It’s kind of silly that I have to even write an article like this, but people in the west still appear almost absolutely clueless to Japanese culture. Now that anime is no longer an expensive, niche hobby and if you talk to enough college students (like I find myself employed with) you’ll notice that it has become increasingly far popular than it ever was when I was a kid. Gone are the days when two guys would talk about Dragon Ball Z for hours, now everyone is watching one or more shows on various services, be they legal or illegal means. It’s just plain easy to watch anime now and many people are doing it.
The problem is that there are a lot of vast cultural differences between the western world and Japan. We’ve been seeing these as of late, as Twitter puritans and other social media denizens are crying out that shows they never would have been interested in ten to twenty years ago are simply not suitable for the mainstream and need to be removed or yeeted out altogether. This raises a bit of a problem and it stems from what I would consider to be a lack of understanding Japanese culture. Let me go into that with one good indicator in mind: I just finished playing a round of Gal-Gun Double Peace for the first time.
In the world of Gal-Gun, our hero is thrust into a Japanese high school environment where he must vouch for the love of whatever heroine he chooses to profess his love to. You see, he was struck with a love bolt equivalent to thirty by mistake and now has every young waifu in the school hitting him up. To combat this, the player is thrown into a rail-shooter situation not unlike House Of The Dead or Virtua Cop. However, instead of monsters and thugs, he shoots love bolts which stop these waifus from coming onto him and they instead fall to their knees in ecstasy. And yes, these are all high school girls in traditional attire. A couple things you might notice off the bat is that this game is quite lewd and pervy. Yes, that is true – however, we need to point out the origin country for this sells used panties in vending machines. And it’s perfectly normal. Not to mention the fact that any kind of sexual assault in Japan is extremely low. They even engage in prostitution there, which reports have illustrated to benefit young Japanese women who have been known to have head counts of three-hundred or more men by the time they hit thirty. That’s an awful lot of men. Meanwhile, the culture is still going through it’s hikkikomori and herbivore male phases, while reporting a sharp decline in the rate of suicide. This is also the country that held a wedding for a young man who married an AI waifu of Hitsune Miku, of whom I happen to have a large poster of in the dungeon.
In the game, young and fit female bodies are hurled at the player, with not a blemish nor sign of cellulite. It’s in many ways a fantasy world. To be fair, these also are not real people or even representatives of real people. While you can buy kugurumi masks of a three-dimensional anime look, it looks rather alien to say the very least. I’ve always considered anime girls or waifus to be a bit of an alien species, same with husbandos and really any other anime character drawn in this style. I’ve always loved and appreciated the art in anime since the early days of the style and feel that it has only gotten better overtime, or perhaps just a bit glossier. In any case, these young high-school aged girls just aren’t human. They’re cartoons, in the same way that Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse are. The pedophilia argument comes up a lot, but I don’t think people, even in the furry community are having sex with real ducks or rabbits – at least for the most part; so I don’t see why these obvious fantasy characters would result in any kind of assault for high school girls in the modern era. In my line of work, you see high school and college girls all of the time. I haven’t seen one that resembled an anime character. But if I ever do, those eyes might freak me out to the point I’m running. You see, things in the second dimension just don’t work well in the third. Honestly, it would be weird to even see a day when people tried to look more like anime characters and obviously even with cosplay, human bodies are human and cartoons are cartoons.
Obviously, I realize that my doll Lyzexxia does not quite look human – nor would I want her to. That’s the point. If I wanted to spend time with a woman, I’d simply find a woman to spend time with. Times are rough for men right now, so a lot of us aren’t shacking up and using the waifu replacement until times get better. However, I’m not the kind of guy to live with someone permanently, because I have spent most of my twenties living with roommates and I just don’t care for the arrangement. I spent a lot of time in my room anyway. I’m just a solitary kind of person who enjoys merriment and socializing every once in a while. As I get older, I find that I want to party far less than I did and consider laying in bed with the waifu while watching anime, old sitcoms and movies to be my idea of fun. I’m in my mid-thirties now and my body wants to slow down and settle down a bit. Though I can assure you that playing a game about high school cartoon girls did not make me want to creep around a high school in my area, because that’s pretty disgusting. And as the main point of this article, I really don’t think it does for other men and women who enjoy this stuff, even if it’s lolicon.
I’ve already said that I’m not the biggest fan of lolicon, considering it silly at best. The whole little sister thing is just kind of funny to me and when you take it into adult realms, that’s just not my kind of thing at all. To be fair, I don’t like furry stuff either, as I’ve stated several times in multiple other articles. I never got into that. I also don’t believe that catgirls are a gateway to furdom, because even though I am a fan of catgirls, I never found myself getting into anything further. I did plunge deep into monster girl territory though, so that can’t be helped. But furry stuff is just not my bag. However, I will defend all of these things because when the social media puritans come after me for harmless anime waifus of all types, then I’m going to want other communities to have my back and I want to have theirs. No, I don’t care for furrie stuff, but I’ll defend your right to enjoy it. Same with catgirls, which the puritans are coming down hard on ever since Nekopara dropped. No one had a fucking problem with Feris of Steins;Gate, but now there’s an issue because things have gotten slightly more erotic. Well, listen here, folks – I don’t think any cat fucking is going to happen either during or after the time that this show airs. I personally haven’t seen the show, but people need to get a grip.
Yes, there’s a weird panty option in Gal-Gun, which they removed in the sequel because of whiners as expected. I’m sure the modders put it back in, but again; it’s a bit ridiculous. Again, these girls are not really even girls at all – they’re cartoon characters. It’s a silly lewd game for people that have a thing for these kinds of cartoon characters, almost like an anime fetishism, which is technically what that is. In no way does that ever translate into child fetishism, nor should it. If someone has that kind of issue going on, they need to go seek professional help sooner rather than later. Gal-Gun, Senran Kagura, Omega Labyrinth and others are all games for people who fetishize anime characters or other kinds of cartoons. I’ve even heard statements from older guys who aren’t into it, but do understand what it is. They look at the pictures and say, “well, I never though of cartoons as being sexual” or “I just never really got into cartoons.” These are both perfectly fine, but you’ll see here that these fellows actually got it. Anime isn’t for them. That’s perfectly fine and furthermore, it’s fucking natural. Everyone has their thing and thankfully a right to have their own thing.
When I think of Waifu World, I liken it to a fantasy or sci-fi setting, which it can sometimes encompass. There are no real life orcs, nor are there elves. I’ve never seen any tentacle monsters, but will be sure to let you know. I’ve never even see a single percent of the fantastical creatures that exist in these worlds, so why would Waifu World be any different? Obviously, it is all just another realm of fantasy and fiction that is not meant to be taken as factual. It’s just entertainment and everyone is free to their own version of entertainment. Without a doubt, this is mine and other people like it too. Japanese high school is assuredly nothing like it has been portrayed in these fantasy worlds and it would appear that most of this kind of content, if not all – is nothing more than an idealized version of adolescence that never happened to begin with. The Waifu World is nothing more than an adult writer or mangaka thinking about what could have been, looking at his or her past with starry eyes as we all tended to do during our own high school years. We all thought that things were far better than they are now, and perhaps maybe they were – so what’s so wrong with fetishizing that? Quite simply, the real world is no real reflection of the Waifu World and we might do well to remember that.