Iron Sideshow

[DirkTiede]

Okay, I grok. Man, the Japanese...

Speaking of which, apparently they're having a serious crisis with their young people-- i.e. the numbers of young men and women actually marrying is going down. Fast. The trend is for young women (or 'Parasite Singles') to get a good career, but live at home with their parents, so they can save their money to go do fun things like shop and travel the world. Whereas, young men (or 'Hikikomori' - "shut ins"), basically just hole themselves up with their parents well into their thrities, shunning the world and any socialization. Otaku, anyone?

Anyway, apparently it's making for a slow social breakdown, and it's accellerating the already rapid pace of population aging, since it means birth rates are down. I heard a fascinating piece about this on the radio last week on WBEZ's Worldview.

[Matt]

Okay, okay, I give.

There's this anime show called Rozen Maiden. It's about living dolls that fight each other or something. I don't know if it's for teenage girls or for preteen boys or pedophiles. Anyway, one of these doll characters is called Suiseiseki. She's not the main doll, but apparently she's really popular. So much so that some people really got sick of seeing fan art of her.

(You see where this is going, here?)

So, as far as I can tell, the malevolent, nameless lunatics of the Japanese Internet created these horrible creatures as a parody of Suiseiseki. They've got her red and green eyes, and a stylized version of her green dress. I think the harelip thing evolved from a triangular mouth used in wild takes or superdeformed mode in the show. I'm less certain about the ears, but I'm guessing that her dainty do-rag thing inspired them.

So, as these things go, the little abominations--called Jissouseki--took off as a huge meme, and truly unreasonable amounts of art have been done of them, generally focusing on the things being extremely stupid and filthy, having slug-like babies (Uji-jissou), killing or devouring their own young, and being very hideously abused by (mostly facceless) full-sized humans. There are often implications that the Jissouseki are sold as pets or toys, raised for food, or used as lab animals.

The images I posted aren't even the tip of this unspeakable iceberg. There are whole image boards and oekakis dedicated to these things. Some people have even gone so far as to create animations: [1] [2] (And quasi-animations.)

The really interesting bit, though, is that the meme has actually gone so far that it's come full circle. Some people have started drawing the things cute, or even turning them into humanoid characters who are not Suiseiseki.

The world is a strange place, and the Internet is even stranger. Especially the Japanese parts of it.
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the dreams ain't broken down here, nah, they're walkin with a limp

[Fortunato]

DESU.

[Matt]

Oh, yeah, and the original doll character is one of those anime characters that overuses and overpronounces the desu particle constantly. So, as far as 4chan is concerned, it's pretty much her name.

[Computolio]

[Iron Spike]

[DirkTiede]

[SABERinBLUE]

[Matt]

Anonymous noticed an interesting thing today.



This is interesting due to a deeply insane Japanese comic which some of us might have seen before.

[shadefell]

Matt, I was going to post that and forgot to.
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[Fortunato]

And here I was thinking I couldn't contribute to this thread. Hmph!









The clown's a [img]classic[/img].

[John]

[Iron Spike]

MOAR.

Remember, folks: This pornography. You are, in theory, meant to get off to this shit.

Oh, Japan.



PS: I changed th' thread title, just a wee bit.

[SABERinBLUE]

See Spike, why have just gore when you can also have gore and mermaids.

Incidentally, most of the stuff that falls under the "what" tag on that site is right up this thread's alley.

[duralict]

what.


This isn't even wtf any more. It's sapped too much of my soul for me to muster the energy required to wtf.