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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • The tl;dr is “Yui x Ritsu”

    The slightly longer story is that if you watch K-On! while really trying to overinterpret every interaction and assume more stuff is happening off-screen, a few romantic dynamics develop, with Yui x Ritsu being the most obvious.

    The full story is 13+ charts and an 8 page writeup that I did as a personal project to justify this overinterpretation. I may post it somewhere if I ever decide to clean it up and make it presentable to the public eye, but there’s a lot in there. Ui x Nodoka. The Azusa->Yui->Ui and Jun->Mio->Azusa parallel. Yui-Mugi breakup arc. The Azusa human instrumentality arc.
    My friends have called me schizophrenic for making these charts and while I don’t agree with their non-clinical use of the word “schizophrenic”, you should know that when I say “speculative / non-obvious” for K-On! in particular, it’s at about that level of extreme interpretation.


  • Cardcaptor Sakura, Princess Tutu, Toradora!, Maison Ikkoku, Chuunibyou, and Kare Kano are all contenders. If I can expand to speculative / non-obvious romance, then K-On!, Hidamari Sketch, Hibike! Euphonium, and Bocchi the Rock! are also up there.

    Overall, the main couple from Cardcaptor Sakura may be my favorite, just extremely cute and well-paced. Miya & Yuno from Hidamari Sketch are also a really great couple.
    Also, shoutouts to this guy who did an extreme overanalysis of how gay Hidamari Sketch is.



  • I have some screen recording software on my computer that I occasionally accidentally leave running. One time, without knowing that I was recording myself, I ended up watching a whole movie with my friends, so the whole movie and our conversations were recorded.

    A couple years later I found the video file and decided to rewatch the movie via the recording I took, so I was also hearing my conversations from the past.

    So many times during the movie rewatch, I would come up with the exact same response in the conversation just before or after my past recorded self would say the same thing.




  • Also, I don’t think anybody honestly believes the argument that it is immoral to have children “without their consent.” The idea that you cannot do anything to someone else without their consent is a very useful idea in 95% of situations, and this is clearly one in which it does not apply. I did not consent to being born, but I would have if I could. Imagine a bureaucracy in which to apply for a passport, you needed to have an existing passport. It just doesn’t work. I can see the logic, but the idea has failed on a functional level. You can apply this to anything and make fake disingenuous arguments for any cause: “I don’t think we should elect a president unless they’ve already been president before. I think it’s a role where you absolutely need to have prior experience.” “You need to consent before being born. Since it’s impossible to do so, I guess it’s just immoral to have children.” See: Catch-22.

    It is more difficult to have children now than it was 20, 40, 60 years ago. Some people feel the need to further justify their decision by convincing themselves that would be immoral to do anything else.











  • As someone who actually did learn Japanese through watching anime, it took me about 3 years. I started watching anime regularly in 2018 and when I was watching Hori-san to Miyamura-kun in 2021, the last two episodes had not been subtitled, so I watched them raw and mostly understood it.

    A lot of people will say that it’s impossible to learn just via watching anime, but have not actually tried it. Yes, if you have subtitles on, it’s easy to let yourself totally ignore the Japanese. But it’s not impossible, and if you are focused, you can still learn even with subs turned on.

    Later on, I started taking classes in Japanese at college and started learning a lot more. But just knowledge from watching anime was enough to pass an oral placement test and skip the first 2 semesters. If you are serious about learning Japanese, I recommend taking classes or studying it seriously online. There’s also better input resources than anime such as streamers or even conversation analysis audio for linguistics research.

    But I am convinced that anime is still a very good tool because many people like anime and are already very motivated to watch it. This is a very big strength because the biggest obstacle to learning language is giving up. This, combined with Japanese’s very very simple grammar and verb conjugations actually makes it a very easy language to learn, imo.