“Lets herself go” is exactly what I’d say is happening to Morimori. I’ve been watching Netjuu and while it’s not my favorite of the season (ImoSae is by far my favorite) I think there’s a lot to be said about this show.
This reminds me a lot of another anime I watched recently: Re:LIfe. There is an element of fancy that largely sets on a mundane configuration that makes more sense as J-drama material than anime would. In this case, it’s probably easier to do a MMORPG look in anime than it would with live actors, and on a certain level anime and voice acting do a better job than, say, showing the same deadpan shock face of Aragaki or something.
I think what makes Netjuu work is not just the delightful voice acting that Evirus pointed out (and it’s not just Noto and Ueda, much of the cast is good as well, but man are those two great like this), but it’s a nice headtrick compared to the other video games relationship stories of recent. Gamers is the one that sticks out to me, and along those lines there are others you can think of, probably. It’s cliche to have a romance budding from MMORPG buddies–10 years too late I’d say–but in some ways the deal of having an ikemen becoming interested in you to begin with out of a chance encounter, and then having to overcome that l33t NEET barrier is what drives, well, mainstream hits like Densha Otoko. It’s a makeover. It’s just nice that gaming is so in nowadays!
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Related to my last post, check out ChaosT’s post on Sakura Quest, as if you didn’t watch the show. There are a few other notes I want to drop, mainly on immigration and population growth.
Using USA as an anecdote, population growth by demo generally slant towards immigrant sectors. I think the trend globally has been that towards established economies, population growth via natural birth have slowed when breaking into demographics and ignoring immigrants.
From an outsider point of view, it’s a no brainer as to what’s happening to Japan. Maybe nobody really knows why some people stop having so many kids or whatever, and this is something that could be caused by varying things differently for different people groups. And maybe it’s not satisfactory to just call Japan’s isolationist and xenophobic tendencies as “racism.” It’s a lot deeper than that term now has come to mean things. I can only speak for myself, but the feeling has long been that some of the people of Japan would rather perish than to change their ways, and now they are getting their wish. It’s a form of racism, I suppose, but it’s not really about discrimination, and it’s not even an unwillingness to compromise–it’s more like they’re unable to seek alternatives. It’s like a form of racial segregation gone wrong, or in evolutionary terms, when a society or set of cultural customs become unable to change in a way to continue its existence, it will eventually goes away and become extinct.
It’s not insidious per se. It’s like in a hypothetical world where everyone rides buses, only white people can sit in front of buses. Unfortunately for the hypothetical bus riders, it turns out sitting in the back of the bus drastically improves your survival rate in bus accidents, and these buses have accidents all the time. And the hypothetical people deciding who gets to sit where on the bus aren’t evil about discriminating against non-whites, compared to their greater desires to have white people sit in front of the bus for some other reasons not connected to continuous survival of white people in this example. Hopefully the people in this hypothetical can take a lesson from Sakura Quest and get bus-on-demand via their iOS apps; the racism can be dealt with later when people stop dying.
