“MM!”

Prac­ti­cal­ly every­one in this show has some kind of men­tal hangup, and that’s the focus of the series.

For the three main char­ac­ters, they all have full-grown psy­cho­log­i­cal dis­or­ders that con­flict and coop­er­ate at the same time. The male lead Tarou is a masochist, but only when women do the dam­age; Mio is a sadist and, in clas­sic ani­me style, is self-con­scious about her flat breasts; and Arashiko of the abun­dant breasts can­not stand being touched or even being around men and will even attack them if they get too close. There­fore, Tarou is in ecsta­sy when Mio or Arashiko hit him, and they do, a lot, as Mio gets inor­di­nate plea­sure from doing so where­as Arashiko does so when flus­tered or by acci­dent and is imme­di­ate­ly sorry.

Its also the run­ning joke, that Mio is always try­ing to find ways to ‘cure’ Tarou’s masochism (includ­ing an can­dle-lit exor­cism) that always wind up rein­forc­ing his masochism instead of cur­ing it. Of course, one of those ways involves hypnosis.

The rest of the cast all have their hangups as well: Tarou’s moth­er and teen-aged sis­ter are extreme­ly over­ly affec­tion­ate toward him (both want to mar­ry him) and even com­pete with each oth­er (and his girl­friends) for his affec­tions; Tarou’s friend Tat­su­kichi is a cross-dress­er (and quite good at it) and seems to have an alter­nate per­son­al­i­ty emerge when dress­ing as a woman; Noa, a senior, although her appear­ance is still that of a younger girl, is a genius who nev­er had a child­hood as she had to study all the time, and who always refers to her­self in third-per­son; Noa’s assis­tant Yuki­no­jō is a major loli­con (fan of pre­pu­bes­cent girls) and joined the Inven­tor’s Club to be clos­er to Noa; and school nurse Michiru knows all about every­one’s hangups, pos­sess­es an appar­ent­ly unlim­it­ed sup­ply of cos­play cos­tumes and loves to take pic­tures of the stu­dents in them.

Need­less to say, the entire series is NSFW.

⇒ Con­tin­ue read­ing ““MM!””

“Love, American Style”

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TV series like this don’t usu­al­ly sur­vive: an anthol­o­gy series based on a sin­gle top­ic (in chse, love in all its accept­ed forms of the day) with­out a cen­tral char­ac­ter or actor (except for the ever-present ornate brass bed) usu­al­ly don’t have the abil­i­ty to car­ry an audi­ence. “Love, Amer­i­can Style” sur­vived for five sea­sons and for many years after­ward in syndication.

[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063925/[

And as usu­al­ly hap­pens with long-run­ning come­dies, there will be at least one (in thie case, two) sto­ries involv­ing hypnosis.

⇒ Con­tin­ue read­ing ““Love, Amer­i­can Style””

“The Woman in Green” (1945)

[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0038259/]

[amtap amazon:asin=B0000EMYI1]

In “The Woman in Green”, a mys­te­ri­ous mani­ac is ter­ror­iz­ing post-WW II Lon­don: inno­cent women are being mur­dered and their right fore-fin­ger is being care­ful­ly removed. Even the great Sher­lock Holmes (Basil Rath­bone) is mys­ti­fied, but the hor­ror of the act is enough to dri­ve him to find the murder.

⇒ Con­tin­ue read­ing ““The Woman in Green” (1945)”

When a Century is not a Century

I just noticed that I now have over 100 posts in my blog. Usu­al­ly that would be a mat­ter of cel­e­bra­tion, except that sev­er­al of those posts (11, to be pre­cise, includ­ing this one) are more of a sta­tion-keep­ing nature (post about the blog) than actu­al­ly posts about what the blog is about, that being hyp­no­sis in fic­tion­al media.

There­fore, I will hold off any cel­e­bra­tions until I have pub­lished 100 posts exclu­sive­ly about the top­ics that this blog is about, and I expect that will hap­pen some­time in July: I already have four more posts sched­uled, as I will be busy the next cou­ple of weekends.

Looker

No, not the movie “Look­er” but some­one obvi­ous­ly based on it.

I’m talk­ing about the DC Comics char­ac­ter Look­er, and she was quite appro­pri­ate­ly named.

⇒ Con­tin­ue read­ing “Look­er”