Mid-video update + Q&A: Something or other Edition

Hello everyone -- I hope you're doing well! Or, well, as well as you can with how things are. It's time for another mid-video update post; that space for channel and life updates, video plans, questions, and other niceties!

This is the first one of these I'm writing after the change to videos being released on an as-done schedule rather than a (mostly-) monthly schedule, which I wrote about here. Well... sorta? I kind of tested the waters with this last video, which is why it took quite a while despite being a relatively short one -- no working weekends and holidays, just to see how things would go, since I figured I could get it out before the end of September even with that.

And, my god, has the difference been absolutely profound even in this short time. I've been doing much better mentally and have had much more energy to exist outside of work, which in turn has made me way more excited about my work and what I can do with it. It's also given me the drive to talk about things that aren't visual novels more, which I know y'all have been requesting to add variety, and yes, I can guarantee that will be happening more from now on. MahoAko video eventually.

At any rate, let's actually talk about what's coming up next. I'm going to be structuring this a bit differently from before by focusing primarily on what the current project is instead of giving a monthly queue, because we aren't working monthly anymore and I could barely stick to the queue anyways. >_>

To Love-Ru video: In the last post I mentioned that I'd be doing a video on Tsuki ni Yorisou, and I do still intend to do that. But while I was working on this previous video, I got an interesting sponsorship offer that made me consider looking into material that may fit it better, which eventually led me to stumble into a curious idea: what if I just talked about some nice ecchi series and the nice things about them?

This, naturally, led me down a bit of a rabbit hole trying to figure out what direction to take this potential video. The first idea I had was to talk about a variety of series across a variety of mediums and make some sort of through-line about the joys of shamelessly horny media... and frankly, I still intend to do this at some point, because it sounds pretty fun. However, I pretty quickly discovered that about half of the series I pilfered had enough to write entire 1~2 hour videos about on their own.

One of those is To Love-Ru, a very famous series that I don't think a lot of people need an introduction to, and the one that convinced me to follow through on the second incarnation of my idea: what if I just talked about a ecchi series and the nice things about it, and went through basically everything that exists for it?

And so now, I'm reading through dozens of volumes of manga, have a few anime ready to watch, artbooks to scrawl through, and games to play. I don't really intend this video to be some exploration of how TLR is an incredible intellectual hidden gem or anything, but rather a video appreciating it for what it is: a very honest, very fun, and joyous work of art that seems to come straight from the booby loving hearts of its creators. And from that, I want to talk about how that's just... good?

In the same way we need mid for the soul, we need shameless self-indulgence for the soul that leads artists to push themselves in pursuit of very bouncy and noble goals, and push what's allowed in their environment. Not to say TLR is a bastion of radical thinking, but, it was horny enough to get partially banned in Australia and anger Shonen Jump's editors, so I think that deserves respect in this current climate.

It's also something I really have not talked about enough on my channel. I enjoy being all heady and analytical about media that encourages that type of thinking, but I think it's even more important than ever to embrace media that is simply indulgent while not ignoring its flaws and what it perpetuates, and while not trying to hype it up into something greater.

Simple, dumb fun art should be allowed to exist as such, with that not acting as a veil for preventing scrutiny nor as an incentive to scrutinize it further than 'high brow' art, and I worry sometimes when people watching my videos or other videos about adult orientated media make that separation - good vs. bad, thoughtful vs. thoughtless - in a very negative, black and white way, that doesn't leave room for the senseless and the sense-ful to both flourish. I hope a video where I excitedly talk about hot women and occasionally pull up Lacanian philosophy anyways dissuades this somewhat.

Future videos: With all that said, I intend this to be the only non-VN video for a while afterwards. Freed from the shackles of a monthly schedule, there's a lot I want to talk about now. Tsuki ni Yorisou is high up on the list when I'm not bound to specific digital platforms, and BL and otome games are definitely a high priority. I've shafted them for too long!

THE LIST: And on that note, if you have VNs you want me to cover... feel free to toss 'em at me! I'm happy to add more to the ever-growing list, because it just gives me more to choose from at any given time. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1WF_2ADCa5UY63yygiElEyGr35UPCf-jfGivuHAeaiqs/edit?gid=0#gid=0

Okay, that's about all for now. I'll see y'all soon in another update, once I finish this stack of 17 manga volumes sitting at my desk. >_<