oW the EdGE

Okay. Point 1. The frog-boiling.

Let me put this in perspective for you. There was already a meme about how the characters in “Saki” don’t wear underwear when I was in middle school. I am thirty now. Okay? And it’s still going.

In the time since, this has stopped being a joke. It is now indisputable canon. This is not because anyone outright says it at any point. It’s because the underwear ran out of places to hide. I’m obsessed with this thought: somewhere in the over 20 volumes of “Saki”, there is a panel in which underwear was objectively deconfirmed. And it would be so hard to figure out where that panel actually is. Maybe the artist didn’t even realize it when she drew it! The frog? Boiling!!

And of course there is also the breast expansion. I don’t know how to put a spin on this. They are just expanding. Like, this happens a lot with artists: you define a character as being, in your mind, “the one with the big boobs”, and over the years you emphasize that trait further and further so that the signal doesn’t get lost in the noise. It’s just that normally—in like a wildly popular manga series about mahjong published by literally Square Enix, for example—normally there would be a point at which the boobs stopped getting bigger. Like, an editor would step in or something. Or you would get to the point where you cannot draw the character in the same panel as her mahjong tiles without her breasts spilling over the tiles, and you’d go, “Well, this is now untenable.”

That did not happen. There is no ceiling. The frog is soup.

Point 2. The complete and utter mundanity of all of this.

It’s like this, okay: there’s no shortage of trashy ecchi manga out there. There’s a million other comics doing wildly bawdier things with wildly more improbable bishoujos.

The vibe with “Saki” is different.

It’s hard to explain this, but it feels like the world of the comic is fundamentally uninterested in the fanservice happening on the page. I cannot describe it as “leering”, because I cannot conceive of a person in the story from whose point of view one would leer. I think the artist is probably into it—I can’t imagine anyone is making her do this—but “Saki” the comic has no opinion on the matter.

There are essentially no male characters in “Saki”. Like, there was one guy? Kind of? At the very beginning? But he is gone now. They put him back in the toybox. He does not exist. It appears to be some level of canonical that in the world of “Saki”, almost all humans are women. Those women are sometimes romantically into each other. According to comments the artist has made on Twitter (which I cannot source), they have lesbian baby technology, so it’s no problem. It’s so much not a problem that the story is about mahjong, instead of any of that.

So, like, the fiction here appears to be this: this is the, like, meta-narrative of the fanservice of “Saki”, right: it’s just normal that they don’t wear underwear and their boobs are arbitrarily big. It’s been normal. It was normal before the story of the manga began. It’s just how things are. Nobody bats an eye about it, and if they do, it’s in sort of a lesbian kind of way so like what’s the problem, we love lesbians here. This is literally normal for girls.

The fanservice simply diffuses into this all-encompassing aura of disembodied, ambient sluttiness. The framing of the panels demands you acknowledge it, and the story demands you already be over it, because it’s mahjong time now, and we’re playing mahjong.

Do you get??? why I’m so fascinated??? Are you not a little enraptured???

I don't want my kids to grow up afraid of dogs.  Dogs are commonplace creatures and being seriously afraid of them is an impediment to going about one's life.  Insofar as I can, I try not to model being afraid of dogs in front of them.  Instead of telling them that dogs scare me, I tell them that I don't like dogs, because dogs are not polite.

I think this is a fair gloss.  Some dogs, to be clear, are well-mannered creatures; it's not universally true that they're rude.  But most dogs are, because they are not or cannot be trained to be polite, and then on top of that, their humans do not act effectively as etiquette proxies for them.

I think dog people have a very bad model of what it is like to not be a dog person, and this impairs them in their ability to be a good buffer between the dog and the parts of the world that may not wish to be exposed to the full surface area of the dog.  People who don't pick up after their dog's toileting presumably know they're being antisocial, but maybe some of the remaining problem is genuine ignorance.  Here I will attempt to alleviate that.

Dog body language is not legible in detail to people who have not studied it.  Yes, I can tell the difference between wagging and not wagging.  That tells me if the dog is (to quote The Hundred And One Dalmatians) "pleased" - it does not tell me what it's pleased about.  If it's pleased about the opportunity to sniff, lick, or otherwise approach me in any way at all, I would rather disappoint it.  Since I cannot predict what the dog is presently trying to do, nor what it may get the impulse to try to do, I must rely on the human to telegraph clearly what the dog is physically capable of doing.  I cannot, by observation, distinguish a dog owner who has a justified trust in the civilized behavior of their pet from one who doesn't really care if I suffer a personal space invasion.  I can distinguish both of these people from someone who has their dog on an extremely short leash on the opposite side of their body from me and whose full attention is on that animal.

Non-dog people are real and can hurt you.  You must not assume that everyone is bursting with the repressed desire to interact with your dog.  Your dog's friendliness is not the sole limiting factor in a burgeoning friendship between it and all passersby, and announcing it does not successfully distinguish you from people who will claim their dog is friendly when what they mean is that if they acknowledge its bite history they'll be at risk of having their animal seized and killed.  Even in the alternate universe where it is impossible to claim a dog was friendly if this is untrue, dog friendliness is frequently unwelcome, coming as it does with saliva, whatever you call the moisture on dogs' noses, the smell of dog, and non-verbally-negotiated physical contact with an organism that is otherwise a stranger.  It is unfathomably rude to attempt to debug this aversion via amateur exposure therapy, or even to let on that it seems to you to be a bug, with someone you are not very close to.  It is accordingly your responsibility as a dog person to keep your dog visibly physically incapable of forcing the issue.

Non-dog places are for legal reasons slightly less real, but a truly mannerly dog owner respects them anyway.  You are legally entitled to bring dogs meeting the legal definition of a service dog into various establishments and many staffpeople will not trouble to go over that legal definition with you on the spot even if there should be cause for doubt.  This does not make encountering your dog in the grocery store into a welcome event for the non-dog person whose need to purchase food is at least as real as your need to be accompanied by your familiar.  Should you for this reason choose to leash your dog outside the building, choose if possible a location where it is possible to spend all points of one's journey past the dog legibly physically out of reach.

Parks with No Dogs Allowed signs should not have dogs in them.  Dedicated dog parks exist specifically for the use of dogs and their people.  Entering a notionally dog-free park with a canine in tow puts you in company with people who (by my personal firsthand observation) unleash their creature such that it then goes on to knock a toddler off their feet, or encourage their terriers to urinate on playground toys which will be used by hygiene-impaired children.  On exactly one occasion in my experience has imparting the information that a park is meant to be dogless actually caused a dog owner to react by taking the dog away, and I find this a discouraging number.

It should go without saying that if your unrestrained small dog crosses your property line to trespass upon a small child and his mother, who both tense up and the latter of whom gently nudges the dog away from her frightened child with her shoe, your priority should be to recall the dog at once, and not to first admonish the mother for "kicking" the animal, nor to, upon eventually collecting the dog into your loving embrace, propose that she pet it, Gail.