The New York Geekcast

Well hello everyone, my name is Trist, and I am one of NY Geekcast’s new bloggers.  I thought I would start off my geeky writing career with some gender confused anime.

I originally started to watch Naruto because my usual sitcoms were on summer hiatus, and I was looking for a new anime to watch.  I remembered that an annoying kid in my high-school classical mythology class was obsessed with it, to the point of wearing the ninja head band and maybe buying one of those dagger things.  (After I graduated, I heard that this kid might have had Asperger’s, and a few opening episodes of Naruto totally explained his obsession.)  Anyway, I quickly learned that ninjas were awesome people to be feared, and that Naruto himself was an annoying blonde boy.

Enter Haku, the pseudo-gay ninja.  Here I am, kicking back with a beer and Hulu after a hard day’s work standing around at the ballet (just go with it) and this androgynous guy in a mysterious ninja-girl outfit appears to throw me a major plot-shuriken.  I would like to say off the top that some Google-research shows that his sexuality and gender is a huge otaku debate, which will not take place here, but personally I believe him to be a nice gay man.  He likes to walk around in comfy kimonos, possibly taking delight in his gender confusion, and experiments with gothic outfits at the age of 9.  And has a wicked cool ninja attack with ice mirrors.

Continue reading ‘Naruto & Haku’

Some of you may have heard of this already but i’m curious what you all think….

Should someone be convicted for posessing drawings of nude children?

That’s what happened to Christopher Handley who had amassed a collection of any manga he could get his hands on. That meant sometimes getting shipments with random manga inside and inside one of these japanese graphic novels their were drawings of nude children.

He now faces up to 15 years in prison possibly.

Here’s the full articled on wired.com.

The reason I choose an image of Astroboy is because he exemplifies a drawing that is basically a robot kid with his shirt off and in underwear. But no one freaks out about it. If you see the show…you realize he’s a robot kid and that there’s nothing coming close to anything perverse.

It still shows that japanese culture has less of a problem with nudity in general because you’d never see a child superhero with his shirt off…robot or not.

What do you think?