October 2009

Ikki Tousen: Xross Impact

I take it this will delight fans of the game. I'm referring to the 'fight til your clothes drop' game series called Ikki Tousen. Yea, it's a one-on-one fighting game where the clothes tear off show skin rather stragetically. You can see how this one developed a fan following. Oh and did I mention that most of the fighters are girls in short skirts and big boobs? And as you guessed, there is quite a bit of boob mechanics involved in this game.

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Kisuke Urahara

My friends and I were discussing this recent, rather controversial study about the pill changing the laws of attraction. According to this study, women on the pill don't flock around macho men who speak in gruff voices and flex their muscles every few minutes. Rather, apparently they are more likely to go for the androgynous males. I did say this is a controversial study and I don't necessarily think that this is a bad feature or that the pill is to blame (hello, maybe the social trends and value placed on different occupations have more to do with this than anything else?).

Our discussion led to listing all the effeminate males in manga or anime who make women's heart go pitter-patter. After all, if you think about it, there is a greater variety in how a male attractiveness is depicted in a lot of manga/anime series. There is no set mold where the male characters adhere to a strict set of macho traits as is the case of a number of Western comics or animated shows (do note, a lot of Western shows do this but, to be fair, not all of them are guilty of such stereotyping). In Japanese geek culture, a male character's personality is less rigid, less like a traditional male model than say Solid Snake. Furthermore, women readers of manga support and rally around either the androgynous males or the males expressing more emotions (thus, portraying them in what the folks behind that study would call a feminine role).

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