accepting the decay of niconico, treading in amber, also requires contextualizing that nico actually does still exist, despite the rallying cry from loyalists when it first returned from the blacksuit hack two years ago. part of the reason I have been reluctant to document more of the decay, besides my own disappointment with the platform, is that the trajectory has not had particularly amazing contours to discuss on the ride down. to experience nico at most points since its return, particularly from overseas, is a misery. nicopedia, one of the more useful primary sources for subculture research and one this site has leaned heavily on, fell behind a geofence earlier this year. unlike the nico seiga block before, which was at least granted a notice stashed on a help page, the restriction was only something I was able to verify through a support email chain. the pain this has pooled with me, as the last overseas user that subscribes to premium, is undoubtedly a rounding error that didn’t deserve even this much recognition. more difficult to accept, to the tune of premium subscribers hemorrhaging below a million total, is the bulldozing of tens of thousands of videos in the name of moral standards.

product managers miraculously do still work for dwango, which is finally starting to ship new wrinkles. this month saw the soft launches of both nico shorts, approximately five years too late to feature any cosplay beauties hitting the 踊ってみた, and AI comment agents that have been seized on by the inmu factions with the deepest-rooted brainworms. shorts are, depending on your charity, a lazy clone or a play to reclaim some of the portal site supremacy that once drove japanese web services to grow. truly new functions, and not shufflings and sunsets, are rare enough from nico that the appetite to compete on the merits, by delivering on feature parity and satisfying whatever users are diligently filling in feedback forms, is truly an unusual play for them to run. given that we are two weeks out from the launch and I’ve already found myself exhausted of shorts to watch, thirty second cuts of vocaloid PVs might be outflanked anyway by the distilled allure of sopranos clips and vox pop captured with a lapel mic.

having stochastic parrots run across the site as first-class users, both inmu fans and AI comment agents, is strangely forward-facing for what we should accept is the actual medium-term trajectory of all online networks. most large platforms, we mostly already accept with some disdain, are overrun with bots and agents. youtube has not yet had the same courage to accept that bots may one day do our commenting and watching for us entirely, likely because it is still the breadwinner to verifiably human attention. by most measures, nico has always been comment gore, and much of the functionality and behaviors one would now assign to the identity of the site were seeded from participants that internalized themselves as outcasts willing to fill text boxes with just about anything, so it is not difficult to understand the enthusiasm to grease the gears this way. nico, now filling the void to pretend there is activity on it worth caring about, has a freedom to rediscover itself as this sort of freak show, one that layers comments over videos and has paginated search results, if it accepts that it already has little to lose by faffing about. faffing about, unfortunately, is not cash flow positive, or entirely reassuring to premium users like me that feel as though they are accepting a PNG award for being the biggest sucker alive. when a hole is filled with garbage, I would usually prefer turning away from the garbage, rather than diving head first into a landfill.

chokaigi, the super festival that puts its best foot forward as a celebration of all things nico, has been spared from these discomforts. when you forget the premium subscriber bleed and the payment processors feuds, it actually took on more sponsors than ever this year and was sanitized enough to be powered (again) by visa, after it had absconded with JCB. for every year I have tuned in to multi-stream drift the weekend, it is a reminder of the heights that nico can reach when it takes serious aim at being a celebration of creators and free culture, even as the event has scaled back, likely because it can pull on influencers further out of its orbit than the ones that directly interact with it and also because it has lived long enough to diverge from the site itself. two-day events at the makuhari messe stroking nostalgia, able to deftly weave hare hare yukai and bon odori, do not have to contend with tech debt or attempting to court uploaders to the creators support program. ZUN beer doesn’t spoil when the man drunkenly sips it while dancing along to paranoia. hiroyuki, too, will gladly show up for any chance to schmooze for a camera, even when his audiences course through youtube or traditional broadcast and he has been less than shy to spit on his video service failson. that any event anywhere in the current micro-audience landscape, past the expiry of the vidcons and ROFLcons that made attempts at celebrating a collective net culture, manages to slot vtuber foot bath consultations into the timetable without seeming too weird speaks to an overarching endurance and quirkiness that lacks representation elsewhere. for a longevity not too far off from the site itself, back to far more innocent and crude fads unencumbered by discourses du jour, it is a touch impressive that it manages to preach sincerity for bizarre and disparate net cultures while also avoiding being entirely cloying or cynical of them.

warm fuzzies for what is operatively a 2008 class reunion can carry you quite far, up to hiroyuki having to perform his best george bush shoe dodge this year. despite that it is sometimes difficult to judge who the event is really targeted towards, attendance has actually crawled out of a post-corona hole that dwango really wants you to know is bucking trends seen on the site itself. while I’ve suggested before that nico has focused its retention efforts on festival events, chokaigi is a reminder for how much physical events are also a credence to the approach, particularly when the grand narrative around online subcultures has coagulated almost entirely around virtual spaces. the last decade has decayed online platforms as destinations, with links no longer having an effective currency that makes them powerful enough to overcome platform incumbents. comparison shopping of different federated wastelands, we would be honest to admit, has an appeal that will always be limited to the type of person that chews the fat, the way only eventers might harangue the makuhari flatlands being a default venue for large events like chokaigi when it is simply an average of conveniences. youtube might not have scrolling comments, or a pizza command, but it does have edge cache servers that do not buffer at the fear of seeks during playback.

if you are a concerned netizen that wishes more people would move against the axis of digital evil, or you are a suit in the marginal digital services division of kadokawa fighting for relevance, it is foolish to believe that migratory patterns can take flight on the web now as swiftly as they may have when services like plurk and friendfeed were things worth going to bat for. the soreness of a falling bluesky, or whatever a nostr instance is, have been dogged by this reality to an extreme that I frankly underestimated would be enabled by polite company that can simply shrug off the harms weaponized by the largest platform incumbents. physical manifests like chokaigi and creator cross are, when I have stewed more on their cadence and their value anchored to a failing website, an optimistic hedge on a future for platforms that is also being expressed in vocacolle and nico’s other digital festivals: users assembling when the occasion meaningfully prompts them to, rather than as aimless daily routine. dwango has competitive leverage here against platforms that have already “right-sized” the humans and difficulty of physical logistics out of their processes. whether there is enough clarity to apply this vision with a full depth, or if the creatively-titled japan music vocaloid powered by dwango heading to los angeles is afforded mostly by the japan creator support slush fund, is an opportunity that largely rests with dwango’s management seeing enough sunlight to guide people out of algorithmic spirals and dark forests online. mentions of expansion in kadokawa’s IR reports, likely really aimed only at satisfying a line item about global presence, have so far chosen to sit on vocaloid’s silver age as this potential path out. forgive me, rattling in my geofence cages and trying to convince a new generation of hungry overseas vocaloid fans that vocacolle actually exists, for being more than a touch skeptical.

chokaigi alone, after the ZUN beer hangover, is unlikely to reverse the health of nico’s vitals. part of the demotivation encoded in the modern web is that comsuming an abundance of outputs, now able to be summoned in our own personal realities, can feel more enriching to our time and efforts than the prospect of planting kusa or pissing into an ocean with a blog post that no one will read. nico’s bet, in part, is that a little bit of generated piss is as much a part of assembling the ambiance in an old metropolis to a degree that will excite creatives to return, in some cases now sitting at the top of billboard charts with a longing for its past glory. safer engineering may be more difficult to achieve, with some understanding that closing maintenance tasks does not win over users or mend a well-deserved reputation for rot. away from agile development, the events teams within dwango is where you can find the grit actually building and maintaining the relationships that allow it to cosplay as a creative force. for the loyalists pissing away paid annual subscriptions on being able to resume playback and a watch history that lasts for a whole 180 days, a chance to remind people with a high-profile event that nico has not yet succumbed is an excitement itself.

there is not really a tremendous solidity to theory crafting against platforms, or that kadokawa has a compass stronger than the threat of their next activist investor. still, the dynamic enveloping the ruins of nico today is, plainly, weird and scatterbrained. nico historically has been at its most fun when it has stumbled, or been forced to discover creative band-aids. if fan festivals and doujin fairs adorning the dwango name are the next international frontier, then I will surely continue to also look forward to peering through the VPN slit to observe VIRTUAL SEX jokes, for reasons that remain inexplicable to every party involved. there’s still hope that I might see it all explode spectacularly some day soon.

from overseas, it can be difficult to accept that comiket is a physical gathering when most of our contact with it is limited to the spoils that end up scanned, or more recently, ripped from digital storefronts. if you are more plugged into the japanese artist starter pack, then you likely have some familiarity with how deeply comiket relies on physical logistics from the number of booth display setups that will flood your timelines on event days. as the battle hymn does go, everyone is a participant at comiket. lottery applications must be distributed and processed so booth space can be assigned. masking tape surveying must be exact so there is a clear origin point for the grid of tables that will fill those spaces. circles must arrange for timely delivery of books and navigate line management as they process cash transactions or bumble with monacoin, all while respecting that tablecloths can exceed no more than five centimeters of droopage. attendees outside of this early entry class, however, can generally remain focused on the mission: sit on asphalt parking lots and do your very best not to die out on the battlefield.

while attendance has transformed rather dramatically in recent years, most people determined to attend comiket are generally not to be deterred by the extremes of weather, but will still find it colors the experience overall. comiket in its modern scheduling, starting from the harumi fairgrounds, established the pattern where you will once bake in the august heat and grimace against chilling winds in december each year. much the way event rules and guidelines have become studied documents, bracing for weather still ensnares small talk for even otaku. on 5ch, where humans once gathered, one thread collected predictions on what the weather for the upcoming C70 might be like. ignoring that the first reply questioned why the thread was made at all, or that such an open inquiry of expertise now would be saved for a kalshi bet, comiket’s online after reports stretching back to C60 do not shy away from qualifying themselves more as weather reports. a long-standing legend has held that the supernatural power of the otaku has always parted the clouds so that most days of comiket are sunny. in exchange for this power, C60 and seemingly every summer comiket report beyond has lead with a note about another scorching heat wave and how many attendees required first aid from heat stroke that year. if there is any doubt about the wallop punched by a tokyo summer, pulling down daily records from meteostat confirms that you should expect summer comiket to crack 30°C and not uncommonly kiss 35°C or higher.

despite the usual otaku irreverance, comiket’s attention to heat and health in after reports is a responsibility that is typical of how much the preparatory committee does till their history. while the beats specific to each comiket can blur before they are even discarded, C42 is still colloquially recognized as the “genocide comiket” from the hundreds of attendees that year requiring attention from heat stroke due to long entry queues. although most people will consider the gamera dome most iconic to the harumi fairgrounds, which comiket would continue to expand its use of as it grew during this era, most of these incidents were concentrated to the second floor of the lesser thought of new hall. with poor ventilation and unusually clear skies this event period thanks to a typhoon that had veered off course from tokyo, new hall’s second floor was tropical enough that oxygen tanks were prepared beforehand and the tatami room with the best AC was reserved only to help people get just well enough to walk out upright.

the conditions in new hall should not have been a surprise to veterans by this point. although it lacks a grand title, or in some cases is even complicated as being the original genocide comiket, C34’s extreme heat as it returned to the harumi fairgrounds made sure that the second floor was called out directly in comiket’s official chronology. in tall tales of combat regaled by veterans, C34 would be the first time that a cloud of visible condensation could be seen hanging over the crowds, with C42 sighting the phenomenon after. by the C43 catalog, all of this mythos had calcified into the comiket cloud (コミケ雲) being a rare weather event, not unlike thundersnow, that had to be seen to be believed. in the sweaty fog of war, there is always uncertainty about the death toll of fallen soldiers that were dumped into tokyo bay. generations onwards, when the memory of your sweat mixing with blood has taken on the cloud instead, the suffering will instead be commemorated with a confectionary that recognizes a golden jubilee of lining up early for captain tsubasa comics.

without access to a full archive of comiket’s earlier catalogs, and because comiket’s online after reports beginning inside big sight do so often emphasize extreme heat, aligning the data does give sense of the actual sweats outside of the drumbeat. initial reports like C62’s emphasized that the early years of big sight were graced by cloudy weather, with the fact that heat being the biggest problem that year suggested there were no other major issues to mention. C64 again skirted a typhoon and brought milder temperatures, but only because a full slate of rainy days was, to the color of this after report and the abridged description in the chronology, the worst weather in comiket’s history. the color almost certainly has as much to do with not wanting to be wet dogs as it does with scrambling to find blankets and hot drinks, absent the summer heat you had prepared for by stockpiling cooling pads. the diversion of rations was probably missed by C67, when the first day dumped enough snow to shift delivery schedules to a rainy day pattern and threatened to strand attendees arriving by the yurikamome and rinkai lines¹.

comiket inside this century should be qualified as a mature event. with an old guard that values the heritage, the ability to adapt to the suite of pressures squeezing comiket is what has most enabled its longevity. C72 reminded staff that an incredibly hot summer was still possible at big sight by giving a truck heat stroke, but it also exhibits many of the lessons that were learned inside C42 by it being cited directly in this report. anticipating a heat wave, coupled with an ongoing moe boom that was quickly establishing big sight with a burgeoning seichi, first aid moved into a space double its usual size and a paid rest area was established for the first time to accommodate still one of comiket’s largest surges in attendance. C84 found itself in the middle of a heat wave that swept record highs and death counts across japan, along with the peak of a new posting heat dome that brought with it a new opportunity to bitch in the heat alongside the usual diary entries and blog posts. sustaining highs above 40°C each day, a regular customary reading from one outlet was able to record an unfathomable 43°C from the rooftop exhibition era. inside, the ghost of harumi’s past returned and photographic evidence of a comiket cloud was captured for the first time. first aid areas again overflowed. a few iterations later and a venue change wiser, however, staff had now buttoned up emergency procedures: besides the addition of even more drink trucks in the east parking lot and more cooling mist fans throughout corridors, first aid could be reallocated to staff waiting rooms. C84, despite any gripes of the otaku sweating out their shirts and potentially thousands of the fallen, reportedly ended with fewer hospitalization incidents than C42. today, it can mostly be feigned glibly as a battle scar, or evaporate and condense again in the media cycle as a soft science.

touring comiket over a weather log may be an admittedly narrow attention, with the chart being no less immune to asterisks and daggers. much as the sun will come up to sweat you tomorrow morning, the regularness of the heartbeat is useful for an event capturing so many different heartbeats, particularly as I could anchor it from the many times I have consulted after reports. comiket is still cherished to this minutiae, logged to metadata so that genre code lovers can accelerate the perpetual motion of contents panics and smears. while it has not yet receded to a counterculture where doujinshi is not the backbone of multi-national companies, comiket has undergone tremendous internal and external pressures, though perhaps with no more of a vocal critique that it is outmoded than since its covid shakeups. physical books do not enjoy the benefit of other analog booms when paper is heavy to any download. broadcast anime run for shorter lengths compromised to a single cour and earn less fixation as they are rotated for a new seasonal harvest. wall circles have abandoned event distribution to enjoy far greater spoils, without the nag of non-profit celibacy or being confined to a strict medium, from fielding skeb requests or by selling goods on booth. as female-oriented genres still flee into regional events, leaving a remaining core of coagulating male genres and aging participants, it is also more fair to judge that doujinshi is being decoupled from a large tent like comiket so that it can sprout events that better match the contents fauna of online creatives. many of the adaptations comiket has taken on to ensure its survival, caught between the miyazaki murders and being kicked from the messe, are entirely vestigial to these new realities. if you can arrive at asking why circles for male-oriented genres are typically scheduled to the last day, it may or may not be surprising to discover that it is a defacto policy of the preparatory committee to not negatively impact circles and attendees on the preceding days.

comiket, as it has always competed for turf, still reserves agency in how it can navigate unprecedented shifts. some of the question marks it must now confront, like a generative AI crowding out other expressions, may one day (not quite today) require a stronger arm of restrictions than its current ethos clings to. others are a trickle that have now built into cascading shutdowns of specialist print shops², disrupted by online festivals that never end. comiket may be famous for its flexibility given the circumstances, but the choice to adapt on these questions would likely be a worse poison than allowing itself to fade away with pride. the smaller touches it does tweak like cooling fans and rest areas, or bombshells like ticketed entry, are still not without their worth in nudging against force majeure. smaller satellite events with less weight to throw around when confronting these pressures should hopefully realize that comiket may currently take on their effects more often, but it is also more likely to absorb the blows on a longer term where it survives because of its sheer size.

comiket’s after reports, from which it is possible to sift passion from procedure, were all written by yonezawa yoshihiro, one of comiket’s co-founders, until his death in 2006³. twenty years on, it is not entirely challenging to imagine how he may have thought of the retreat of large-scale doujinshi into more insular crowdfunding and satellite events when the discontinuation of manga magazines like COM in the 70s had pushed experimental manga underground. yoshihiro was not able to steward comiket through the moe boom that gave it new global profile, and yet the continuity of the after reports that have succeeded him have not broken on cadence or tone. the institutional memory, much as I try to parse the aliases of legends that steered it in its infancy from retellings of retellings in online accounts, remains with the rank and file comiket participants that carry his legacy. each report, invariably, will still have small talk to say about the weather and the way the winds are blowing. the struggle for survival on this battlefield, in the new theater of the attention economy, should still brace to one day crawl through deployment in a new sweat of war.

hare hare yukai will soon be a two decade old song. surely this does also mean haruhi is a two decade old anime, but I don’t need to pretend there’s a cultural footprint where there is none to inspect. haruhi after her disappearance is, appropriately, a franchise missing in action, except when it is a carted out for another kadokawa light novel showcase or cast stage event. besides the meta of it being the most common answer to queries for once popular and now forgotten shows, I don’t really see myself disagreeing with the popular assessment when the pachinko heatlamp burnt out over a decade ago and my phone is permanently on vibrate now. we should, however, keep some perspective that even expired memes like this would still make it about twenty million times more remembered than any digipaint show that is now stuck in standard definition.

assessing hare hare yukai might validate the quip without a need for any funny accounting. the choreography was probably always going to enjoy some reappraisal on tiktok, even if we weren’t sure people in the future were going to find money in performing dance covers online. to its full historical breadth, it amped up japan’s streaming video boom through bedrooms and akiba flash mobs, enough to become a feature to almost every popularly recognized kumikyoku. when many radio ranking shows at the time were doing their best to ignore anison, the single punched into a top 5 slot on the oricon charts. while you might be troubled to pull on these threads directly when confronting haruhi as a forgotten franchise, the heisei nostalgia compilations and camcorder footage from the last gasps of civic freedom that are being trudged up are very real and very everywhere, even when the coinages like エモガキ following them aren’t. when haruhi itself only manages to land in its shadow with 3DCG mocapped dance mush, I imagine whoever was sent down to the kadokawa basement to steward it must find some sick joy in twisting the knife further on its best legacy. twisting the knife is, after all, a yamakan speciality that doesn’t quit.

yamakan’s trademark, when you can separate the art from the shithead, is nailing the physicality in dance choreography. although I have seen it suggested that yamakan hates having himself labeled with a narrow legacy as the haruhi dance guy, when he has always wanted to be anime’s white knight by announcing his retirement for a fifth time, he does seem to wear it with enough pride to seize opportunity over it. by 2010, he was hosting “yamakan dance night”¹ and invoking himself as “the director of haruhi” in commercials for his first live action film, enough that it allegedly caught kadokawa’s ire. characters have of course been dancing in endings since at least urusei yatsura and tokimeki tonight, and any haruhi mook will already tell you that the decision to make haruhi dance was inspired by hare guu, but the follow-ups by yamakan in kannagi and lucky star absolutely center the modern concentration where every show must have a tiktok exploitable. unsurprisingly, yamakan has a big mouth that doesn’t shut up and has more to say on the matter, which is for once valuable for more than an eye roll: hare hare yukai’s inspiration actually goes back even further to kodocha’s ultra relax.

even though hare guu isn’t necessarily an incomplete trace for yamakan, given the episodes he directed for it and kyoani’s coupling to shin-ei, ultra relax does feel like more of a rosetta stone. this is less because it is a prototypical example of dance in a fixed perspective and more that it was clearly geared for imitation, now that I’ve collected three anecdotes, along with yamakan’s, of university clubs performing it for MADs on film or tape. dance is of course a social communication, and therefore it has always been a potential pathway to online collaboration and community, but the social functions of digital communities still require a discovery even when they may be low-hanging fruit. the surviving example with a light evangelion parody by dentsuudai maniken (電通大まにけん), UEC’s anime and manga club, I am pleased to say finds itself surrounded by plenty of hare hare yukai videos as one of the earliest uploads on nico tagged with 踊ってみた. while dance covers have of course exploded outward on the web, treating nico as the site of their collaborative cambrian explosion would not necessarily be an excessive fanfare. taking the trace back even further² to entirely different and longer-living collaborative cultures, exhibited by videos like this one, I still find useful when revisiting these brightline certainties.

the act of this video’s creation itself, and the bravery to shake your butt on gainax’s stoop, is of course a courage that deserves the majority of its kudos, but to publish without specific aim or goal and even only a nebulous sense of audience I characterize as closer to a philanthropy. the participants in these activities, in this case faffing in circles with their friends and digitizing the results for filesharing, aren’t performing a unique or virtuous homesteading. while I know they would not accept the laude I am heaping here tying them to a larger cultural moment, certain examinations, at least this close to their emergent digital mediums, currently do require a mania that can appreciate camgirls as an amateurization of media rather than a cheap smut. when we do advance the social contagion of the haruhi dance back onto CPDRC inmates and stay home calisthenics, or dance apps that have become the new propaganda, the anthropological digs that reveal these links are more valuable with the elevation. throwaway uploads to sites treated as file lockers, or casual forum discussions aired in public, are challenging to convince to participants and hosts that they are not entirely disposable artifacts without the fanfare, but even alone they are still the untapped proof for digital legacies. to the right person, the web that they are buried under is still accessible to the voyeur, and the artifacts remain available enough that there is an entertaining challenge to be had in the dig for things like scanning haruhi’s legacy, even if only to model the trash we think is the coolest. much of the freedom left to find in the web, I have found, is in excavating this trash: wiser wielders of this power may use it to navigate truth in digital goon hazes, rather than spend their time watching haruhi dances, but the paths to both walk along similar trails.

any number of tours over personalities or their popular artifacts will tell you that it is generally presumptive to suggest your own cultural longevity, with very few exceptions. yamakan, as late as 2012, has naturally preferred to boast that nothing may ever surpass the haruhi dance, if you can forget that most of the choreography was already borrowed. given that he has been effectively blacklisted and shamed out of the industry, for reasons too perverse and sprawling to enumerate here, I instead counter that yamakan will now never surpass anything other than an ability to dig a deeper hole for himself. undoubtedly, the conditions for media today do make it difficult to imagine an equivalent dance could seep as fully into our cultural watershed, but to suggest you sit on top of the last mountain is both a special arrogance and a disrespect for what has come before and will come after you. yamakan’s most famous flame out, at this point, fully overrides his own kemoko deluxe shame. he lacked a crystal ball to see into a rotoscoping future that has already made one close brush against his legacy, or that dimension W would get a sweet OVA variant, or that the akiba mecca for dance assemblies would not last forever. perhaps, we will need a little more time for the right artifact to find its supplementing trash, so that it can be raised up to his level.

last year was the wednesday of all years, which is a difficult accomplishment for anyone with a living memory reading this post close to when it is first being published. if that’s not you, I’m honestly thrilled you’re reading another new year post, because it means I’m either successful or controversial enough to have everything I’ve ever said combed over, or you are also the kind of person that ignores publish dates.

establishing tradition on the web is difficult when most of the tectonic movement on it results from mudslides that wash away our geocities shrines. tradition, even in meatspace, is already a difficult and transient accomplishment too. americans will probably eat ham on easter until we find ourselves fully unchurched. kentucky for christmas only started from the 70s, which still might qualify it as an ancient tradition the further it lasts after the post-war period and the closer we get to preheating the next great war nuking it in the microwave. pekora keeping my chicken cold is fully tradition this year too, now that it has gone through enough ritual posts that have allowed it to emerge as a festivus for the rest of us. the further removed we are from a sincere tradition of food shrines on christmas, a pure love, the more I will still never change my hikikomori ways.

publishing online, especially independently, is a tradition I considered under threat even before taking on a website like this one. this has less to do with publishing being a hard accomplishment, but either there being less appetite to publish online or even less meaning in the act at all when it cannot be discovered or can be hallucinated privatively. discovery was hardly a serious concern when we were making geocities shrines and checking our guestbooks, but I think it probably is the residual expectation of winning the algorithm that makes people go public when their selfies are now being mined in grotesque ways. even as the novelty has dramatically diminished, when being online in its widest and most open surfaces now feels actively detrimental, the expectation is hard to unlearn. running dedicated websites that do not make contact with socials is, in some ways, reverting to what has always been true about going online: you need a qualified sickness and ego to bother announcing your presence, or think there is a commons inside the noise worth enriching. there are sickos that do this purely for hobby, with no expectations of eyeballs or dollars, that will outlive any outlet that subsists on advertising revenue. there are also lolcow tippers and their aligned parties, seemingly the uncomfortable last lines of defense for publishing remaining a reasonably accessible option at all.

a lot of that tradition I have managed to breathe life into this year, thanks to discovery not being completely dead on the open web either. as far as I can tell, this blog doesn’t have all that many inbound links. the handful that have popped up around are the only reason I know this blog has achieved any readership at all, or why I have been fortunate enough to contribute on an anthology like vocaloid culture. what that has imparted on me is that the doujin ethos does, as always, struggle not only to survive against hardship, but has continued forging the backlinks that bridge creators and audiences in ways that platforms have forgotten. the great fortune of this ethos is that it has mostly, until very recently with crowdfunding and some digital storefronts, remained insulated from an expectation of audience or profit and has strong bones. for the web at large, where the initial hysteria over government control on it was missed for the weight of corporate influence that would infect it, it is not such a hopeless endeavor still to dream and work for better. I am still hopeful, as well, that making a living on the web can be more completely separated from malicious hosts.

there are parallels on the web in the corporate pressures that have attempted to wash it, and yet people are finding their way to each other one way or another. game jams are being scheduled, zines are being mailed, and collaborative anthologies are being bound. virtual worlds are creative undergrounds that are not drunk with their technologies or formats. comiket and its descendants are an important flare that return participants home, even as they have teetered on uncertain futures. while tuning to the signal on the web is probably more difficult than it has ever been, without better social glue than invitation-only discords, it is broadcasting out there, faintly, if you are hunting for it. out on reconnaissance or inside enemy territory, it is comforting to tune back and recalibrate to the fuzzy lincolnshire poacher.

survival was already my personal repeating mantra last year, before it became its overall tenor. for as much as can be seen surviving against adversity, the retreats are often unseen, unknown, or initially numbing. one of 4chan’s only remaining heartbeats is its celebratory traditions, the sora no woto broadcasts and mogra threads, which were luckily not caught by the one month of downtime it experienced in april. with how much has been fantasized about the site finally kicking the bucket, I found myself mostly aloof about the seeming finality of it all, knowing these communities would pick up the pieces elsewhere in hobbled IRCs or on other alternatives. platforms, even at 20 years of age, are shifting sands. they are only as long, or as good-natured, as their inhabitants and hosts want them to be. the sands from 4chan have long been scattered, both good and bad, to other websites and communities that do better to enforce against shitposting ironically. without an equal intake seen on alternative bulletin boards matching its contraction, I expect to find even more comfort with decay and dilution this year. it is difficult to give up comforts and hope for better, much the way I have refused to give up IRC.

the numbness is recognizable, either from hikikomori behaviors that have long enveloped me or a self-preservation that I see more of you around me retreat to as chaos rains needlessly. the reality for an atomized site like this one is that when I am gone, it is likely to survive only as long as the readers for it are around to fish for it in archives and keep it fresh in working memory. survivor, fittingly, was one of my dad’s favorite shows to tune in on regularly before he passed a few years ago, and while I have not made tremendous effort to continue the ritual of mugging jeff probst every week, the longevity as it approaches a 50th season does leave me a little awed and fond for the regularity when we did watch it. I am certain, with more time and distance to accept the fate of what is lost, I can develop more fondness for an absence that breaks through any numb.

the ambition for longevity on this site, or even to potentially blossom it further, is not misplaced. it was effectively the first full year that it has gone off in its own direction without another platform anchoring the presentation or providing even a minimal feedback. my desire to have more regular posts of “idle explorations and simple curiosities” sputtered simply because when it comes to fishing expeditions, I can’t help myself from wanting to pull up and exhibit whole oceans with me. I’d like to survive long enough to see myself develop a better discipline for this. what I have fished up this year, however, I recognize is a pride mostly for myself, inspired by artificial flower stands and banks of digital dust. when you look up to see fire pouring down even harder this year, surely our final denouement, I hope at least a few of you will see I have left the light on for you to find some comfort, or enrichment, or curiosity in the results too.

Hey, this world really is cruel
You wished for a day like this
But your silent body
Is blooming here

japan may have one the most developed muzak soundscapes in the world. its best vistas, yamanote departure melodies and muji, depend mostly on a casiopea or YMO touch. for anything else, you can mostly expect sickly sweet MIDI synths that are a hybrid combination of hold music and commercial jingles. you can’t, however, hang up on the don quijote loop while you find yourself shopping for tube socks and underwear at 2 AM. outside of unfortunate contexts like this, it’s also a gut-busting choice for a middle school lunchtime broadcast or conveying realism in yakuza.

theme songs are such an assumed part of the corporate identity for big box and discount stores in japan, like mosquito buzzing and parking lot tattlers are stateside, that I’m not convinced they aren’t also an employee retention repellent. one hopes there are studies rotting on company intranets that say cheap-sounding songs like this are a good grounding for equally cheap crap, which justifies keeping them on a constant rotation. coming up empty on anything real to cite here, I still have to presume they have a bigger psychological footprint than logo snobs already assume when dissecting serifs and color theory, given how many regional varieties and defunct examples exist that quickly expand a potential tier list of store melodies. yamada denki is, obviously, best girl. you have your nostalgia goggles strapped on too tight for bic camera. they don’t make them like dospara used to. you seriously like lopia’s amateur attempt at brainwashing? have some respect for yourself, terry. should you ever find yourself at this stage in discerning the low-brow, you may already be the incontrovertible snob susceptible to grading broadcast bumpers and sandwich porn.

lamu, sort of a dented can store crossed with costco attitudes about passing savings to the customer, is an arrow shot at a mid-aughts eroge opening. I had some awareness of this heading in to my encounter with one, but eating chewy 100 yen takoyaki and drinking canned coffee that tasted like dirt while bumming it in nagoya was enough to confirm to me that it is the best store music ambience of all time. see-saw’s jusco, with the kajiura yuki touch, might have come close in this respect if I ever got the chance to pair it with near-expired food. respected ranking science following energy drinks and fighting games, however, is not controlled for in a lab with a youtube video. lamu’s theme is, so far, the only thing that I believe is qualified for sweeping blue sky camera pans and lens flares. daikokuten, the parent company to lamu, does seem to acknowledge they know what they have when advertising it as a free download directly on their homepage.

premium quality, hidden in an aisle of discounts, really is what getting a good deal is all about. it also begs question when a deal appears way too good to be true. most supermarket songs are never worth elevating to an idol pop hit, but I can see why daikokuten would have it performed at a suit and tie meeting of managers the same way aiscream was irresistible to the tiktok awards. mizna, the signer, blogged about stumbling over the lyrics and how exciting the experience was. supposedly, it was a rather big deal that she made a public appearance here for the first time, as I would learn there may be good reason for the shroud: scratching a little deeper reveals mizna is the stage name for tamura shoko, credited almost entirely on happy science projects under their new star production talent agency.

japanese businesses, or really any business anywhere, being connected to death cults isn’t tremendously groundbreaking. APA doesn’t exactly conceal that they are connected to the fundamentalist right when they furnish propaganda in every room. daikokuten doesn’t appear to be as overt, but their recently departed president wasn’t entirely shy to say he sipped from happy science as well. according to okawa ryuho’s disowned son, they are directly responsible for billions of yen in incoming donations. ramu, I’ve now learned, is the name of one of the branch spirits preaching the miracle of happy science. plenty of career prospectives praising lamu’s logistics and mission can be found from the happy science academy. their stores initially being branded as happy shops (幸福の商店) and happy markets (生鮮市場ハッピィ), before they would adopt lamu as a front, might have answered the question of any connection too directly for comfort.

viewing the metadata on the theme’s download earlier could have saved me a lot of trouble from having to assemble the details myself if I noticed the composition was attributed to mizusawa yuichi, the main point man composing for happy science’s infamous anime films. a lot of questions about a cult brand, it turns out, are answered directly by its cult members. when it is already a sprawling media empire, one making it to the top of japan’s box office charts, I can’t feign any surprise that they are also fully integrated as a sprawling supermarket chain. the patterns in dianetics and free personality tests aren’t exactly a very localized phenomenon for anyone that has observed new religious movements with any suspicion, or mocking, as they gain foothold with famous celebrities. supermarkets are, of course, only just a different kind of celebrity.

I’m not mistaken about the impact of consumer boycotts or how difficult collective action is. I’m also, in general, not willing to wash my hands of consumption not being a very real material support. when I can avoid it, I don’t like giving money to jeff bezos or the walton family, or knowing that my money will flow upwards to drone manufacturing. to be perfectly clear, lamu speaking in happy science symbols is enough for it to be a disqualifying choice to me when substitutes exist, but I also know exploit is likely to follow the facade of every brand when they all consolidate under a few umbrellla companies.

this never means dismissing their unique harms when we do decide to scratch at the underbelly. happy science was the only group to oppose recent revisions restricting religious donations from people in a “state of confusion”, which I think alone is enough to color its character, but there are plenty of second and third generation accounts that do itemize the kind of damage they have inflicted on japan’s families and social fabric. supermarket jingles are, probably, a reasonably divorced curiosity that we can remove from having to address such heavy concerns. even if I have arrived to them this time by ranking store background music, reserving an empathy when probing what appears to be a pithy curiosity is still not something I would ever choose to forfeit to a mindless consumption. the critiques end up more entertaining themselves, and ingesting them is a valuable fiber.

discovering that lamu’s theme is more of a soft gospel does perfectly color my own encounter with happy science, which admittedly sort of makes me it love it even more approaching the sardonic. it is already fairly likely you will be approached with a flyer of mount fuji if you are a white person traveling in japan. happy scientists, having optimized for idol worship, at some point figured out they can bum around concert halls by feigning an interest in the performing groups, so I have also found myself unwittingly chummy to the charm before being pitched on heading to a famiresu retreat and ejecting. there is, unsurprisingly, strength in the number of idol fans you can find that share this experience.

there is no ethical consumption of eroge songs under supermarket capitalism. my light brush with lamu and the dissections of happy science I’ve performed from a safe distance, but mainly the children that have had their hearts broken by parents getting lost in the sauce, are enough for me to conclude that I’ll probably try to stick with nobikomi-kun when shopping for produce in the future. suffering alone with my spirituality, I have learned with these enlightments, provides enough nourishment on its own. still, I pray everyone receives the discounts and bargains that we all rightly deserve.

“The empty pleasures of this world
The unhidden obsession of a dignified young man
[...]
All the workings of this world are evil deeds!”

Tracing the tradition of single flowers posed in vases to maximalist flower stands for 2D characters is probably easier when your culture already elevates the flower as a heritage. It’s so easy, apparently, that no one seeped in either has really bothered to document how the minimalism of ikebana (生け花) evolved into flower stands now being gifted for new businesses, concerts, retirements, product launches, and promotions, before we even reach the otaku. The oldest known flower shop in Japan dates back a little over 240 years ago. For what is supposed to be an ancient art form, that would be fairly young for a thorough trace.

Ikebana has always been, chiefly, an exercise of simple elegance. As a serious practice, it is a collection of unfathomably specific rules about structure and balance, all in service of a sparse and deliberate construction. While minimalism rarely survives modern cultures now, it’s also rarely the preference of rulers that want to flaunt wealth, which Japanese flower arrangement was never going to be immune from. Hideyoshi Toyotomi’s overseeing the construction of Osaka Castle, a fortress with a gold trim designed entirely to surpass Nobunaga, is only a narrow slice of that ambition. His planting of cherry blossom trees at the Daigo-ji temple in Kyoto is a similar extravagance in presentation. The reserved dignity of ikebana would not survive Hideyoshi either, where size mattered most as he commissioned four-story tall flower arrangements with a lavish excess. Flower arrangement, for most of Japan’s history, was not imbued with a high-minded meaning or structure that would qualify it as much of a developed art form, before it was allowed to be the subject of a comedy drama. Hideyoshi’s practice, one of the generals most principally associated with the tradition now, instead elevated it as art with a most useful function: signaling the ostentatious.

Most English overviews one can locate about ikebana, winding the competing schools of it that traveled through different shogunates, prefer to emphasize the dignity and high art. The one that I have found most compelling in trying to discover any connective issue to the modern practice of flower stands instead prefers to characterize it as a light accomplishment, just as playing the harpsichord was for the English. Particularly as the otaku undergoes a change in perception where signaling status becomes in many ways more valuable than amassing trivia, this qualification felt like accidentally tripping over ground truth while wandering lost in a dense forest of history. When the Teshigahara school took the ikebana out of the tokonama, a discipline taken up by housewives during the Edo period, it would still be a stretch to qualify it by this point as a hobby interest. It certainly succeeds, however, in orienting it as bombastic in ways that I recognize from now looking at the array of otaku flower shops that have launched in the last decade and a half, including novel species, brilliant forms, and new materials like inorganics. Ikebana, mostly here, began to appear in public spaces like exhibition halls in department stores and lobbies of hotels. As grand openings became more elaborate, flower displays scaled to match as they became even more ornate.

There is still tremendously little documented specifically about the introduction or progression of flower stands as an otaku activity, which is curious for the otherwise documented minutiae that dominates breathless fandoms. Particularly as they have been so present across Japanese culture, it may seem unnecessary to frame them as any sort of uniquely otaku convention. Knowing better, the excess of the bubble economy is how I have usually understood to center Japan’s modern entertainment industry, and this golden age for idols is generally cited as the beginning of flower stands being gifted by fans for concerts. Assumed truths like this do make me uneasy, but strong evidence does support the bubble era establishing a lot of modern tradition in this space. Moth orchids became the preferred flower for business gifts during this period, considered to symbolize good fortune, and it’s recognizably common to see more modest displays using them gifted by corporate partners mingling among the more ostentatious fan stands.

Few rules and conventions from the flower stand’s growth out of ikebana, if any, seem to survive in the modern practice of businesses playing flower-gifting tag, which is inconvenient if you are trying to elevate their art as anything other than a holdover from wasteful bubble excess. For as much lip service has been paid to integrating the consumerism of acrylic stands and locally grown produce into regional revitalization, it would be useful if one company, any company, had some grandiose mission statement on the magic of flower stand gift tradition that could be retold by otaku to back the custom, or parsed by foreigners trying to understand what a flower stand even really is. Instead, it is mostly surprising how bereft overseas fan accounts are of any mention that a company like Flosta, contracted by Cygames and Sega to provide flower stands for concerts that intersected one weekend, fumbled so spectacularly with damaged stands, super-duper bankruptcy, and failed refunds that it has brought tremendous viral attention on flower stands in Japan. As much as I would qualify flower stands as an east Asia fascination, I also wouldn’t say a disposable vanity and presentation is any more baroque to westerners than kabuki, especially when it can be anchored to virtual idols and horse girls. Outrage remains the reserve currency of all otaku the world over, even when it is well outside our spheres of influence, so the silence from overseas is more bizarre to me than it is deafening.

When did flower stands, then, grow as an otaku concern that makes them now able to support a company as over-promising and under-delivering as Flosta? The process for gifting flower stands in the bubble era for concerts was largely informal, often beginning by asking management directly for approval, and the growing popularity of character idol concerts is likely to be where it was solidified as otaku ritual. The closest primary source I found linked to its current expression is a signup spreadsheet for IDOLM@STER’s 5th Anniversary concert in 2010, showing HarukaP putting up a fixed contribution of 1000 JPY each to fund a flower stand. Crowdsourcing funds in this way remains the popular convention today with the expectation that contributors will be credited on a placard, although some fans do prefer to develop stands alone.

Some flower shops that have had a long online presence do preserve some evidence of otaku participation at smaller IDOLM@STER events in the years prior to this concert, confirmed by at least one veteran fan I know that was around for the era. IDOLM@STER did not formalize accepting flower stands until NEW YEAR P@RTY the following year, where after reports of that concert were the first time flower stands appear to have earned serious focus. The start of IDOLM@STER’s Second Vision here is a fairly convenient delineation, seen with even more clarity as Azumi Asakura, replacing the voice for Yukiho during this transition, celebrated the novelty of receiving a flower stand at this concert. Speaking to how green the ritual was, applications were accepted for them not as フラワースタンド (flower stands), or フラスタ (the otaku’s now preferred shortening), or even スタンド花 (stand flowers, the normie’s preference), but more specifically ロビー花 (lobby flowers), a carve out that has definitely fallen out of fashion.

If we were to chart an inflection for flower stands, IDOLM@STER’s 7th Anniversary might be a good one for increased participation in general. Some of the earliest Twipla event IDs, where fans mostly begin with organizing flower stands even today, apply to flower stands starting with NEW YEAR P@RTY stretching into this event. On the heels of a post-anime boom period, IDOLM@STER was also undergoing a sea change in participant regulations. Penlights using AA or AAA batteries were no longer allowed at these concerts due to an incident that caused equipment damage, leading to the popularity of LR44 battery powered penlights and the development of character penlights as merch. Coupled with this bombshell announcement, and certainly less mentioned despite a similar surviving longevity, flower stands (no longer lobby flowers) were now pinned to a 40cm base and 140cm of height. Some fan wisdom I recall suggests this became explicit policy due to bounds being overstepped when overeager fans began to furnish extremes, like huge wreaths. As regulations became studied documents for concertgoers looking for any in to flout the rules, a now formal warning specifying that the number of stands might potentially exceed what could reasonably be accepted does suggest that flower stands were going through a new swell in interest.

M@STERS OF IDOL WORLD (MOIW) would be where we really begin to see that interest show in its modern concentration. With each of IDOLM@STER’s branches converging for the first time at one concert, the grandeur of this event’s format continues to propel it forward as a significant opportunity to push your tantou (or oshi if you’re now hip with it). Across the two days of the event in 2015, approximately 300 stands were counted exhibited outside of the Seibu Dome. One fan, hyping IDOLM@STER as the start of otaku giving gifts at events, wants to claim 10% of flowers in the country were consumed over these two days. Somewhat more impressively to me, Omo, as he recounts his personal exposure to flower stands at MOIW, says that 2ch by this point was still an operating organizational glue for them, although I had trouble digging up specific references. Flower shops were very much keeping up with demand by this point, leading fans and retrospectives from florists to jokingly refer to this exhibit as the 花屋天下一武道会 (Flower Shop World’s Martial Arts Tournament), riffing on Dragon Ball’s tour of force.

The label would be pushed most visibly by an otaku-focused flower shop, a relatively new invention, that had launched in 2013. Although more recent MOIW events have chosen to discover a new format of lottery participation with nobori flags, more logistically agreeable and equally well received by fans selecting into ad hoc groups, flower stands became embedded as part of the core Producer identity by displays simply of impressive scale than even individual stands being uniquely expressive. Theater Days later in 2017 would also make gifting flower stands the core interaction among players added as friends, with Starlight Stage grafting a similar interaction on a cooperative mode that was made permanent in 2018.

Realistically, the process of otaku organizing flower stands has only recently matured as they have become more individualized expressions, instead of being furnished as a general support. Organizing and delivering a stand is still uncertain and tepid enough that it is not unusual to discover organizers writing postmortems for Note blogs, or to find curious fans inquiring about how to proceed on Yahoo Answers. Rather than simple displays of bouquets, otaku have invented the flower stand as a crowdfunded accomplishment by contracting independent flower shops to realize designs that embellish a character or performer. When money does intersect doujin in this way, there is usually a conduit, like print shops and digital shopfronts, that allow the interest to scale. The advantage flower shops may have most over doujinshi, however, is that their testimonials are more publicly palatable, which allows featuring completions as case studies or in galleries on websites.

While in the past it may have taken an inventive otaku with ambition to boldly ask for Arisu’s strawberry pasta, accelerated exposure through social media and legitimization like this from independent businesses have grown the otaku flower stand into an industry, realized most by these specialized shops. One of the largest shops, citing fanaticism around Cinderella Girls, prominently seized on otaku during a post-quake downturn in business to trademark 痛花 (itahana) and make this business their focus. The characterization certainly seems applicable to the ways we have seen itasha now being stretched by custom car culture. One stand in 2017 attempted to skirt the rules by using a tablet in its display, leading to a revision of the boilerplate rules for flower stands starting with PRODUCER MEETING 2018. Later follow-ups, like an AR solution using a QR code, feel as if they are ribbing someone to make a further amend of the rules.

Most of subculture, it should be said, remains a loose collection of conventions rather than strict rules preventing these teases of the boundary. Flower stands began as such, and all related doujin concerns, if they are to continue existing with any sort of purity, will always lack a full qualification or understanding for what is completely acceptable. The abbreviation and awareness of flower stands, even among the otaku, likely has as much to do with Ensemble Stars fans upsetting what was still a reasonably loose etiquette in 2018.

Overseas otaku, as they do become more attuned to Japanese expressions, will desire to achieve the flower stand as a measure of fan legitimacy. Fans that have already sampled from this world, where a light creative achievement is still a signal stronger than accumulating merchandise, are also the reason why more overseas conventions are continuing to attempt replicating Comiket and WonFes as an export of the doujin fair model. Anime Central more recently has been able to support flower stands in its exhibit hall, mostly on prodding from fans that have strong familiarity with the process already, and Otakon secured a corner for them as well this year. Houkago P Time, one of the older assemblies of overseas Producers, effectively banded to legitimize the overseas interest in the franchise and was able to achieve a number of overseas-sponsored flower stands to Japanese concerts in its heyday.

Attempts at achieving flower stands overseas have otherwise been minimal, if not sober to the realities limiting them. Not only do volunteers at anime conventions and contracted staff for concert venues lack familiarity with flower stands, but the infrastructure, labor, and business to support them effectively do not exist in an analogue overseas, nor does anyone want to dedicate floor space to something that is, realistically, an insurance liability and fire hazard. When fan activities can be atomized and exercised organically by overseas fans without significant hurdles like this, as they can be for call guides, sponsored cheer billboards, or itasha, the purity of the expression does not feel compromised and can ramp organically. Flower stands, probably, will always have trouble achieving a similar penetration that they enjoy in Japan unless fans accept compromise on their inherent maximalism, at least initially. Japan, for what it is worth, did learn to make concessions when scaling their participation with flower stands: many of the examples you will see today now use entirely artificial flowers.

Bushiroad, despite aiming to achieve 50 percent of net sales in overseas markets, has hedged on the potential for concerts overseas. Animenomics, in their analysis, expressed this as showing the limits of holding anime concerts abroad. For overseas fans that can recall Anisong World Matsuri in Los Angeles, or Lantis Festival in Las Vegas, or Bushiroad’s own CharaExpo USA in Anaheim, it doesn’t take the head of Bushiroad Music saying it to know live events are a tough nut to crack. The cloud of fan behaviors surrounding the performances themselves are, also, more of an intangible that do as much to complete what makes the experience of a live (ライブ) more special than any concert is when realized with the same performers abroad. While it isn’t to be suggested that the intangibles like flower stands override the core experience, one does wonder if the camraderie that collects to realize a live are what western fans may be missing to unlock a deeper appreciation for them, or an experience that makes them worth traveling cross-country for. When Bushiroad and Lantis already prohibit peacock penlight holders and shouting during intermissions¹, tempering the wild spirit of the otaku, flower stands and similar completions being absent from the experience does already risk, in my mind, chipping at that core.

For otaku that have relished in the maximalism, the boundaries being drawn so tightly around their behaviors can feel constricting when they are enforced most viciously by fans policing other fans with online haranguing. Even traditions that are inherent to the spirit of Japanese concerts have teetered on a similar uncertainty in their enforcement, with COVID at one point pushing them to the edge when it ushered in a dark age of prohibiting calls and chants altogether. The convergence of the otaku on the flower stand in this period, to me, does not feel accidental. Flower stands, a venue where gilding the lily to impress other otaku remains encouraged besides simply acceptable, may be where the otaku still consider themselves able to shout freely at their loudest, without inducing the ire of fellow fans. Struggles may still lie ahead anyway, if even flower stands have now been locked out of certain events due to disputes among fans.

Seichi junrei and itasha have been similarly initiated by fans, but are catalyzed by mature business rather than being wholly dependent on it to exist at all. Whether American brutes can learn to care about flower stands in a similar context is likely, still, an open question. If they are to, they will probably first need to sprout an understanding that you can’t mirror a model of engagement by throwing more money at it to make it bloom faster.

以前オタクと飲んだときに声優現場は奇声を上げたり全身をサイリウムで発光させたりすることができなくなった結果オタクの自己表現方法がフラスタに収斂したという話を聞いてその時はそれはどうなんよと思ったけど全般的には平和な方向への歴史の歩みだなと後では思った

— えるあ (eruatashi) Jan 14, 2024

Kasane Teto, more than a simple lie, is a phenomenon. Reignited by a SynthV release in 2023, Teto is undeniably going through an explosion of reappraisal. Despite being imagined in the swamp of posts on 2channel closing in on almost two decades ago, she has been allowed the time since to earn recognition from audiences entirely foreign to the fog of April Fools jokes and comparisons to Doraemon that birthed her. The discard of this context has thrust her into a new limelight. Beyond the usual fad popularity vocal synth fans are used to observing with characters that cycle through the silver medal podium neighboring Miku, Teto seems staunch to prove, even more steadfast than her predecessors, that she can be an exception to a trend rather than a brief aberration.

Casual vocal synth observers will likely already register Teto’s ascendant popularity without requiring data to prove as much, thanks to watershed events like Satsuki’s Mesmerizer and the emergence of fresh sounds from producers like Masarada, Haraguchi Sasuke, and Jamie Paige. Even so, the statistics in enthusiast spaces provide a sense of scale: Niconico has seen the number of video uploads tagged with “重音テト” accelerate from 38,000 at the start of 2022 to now being on the doorstep of 70,000¹. VocaDB, an overseas site crowdsourcing a catalog of vocal synth releases from PVs and albums, has charted a doubling of song releases tagged only to her UTAU voicebank, with her SynthV voicebank so far comfortably cataloging 500 new songs every month on average and still increasing². By any direct measure, or even soft measure like views on TikTok, Teto’s flame is continuing to burn at its brightest.

For Japanese fans that have followed Teto from humble UTAU beginnings, it should not register much shock that she has always collected some overseas recognition. More surprising perhaps, even for those overseas that have followed her for as long, is that much of her recent overseas growth and creative enthusiasm feels exceptionally assertive. While Miku is used to being appraised as a global sensation and is unlikely to ever lose that stature completely, Miku’s ownership culturally has largely flowed downstream sourced from Japanese expressions, as did Teto’s initial brief overseas popularity. The circumstances now surrounding Teto’s most recent global reappraisal, however, are not necessarily uniquely multifaceted, but arrive at a convenient period of expansive growth for both vocal synth music and global audiences becoming more familiar with traditionally otaku representations. Detached from any initial 2ch context, she is most pointedly another demonstration of how decades-old cultural kindling can take years to reignite.

Character-focused origins

“VOCALOID” has remained a slippery definition. While the exact properties and prevailing characteristics of what we consider “VOCALOID” music can undergo different critiques, its endurance as a term itself suggests much about the trajectory of the genre. The diversification of character synthesizers to include software like CeVIO and SynthV has effectively genericized the term, while Yamaha continues to hold it under trademark and license it effectively in perpetuity. Even as “vocal synth music” has become a favored umbrella term for overseas enthusiasts, usage of “VOCALOID” broadly continues in the same way as it does in Japanese due to a wide recognition. Being able to identify a voicebank in a lineup of vocal synths for one character, from UTAU to SynthV, remains more of a point of pedantry than a trivia digested fully by most listeners.

The overriding language of “VOCALOID” is in some ways more keenly felt in English. Western fans have never struggled to police UTAUs being invoked as Vocaloids. UTAU, initially as a VOCALOID parody with Defoko and Teto’s designs, would highlight some of the initial novelty in characters existing outside of the Crypton umbrella. Despite the point of distinction, overseas fans arrived early to Utauloid and Cryptonloid as character categories, borrowing the same -loid suffix. Teto, as the most recognizable example of UTAU, earned early accolades as the icon for it. Associating UTAU so closely to Crypton characters could have already been considered invalid at this outset, though it highlights a common refrain seen in early overseas fandom exposed to derivative characters like Teto, Neru, and Haku: why do these characters look so much like Hatsune Miku? With these expressions being exported from nebulous VIPPER and Niconico contexts, their histories would not be intimately understood, even by those tuned to recognize the characters through reprints. The loose assemblage of these derivatives as sister characters depended most especially on them being closely associated in Japanese expressions.

Much of the initial overseas enthusiasm for Teto can be found in these reprints. Reprints, operatively, are a contextual collapse. Part of what made Vocaloid so culturally mobile initially is that moe characters, frantic animations, and catchy denpa melodies do not especially require translation to earn appraisal. Further operative to the Japanese doujin context is that expressions must be atomized so they can be easily blended together. Kasane Territory by oxi, though most especially the supplemented PV animation by Riot, was the initial overseas success emblematic of these conditions. While it is most practical to trace doujin expressions as a waterfallーan animation PV parody, itself borrowing a cover song by oxi, itself a parody of a previous vocal cover by circle SilverForest, itself descended from Suwako’s stage boss theme by ZUNーsuch a full accounting was rarely digested for reprints, especially in a nascent overseas Vocaloid culture. Besides that overseas viewers were unlikely to ever parse the 2ch-isms and mentions of Tsutaya, many of these reprints gained attention without fan subtitles or instead with poor machine translations. The meta commentary in Kasane Territory became entirely secondary in its overseas appeal, pushed most eagerly by YouTube as a related video before it had mature personalized recommendations. Ironically, Teto’s questioning of whether she counts as a Vocaloid (重音はボカロに入りますか？), intended as a light gag, would very likely be sincerely affirmed by many overseas fans of the time.

It would be difficult to undersell Lamaze’s influence on being an accelerant not only for Teto’s overseas popularity, but for Vocaloid overseas in totality. Lamaze benefited perhaps more than any other producer from the herding of YouTube’s initial recommendations, thanks again to animation PVs for Popipo by Sunafuki and Triple Baka by Berserker Soul. More than contextual collapse, PV reprints like these not only often came with no attribution or sourcing, but also had obfuscated authorship due to their collaborative components and multiple uploads. The prevailing disinterest in enforcing copyright norms on YouTube, both from audiences and set as explicit policy from up top by management, would mirror what was seen on Niconico, though absent the strong relational tagging that would allow these producer relationships to be revealed even incidentally. Japanese fans, in my experience, have sometimes remarked that Triple Baka is a unique fascination by Western fans, and while I’m not entirely qualified to assess this as completely true, it is undoubtedly verified from Wayback Machine archive captures, surviving reprints, and casual parodies that Triple Baka was widely exposed on YouTube. Teto in this representation was not owned by Lamaze, but thanks to close association with Miku, became a character with equal recognition in what was otherwise an immature overseas Vocaloid canon.

Perhaps more than any other Lamaze contribution, however, Ochame Kinou (most commonly referred to as Fukkireta overseas) was an inflection in Teto’s recognition. The explosive popularity of this meme overseas, and not simply as a video duplicated wholesale, should not be understated. Principally, its growth on the western web vectorized in many of the ways we consider organic to Niconico’s culture, including through home-grown trace MADs, covers, and compilation videos. A large component of Fukkireta’s success would naturally depend on reprints from Niconico, though it is probably fair to assess these as a bedrock that allowed a western ownership over the meme to develop. 4chan, the west’s message board equivalent to Futaba Channel that was far more relevant at this time to a casual fandom than it would be considered todayーweekly “Miku Monday” threads often became an excuse to post Teto alongside other Cryptonloidsーchristened Fukkireta with “daily dose” status, or a video that was memetically posted to boards there ad nauseam³.

YouTube’s annotations functionality, removed in 2019, at one point allowed for collaborative comments to be layered on top of a video not unlike Niconico’s danmaku, which was taken to an absurd extreme for the fansub of Ron’s rendition of Ochame Kinou borrowing the same Lamaze animation with Teto. Many of the oldest comments on this video, clearly unfamiliar with the specifics of Teto but familiar enough to ask questions, muse whether UTAU is capable of sounding this human-like. Fukkireta as a cultural memory overseas would still likely now be most widely invoked when associated with this layer of annotations. Even with this exposure, Teto could be said to have remained set dressing rather than focus, and the constituent elements of this PV itself unattributed the way memes usually are. The character parodies conveniently stripped her away as grounding context, and the earworm quality of the rendition had standalone memetic value. Ochame Kinou has otherwise persisted with recognition over the last decade and a half, and most notably before Teto’s SynthV revival was considered Hololive’s most enduring danketsu song with a parade relay. Nonetheless, it is often invoked together with Triple Baka by many western fans as their initial contact with Teto. As can be observed in any collection of secondary creations, doujin expressions are no stranger to discarded and stripped contexts, so Teto is certainly not unique in this appreciation. It is more appropriate, instead, to consider Fukkireta as a creative precursor that perhaps somewhat incidentally raised Teto’s character profile overseas, though tuned only as background noise in a literal layering of recontextualization over the top of her. The value seen in this introduction would not be fully realized until her SynthV release, as interest in vocal synths broadly lulled in the following years.

From Japanese imitation to Western ownership on a post-regional web

YouTube as an outlet for readymade Japanese expressions was broadly important in the export of Japanese pop culture in the late aughts, but we would be remiss to not highlight the participation of overseas users in shaping characters like Teto at even an early stage of development. Overseas users have in fact been long participants in UTAU, evident not just from remnants on preferred platforms of the era like deviantART, but also embedded in the creative explosion of sites like Niconico with tagged collections like ＵＴＡＵ海外組. Many of the names likely already familiar to long Japanese fans of vocal synth music, including CircusP, cillia, MystSaphyr, and Crusher, did not go unappreciated in this time. This is not necessarily highlighted to overstate the overseas influence on UTAU, but to exhibit that a core producer class, vocal synth otaku in the most pure sense, can be considered of equal value to why an unlikely candidate like Teto developed overseas attention.

Much as they were with Miku’s initial attention by Japanese producers, cover songs remained a routine component of Teto’s core overseas producer class. UTAU as a free software alternative has always conveniently realized this remix dynamic, which was heavily focused on overseas. With English support not arriving comprehensively until Vocaloid V3 in 2013, overseas users even slightly curious about producing vocal synth music still had to entertain wrestling some Japanese, and thus the obtuse nature of UTAU was no more of a hurdle to overcome. It is also the case that many producers of this time overseas explored pirated and unlocked solutions for Vocaloid, with region locks and limited distribution being prohibitive to acquiring voicebanks legally; it remains a sore point, even now, that voicebanks like Rana were only available for purchase through the magazine ボカロＰになりたい⁴. Beyond this, it is a repeated truth that much of vocal synth music overseas is steered by teenagers without the pocket money for fancy DAWs and equipment. Any software free and easily accessible (see also MikuMikuDance) was a huge boon, no matter its rough edges. SynthV’s arrival for Teto, most especially, is anchored to pent-up demand from fans nipping at Crypton for English voicebanks and also fans that were unable to bargain with UTAU’s shortcomings, despite being loyal to the characters themselves.

The global sound that has developed around vocal synth music can be most pointedly recognized to have started as Japanese imitation. As identified in the previous examples with Teto, much of vocal synth music’s initial overseas history was the result of Japanese cultural output being “lobbed” over regional borders online. While no one would dispute that vocal synth music is a global scene now, the global village of a web where all netizens interact together has only ever been mythologized rather than realized. The dynamic with Japanese spoils like Triple Baka was that they were, more accurately, extracted by those brave and technically savvy enough to export them out of regional websites like Niconico, instead of fully bartered for with our own expressions. Language is a limiting factor in why this remains true even now for much otaku media, and also why expressions that are culturally smoothed or maximally bombastic for global audiences earn favor. Even so, the regional disparities present in these expressions will likely never fully evaporate, as long as overseas fans cannot engage with the physicality of doujin events, but Vocaloid music is also some of the closest subculture has gotten to global participation thanks to loose copyright restrictions and industry barriers that do not afflict it like traditional Japanese pop music and anime. It can be simultaneously true that while overseas fans may still target a sense of Japanese authenticity in their expressions of vocal synth music, geographies still exert cultural differences on a global web that will always code them as obviously regionally unique. Our prolonged exposure to Japanese expressions is thus less of a complete import and, over time, dismantled to be an aperture for rebuilding and remixing them to our own cultural specifications. Undoubtedly, the rise of fresh sound from overseas producers like Jamie Paige, omu, and TONE suggests this has been realized not only across Teto’s sound, but also the totality of vocal synths.

Discussing vocal synth music and Teto in an overseas context impresses how much the homogenization of platforms into global spaces has accelerated our exposure to vocal synth music, enabling more of this participation from overseas producers. While the consolidation of social media has created fewer large platforms overall, the herding of locales on platforms like TikTok and YouTube makes cross-regional conversation more an unavoidable reality than a deliberate choice as music and images are exposed indirectly through algorithmic presentations. Some of this homogenization is attributed to English becoming the lingua franca of the web at large. TikTok especially has emerged as a nexus for overseas growth: much in the way Niconico exposes parent-ancestor remix relationships and attribution, TikTok has oriented original music as the ultimate point of truth. Japan is of course no less entrenched in TikTok than the rest of the world, and so their participation and contribution quickens what would have otherwise taken months or years to be communicated over regional borders online in the past. This may contribute to some of the Japanese perception as to why Teto seems principally steered by overseas interest, when in fact it is simply that cultural conversations that previously followed waterfalls are instead exploding to more corners of the web with more haste. The TWINDRILL circle account on Xitter may continue to converse even directly with overseas fans, but even the atomized text of tweets is unlikely to override the mobility of short form video that controls so much of our culture now.

Regardless of how we measure our balances in cultural trade, overseas Teto fans are certainly controlling a larger share of her character canon than before. Meme variants like “Pearto” and “Fat Teto”⁵ are undeniably a huge constituent of this phenomenon. Whereas before expressions were curatively imported, memes like this can be said to encroach on spaces rather than having been directly picked for import by Japanese fans. There is a marked difference in this, for example, than having memes like “Nice boat”⁶ reappropriated from a 4chan post, or comments on Teto reprints translated for matome blogs collecting overseas reactions. While a post-Miku boom for Vocaloid has often emphasized the celebrity of producers over characters, overseas fans are now reasserting Teto’s character, often with crippling back pain. It should not be suggested that overseas fans do not value producer personalities, but rather that the character remains overriding in why vocal synth music attracts popularity here at all. Much of Japanese vocal synth music of course also remains reliant on this principle, and the existence of events like Snow Miku and Magical Mirai would not exist without embracing it, but it is my sense from reviewing examples like Joysound rankings and Billboard Japan charts that vocal synth music has done more to permeate the pop music conversation in Japan instead of continuing to remain related as pure subculture, as it does overseas.

It is also notable that as overseas vocal synth fandom catches up to Japanese expressions, there are still times when we will find ourselves unexpectedly all on the same wavelength. For many overseas fans, producing music or animations remains out of reach, which allows softer or more casual expressions like fancams and memes to become their participation in promoting the subculture. While we will still need more time to digest its influence, Mesmerizer has already been clearly relayed as an inflecting moment for both Teto and vocal synth fandom with these reliances. Principally, Mesmerizer managed to capitalize on unified Japanese and western interests with a light mystery that encouraged speculative yarning about hidden meanings and codes. Aesthetically, it also manages to blend the components of viral growth that have proven successful elsewhere: there is a grounding familiarity in Channel’s designs of Miku and Teto, performing a dance in vertical video engineered for repeat on TikTok, that is also compellingly amplified with a quirky denpa sound far outside of mainstream pop music.

The success of this song, an escape of subculture into the mainstream by any measure, continues to reverberate with the number of Miku and Teto duets that have been released in its wake. This event alone may, realistically, have more to do with Teto’s overseas appeal than any other prior history we’ve discussed, simply due to its sheer scale and wide exposure. Admittedly, there is no surefire theory to deriving a global appeal, and at the time of Mesmerizer’s release, I personally did not evaluate it as the runaway success it has now proven to be. Although it is possible for me to now retroactively assess its qualities, it is also important to accept that any cultural critique will more often find itself blind to the multiple facets and serendipity of social media that judge a song, or an artist, or a character like Teto. On attempting to gauge a song or a character in regional locales, or evaluating the cultural sensitivities of expressions (see Hiiragi Magnetite’s Zaako), we should remind ourselves that it is difficult, if not outright impractical, to estimate how they will be received across all different cultures and descendant subcultures, either with a glowing praise, a swarmed contempt, or a shrugged indifference.

Kasane Teto as a commons

Although Teto has never been a Vocaloid in the technical sense, her commercial representation has only been loosely stewarded by Crypton under the Piapro umbrella since 2010, casting her as a character born from Vocaloid culture. This distinction has proven essential to how we view Teto as a kind of cultural commons: her association with the Cryptonloids, particularly in situating her beside them in the Project Diva franchise, gave her an accessible and polished public form that did not entirely erase her independent origins. Even before Project Diva titles were localized to the west, starting with Project Diva f in 2014, widespread PSP piracy and the circulation of reprinted PVs ensured her overseas visibility as an underground concern. With this loose exposure, Teto rode the wave of Miku’s first global boom, accruing legitimacy as part of the frenzied excitement around Vocaloid without being wholly bound to its strictures, or indeed even being able to benefit from the commercial floating performed by Crypton.

Teto’s rejuvination with SynthV has been marked by more than a technical update. Emerging on a moment of upheaval following COVID, her new voicebank and renewed interest aligned with a generational turnover in Vocaloid subculture and a youth desire for a new cultural jumpstart. This new audience, raised on participatory fandoms fluent in atomized meme cultures that were a novelty in Vocaloid’s first boom, have now collided with a loyal doujin base of vocal synth otaku that had already matured her identity across years of grassroots activity. The modern rhetoric of democratized creation, where anyone can jump in to participate, finds in Teto a fulfillment where she is simultaneously an accessible entry point for new creators and a cult figure sustained from long-term community investment by TWINDRILL fans that could not have ever imagined the level of attention she now commands. Her appeal is situated between these classes, embodying both the underdog authenticity of an UTAU while borrowing some of the polish of a mascot character. From today, she is consistently a second choice for vocal synth creatives behind only Miku, and yet the split narrative of her emergent star makes estimating her longevity in this attention difficult to compare to previous second favorites that have preceded her, like IA and GUMI.

Miku’s history has now been canonized through a near-corporate mythology, matching a mascot appeal borrowed from Hello Kitty crossed with the creative reinterpretation of Disney characters. Miku has also had an enduring presence, even in the west, for close to two decades, and yet much of the Japanese trivia that does orbit Miku (recently revisited examples such as the JAXA signature campaign⁷, for example) remains broadly not a part of her overseas simulacra that instead relies on solidified touch points like her concerts to convey her influence. Teto’s story, instead, remains highly mutable, shared, and still fluid, though similarly dependent on a contextual decay that makes her character very culturally mobile. Whereas before Miku and Teto were dependent on receiving and recreating Japanese expressions through a clear waterfall, overseas participants are now entering this commons on an equal footing that was not possible during Miku’s first boom when her ground truth was being established. The esoterica with Teto’s 2ch hoax may now be of less importance, but it is with the dual contexts of the emergence of a borderless creative space and the digestion of expressions associated from her early era that her appeal is being supercharged overseas. The web’s time lag has, effectively, collapsed in a post-regional web. Teto’s evolution thus reflects not just her own persistence as a character, but a diffusion of ownership and recirculation of culture that has offered overseas fans whetting their subculture appetites with Vocaloid for the first time an unprecedented opportunity to forge their own participation and assemble a unique canon for Teto on her second splash. In overseas locales where participation has not yet come online or where regional firewalls persist, most notably in China, there is likely much opportunity left for Teto again, or any other character revived through a SynthV release, to be reappraised with more global remixes.

japan’s annual buzzword trends, a season that seems to arrive earlier every year, have started trickling out. while stateside we settle only for a word of the year announced by a dictionary, japan is lucky to have teams that yearn for data warehouses and are employed to make us funny charts about kids’ slang. if there’s any takeaway to be found so far in what’s being released, it’s that italian brainrot is explosively popular with the youth. this probably isn’t all that surprising, if you have kept an ear to the ground on roblox or tiktok, which itself was already a qualified sickness of mine. it’s also fairly likely to be an uncomfortable watch, if you’re on the other end of being a tween and are only being exposed to it now for the first time.

oricon, much the way billboard has needed to reinvent itself multiple times over through the rise of compilation albums and streaming, is still trying to find some statistical ground truth with digital media. critical sakuga fanatics have always recognized its reports are consistently flawed, rather than absolute truths, and it still relies heavily on an old world model of media that ingests data from retailers and publishers. with public-facing metrics on socials becoming worse than useless as they inflate beyond comparison, consistently flawed data actually ends up being a pretty useful promise. we don’t exactly know what back channel data oricon might be sitting on for a comb of trends online, but we trust that a simple survey conducted jointly with shogakukan also wants to find that ground truth if they’re going to be selling to kids and having to pitch advertisers. it’s certainly better than I would likely do if I were the guardian of corocoro comic, where it would be justifiable to fudge the numbers and report puniru in all fields.

even if you have skirted around its characters like bombardino crocodilo so far, crunching the numbers isn’t really required to know that fads like italian brainrot are the tenor of all global platforms now. if you thought logging out was an escape, you can still glance up to see it projected on buildings in shibuya, or sitting on shelves as card packs to be resold later on mercari, or rigged in crane games, or charting interest for karaoke. if you doubt its staying power as memes usually cycle out on a timeline of days, the nikkei picked up a full profile of it only a few days ago. plenty of past examinations on this site have examined encroachments of net culture into the real world, and while I think we are all sober enough now to understand that the luster for that pure of an ideal is far beyond expired, an encroachment into the real world might be one of our strongest signals left in knowing if an online fad is more than just smoke. the proof exists in cheap manufactured plastic, and unless the market needs a dramatic correction, kids currently really do want skibidi toilets and tung tung tung sahur rubber straps.

one thing I have found myself stewing more on with emergent fads like this, maybe equally to the attention we have given to outrage bait, is how participatory kids are online now. delineated social spaces for kids, the club penguins from years gone, are extinct. to be a kid online today is to now exist on the same three websites and apps that all adults do, no longer sitting ducks for tired trolling on habbo hotel, but as convincingly equal participants that steer conversation as much as they may have once passively observed. children have all the free time in the world to occupy theirs doing both. when the success of these gatekeepers is so tightly coupled to attention retained, it is not tremendously surprising that they do much of the steering for us. the character of tiktok, with little doubt, is children being the first movers for turning over old culture and reappropriating subculture outside of its containers. when only slightly fabricated, that can deliver the invented simulacra of frutiger aero. when shame is left for dead, there’s little to wonder in how yajuu senpai and his inmu pals have also escaped containment to become generated pop idols for children as YAJU＆U, beyond the clutches of corporate reappropriation.

as a champion of the sound MAD and its focke adjacents, I feel confident in saying that one man’s brainrot is another child’s high culture. extremes have always been seen at all ends, with truly horrible flash animations to commercially licensed mega franchises like bobobo. it is hardly unique, then, that italian brainrot’s tiktok rise is being cast as nonsensical and devilish by adults today as much as beanie babies, or pokemon, or garbage pail kids were during their cultural peaks, simply because its awareness has penetrated a pop culture. for as much as italian brainrot does lack structure, it has also birthed a wiki attempting to categorize its many expressions, no less collaborative and in search of categorization than the SCP foundation or anime bath scenes. it’s also imperative, I feel, to recognize when generative content does experience a cultural resonance across the web not as porn or deceptive content, so far its most proved realizations, but as a category novel from its ingestions. if generative AI is to discover itself as a new medium, the rare moments where it has been seen to discover a shared language of characters, evolved from solitary personal experiences like chatbots aping existing characters, could suggest its arrival. for now, it still does not appear to extend much further than its digital pulps.

most people who reach any level of this analysis in trying to dissect italian brainrot, I suspect, are likely to view it with some scorn. while I’m fairly confident I’m not that much more charitable in my read, having watched enough to be reluctant to embed any in this post directly, I don’t see much reason to leap further than recognizing that children have always liked cheap, bad, and crude entertainment, with many of those kids also growing up to have a palette that only accepts media mush. if media is how we complete our identities, then its exposure and infection through socials has already become its fast fashion equivalent for every demographic. distribution online through socials for the past decade, well before generative AI’s arrival, hardly has ever felt that it is promoting creatives with recommendations as much as it has been staking signposts for paths that wind you even deeper, often of content stolen or without attribution.

today’s kids, probably unwisely, do not play in their own media landscapes where content is restricted to their circle of friends or presented in a digestible chronology. the corners and traps of the platforms that are already sharp for adults are even more hazardous to them, where their attentions are no less statistically likely to be sucked into house MD clips or communities for suicidal ideation. the static mediums it is displacing are unfortunate casualties across all demographics, but it is doubly wounding for children that may lose access to them altogether. television, even as boob tube entertainment, still exercises some controlled curation that allows for more encounters with enriching programming. while I suppose television could conceivably claw back its legacy of morning cartoons, fifty shorts on tiktok or youtube, consumed for free in a permutation uniquely gripping to each individual, provides more micro-climaxes and excitements than an episode of pretty cure padded for time every week could ever hope to achieve with stock transformation sequences. those same transformations, squashed into a mega mashup on youtube or as interrupts in a dynamically adjusted feed, are simply more likely to do a better job when repackaged as the media equivalent of a pacifier.

what does it say, then, about the current mechanics of producing children’s entertainment that super sentai is getting killed off in its fiftieth year, while italian brainrot and equivalents are sucking up even more attention? not all that much, maybe. commercial kids entertainment is still clearly discovering winners, which suggests shorts are not so filling as to make children ignore pangs for media variety, but the long tail has dried up as much as the long tail has dried up for all commercial entertainment that has to turn to safe bets. sneering digital trends like brainrot will always be an available stance to critique that our children are beyond repair and are responsible for entertainment’s demise, even when there are analogs of nonsense in our not so distant pasts of animutations and youtube poops. when content is done for free and spread at scale, there are already no guardrails on it being calorically meaningful to any recommended media diet. cocomelon already does deliver empty calories to billions, but its contours are at least well understood in a top-down delivery model of entertainment. with amateur content like italian brainrot, where children lead with prompted approximates or donate labor themselves for monetized roblox games, it is easy to understand that anxiety over its influence stems equally or even more to an access that children are granted on an open web, where most parents are only just now coming online to understand what a discord server is.

finding meaning in the disjointed clips of italian brainrot itself is, of course, a deliberately pointless exercise. while I have tried to find a shape to its container, it is mostly that I have found it bereft of any graspable meaning except as a lightly-oriented cyber punk. today’s children have grown up in a world where we have impressed on them that everything must be hyper-optimized under constant surveillance, while screens are also destroying their focus and ability to ground themselves to the humiliation of an impossible to achieve career drudgery. we have relentlessly drilled that the web they are now entering is already beyond any stage of recovery. forfeiting their time to the nonsensical instead occupies a rebellion that pirating hollywood movies on bittorrent or downloading music on napster may once have been a beacon for as a digital native. they are not entirely blind to recognizing that the systems they are only now beginning to be exposed to are engineered to addict and break them with overexposure. with an unavoidable and boundless abundance, however, there is doomscrolling, gooning, and parasocializing available in their extremes and to an optimization that has already been invented for children on their first exposure, punched to their tiktok shortest or stretched to their podcast longest. if you have them, why wouldn’t you smoke them? many that find themselves caught in these webs, of course, will skip past bothering or thinking to ever ask.

my examining of italian brainrot by writing this post was never necessarily to discover some kernel of worth in it, but to digest whether my general disgust with it was potentially reflexive to looking at younger generations with derision, or if there is more to learn in examining the scaffolding that birthed it. even as I have approached the latter here with some balance, I am less shy to say more pointedly that I believe many of the large players controlling the platforms hosting it are the ghouls that would profit off of a literal brain rot if allowed to. italian brainrot on its content scale, at least in my dive into its world, still mostly seems to fit benignly into the expected contours of cheap shock expected of these platforms than as a uniquely corrupting influence. its infection, even as a generative slop, leans towards a glib and irreverent that is recognizable across a sum total of digital cultures, rather than one of the many other directly enumerable and targeted harms enabled by large platforms that can’t be bothered to care.

if there is any alarm to be summoned from italian brainrot more specifically, then I would suggest it is as study for how social platforms breed and reward outrage trending closer to its youngest participants. this is hardly much of a secret to all engagement online now, and especially in japan, brainrot appears to have seized on overflowing outrage every time it has been flushed so far. zabyan (THE BYAN), a self-described vocaloid producer, has attached himself to italian brainrot by prompting suno AI songs and morphing its generated images into melting animations that are proving to be its catalyst in japan. his most popular song upload, having leapfrogged an escape into the mainstream, achieved 29 million views in a little over three months. while vocaloid has begun flirting more with generated audio content, most recently with the mushoku tomeisai song festival softening its rules to allow for suno AI instrumentals, it remains mostly rejected by its core subculture. vocaloid’s fans, still of a subculture that struggles to process its internal drama and that has experienced a similarly young influx globally, are not well-situated to ignore the bait of any intrusion or to know when not to feed the trolls.

zabyan has adopted a mocking stance to promoting his spin on italian brainrot, mostly by prodding vocaloid fans. for a paltry 100k likes, he promises that he’ll remove the vocaloid producer label that’s proudly perched on his different profiles. he has, of course, now earned more recognition for brainrot than any of his honest attempts as a vocaloid producer have ever come close to achieving, though his die being cast as a vocaloid producer has become convenient ammo and reason to keep his name close at hand for flame wars extending to surrounding cultures. some cultural critiques I have seen openly ponder if this moment is, perhaps, the beginning of the end for vocaloid’s latest boom period. zabyan, however, does not have much anything as interesting to say with his success, either in crude attempts at music or even as a culture warrior. his presence is largely outrage for outrage’s sake, an unpopular opinion swords guy affixing a “kick me” sign to his own back and reaping the rewards.

there is hardly any way to critique the approach without also feeding into the troll yourself, yet it seems difficult to expect we will ever be able to recalibrate our attention collectively against attempts like it in the short term without developing a more conscious understanding of how they spread, particularly in an already vulnerable period for social media. human behaviors, we can accept, may not always be possible to guide to their most positive on large platforms hosting them, but we should expect some baseline empathy and correction from their stewards if we are to allow them to continue existing. when communications platforms instead hire psychologists to soothe their unease by smoothing over internal studies, cover their eyes when they encounter unavoidable maladies, and raise the flood gates on moderation to buoy their sinking engagement, it doesn’t take a mark zuckerberg apologizing to a crowd of parents with dead teenagers to understand why they are undeserving of much slack in their rightfully earned negative characterizations.

the immediate solution remains in that even as brainrot wins gamified attention with kids, we are starting to see the youngest users of social media proactively retract from it, although not with any urgency that would be needed to correct for how they are monopolizing attention. without having attractive substitutes to fill the gaps left from their time scrolling, zabyan’s cat avatar being deep fried by chino may be all that’s left to air in public as slop is left to snowball with even more slop. somehow, and with a regrettable twinge of what seems inevitable, I sense that even more punchy and absurd forms like it, supercharged by generative content, will only continue to overflow containers until we arrive at a solution to address the bloom of outrage that tails them. it is difficult to see much further past the horizon online, but with how concentrated our access currently is, it will take a long time for any correction to produce observable results.

the bright side is that it should be fairly obvious if someone does engineer a silver bullet to pull us out of our dark forests of closed discord servers and group chats, rather than continuing to hop laterally between platforms: it probably won’t go through a round of seed funding and struggle to discover paths to monetization. fortunately, elementary school festivals do not yet find themselves steered by this kind of corrupting brainrot. it is one remaining space where kids are still allowed to be kids, without being goaded by malicious gatekeepers that must squeeze their attention for dollars, and without needlessly prying eyes like mine searching for meaning in the behaviors of online zoos.

小学校のお祭りにイタリアンブレインロットのトゥントゥントゥンサフールがナルトダンス踊ってる顔はめ作ったの正解だったってことやな☺️

— いあら (@iara_AmI) Nov 26, 2025

The poetry of news, providing context for events, is that it informs a critical public. Technology, instead, has been thrust upon me in an information age that is past ripe. It should be clear by now that ingesting a modern daily news, where images of community raids and poetic destruction are beamed directly as seizure, is more of a ritual that allows one to hallucinate a Fourth Estate than an actual enrichment. The amateur blend of news now found in true crime, Joe Rogan hang-ons, investigative reporting learned from Google Docs callouts, and live stream clips beamed from suburban bedrooms by influencers with ring lights, dizzies before one is allowed a thought that might ever focus them.

The supposed professionals are not doing much better to distinguish themselves. The New York Times now sells their news on the side as a game publisher with a bonus of endless, pulsing, full color video. Democracy dies not in darkness, but with bankers boxes from editorial staff clearing the room so that the invisible hand can direct more salutes of business. Talking heads, evolved from grey hair dulls into slicked-back DUI hires, now have their clearest path to upwards mobility by sitting in the rotating chair on podcasts or skipping all standards to be confirmed as Chief of War Crimes. These acknowledgements are not comforts themselves, in a traditional way as you or I will understand a warm blanket or a tricot dakimakura cover, but a fun house comfort that allows one to believe they are able to parse the ruins of our media landscape with complete clarity. For every ProPublica that does remain, there are ten thousand independents and generative summaries jockeying for their pennies and attention.

The iteration of media’s current forms did not arrive all at once, or without truths borrowed from the style guides and behaviors of mass broadcast. Dan Rather may be one of the most recognized of our grey hair dulls, as one of America’s “Big Three” evening news anchors for CBS, but he is no less an encapsulation of the thrust from technology. Most of the urgency of modern hurricane reporting is owed to Dan’s time at KHOU in Houston, where Hurricane Carla would be the first time satellite images of a storm were projected on a scale map, urging the largest evacuation performed during peacetime to this point. Telestar I, the first telecommunications satellite launched in 1962, was the first time live images were broadcast globally by satellite on CBS. The year after, in 1963, he was one of the first to screen and narrate the amateur Zapruder film out of Dallas. Any understanding of media or television is incomplete without also an understanding of Vietnam, where Dan was on the front lines for the living room war enabled by satellite and video. By his own account, he was ill-prepared for the gravity of the role.

The highlight of this five year window is not necessarily to regale technological accomplishment, or to tour Dan’s presiding over major events in his tenure as an evening news anchor, but to bookend with where you will ultimately find Dan now: writing a Substack, swimming in the trash heap with the rest of us. The conveyors of technology (Dan’s characterization) have pushed him into the blogosphere, though only after experiencing a stint as a podcaster. His Substack equal has now been absorbed as the boss of news on the network where he first developed any authority at all.

Neil Postman, an already renowned media theorist during Reagan’s political star, would most pointedly express that serious television is not just worse than useless, but embarrassing. Dan would attempt to override this modality at his outset by inventing his own take on Walter Cronkite’s signoff, but lacked the courage to continue after one week. It is instead mostly the squabble between Dan and George HW Bush dissected by expert political analysts for form, not content, that became an emphasis on Postman’s core thesis that television encouraged tennis matches of picking winners, completing television news primarily as entertainment.

The submission of news to technology is where Postman’s critique postures some of its strongest today, not the least when Dan also attempted to pass off proportionally-spaced Microsoft Word documents as originating from a typewriter. The specifics of this episode are best revisited in broad strokes today, recognizing attempts at sourcing, verification, and correction were gestured at more than ever really attempted. The cranks on the Free Republic forums, obsessed with exposing the liberal media bias, shattered the illusion minutes after they were first presented by Dan. A concise analysis posted there the day after should have been good enough to expedite a retraction. CBS instead moved at the speed of television, choosing to take twelve days to correct the record.

Similar embarrassments today have been worse than enduring. The outcomes and their expressions, however, are still not foregone either. Of the lawn chair media critics that do remain, most prefer to pose what past luminaries like Postman or Nam June Paik would make of our now accepted mediums in podcasts and short-burst social media. The atomization of news, disjointed into segments that arrest thought as they are chained back together, would be as clearly seen by Postman as the remote control was to Federico Fellini in interrupting an emotion.

For Postman, it would perhaps by difficult to accept that the linear nature of television as he knew it would make it a relatively slow medium today. It is instead a horrible invention of a wandering mind, one exploded by looping shorts assembled reactively and that allows itself to write a post aggrandizing the media ecology of Dan Rather and Gochisua, that imagines if Postman would react as a small Victorian child would when allowed a sip from an overstimulating marriage of their forms. What, possibly, would Postman make of Gochiusa News (ごちうさニュース), if not the ultimate perversion of our news as entertainment that it deserves?

“Of course, in television's presentation of the "news of the day," we may see the "Now... this" mode of discourse in it's boldest and most embarrassing form. For there, we are presented not only with fragmented news but news without context, without consequences, without value, and therefore without essential seriousness; that is to say, news as pure entertainment.”
_{— Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death}

Teleivison may be yesterday’s medium, but Gochuumon wa Usagi desu ka? (Gochiusa), when it was first broadcast during the spring of 2014, began when simulcasts were not a complete substitute. Depending on how much you can remember the anticipation of fansubs, it may be difficult to accept that in Japan it did not release on streaming services without a few days of broacast delay from its airing on Tokyo MX. Gochiusa was likely to have been a success without streaming, though a great deal of the fandom is still attributed to its attention on Niconico, where the participatory nature of layered comments remains attractive even today over better streaming options under the Kadokawa umbrella. A specific diehard audience, at scale, is imperative to it being an appealing option at all. Gochiusa, not necessarily uniquely but as one of the more prominent examples, had each new episode free to view for its first week on Nico. Operative to this recount, the first episode remained free to view through Gochiusa’s entire broadcast run and after it concluded for some years. Gochiusa’s first episode, it feels now, was predestined to become an informal meeting space for fans, creating conditions for the raucousness of a Rocky Horror Picture screening seasoned with otaku inventiveness.

The common Gochiusa fanatic here has more overlap with the average K-pop fan than they likely care to admit, as the initial goal of their attention was to push this episode to one million views and to run it further up the site’s ranking charts. On Nico, where view counts have always been protected for rankings rather than inflated exponentially, every view captures an active engagement that can’t be equated to YouTube or other global platforms. One million views continues to be an accomplishment of magnitude on the site, and especially so in the era before it stopped requiring user registration.

While numbers-chasing is potentially enough of a carrot to snowball an audience, the fervor around Gochiusa has larger otaku recognition. With Comiket 86 (C86) as Gochiusa’s first debut, corporate booths from Houbunsha and RONDO ROBE were ready to lay out the proverbial otaku carpet with dakimakura, tapestries, and bed sheets. The result, as you can still find expressed on dives back into dusty blogs and profiles, was mayhem: each item’s stock sold out on the first day, though not without also forcing many to wait in lines until closing time that they had queued for in the early morning.

By the second and third days of C86, either from rationing what was left or having learned from the crowds in their first day of bumbling around, stocks at these booths were depleted within minutes. We know this today not because of my fastidiousness in combing old tweets declaring breaking news, but because Gochiusa fans on Nico were monitoring intel and have compiled a C86 merch table for posterity plastered with 完売 (sold out) labels, as if we are still gawking at the same merch advertisement boards affixed with stickers on each item. Communicating merch stock has long been considered an advanced tactic of Comiket information warfare, stretching back to Nanoha in 2006, and social media is the preferred theater for making things up as you go along. Nanoha’s sold out and war is cruel. Gochiusa fans are hopping in and out of line. Someone at the Garupan booth just collapsed to the floor pissing and shitting themselves.

Gochiusa fans would feed on this potential prestige of earning title as the next Nanoha, when such title meant something. The invention of Gochiusa as news was therefore not modeled by any serious event, or even one rooted in any true reality with anecdotes meant to lightly smear respective fandoms, but an opportunity to stamp ごちうさ完売 (Gochiusa’s sold out) over Chino’s face on Nico as template as they declared themselves refugees from one of Comiket’s worst trials.

Gochiusa’s first episode becoming an informal wire service for otaku would only need a few danmaku repavings to overwrite an initial context of breathless Comiket reports, beginning with headlines front loaded in the first few seconds of playback. What did eventually develop this aggregation of headlines with the moniker “Gochiusa News”, as if to suggest it had secured a broadcasting license, was the 2014 snap election colliding with this episode also being on the precipice of two million views.

Japan’s politics have been a prominent fixture of Nico’s democratic engagement since it adopted live streaming, but what intrigues here is not that the otaku have thoughts on politicians or their politics, but that the 2014 election would be, and remains, a low point in voter turnout. Syaro and Chino fans are not yet a political class, but still the headlines about Abenomics and the weakness of the Democratic opposition are littered through the comment log during this time. It is frighteningly conceivable that someone could have extracted all of their news for the day from these headlines alone, but the posing of serious news over latte art could convey no more clearly that dooming headlines were undeserving of the grandeur that they tote. Gochiusa News became settled primarily, here, as performance. Most contemporary invokes of it would more sharply narrow it as breaking news (ごちうさ速報), except if you live in Oita prefecture, and there is perhaps no performance more enduring than news that never stops breaking. Even with comments posted at their largest font and their most urgent, they are immediately shoved under layers of more novel noise, pushed to the back as quickly as they were never seen or inspired thought about to begin with.

Even as a crowd, there is an editorial voice that applies to Gochiusa News in that of the daringly absurd. The nakedness of a deadly car crash being invoked next to Bitcoin price reports presents not so much a slice of life, taken in as nibbles coming from multiple sources, but as a dense pound cake of the ludicrous being shoved directly into your stupid face. The awe of this spectacle itself, where every headline can barely be discerned as visual content, is holistically the news. Tabloids exploded by a hydraulic press would retain more recognizable context. Tweets in a timeline collapsed into a single post container would still impress some average of attribution. Gochiusa News may elect to find more shared in a graffiti wall dedicated as community bulletin board, with a similar adherence to informal rules not established by committee but inferred from other participants. Unlike the rules that would be common to graffiti, where tagging over another another’s work where ample room was still available would be considered bad practice, the overwhelm toes vandalism as each comment can only be valuable to the performance in a whole.

Gochiusa News does focus where formality must be sacredly respected: news should only flood the screen until Cocoa’s first line, starting at 35 seconds, so as not to cross-talk. The first user to specifically mention this phenomenon would invoke it as the 31 second rule (31秒ルール), a direction accounting for comments taking at most four seconds to clear the screen at their posted timestamp. As Postman would describe for the nibbles of televised interviews and news segments, there is never enough time for anything but the openers and the irreverence of time-keeping.

An assembled danmaku shares more with a supposedly serious news than we should be comfortable with. Comments scrolling from right to left, punchily condensed so as to catch the eye swimming among others, are evocative of the news tickers that dart around skyscrapers or sit with importance as chyrons below the faces of nightmare round tables. Tickers are undoubtedly the best characteristic of visual news, so much that they are globally recognized when performed for parody in blockbuster movies or by amateurs opening Windows Movie Maker. Everything one could hope to know about the world is promised within a ticker, not with enough patience to read it in full, but with a darting gaze back and forth over it searching for some end to an infinite. Does anyone truly expect to find enlightening news outlined here, enriching beyond school delays and closings, when the events described are churned through and atomized as a flurry of unconnected points? It seems difficult to emphatically answer “no” to this question when, for a large cohort of adults, a scroll at the bottom of news as entertainment may be their only brush with news at all. The danmaku, at least, has sense to not keep one waiting when it blasts as a confetti of infotainment.

A lone individual repeating the dignity of a news anchor projecting steadiness will always be difficult to achieve in a 500-channel universe. Gochiusa News, instead, tunes its expression as a mass hysteria. For some years during its most prolific era, searching for “1” alone on Google or Yahoo! Japan would present Gochiusa’s first episode and related pages on Nico as top results¹, a vote of endorsement in the ratings rat race against other first episodes. While cable news may have been antecedent as only a finite and closed universe, the web has certainly graduated ourselves to uncountable multiverses. Gochiusa News indeed is only one constituent element of a broader templating that applied to Gochiusa’s first episode with an exacting detail. Each second has been outlined in a timeline guide on the video’s Nicopedia article, returning some context and categorization to what would otherwise require an academic grant to compile.

Reference guides are, of course, tremendously useful citations for anyone returning to parse these riddles today, but in their time would offer otaku mentorship matching the call guides distributed by fans at concerts for call and response. The revisions made regularly to this page during its peak run are a revealing supplement in that many of the citations are not just highly referential, but are meta to the act of templating itself, branching from comments vectoring as inquisitive reply to a prior template or from similar posts made to the guide’s bulletin board. The memetic value of otaku in-jokes is exposed as not exclusive to one video, or one website, but most entertaining when they are allowed to confuse new hosts. In distant galaxies of anonymous boards dedicated to posting Chino images as avatars, when someone will always undoubtedly query why Sxarp must be invoked that way, it remains appropriate to always volley your own question back: are you a virgin here, or do you kiss Hepburn with that romanization?

Many of the touchstones applicable to Gochiusa News were crowded to Nico’s silver age. If it were to have an emergent property, it is not as an authority for aggregated headlines, but as the rabbit hutch returned to as shelter. Whereas we can focus anonymous participation as a creative destination for movements like Muneo House, Gochiusa’s first episode qualifies itself more an event destination. Although people certainly do return to this video as regular ritual for news, enough that a Twitter bot began to capture the first thirty seconds each day, the ritualism most obvious in its pattern of activity is as meta participation tailing Gochiusa itself.

As main example to this phenomenon, Gakkou Gurashi will always be most viscerally remembered for its bait and switch. Notwithstanding that Minase Inori voiced main characters in both shows, Gochiusa provided retreat for shell-shocked otaku in 2015, grounding itself to a reality where Chino will always make you a fresh blend and Rize will always be your mom. The serious news is, as result, incidental bedding. Everyone arriving to Gochiusa News already implicitly expects the stock market to crash today, or that 40 million people will lose access to food assistance next month. What they would really prefer to jockey is when Kemono Friends’ first episode rocketing to the top of Nico’s rankings, a phenomenon forever intertwined to Nico and Kadokawa’s meddling, would achieve parity with Gochiusa at an eye-popping 9.3 million views. The dressing of the fluffy and lighthearted with wildly divergent global chaos, a crisis that never seems to cease, authorizes a fiction that this is a five-alarm meltdown worth freaking the fuck out about. The news, it does then appear, is always at its most entertaining when it is allowed to create the news.

It should not be discounted that many did derive some utility from Gochiusa News. At the peak of its recognition, when more eyes were on it as its danmaku were reposted outside of Nico, the most common refrain would be that it was faster than official sources, or even the early warning system of platforms used to brace earthquakes; it is, for example, only one way you could have learned about Brexit. Nothing posted to Gochiusa News had to go through the gullet of being spotted and reposted, because no comment existed in any hierarchy or with any specific authority. Naturally, there is no fact-checking ombudsman accountable for anonymous comments, or sourcing concerns gumming them up from flying at anything faster than the speed limit of their own medium. The informal meeting as news is a more general quality that wreaths it, as students gathered to vent about shitty questions on the Center entrance exams, or fans popped champagne celebrating the Hiroshima Tokyo Carp advancing to a Japan Series championship for the first time in 25 years.

Gochiusa News, in many ways more constructive than much the rest of Nico’s comment culture, mostly avoided devolving into fake news or vandal trolling. It is often improbable to consider that anonymity can deliver positive or even neutral outcomes online, when there are plenty of reasons to hark otherwise, but the localization of digital community often is a concern of probabilities as much as it is bending them into shape with moderation. Nothing is necessarily foregone about the character a medium does express: Kemono Friends did not break the Gochiusa News monopoly, and recent ascendants like Hiroshi Nohara returning viewers to Nico² have yet to show a convergent evolution as they also template danmaku over confusing food porn.

Gochiusa News does not hop in many hearts today, except when it is allowed to arrest them for reminisce. Checking the first episode today is enough to expose that most of the fluff is gone, now transplanted to mediums that push even closer to the speed of light, while a few diehards make vain attempts to replicate the magic. While I am tempted to close the book on its retreat as constituent to Nico’s broader decay, there is a hypnosis in its visual nature that I find myself gnawing on as artists and ghouls take to discovering representations of how our world will look with ceaseless horror and push notifications broadcast hovering in my retina. It is usually not that we are willing participants in our mediums, but that I find we are often first only bemused by them before being involuntarily attracted to their fine-tuned expressions, now tabs and swipes away, or pushed to us without consent as we must settle for them. Is there any wonder, as I stare into the eternity of scrolling feeds with voices barking at me teetering on the nonsensical, that I feel my eyeballs pulse with the caffeinated memories of Rabbit House?

Postman has had his mettle stretched in the four decades since he concluded we are amusing ourselves to death with television. The speed at which amusement does become terminal, rather than a chronic ache teetering on migraine, has yet to hit escape velocity. Postman’s books and lectures are now numbing parts painfully quaint and prescient of a technology that has, to align with his critiques, fogged our thoughts. He was too early to experience the web as we now know it, or to offer thoughts extending beyond the interrupt of electronic mail, telephones, and fax machines. The wrestle of old world technologies with a technological determinism seems as plucked from coverage today about generative AI, but the cultural references themselves are dated enough to require decent preface. A context of Reagan, Dan Rather, and the connective tissue of AM talk radio remain a useful grounding when dissecting why our modern media landscape looks like a Stormfront gathering in Breezewood, PA, but there is no singular Neil Postman of a similar critical renown that seems to offer as much modern clarity (Douglas Rushkoff could get there given enough time to hoist his influence on Lain and the psychedelic substrate), likely because so much of our energy is spent contesting platforms, as Cory Doctorow now wrestles with, rather than mediums themselves.

So much of what was at once theoretical about the web no longer needs to be said in aggrandizing detail when it can be lived. So much of our digital information pummels the senses without distinguishing venue to its expressions, a pornographic convergence that oscillates between rage, entertainment, and lust. So much of this convergence is engineered and designed to strip away all nuance and importance until it is sufficiently naked for decorating spectacle. Registering these mediums may be like explaining to a fish that they are swimming in water, as McLuhan posits, but the shifting of currents still cannot go unnoticed to even the most naïve of participants. Otaku ー maximalists, consumerists, and technophiles in their most modern derivation ー we may learn with more time provided early warning with Gochiusa News of our current barrage in mediums created primarily by their participants. They had no time to concern themselves with the shame or embarrassment then, nor does it seem we appear much concerned with the embarrassments of our new mediums since.

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 wholly 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.

Anonymous 05/02/15(Sat)11:21:24 No.124805690

50120418_p8_master1200.jpg 315KiB, 800x800

Anonymous 05/02/15(Sat)11:25:34 No.124805821

a cat is fine too - maybe the ca (...).jpg 66KiB, 1280x720

>it's almost Sunday
Yes!

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.