LAST ENTRY TODAY RLY.
Okay so maybe it's retarded to essay on a character before I've played them! But. NHK is a special canon, Yamazaki's a special kinda guy, and I wanted to get some of this down while I was thinking about it. Because I think it'll help me PLAY THE FUCK OUT OF HIM if I do. |D
So lemme see what I want to cover. I'll start with the lolicon thing, which I FAILED TO MENTION IN HIS APP, SURPRISE GUYS! (Although he's not a REAL--well I'll get to that.) Mostly I want to essay a little on Yamazaki and women (REAL LIVE WOMEN, that is), because it's a complicated issue and you don't get to see the full story until like the end of volume 6.
With that in mind, this will be kinda spoilery. NHK isn't a series that I think suffers much from being spoiled, but proceed with caution!
I said I was going to start with the lolicon thing, and so I will! Because I did want to address it a little anyway, and also because it's a good example of Yamazaki's overall pattern of behavior.
Is Yamazaki a lolicon? Yes, kind of, but not in the sense that he's a danger to any actual children. For one thing, I'm going to have to check with Desu or someone on the translation of chapter 2. One of the plot points in chapter 2 is that Yamazaki gives Satou a CD full of child porn. In the scanslations, they're anime drawings, but in the official translations, they're photographs. . . . Personally, considering the later events of the chapter, I find it hard to believe that they would be photos victimizing actual kids? BUT I DUNNO. Whichever it is, the end result is the same: Satou takes Yamazaki to an actual elementary school to take upskirt pictures of the girls, Yamazaki freaks the fuck out and runs away, and in the next chapter he tells Satou that he needs to turn his affections onto two-dimensional little girls so that they don't have to do any more horrible things. So yes, Yamazaki is a fan of the sexy little girls, but . . . only in 2-d (and I'm going to assume drawn, not photographed) form. Actually going after a kid? Is a big no.
I bring it up both to reassure anyone who plays a little girl and because it's really typical of Yamazaki's more blatant issues. This idea of "these horrible things are okay b-but not FOR REAL!" is a pattern of his, especially when it comes to women. It kind of explains how wildly his behavior vacillates when it comes to girls and relationships. HERE IS THE BASIC GIST OF IT.
Women . . . are they not merely human? After all, real passion does not exist in three dimensions! Understand? Essentially, love does not exist in Japan! Only arranged marriages and sneaking visits in the night! Love is a custom imported from overseas! We porn game creators must not fall into such traps! "Romantic love" is a snare for the promotion of capitalistic ideals!
Yamazaki . . . really doesn't trust women. Well, he has some issues with all people, but especially women. Essentially, he had a shitty childhood (right up until he met Satou, it seems), he was constantly attacked by his peers and left bloody and beaten and alone, he had no friends. In elementary school, one person stood up for him, a girl that he then fell in love with. But she rejected him for another guy! Woe. :(
When Yamazaki tells Satou this story, he follows it up with a speech:
Time passed . . . and he became a demon of vengeance . . . YES! Kidnapping and imprisoning double-dealing women! Chaining and breaking women that despise men . . .!! Punishing loose women with his hammer of iron . . . THE MASKED RAPER!!!
And then immediately goes into a tirade about how writing a rape scene for a porn game (which is what he's trying to get Satou to do, incidentally) is like getting mental revenge on all women who reject them. SEE ICON.
This is some bitter stuff, obviously, and it's not the first time in the series that he pulls the whole "ALL WOMEN ARE SLUTTY TRASH" thing. What's interesting, though, is that--these speeches don't at all reflect his actual behavior towards women. He interacts with a few throughout the series, two very closely, and what we see is this: when they start getting close enough to either him or Satou to hurt them emotionally, he lashes out at them a little and accuses them not of being horrible sluts or inferior human beings, but of deliberately setting him (or Satou) up for heartbreak.
In the end, that's what Yamazaki is really afraid of. He's been teased and abused by people his entire life, and when a girl is nice to him, he assumes it's because she's setting him up for a fall. His whole obsession with loli and 2-d girls stems from this: they're safe, they can't hurt him. THE MASKED RAPER!, along with his insistence that he's not at all attracted to real women, is a front designed to make him LOOK like he doesn't need love, even though he desperately does (which Nanako calls him on).
Why am I essaying on it? I think it was the hardest part of Yamazaki's character for me to reconcile when I was reading NHK. The masked raper speech and some of his drunken ramblings are pretty horrible towards women, but his actual behavior doesn't support what he says at all. When he's actually interacting with girls, Yamazaki is friendly, funny, eager, perfectly courteous--he does not view them as a lower class of human being worthy of being raped or thrown out on the street, and it's definitely not a front designed to lull them into a false sense of security. It's the same as the lolicon: "MWAHAHAH I AM SUCH A TERRIBLE NAUGHTY PERSON but uh not in real life guys okay?" When girls start getting close and he starts getting scared, it's something to fall back on to push them away before they break his heart. In private, it's a lot of bravado to pump himself up and make him feel better that he's alone.
But in the end, Yamazaki is very much the bitch of women. XD HORRIBLE HOSEBEASTS I AM NOT ATTRACTED TO YOU AT ALL b-but please love me I need you ;; Everything he keeps hidden inside is a lot more evident in his speech to Nanako in chapter 29:
That's right . . . I was pretending there might be a chance . . . I always believed in it! That if I had just continued my futile work maybe sometime I would have found my dreams and aspirations again! I believed in the power of miracles! And then a miracle did occur! A real 3D girl like you said to an ED guy like me that she liked me! . . . Exactly . . . even if your dream disappears and you fall into despair, or your love is unrequited, that pain can . . . that pain should be able to support us! Dream and reality, happiness and despair wandering in between, these valleys in hills that is life! That is why you should have confidence and yell it out! There was meaning in every single moment I experienced. We have shared the story of youth together.
That all ties into his feelings for Satou too, which is another FUTURE ESSAY and I will totally hold off on it until I like, play >D I JUST WANTED TO RAMBLE A LITTLE. It is hard to reconcile the Masked Raper with the Story of Youth, but what it boils down to is that Yamazaki talks up a misogynistic game to try and hide his fear of the kind of emotional damage he's been subjected to in the past, and to try and push girls away before they can hurt him; when it comes to his ACTUAL feelings on women, he doesn't have any issues with them unless he thinks they're fucking with him, and he's definitely not a danger to them or anyone else.
'm done now /o/
So lemme see what I want to cover. I'll start with the lolicon thing, which I FAILED TO MENTION IN HIS APP, SURPRISE GUYS! (Although he's not a REAL--well I'll get to that.) Mostly I want to essay a little on Yamazaki and women (REAL LIVE WOMEN, that is), because it's a complicated issue and you don't get to see the full story until like the end of volume 6.
With that in mind, this will be kinda spoilery. NHK isn't a series that I think suffers much from being spoiled, but proceed with caution!
I said I was going to start with the lolicon thing, and so I will! Because I did want to address it a little anyway, and also because it's a good example of Yamazaki's overall pattern of behavior.
Is Yamazaki a lolicon? Yes, kind of, but not in the sense that he's a danger to any actual children. For one thing, I'm going to have to check with Desu or someone on the translation of chapter 2. One of the plot points in chapter 2 is that Yamazaki gives Satou a CD full of child porn. In the scanslations, they're anime drawings, but in the official translations, they're photographs. . . . Personally, considering the later events of the chapter, I find it hard to believe that they would be photos victimizing actual kids? BUT I DUNNO. Whichever it is, the end result is the same: Satou takes Yamazaki to an actual elementary school to take upskirt pictures of the girls, Yamazaki freaks the fuck out and runs away, and in the next chapter he tells Satou that he needs to turn his affections onto two-dimensional little girls so that they don't have to do any more horrible things. So yes, Yamazaki is a fan of the sexy little girls, but . . . only in 2-d (and I'm going to assume drawn, not photographed) form. Actually going after a kid? Is a big no.
I bring it up both to reassure anyone who plays a little girl and because it's really typical of Yamazaki's more blatant issues. This idea of "these horrible things are okay b-but not FOR REAL!" is a pattern of his, especially when it comes to women. It kind of explains how wildly his behavior vacillates when it comes to girls and relationships. HERE IS THE BASIC GIST OF IT.
Women . . . are they not merely human? After all, real passion does not exist in three dimensions! Understand? Essentially, love does not exist in Japan! Only arranged marriages and sneaking visits in the night! Love is a custom imported from overseas! We porn game creators must not fall into such traps! "Romantic love" is a snare for the promotion of capitalistic ideals!
Yamazaki . . . really doesn't trust women. Well, he has some issues with all people, but especially women. Essentially, he had a shitty childhood (right up until he met Satou, it seems), he was constantly attacked by his peers and left bloody and beaten and alone, he had no friends. In elementary school, one person stood up for him, a girl that he then fell in love with. But she rejected him for another guy! Woe. :(
When Yamazaki tells Satou this story, he follows it up with a speech:
Time passed . . . and he became a demon of vengeance . . . YES! Kidnapping and imprisoning double-dealing women! Chaining and breaking women that despise men . . .!! Punishing loose women with his hammer of iron . . . THE MASKED RAPER!!!
And then immediately goes into a tirade about how writing a rape scene for a porn game (which is what he's trying to get Satou to do, incidentally) is like getting mental revenge on all women who reject them. SEE ICON.
This is some bitter stuff, obviously, and it's not the first time in the series that he pulls the whole "ALL WOMEN ARE SLUTTY TRASH" thing. What's interesting, though, is that--these speeches don't at all reflect his actual behavior towards women. He interacts with a few throughout the series, two very closely, and what we see is this: when they start getting close enough to either him or Satou to hurt them emotionally, he lashes out at them a little and accuses them not of being horrible sluts or inferior human beings, but of deliberately setting him (or Satou) up for heartbreak.
In the end, that's what Yamazaki is really afraid of. He's been teased and abused by people his entire life, and when a girl is nice to him, he assumes it's because she's setting him up for a fall. His whole obsession with loli and 2-d girls stems from this: they're safe, they can't hurt him. THE MASKED RAPER!, along with his insistence that he's not at all attracted to real women, is a front designed to make him LOOK like he doesn't need love, even though he desperately does (which Nanako calls him on).
Why am I essaying on it? I think it was the hardest part of Yamazaki's character for me to reconcile when I was reading NHK. The masked raper speech and some of his drunken ramblings are pretty horrible towards women, but his actual behavior doesn't support what he says at all. When he's actually interacting with girls, Yamazaki is friendly, funny, eager, perfectly courteous--he does not view them as a lower class of human being worthy of being raped or thrown out on the street, and it's definitely not a front designed to lull them into a false sense of security. It's the same as the lolicon: "MWAHAHAH I AM SUCH A TERRIBLE NAUGHTY PERSON but uh not in real life guys okay?" When girls start getting close and he starts getting scared, it's something to fall back on to push them away before they break his heart. In private, it's a lot of bravado to pump himself up and make him feel better that he's alone.
But in the end, Yamazaki is very much the bitch of women. XD HORRIBLE HOSEBEASTS I AM NOT ATTRACTED TO YOU AT ALL b-but please love me I need you ;; Everything he keeps hidden inside is a lot more evident in his speech to Nanako in chapter 29:
That's right . . . I was pretending there might be a chance . . . I always believed in it! That if I had just continued my futile work maybe sometime I would have found my dreams and aspirations again! I believed in the power of miracles! And then a miracle did occur! A real 3D girl like you said to an ED guy like me that she liked me! . . . Exactly . . . even if your dream disappears and you fall into despair, or your love is unrequited, that pain can . . . that pain should be able to support us! Dream and reality, happiness and despair wandering in between, these valleys in hills that is life! That is why you should have confidence and yell it out! There was meaning in every single moment I experienced. We have shared the story of youth together.
That all ties into his feelings for Satou too, which is another FUTURE ESSAY and I will totally hold off on it until I like, play >D I JUST WANTED TO RAMBLE A LITTLE. It is hard to reconcile the Masked Raper with the Story of Youth, but what it boils down to is that Yamazaki talks up a misogynistic game to try and hide his fear of the kind of emotional damage he's been subjected to in the past, and to try and push girls away before they can hurt him; when it comes to his ACTUAL feelings on women, he doesn't have any issues with them unless he thinks they're fucking with him, and he's definitely not a danger to them or anyone else.
'm done now /o/