Jackie Wepps

I'm chosing to make a new post for this. It feels better like that.

Keeping it short, this is an update on what is going to happen on here in the new year and in the future.

First things first. Jackie in Japan is over for the time being. I have left Japan and am back in my home country and will therefore have no Japan-related experiences in a while. I could probably cook up a post or two based on my diary entries from my first time in Japan, but otherwise, consider this series over temporarily. I say this because I do have every intention of going back there. I don't know when or how, but I promise you, it will happen. And I will share my experiences with you again, when that time comes.

Now, let's move on to what will actually happen.

I'll still be making updates on my WIPs. I do have quite a few and I hope you'll read some of them. I will try to make an announcement about something once a month. I hope I have enough to talk about withou tspoiling anything.

I didn't really announce this in my first post, but I'm thinking I will share my opinion on some anime I'm watching. I will also try to put a limit of once a month on those posts too. If I don't, I feel like I'd be talking way too much about that.

I'll also do asks every now and then, but feel free to send me questions outside of that too, if you'd like.

Lastly, if you have anything you would like to talk about, feel free to reach out. I know I'm not most people's first choice, but I'm told I am a good listener, so if you ever want to vent or rant but don't know where to go, you can come here. I'm always open for anything.

Okay, so here I am, about to talk about one of my favorite sports anime. A new season just started earlier this month, and of course I'm watching it.

I found it ages ago. I think I started watching it because I'd heard about it and there were a lot of voice actors I knew in it (yes, it's from my Japanese VA period). There were two seasons out at that time. I started watching it, took a break because I found the protagonist, Sawamura, loud and annoying, and then returned about half a year later, bingding over half of Ace of Diamonds and then went on to Ace of Diamonds Second Season. I later watched Act II, and I'm now watching Act II Second Season.

These days, Sawamura Eijun is my baby. I wouldn't exactly say the other characters are my babies, but I do at least like everyone on the Seidou High School baseball team. The rest of the cast consists of a mix of characters I like and characters I hate to love.

Other than the characters, what I really like about Ace of Diamonds is the fact that I can't predict what will happen.

When you've been exposed to as many stories as I have in my nearly 30 year long life, some things become very easy to predict. In most anime, it's not so much a matter of whether the good guys win or not, but how they do it. I wouldn't say it makes the story boring, it just makes it possible to relax and enjoy the show.

With Ace of Diamonds, you can never predict how the battle with go. Not even if it's Seidou playing, even if they're in the lead. In fact, it's when they're in the lead I expect the game to start going bad for them. And this also holds true for the teams Seidou play against, even if those teams are not playing Seidou.

As of episode 3 in Act II Second Season, the final summer game between Yakushi and Ichidai Sankou has just finished. Even if I was trying to guess who would win, I never knew. Sometimes it was Ichidai, sometimes it was Yakushi. I didn't know for sure who would win until the very end of the game.

As for how this season will end, who knows? I haven't read the manga after all. Will Seidou go to Nationals, or will Sawamura's last summer with Miyuki as his catcher be cut short? And if they do go to nationals, how far will they go? Could they win? To be fair, there are things that point towards the team going to nationals, but the question is how far they get to go before their journey ends for this summer. And then what comes after that? Will we get to see it?

To anyone who has read the manga, I definitely sound like an idiot, but I love this series. It's so good. I know what I'm doing this summer (rewatching the whole thing just because I can).

No, I'm not in Japan at the moment, but the Danish weather forecast said there would be blizzard-like conditions this evening, and that made me think of the time in Japan when I experienced "ooyuki", which translates to "much snow".

This was in January 2018, in the Kanto region, more specifically Tokyo and Yokohama, at least that's where I was. It's more or less based on my journal entry for the day of the snowfall and the following day, but since dumb me in 2018 excluded an important part, I'll refer to a smaller portion from memory. I don't remember if I have talked about this before, please forgive me if I have.

I was studying at EF Tokyo and commuted every day from the dorm in Yokohama to Shibuya in the heart of Tokyo. It was Monday morning and I had classes from 9:00. Around the second lesson, so around 11:00 I guess, a different teacher knocked on the door to our classroom and informed us that all classes from 15:00 were canceled, as all trains in Tokyo would stop running due to the snowfall. To make it fair, the classes from 15:00 would also be canceled on Tuesday. I had classes on Monday until 15:00, so when they were done, I hurried down to the train at Shibuya station. Thankfullly, I didn't need to change trains to get back to the dorm.

Usually at 15:00, Shibuya station is not quite as crowded as it can be during rush hour, but the crowd on that day was several times worse. The train was so insanely crowded it was hard to navigate, and very scary. Thankfully, I met a Japanese girl who had lived in Michigan (the US state, either she didn't mention the city or I never wrote it down) for a few years, and she was very willing to help me. She got me a seat and made sure I got off at the right stop. She later told me that she should actually have gotten off at the previous stop, but as her home was right between the two stops, it didn't really matter to her. I'm still so grateful to her. I told the girl I'd be fine navigating home on my own, mostly because I didn't want to inconvenience her further, and also because I could sense that she too wanted to go home. Besides, I later learned that I probably lived in the exact opposite direction of where she was going.

Well, getting from the station and to my dorm was hard. There was lots of wind and lots of snow, and my normally poor sight was made so poor I might as well have had none at all. I only had a vague idea of where I was going. In a way, it reminded me a bit of how blizzards are discribed in The Little House on the Prerry series I read when I was in my early teens. I managed to find my way to Family Mart, which was on the way to the dorm, and buy some food to live off of. Then it was just straight ahead until I found the dorm. Based on what I wrote in my journal, it was very cold and I needed time to warm up after getting inside my room.

On the following day, the whole world was covered in snow, and there were many icy places and lots of drifts. I planned on going to the supermarket, since my classes that day were canceled, and I needed to get help from a kind mother and her little daughter. At least she enjoyed the snow.

Apparently, it's fairly common for Japanese people to cancel all trains in case of a heavy snowfall. However, I heard from someone who had been on exchange on Hokkaido that up there, the trains run even if it snows. Considering that Hokkaido is that much further up north and they experience more snow up there than in the rest of Japan, it makes sense. If they were to cancel all trains in case of snow up there, the trains would probably never run during winter.

The picture I took from my dorm room after getting back there safely.

I just found this song on YouTube, a musical commentary on the Greenland conflict with an Irish pub twist. The music is not bad at all and the lyrics are so fun. It had me laughing and clapping along. The situation right now is terrifying, but I believe one of the best ways to conquor with fear is laughing at it.

I've asked for it for years by now, and finally, it's hear!

Lately, anime has become better at displaying people with disabilities. Two years ago there was Yubisaki to Renren (A sign of Affection), featuring the romance between a deaf woman and a hearing man. It seemed like an accurate portrayal of the daily struggles of deaf people, even if I don't know anyone who's deaf. And not only that, there were matters that I related to as well, like the struggle to communicate when one of the three key components of communication is missing, seeing, hearing and feeling. It was a beautiful anime. But since I finished that, I was wondering when we would get a similarly accurate portrayal of the blind people.

It's not like blind people are not portrayed in anime, but in most cases, either they are completely useless and have a different disability that makes them wheelchair bound, or they are simply too overpowered so it feels like they were made blind just so they could have a weakness.

Breakers, an anime about para-olympic sports did a pretty good job portraying the blind and visually impaired, and all the other disabilities represented. However, they only focus on the visually impaired for a few episodes.

But finally, there is an anime that seems to focus more or less exclusively on the blind. The protagonist of Toumei Otoko to Ningen Onna: Sonouchi Fuufu ni Naru Futari (The Invisible Man and his Soon-to-be Wife), Yakou Shizuka, is completelly blind. She has a job, she can get around by herself by using her cane, she uses some type of voice over when working and she struggles with all the visual cues of communication. Well, everyone has that issue with the titular invisible man. Shizuka, however, seems to struggle a bit less because she does not rely on sight to locate him. Instead she relies on hearing and smell. Admitedly, I have only watched one episode, so I don't know how it'll turn out yet, but judging from the first episode, this is promising.

To me, it feels like my prayers have finally been answered. It feels like I finally have a proper representation of myself, someone I can relate to in a different way.

Don't get me wrong, I also relate to characters emotionally, Some might correspond well to other feelings inside of me, and that's also very nice, but this is different.

I feel like I need to share my opinion on this series because I have one, and I feel like it's a bit controversial.

Gachiakuta is an anime about trash, or as I see it, an anime about taking care of the things precious to you, especially things. It's set in a world where there is the Sphere and the Ground. The Sphere is an island, soaring above the ground which is further divided into two zones, one for the people who are accepted into society, and one for the outcasts. The ones accepted into society never bother repairing anything that is broken and live in a very clean and bright city. The others live in a dirty area and appear to be poor. Rudo gets wrongly accused for the murder of his adoptive father and seeing as he is already an outcast, he is tossed out along with the rest of the day's trash. He somehow survives the fall to the Ground, is saved by a stranger named Enjin, who is a member of a group known as the Cleaners, who defeats monsters made of the trash thrown from the Sphere, known as Trash Beasts.

I'm sorry, I can't make it any shorter than that.

The series is quite popular, and I was curious about it because the story and the world seems interesting. I was thinking it might be a bit like Made in Abyss, with a twist of fantasy books I've read. It's far closer to the books I've read than Made in Abyss. That doesn't have to be bad though. I can see why it's popular. The story is really good.

So why don't I like it?

Right now, I actually wish I liked it better than I do because the anime ends on quite the cliff-hanger, and I actually want to know what happens next. But I've really been looking forward to the ending of this series.

My primary issue is that I don't connect with the characters. No matter what, I can't really bring myself to care much for any of them. Maybe it's because none of them hit the things I usually connect with characters on. They have interesting backstories and I do enjoy learning it, but still, I wonder more about the plot of the story than I do them, and I have wondered when the series would end even more than that. I couldn't even name a favorite because no one speaks to me at all. Maybe Zanka does a little, but that comes down to him speaking Kansai dialect, which has absolutely nothing to do with his personality.

I guess an issue that connects to this is that there is a bit too much action for my taste. There are a lot of characters who are tossed into babble immediately after they're introduced and because I don't know them, I don't even care whether they live or die, which makes the battles really dull to watch.

The second thing I don't really like is actuallly the music. I don't know, it's just not really my style. It doesn't hype me up, it does nothing for me.

Long story short, while the story is interesting, the rest is incredibly dull to me, and watching the anime leaves me with a really dull feeling inside. While watching the anime today, I spent nearlyl half the time on my phone while it played in the background, just so I could finish the episode.

So, what about the next season?

So, I watched this video yesterday, and it prompted me to reflect on my own experience with BL anime (and BL in general I suppose). For the record, BL is short for Boys' Love.

I was introduced to BL by a friend of mine, before I even became a teenager. We'd read fanfictions on real people where they were romantically involved. Eventually, I'd go on to write them too. Later on, we met anime. That was around 2012 in my case. The only difference that made at first was that the characters in the fics I wrote were no longer real people, but fictional characters. I am not proud of the real-people-era of my writing and would rather forget about it, but that's a part of my story too.

Anyway, after discovering anime, my friend and I discovered BL anime. I was initially limited to what was dubbed, which gave me two series to choose from, Gravitation and Loveless. I don't remember Gravitation much anymore. It was a music anime and the dubbing was poor. But I have a funny feeling that the relationship portrayed wasn't in any way healthy. As for Loveless? Well, the battle system was interesting, but anything else, from the fact that the uke (submissive) was 12 and the seme (dominant) was at least 18 years old to all the things that happened between them, was very uncomfortable to watch.

Then I began watching subbed stuff, starting with Sekaiichi Hatsukoi and later going on to Junjo Romantica. For the record, Sekaiichi Hatsukoi is the spin-off to Junjo Romantica. This is a whole other can of worms. Junjo Romantica has two relationship with a terrible age gap, Uke 18 and Seme 28 in one pair and Uke 17 and Seme 35 in another. Not to mention that sexual assault takes place in both of them (which I didn't even remember until that video linked above). The former of the two also has an unhealthy power dynamic of the seme being the landlord and the uke being the tennant, and unable to escape. The third relationship in that series seems healthier. The age gap isn't that big (uke is 29 and seme is 24-5 I believe) and there is no problematic power dynamic. In Sekaiichi Hatsukoi, it seems better. There is still a lack of balance in the power dynamic. In the leading couple, the uke is the employee and the seme is the boss, but the age gap is small and leaving the relationship doesn't have consequences as such. The second is probably the healthiest in terms of power dynamic, except the fact that the uke has no life skills and relies on the seme to take care of him. But there is no age gap (both being 29), and neither of them would lose their livelyhood should they decide to split. The last pair has quite the age gap (uke is 31 and seme is 21), but they have independant lives. However, it has to be mentioned that all relationships in both these series suffer from jealousy. The amountvaries a little, and some is with reason, but the amount is big and what they do with it is not good.

The problem with that series is that even if bad things happen, it's never addressed as unhealthy. I remember reading that the seme in the 29-year-old couple in Sekaiichi Hatsukoi assaulted the uke in the manga adaptation, and was horrified. It didn't happen in the original light novel or the anime adaptation. I was also never comfortable with the larger age gaps. The larger the gap, the higher my discomfort would be. Even now, I don't feel comfortable about those relationships. But there were so many of the other red flags that I didn't recognize when I watched the series.

I have seen BL with many healthy and unhealthy relationships since then. Super Lovers is a very good example of another unhealthy relationship dynamic, and I still don't know how I got through the first season. By the time I started watching the second, the discomfort became too much and I stopped. It wasn't just the age gap. It was also the fact that the two leads were acting like siblings if they weren't lovers, and there is only one pair of siblings where I find myself perfectly fine shipping them. Who's that? Only Hikaru and Kaoru Hitachiin from Ouran High School Host Club. I can't explain why, and I'm not sure anymore if it's not just their sibling dynamic I love to bits, but back then, I liked it.

I think modern BL has gotten better at making healthier relationships. Given did a good job, and Tadaima Okaeri also portray some relationship dynamics that seem healthy to me. There are even some healthy looking age-gap relationships like in My Happy Marriage, where she is 18 and he is 28. But maybe I'm not the best judge of what's a healthy relationship and what's not. I think a part of my mind sort of knows some of it, but I don't know.

My point?

Do I even have a point?

It surprises me what I used to consume without thinking much of it. Whether it was good for me or not is debatable. I can't say what consequences it has had, but it's a relief to know that BL can portray healthier relationships.

As for my writing?

I'm definitely not going to stop writing BL fanfictions (did you think I would go that far?). As far as I know, none of them contain anything problematic, and I'm going to either keep it that way, or make it clear that what I portray is not okay, at least to my best ability.

I have talked about this series before, Ron Kamonohashi's Deranged Deductions (or Kamonohashi Ron no Kindan Suiri in Japanese). It has been one of my favorite manga since I started reading it on April 28. 2022, and I have now finished reading it on July 6. 2025 (the final chapter coming out on the day before).

I am writing this post to cope with the fact that another good manga has finished. Last fall it was Oshi no Ko. Now it's this one. It's not like the other manga series I follow aren't good, but especially Kamonohashi was capable of satisfying my hunger for murder mysteries.

In total, the manga is now 170 chapters long.

What I will do now is give my thoughts on the ending. I will not tell anyone what it's about, as I hope others will start reading this interesting detective manga.

Honestly, I think the ending was a bit cliché. It was a good one, but I think I had expected more, and twice, Amano starts some sort of explanation with something like "Oh yeah, and this happened too". For the sake of keeping the readers interested, I understand why she did it. You only have so many pages, and dividing this chapter into several would not keep the readers interested. She had 48 pages to wrap up her story. She also does something else that I like because of what it shows, but it's still a bit of a cliché and a bit of a flat way to end such a good series, in my opinion. It actually sums up my thoughts on the ending quite well. It's good, but compared to the rest of this manga, it's a little flat. I can't say what she should have done. I'm pretty sure I couldn't have done it any better myself. But I think I had expected a bit more.

I realize that not everyone shares my thoughts and opinion, and that's perfectly fine. Just please accept that I'm allowed to have mine too.

I am sad to see this manga end because it means I will not get my (almost) weekly dosis of deranged deductions, but I am glad Amano got to wrap up her manga in the way she wanted. I'm glad I got to spend over 3 years reading her story and enjoying her mysteries and her wonderful characters. I think Ron and Toto are the ones I will miss the most in the weeks to come.

It's going to be weird that I won't see them as frequently anymore.

Well, hopefully we will eventually be treated to another season of the anime. Last season was a bit of a cliff hanger, and I want to see characters that will be introduced in their animated form. I really hope they don't keep sitting on it until forever and a half has passed.