. You cannot have PJO without some level of violence. It's kind of very inherent to the series. Rick actually talks in his original Teaching Guide for The Lightning Thief about how, in argument against attempts to ban TLT (in this specific instance for "being too violent"), that monsters in the books poof into golden dust for a reason, because then they haven't "died." There is no blood. They can and will come back. Because it's fantasy. That is the excuse for all the violence. Of which there otherwise technically is a lot of.

If you are doing live action PJO you are going to have to have some amount of violence (and there is absolutely a level that is perfectly suitable for a PG13 audience. The show right now is leagues below that level. PG13 just means parental guidance for under 13 - this majority has to do with concerns about children under 13 replicating behavior on-screen. Past 13 kids know better than to do that, which is why that rating is a thing. There are plenty of film/media/etc that are way more gory and violent and are still PG13). You are going to have to CGI monsters/creatures to some degree regularly (alongside demigod powers like Percy's hydrokinesis even more regularly). And between those two things, characters are going to have to look like they're physically interacting with the CGI at times. Disney is capable of doing this. Disney does have the budget for this for the show. They're not doing it because they're being cheap. Disney has done this before and does it regularly. This is not anything new. It entirely has to do with CGI not having as many unions. They have no excuses. If they didn't expect to run into these problems then they clearly did no planning for what adapting the series would entail and didn't think at all of what the series actually featured before diving into it. And they have no excuse for that! That is step one!

[mst3kproject]

Black Dragons

 This is a bizarre and thoroughly mismanaged WWII yellow peril movie.  It features Bela Lugosi and Joan Barclay, both of whom we’ve seen before in The Corpse Vanishes, and was produced by Sam Katzman, who brought us both The Corpse Vanishes and Teenage Crime Wave (also The Giant Claw).  I liked The Corpse Vanishes.  It was fun, fast-paced, and in some ways surprisingly feminist.  Black Dragons is none of those things.

It’s 1942, and Japan has just bombed Pearl Harbour, forcing Americans to stop ignoring World War II.  Stock footage of stuff burning and blowing up is implied to be the work of a bunch of indistinguishable suited men who are sabotaging the allied war effort.  They’re standing around one evening congratulating themselves on how evil they are, when a mysterious Monsieur Coulombe arrives and talks privately with one of them, a Dr. Saunders  Coulombe hypnotizes or drugs Saunders somehow – and in the days that follow, the conspirators start turning up dead, each with a souvenir from the renaissance faire… oh, excuse me, a Japanese dagger… in one hand.  What the hell is going on?

Well, the ending is supposed to be a surprise, but I’m gonna spoil it for you to save you having to watch the stupid movie.  All the victims, plus Dr. Saunders, are actually Japanese operatives from the Order of Black Dragons who had plastic surgery to turn them into the doubles of American businessmen!  The originals were killed, and the duplicates took their places… and the surgeon?  He was a Nazi who did it as a favour from the Fuhrer, but afterwards the Order tried to kill him so that he could never reveal the plan to anyone.  He escaped, and went to the States to murder them in revenge for their betrayal!

As ideas for an espionage movie go, this one reaches near golden-age comics levels of absurdity and as such it’s almost kind of brilliant.  A movie that used this plot to its full ridiculous potential could be great fun – I especially like that it pits two sets of villains against each other, while the supposed good guys spend most of the film completely clueless.  Black Dragons, however, was rushed onto theatre screens within four months of the bombing of Pearl Harbour, and it’s an utter mess with no idea what to do with its premise.

For being made in 1942, Black Dragons mostly doesn’t look bad.  There are no scenes so dark you can’t see what’s happening, and we get an idea of things like the layout of Dr. Saunders’ house. The characters all kind of look alike but I’ve just had to accept the idea that all white men had the same face until about 1965.  The steps of the Japanese Embassy are obviously somebody’s house with a sign on the door, but I can forgive them that, and the voices sound a little brassy and indistinct but no more so than in The Corpse Vanishes.  The main technical flaw in the film is that most of it has a constant crackling noise in the background, sounding kind of like heavy rain. This is obviously a problem with the print itself, since it continues as we switch scenes from Washington to Philadelphia, and it is very annoying and confusing.

No, almost all of Black Dragons’ many problems are in the writing.  Just based on the premise you can guess that the movie is racist – we’ve got the ‘Japanese dagger’ that doesn’t look even remotely Japanese, and Japanese characters (even some of those who are supposed to look Japanese) played by white guys in costumes and makeup, speaking in fake accents.  And as for the racial issues inherent in the plastic surgery plot point... I don’t actually feel qualified to address those.

What is slightly more surprising is that it’s also egregiously sexist.  There’s a woman living with Dr. Saunders who’s supposed to be his niece Alice, worried about all the weird things happening around her.  She turns out to be a policewoman who’s there to spy on the fake Dr. Saunders, and she gets shouted at for being entirely incompetent when she fails to solve anything (it must be admitted that she didn’t try very hard).

Everything that surrounds this character is just terrible. She’s there to be one (1) pretty girl, like the film is trying to fill some kind of quota.  Alice is introduced when the chief of police suggests that detective Dick Martin might get somewhere by questioning her.  Martin responds, “let me guess, she’s fifty and flat-footed, and wears glasses.”  Oh my god, you poor thing, you might have to talk to an unattractive woman!  She flirts with Dr. Coulombe throughout the film, even as he hangs around being ridiculously off-putting and creepy.  The revelation that she’s a spy herself explains this, I guess, since she must have been doing it in the hope of learning something from him, but it never avails her anything and is, in the end, useless, much like Alice herself.

The worst moment is when Martin, who has been trying to get her to move out of this dangerous house, walks into the room and out of nowhere says, “Alice, will you marry me?”  She stares at him like he’s crazy and asks, “what for?”, and I swear to you he actually replies, “so I can beat you up.  It’s the only way I’ll get you out of here.”  I had to pause the movie and watch it again because I couldn’t believe I’d just heard that.  I have combed the internet for a gif that expresses a sufficient level of what the fuck for this line and I cannot find one.  I need Shikha again.

Black Dragons really has no hero.  The closest thing on offer is Detective Martin, who is honestly just as useless as Alice.  I usually enjoy movies that are just a bunch of bad guys trying to thwart each other, but this is actually Black Dragons’ biggest mistake.  If this were supposed to be a suspense film, then we really ought to be focused on Martin (and possibly Alice) trying to solve the mystery.  Martin sees the Japanese agents as upstanding citizens in danger, and he is doing his best to help them but has started to suspect that the victims aren’t as innocent as they appear.

That has the potential to be an interesting story with a surprising twist at the end, but Black Dragons is not told from Martin’s point of view.  Instead, the audience is privy to at least some of the secrets from the beginning.  We already know that the murder victims are the bad guys, because we watched them brag about it to each other.  We watch Coulombe killing them (though the way he behaves, it would be obvious he’s the murderer even if we didn’t) and hear him calling them by Japanese-sounding names before they die.  By the time we get to what should be the twist, we’ve already figured most of this out (while Martin hasn’t a clue), and the only surprise is that Coulombe’s motivation is personal revenge rather than being a government assassin, as I initially assumed.

A version of the movie that actually tried to keep its secrets secret could also have something I kind of hoped we would see but never did, which is the conspirators interacting with their families.  At least some of the men who were replaced ought to have had parents, siblings, wives, or children, unless they were chosen specifically for being orphaned bachelors with no friends – and that doesn’t seem likely when we know Dr. Saunders had a niece he was close to.  Watching the people around these men feeling like there’s something different but not sure what it is would have been nice and creepy, but Black Dragons is not that subtle.

It’s all doubly unfortunate because there is some cool stuff in this movie.  There’s a bit where rather than killing two of the conspirators himself, Coulombe tricks them into killing each other.  That was nicely done.  His creative methods of hiding bodies are fun, too.  The fact that he ultimately dumps them on the steps of the Japanese embassy with an unconvincing ‘cultural artefact’ in their hands seems like it ought to mean something, like he’s trying to either alert the Americans to the threat or the Japanese to his survival, but nothing is ever really made of this and we never see what the head of the Order of Black Dragons thinks of it at all, as he is seen only in flashback.

The biggest problem with the whole concept behind Black Dragons is the same one as in Hercules Unchained: they needed to make a movie really fast in order to capitalize on something, and just didn’t have time to figure out what they were actually doing.  Hercules Unchained was a movie that tried to have two storylines at one, neither connected to each other and one of them only barely connected to its main character.  Black Dragons isn’t even sure who its main character is. Dick Martin is the nearest thing to a hero, but an argument could equally be made that this story is about Coulombe as antihero.  The result is a film that’s trying to do too much and too little at the same time.  And of course, Black Dragons’ intentions are way less honourable than Hercules Unchained’s.  Hercules Unchained just wanted to capitalize on a popular film.  Black Dragons was capitalizing on a literal act of war!

A version of Black Dragons that tried to do justice to its silly premise would still have been a bad movie.  It would still be an old, grainy print with sound issues, and it would still be deeply racist (among many, many other things, there’s a particularly detestable bit where Coulombe insults the Japanese operatives by calling them ‘apes’) and probably still have that stunningly horrible line about how you have to marry a woman before you’re allowed to beat her.  But it would have been a much more interesting and entertaining bad movie than it ultimately ended up being.

[dogsliampaynedoesntinstagram]

Surely at this point it’s less likely that Louis was the one to make that tweet than it was at the time. The timing of the tweet (at 8:30am right as London went to work) always made that a strong possibility. At the time people said, “if his twitter was being mismanaged he could just get rid of JGG”, which is more or less what happened. He seems to have waited until the end of his contract to part ways with JGG, but Rusty was removed as his day to day manager long before that.

Hi Anon,

These are some really interesting points and I agree the change of management definitely makes it more likely that he wasn’t the one to tweet it.

I think it’s important to acknowledge that we don’t know and can’t know and are talking in posisbilities and probabilities, rather than absolutes.  I’m also hyper aware that I’ve very much got my thumb on the scale of this one - I would really like Louis not to have tweeted at Ash London (both because I think it was a horrible thing to do and because I don’t like what it suggests about his wellbeing). Ultimately I’m only comfortable talking about this if I first make it clear that whatever happened behind the scenes, Louis is responsible for what’s on his social media.  

With that caveat - I am going to talk through what information we have and what that implies, because I’m interested in your points. 

The timing question is interesting - it was posted at 7.36am GMT, which is 11.30 LA time.  I had actually thought about it the other way round.  I had ruled out the possibility that anyone London based had tweeted.  My assumption was that if anyone besides Louis himself tweeted - it would have had to be run up the chain for authorisation.  And I don’t think that gets done at 7.30am unless it’s an emergency.  Perhaps I’m wrong about that - perhaps there was a social media plan that included: ‘support fans in some kind of conflict that they have’.  And whoever was on first shift would have authorisation to do it. That seems unlikely to me, but I’m not basing that on any knowledge.  I tend to think an LA based team working on this through the evening is more likely (although perhaps waiting for authorisation until someone in the UK woke up).  

As for the timezone implications for Louis - we’ve no idea where he was at that point.  He saw Liam gallagher on 7 December and was at Kim Davidson’s wedding on the 16 December.  In between, there were pap pics released of him in LA, but I don’t think there’s any particular confirmation they were taken then.  If he was in LA that’s a reasonably normal time to tweet, if he was in the UK the whole time then that’s less usual.  If anything, a popstar up at 7.30am might be expected to be in a heightened emotional state.

For me, the  tweet itself actually raises quite a lot of questions.  I don’t know how much this travels outside the UK (I think a year ago I would have got it, but now I feel it viscerally) - but it’s a really nasty tweet.  Men describing women who they’re dismissing in some way as ‘love’ is a specific subuse of the phrase that is awful and misogynist.  Combining ‘love’ with a suggestion she disappear (be silent/deserved to be silenced by violence) intensifies the misogyny.  The fingers then come across as really nasty and aggressive.  If Louis wrote it, it reveals how nasty and misogynist he can be.  

But there is another way of looking at it.  We see Louis do the fingers a lot, both in person and on twitter, and it’s almost always in a joking/jovial/banter/building a bond between him and the other person kind of way. Doing the fingers to be nasty to someone, as opposed to either bond with someone directly, or bond with them about a third person, is not something we’d seen from him on twitter or in person (as far as I can remember).  I can see a non-London based person thinking ‘oh this is British’ - and not realising the implications of what they were saying - ‘love and the fingers’ that sounds like Louis.  

I tend to assume tweets are them (unless it’s like straight promotional information) .  Not because I think they are all them, but because you have to make a choice in this world and I’m sick of the ‘if I like it it’s Louis’ school of social media analysis.  In general the stupider the tweet, the more likely I think it is that it’s written by a pop-star rather than a professional.  Immediately after this happened I thought that it must be by Louis (because no way a professional would do something that awful).  I talked to someone in this fandom who works in social media and assumes that nothing on social media is them.  And she persuaded me that it was possible that a SMM would tweet that.  Listening the Popcast episode on Nicki Manaj reinforced the idea that it was possible.

Like you say, the indication that Louis changed management does enable quite a song story to be told. Whereby it wasn’t just that he didn’t tweet it, but that he disapproved and it was part of his decision to leave, but that’s only one option.  You can tell so many others (including one’s where things are really bad for Louis on a personal level).  None of this conclusive.

What I do feel more certain about, is that there is probably connection between this and the larger questions around Miss You publicity.  Releasing a song without a plan to publicise it is weird.  In addition to all the other reasons why trying to figure out who tweeted a particular tweet is a fool’s errand, I suspect that this tweet is tangled up with the larger questions about the release of Miss You.  And trying to understand it in isolation is always going to be futile.

[sirchubbybunny]

Fyrom Responds: Channel Awesome’s “Our Response”

Well, I didn’t think I’d make another post this quick. I woke up about an hour ago and I’m currently writing this from Soft Lavender’s stream. The talk of the day is that Channel Awesome made an effort to give an “apology” that wasn’t “we’re sorry you felt that way” aka “Our Response”.

And, oh...boy.

Also, just some background on myself before I go further.

I started doing reviews for some sites as far back as 2009, and I was inspired by TGWTG/CA and a number of people on Youtube to kickstart a series of my own. The original blueprint was to do a fanfiction based review series with two other friends - one of which is/was also a fan of the site. Those plans fell through due to how complicated it was (especially since we were still in high school), and I turned to doing my own series. I kept the name I made for my persona, Fyrom, and established myself as the Scavenger Reviewer - as my work consisted of the scraps people left behind or overlooked. The content consisted of obscure PSA/PIFs (like Dangerous Games, an 80s PSA film about fireworks) and failure to launch shows (such as Heat Vision and Jack), and would eventually consist of the direct to video stuff from the 80s and 90s like the original Barney and the Backyard Gang series and the direct-to-video Mary Kate and Ashley stuff - which Allison and Phelous would review later on.

I began doing those around the summer of 2012 or so for The NetDwellers and Manic Expression until both sites (the original ME site) shut down and I’ve put the series on an indefinite hiatus in 2014 due to my declining mental health issues. While I wasn’t on a level like Why Guy or The Fanfic Critic where they had somewhat of a following, I joke that I was a z-lister with how short lived and obscure I was. From start to finish, it was always my dream to eventually get the attention of those I looked up to, like Diamanda Hagan and Kyle Kallgren (OanCitizen) to team up and make something great. Following the news that broke in 2013, I started distancing myself from the site and I only ever popped by the forums to talk with fellow fans of Brad Jones (The Cinema Snob). And here we are now in April 2018, and I’m sure this is the last time we’ll see the site active.

And with all that out of the way, I’m back on track to giving my own two cents. I’m pretty sure that, unless something new happens, this will be the last time I ever talk about CA/TGWTG.

As I said, I got online to check some emails and saw that Soft Lavender, who has been making videos discussing the document “Not So Awesome” in regards to the grievances by former Channel Awesome contributors and the trending hashtag #ChangeTheChannel, was doing a stream (which as of 2:23PM EST, is still ongoing) and the title was/is “Channel Awesome Responds and Is Not Sorry”. I dove in as fast as I could and then jumped onto Channel Awesome to see the response and who was left; which, as of writing this, MasakoX and Angry Joe left last night - bringing us down to eight contributors.

The post, which appears to be written by Mike Michaud, attempts to absolve the “allegations” listed in the document; from all the sexual misconduct that has taken place on behalf of Mike Ellis and an unknown contributor, the misogyny, and the horrible mismanagement. Here’s how it starts:

“Since the posting of the “Not So Awesome” document on Monday, April 2, 2018, we have been exploring all of our options of how to address the lies that have been alleged by multiple disgruntled individuals with vindictive intentions.

Channel Awesome has always tried to keep our dealings with our content partners out of the public eye and despite any differences or disagreements we have never publicly spoken negatively about any of them, but a response to the accusations leveled against us must happen. Obviously, we cannot address all 73 plus pages of accusations against us in this forum, but we will address the most egregious now.“

I’m sorry, what now?

As MarzGurl (Kaylyn Saucedo) said in a currently ongoing stream, from this point on, any chance of this being in good spirits has gone out the window. The comments on said post echo the anger many of us; fans and former contributors alike have been saying for a long time. This is an absolutely horrible excuse for an attempt at saying sorry for their actions, and they’d rather point fingers at people coming forward rather than take responsibility for their own incompetence and mistreatment of their staff. Many of the comments agree that a lot of Michaud’s choosing of what to address were jabs at both Holly Brown and Allison Pregler (Obscurus Lupa), which is almost insulting considering what they both had to deal with - especially from Michaud himself.

Here’s what Michaud had to say in response to “accusations” about the lack of communication:

“We agree communication could have and should have been better. We got into this business based on our passion for content creation and have had many growing pains over the years. We always strive to learn from our mistakes and strengthen our skills. Have we made mistakes? Yes, we have. We even discuss some of our challenges in our behind the scenes videos. We’ve always focused on trying to entertain our viewers, shine spotlights on unknown talent and share our attention with various charities – and we hope to continue to do so moving forward.”

This shouldn’t have happened to begin with, and if they know mistakes were made, they should have resolved them then and there. Keep in mind that this has been going on for years, and many of the grievances go all the way back to Kickassia, which was made in 2010. This wasn’t a recent thing that these people wanted to just bitch about for attention or to be vindictive or petty - and that’s excluding the injuries and general arrogance (not even ignorance at this point) with how sets are managed; such as Lindsay asking about water on set, to which she got laughed at until Spoony said providing water and food for your crew is the bare minimum you have to have. A lot of this what people want to know about was either barely touched or omitted all together - such as said injuries, Dr. Gonzo‘s tribute to JewWario (Justin Carmichael), the rampant homophobia, the absolute incompetence with how filming the anniversaries were, MarzGurl (Kaylyn Saucedo) getting a lot of shit for the stuff she did with ScrewAttack, and how IndieGoGo threatened to investigate them for potential fraud due to the failed show Pop Quiz Hot Shot to name a few.

A lot of this is still ongoing and a raging tire fire when this is all over. More news is coming out about some details of the document, and I’m both deeply hurt and upset by this. So maybe this won’t be the last post from me. If you wan to keep up with what’s going on, please head to Soft Lavender’s Youtube channel and join the stream.

[fiddletwix]

Plot: Yori and Iku have a falling out after Iku learns that Yori has slept with her friend Tomoka, who was being a stand-in for Iku in order for Yori to have a sexual outlet for his feelings. Iku starts dating a guy that has had a crush on her, Nakamura, in retaliation, but Yori won’t stand for another guy touching Iku. When the tensions come to a boil, Iku forces Yori to a love motel in order to know him in the same way that Tomoka got to, but will they really let this taboo reach a head?

==============================

I obviously ran into some trouble designing this week’s poster. I’m actually a little ashamed of it. See, I figured with clashes that went volume by volume I’d use the starter pic of each volume for the poster and find a matching or similar shot from the anime to go with it. I figured Yori and Iku never go to a summer festival, use fireworks or have this pose in either the manga’s canon or the OVA, but surely I can find a picture of the two of them smiling right next to each other……No. No I can’t.

I know I’ve already gone on and on about how miserable this show/manga is, but I never realized that there is an insane lack of any shots involving Yori and Iku smiling in the OVA, let alone smiling together in the same shot. They laugh once in the train, but I couldn’t use that because it’s a closeup panning shot. That was the only time they ever seemed happy together.

How horribly mismanaged is a romance anime where the main characters are never shown being happy together? Even in tragic romances there are plenty of moments where the main characters are smiling and laughing together. Even in the Star Wars prequels, with the most chemistry-less couple of Anakin and Padme, there were several shots of them smiling and being happy together.

All of the shots of them have their expressions in one of two modes: angry or crying. Or Yori’s default expression – the angry rapist pout.

Because of this, I had to settle for one of the few shots that at least has them in a similar pose. I hope I have better luck in volume three.

—————————–

Nice to know that really stupid thing with the ‘Clover=c-lover=She is a lover’ thing is also in the original manga.

This volume starts out with Yori and Iku actually deciding to be lovers. Iku can’t stand the thought of losing Yori, so she decides to give into his feelings, which Yori gladly accepts. They’re enjoying the sights of the church that their parents got married in and they decide, hoo boy, what a great spot to have incestuous sex. I know this is in the OVA too, but holy crap is that a stupid decision.

Also nice that the pretentious and overbearing ‘God is watching us through the angel statues’ scene is kept. So, yeah, Iku calls it all off since God is watching them do it and Yori accepts her decision. However, his intense jealousy starts coming out when a long time classmate, Nakamura, expresses interest in Iku.

Hair sniffs: 7

Iku doesn’t pay him much mind, and actually seems to be increasingly lusting after Yori as well when he initiates more foreplay. Their advances continue to get jilted by the presence of their parents, but Yori stays insistent on sealing the deal with Iku and suggests they find a place, even a love hotel, to go to soon. She’s still very shaken by the close call, however, and worries that their parents ever finding out will mean them being separated forever. Tensions are very uneasy between the two the next day, and they come to a head when she discovers that Yori has slept with his girlfriend, Iku’s friend Tomoka. Enraged, she later decides to start dating Nakamura.

A couple of things to note so far; to a degree, Yori does admit that he’s a terrible person…..but that doesn’t stop him from continuing to be terrible.

Yori is really violent when people even get a little close to Iku or if they make the slightest crude comment in her direction. He is more than adamant about not letting any guy ever be her boyfriend or, worse, having sex with her. They dedicate a whole splash page to him yelling internally that it would be completely unforgivable for such a thing to happen.

We get a flashback of why Yori is dating Tomoka in the first place. She had a crush on Yori for a long time and continuously tried to get him to accept her feelings, but he wouldn’t. When she finally realized that he liked another girl, she decided to offer herself up as a substitute. Yori, filled with sexual tension and no outlet besides his handy dandy hand, decides to accept Tomoka’s offer and they go to a love hotel to have sex. The whole time, Yori is imagining doing everything to Iku and sadly admits that doing it with a substitute isn’t enough nor is trying to love someone else in Iku’s place. But he continued to date her for release and possibly to keep up appearances.

He doesn’t even get through this sex scene without being creepy. He clasps his hand over Tomoka’s mouth to prevent her from making noise since he knows hearing her voice and not Iku’s will ruin the illusion. Tomoka’s doing this of her own free will, so to each his own, but still.

Back to the present, Nakamura and Tomoka decide to have lunch with Iku and start talking about the physical stuff Tomoka and Yori have been doing. Yori interrupts them just as Tomoka starts explaining what Yori’s like in bed. Ya know, even if they weren’t romantically involved, who wants to talk to their lover’s sister about how good their brother is in bed? He tells her to knock it off since he broke up with her and that he has a girl he likes, one that is the only one for him.

He turns his attention to Nakamura, who has done absolutely nothing, and grabs him by the shirt. Nakamura calls Yori ‘Big brother’ I guess because he either sees him that way as a long time classmate or because he’s dating Iku, and Yori tells him if he ever calls him that again, he’ll kill him. I have no doubt he would really keep that promise. Yori grasps Iku’s hand so hard when he’s yelling at Nakamura that he visibly hurts her.

After this, he drags her into the science room, plops her on the floor with her begging him to stop and he just tells her to shut up and starts forcibly kissing her again.

Possible continued emotional manipulation; Yori says he can’t and won’t stop pursuing her, because if he let her go, he’d die. Like I mentioned before, on an emotional level, Iku’s main role in this relationship is fueled by her fear of losing Yori if she doesn’t respond to his advances. Saying he’ll die if he can’t be with Iku is a really extreme way of instilling that fear even further.

Also, is he even really serious? Because going to a faraway school and planning on likely never seeing Iku again is basically purposely ‘letting go’ of her. Unless he was going off to some fancy school to die.

After Yori and Iku talk some more, they make up and Iku even starts initiating some of the kissing before they nearly get caught and stop.

Oh, by the way, for anyone patting Iku on the back for dating someone else after all this, she was only pretending to date Nakamura for the sake of pissing off Yori as retaliation for him dating Tomoka. She is such a passive sack of useless.

Yori, I really think you have a problem.

Oh goody, now we’re getting to some Iku creepiness. We see Iku giggling and learn that she’s super excited because Yori said he’d die without her and only her, then she flips because the same can be said of her.

Being reminded of Tomoka, she drags Yori away to a love hotel and begs him to have sex with her, to make him hers, and to allow her to know him in a way that Tomoka knows him. Yori actually doesn’t want to have sex in the love hotel because he wants their first time to be in some place romantic and special…..Pbbbbbbtttttt Yori, what are you smoking? You delusional liar. He’s damn near had sex with her in –

a church,

their bunk beds

the shower

their bunk beds again

a train

the bathroom

a science lab.

I’m pretty sure he’d plow her behind a dumpster at a Taco Bell up until this point. NOW he’s all picky and worried about making it special for her?

To be fair, she is actually the one initiating everything and Yori does ask her many times if she wants him to stop and she keeps saying ‘no.’….However, I am still very uneasy about this scene. She’s still very scared, which I suppose is normal for any soon-to-be-not-virgin, but I still feel like she’s just doing this to stake a claim on Yori. Like she still feels threatened by Tomoka possibly taking Yori away because they’ve had sex and Iku hasn’t done it with Yori yet. She likely sees it as Tomoka having a higher claim on Yori than she does, and she won’t have that. I’m not even reading too much into that either because she basically admits that as the reason. She’s jealous that Tomoka had sex with Yori so she wants to have sex in the same type of location doing the same things they did. That’s not having sex for love, that’s having sex for possessiveness.

In the end:

ROUND TWO WINNER: ANIME

I was really on the fence about this volume’s winner. The only major point of difference is the inclusion of Nakamura. Iku never gave a crap about Nakamura and was purely using him for the sake of making Yori jealous so that went nowhere. The whole thing with Yori and Tomoka and Iku and Nakamura at this point really just seems to be accentuating how frighteningly possessive Yori is, which just makes him look worse.

Yori really was bad enough in the OVA, but he cannot go one chapter without either thinking something incredibly creepy, doing something frightening or forcibly molesting his sister. He only had a couple of these instances in the OVA due to time constraints, so, by all means, the anime wins this round.

Next volume, do Yori and Iku do the do at the love hotel?

AniManga Clash! Boku Wa Imouto Ni Koi Wa Suru (Volume 2) Plot: Yori and Iku have a falling out after Iku learns that Yori has slept with her friend Tomoka, who was being a stand-in for Iku in order for Yori to have a sexual outlet for his feelings.