My Brother’s Husband tells the story of Yaichi, a single father raising his daughter, and Mike Flanagan, a Canadian man who was married to Yaichi’s twin brother Ryoji. Mike travels unannounced to Japan after his husband’s recent passing. Yaichi must face his deceased twin’s sexuality and overcome his own preconceptions, and Mike learns what caused the brothers to drift apart.

The manga by Gengoroh Tagame will debut as a TV drama on NHK’s BS Premium in March 2018 and will star Ryuta Sato as Yaichi and former sumo wrestler Baruto Kaito as Mike.

It’s about creating a Brand Identity - an anthropomorphized personality that your brain fits into an established schema (system of thought) so it’s easier to just drop into the background of your everyday life. It’s not about making you want a burger, it’s about making it so, when you DO want a burger, the first place you think of is Wendy’s, because their ads have made you think about them five time already that day. And most importantly, it’s about making sure you dont realize how often they make you think about them, so you don’t resent how pervasive they’ve become. They do that by tricking your brain into thinking of them as just another human-like personality. Your Funny Meme Friend Wendy’s. Wine Aunt World Market. Woke Jock Nike. Even your Endearingly Unhip Uncle Geico.

this shit works. it makes people like Brands. gets under their skin and in to their minds. when i said i didnt like the wendys twitter i personally offended people that viewed wendys as a friend, that viewed the wendys social media manager as a friendly individual that they respected.

the wendys social media manager is not your friend. they don’t even really exist. there’s no one person that writes the tweets for wendys. there’s a team of 20 something year olds that casually observe the latest meme trends and crank out mspaint memes because they know they’ll get retweeted if the memes are relevant.

they trick you in to thinking that Wendys is a hip friendly young person, and they manipulate you in to thinking that disliking marketing is somehow a “problematic” “un-woke” thing to do. 

and it works. 

I’m just going to be blunt about it; America’s depression epidemic is a direct result of the all-encompassing alienation we experience under late stage capitalism, and now private interests are attempting to recuperate the general public’s feelings of hopelessness and despair into marketing material, the spectacle in effect recuperating our despair and making it appear that the powers that be are on our side. That we are being watched over by boardrooms with loving grace, despite the fact that they are part and parcel with the forces of economy that has driven so many people to not see any hope in their lives. By recuperating the public discourse about the root of endemic depression, the status quo is able to trivialize it and sterilize it before before safely incorporating it back into mainstream society. Not only are we unable to strike against our enemy, most of us can’t even see them for what they are, and the rest of us can’t even speak to the truth of what they are capable of.

Gifts you received, photos of your siblings and your children (dead or alive), things that you love, your favorite chair, your books, that last poetry collection your read, a letter from your expatriate sister, reminders of the ones you loved, the smell of your bed, the jasmine tree that hangs off your western window, your daughter’s hair clip, your old clothes, your prayer rug, your wife’s gold, your savings; imagine; all this passes in front of your eyes in ten minutes, all that pain passes while you are struck by surprise.

Then you take your identification papers (passport, birth certificate, etc.) which you have ready in an old metallic candy box, and you leave your home to die a thousand times, or refuse to leave and die once.”

Me: