yotsuba blue archive
one thing that can be fun to track the appearances of in anime, like clock pillow shots or ojou laughs or burger girls, is bulletin boards. while we once had shows that relied very obviously on 2ch as a plot device or for gags, more nebulous social media platforms or white label video sites have largely supplanted those uses. for some sense of my gut feeling on this, mekakucity actors and the rest of shaft’s prior heyday I suspect have a relatively high concentration of fake bulletin boards.
food court de mata ashita, broadcast this summer, is a modern abnormality. besides having the restraint to aim for a modest six episodes instead of a full cour, it’s amazingly proud of its dryness and KFC placements. it’s also one of the few modern invokes of 2ch, made more anachronistic with it shown being browsed by a cute JK. wada, an emphatic shitposter, seemingly leaves no platform unturned for pithy arguments, no matter how expired. perhaps more to the point is that she also celebrates characters with cake, which used to be the standard measure of nijikon love before whaling.
there is an operating difference between 2ch, far more likely to host arguments about food courts, and any other bulletin board, but it pretty universally does not matter to foreign audiences when 4chan is the overriding point of reference. for someone that can parse the difference between 2ch and futaba, or even textboards and imageboards in general, it is a little more informative than slipping an A113 in somewhere. akane preferring futaba over 5ch and superfes over wonfes in gridman makes her a believably smelly kaiju otaku. panty and stocking is clearly angling 4chan even without the theming, though it’s mostly informed succeeding little witch academia putting a blue board on display with a red text banner that was probably begging for new janitors.
studio trigger having a storied history with bulletin boards, or even this style of reference, shouldn’t register as all that surprising. while 4chan wasn’t wholy responsible for the success of little witch academia’s crowdfunder, a common perception was that it had an outsized role in funding it in under six hours. tattun, trigger’s head of socials that posted during the TV broadcast run with a verified capcode, is probably the closest /a/ has gotten to ever actually understanding any part of the production process. there are good nuggets found buried in these posts, like the color of his pantsu and that everyone knows yoshinari mogs, but they are mostly incidental. the chain of custody for this participation is clear: one bilingual man connected to some of the greatest talents in animation wanted to hug diana and probe barbara’s butt on a mongolian basket-weaving forum.
Chammys are 2cute. Gonna save up gems for them.
>tfw furry gatcha lasts 2 weeks
show by rock, then, would be qualified as a solar flare event that arrived without warning. studio bones is certainly not without link to the west, though retoree probably lacks a good english contact that will tell her she needs to be 18 to browse sb69chan. while this level of reference would usually be enough to leave alone, these posts were triangulated to a throwaway three reply sequence on /a/ that was made the day before this episode’s broadcast, down to the quote links and analogous thumbnails. either this is all a cosmic coincidence of monkeys like wada at typewriters, or “kawaiiyone” is the divine translation for 2cute that no one else is exploiting with a needed attention today. while I imagine someone more sakuga-brained may be able to comb the episode credits for a reasonable suspect, the mystery, at this point, seems better fermented in anonymity.
this was all fairly quickly noticed after broadcast. futaba was looped in for the cultural exchange. 4channers opened up dev tools and performed their best faithful recreation in a translation party. for as brightly as this flare burned for that day or two, it was a brief celebration with local impact. otaku creatives, being down in the hole with the rest of us, do seem to thrive on being in this sort of winking conversation with fans. mostly, I’m thankful for what is allowed to rest as dusty triviaーwe no longer want or need to fantasize about how a big flare over trivia can break the grid.
