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[JoshuaFH]

Something that surprised me quite a lot recently: I discovered that Crunchyroll has made it's own live action miniseries "Anime Crimes Division" and, even more surprisingly, it's awesomely good. I guess that's just what happens when you hire the ProZD guy.

[Gentlefish]

TBF the anime of "My little sister can't possibly be this cute" wasn't bad. But holy shit the source material they had to work with really, really was.

[Reelya]

Hah. I just read about something relevant that happened on Reddit just over a year ago.

Someone hack a moderator's account on r/music and encoraged people to spam the subreddit with tons of popular jpop/jrock tracks from various anime (including Who Knows from Haruhi Suzimaya, the second JoJo opening, the Death Parade opening etc).

Apparently the stuff was a major revelation to a lot of the jaded indie-rock listening folks over there and sparked some serious gushing over all this new amazing music they suddenly were exposed to, and this was a major surprise to a lot of people as the music subreddit was known to be full of a bunch of hipsters who hate just about everything.

https://www.reddit.com/r/anime/comments/5nu3uz/i_was_wrong_about_anime_the_music_at_least/

[heydude6]

TBF the anime of "My little sister can't possibly be this cute" wasn't bad. But holy shit the source material they had to work with really, really was.

Ha! Someone else watched that, now I don’t have to suffer in embarrassment alone. Honestly, it wasn’t even remotely as gross as it could have been, though I wouldn’t really call it “good”.

If that sounds weird to you onlookers, you should know that it’s not actually a story about incest (in season 1 at least, I didn’t watch season 2 and probably never will), but more so about otaku culture as a whole (which includes the imouto genre unfortunately). The biggest problem with the show is ironically the sister character. She’s just so annoying and she gets way too much screen time. The episodes that limit her presence are actually pretty good, but there aren’t enough of them to fully redeem the show in my eyes (episode 11 in particular made me want to vomit).

[Reelya]

TBF the anime of "My little sister can't possibly be this cute" wasn't bad. But holy shit the source material they had to work with really, really was.

Ha! Someone else watched that, now I don’t have to suffer in embarrassment alone. Honestly, it wasn’t even remotely as gross as it could have been, though I wouldn’t really call it “good”.

If that sounds weird to you onlookers, you should know that it’s not actually a story about incest (in season 1 at least, I didn’t watch season 2 and probably never will), but more so about otaku culture as a whole (which includes the imouto genre unfortunately). The biggest problem with the show is ironically the sister character. She’s just so annoying and she gets way too much screen time. The episodes that limit her presence are actually pretty good, but there aren’t enough of them to fully redeem the show in my eyes (episode 11 in particular made me want to vomit).

Yeah, I've seen it as well as I'm sure a lot of others here have as well.

It'd be a classic "popcorn" anime. By that I mean there's a large discrepancy between popularity and how highly it is rated by those who watched it. It's very popular (#112 on MAL by number of viewers), which, if you exclude sequels etc should put in the top ~100 most popular animes ever, at least in the West. However it has a fairly low score (#2356 by ratings). Like SAO, lots of people watched it but don't necessarily think it's all that great. I doubt all those people went in expecting a masterpiece of storytelling. Sometimes people just want to tune out with what they know will be cheesy shit.

I'd definitely say that if you didn't catch the second season then there's no real reason to tell you to go see it, unless you were totally hooked on the characters or somesuch, in which case you would already be onto that. More of the same, more or less, though the ending pissed some people off. Nothing in there to warrant sitting through 12 episodes, which you could better spend just picking some random obscure 12-episode anime and get more benefit from.

Plenty of better stupid comedies out there. A few random ones off the top of my head that don't get much mention. Saiki Kusuo no Ψ-nan, Sabagebu, Seitokai Yakuindomo, Binbougami Ga, Cuticle Detective Inaba. They'd all be more worthwhile than Oreimo if anyone's thinking of watching that.

[Reelya]

Eh, while not strictly an anime, I should probably quarantine this stuff to the anime thread from now on, but the latest news is that they're confirmed to have a Bowsette convention in Japan, entitled "Project Crown" on October 27th. This was announced 5 days ago, which means that there was one week between the meme even existing, and having enough momentum in Japan to have a confirmed in-person event. This is a new level of viral.

Apparently a bunch of mainstream manga artists are joining the fray alongside the fan artists already. (not to mention what looks like a coincidentally similar Bowsette idea in some Nintendo concept art in a recently released book). This is seriously some phenomena, i can't recall the last time any meme blew up this fast. Sure, for lazy copypasta and caption memes, you can get fast dispersal but those memes are also very low-effort / low-investment, but the sheer amount of high quality fan art and images that have been released is just crazy. Lots of people have been working 100% flat out making Bowsette fan art for the last 12 days. It exceeds many established franchises already.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThUUf9ljNc8
https://nintendosoup.com/bowsette-princess-bowser-is-getting-a-dedicated-fan-event-in-japan-next-month/

just check out this itinerary for the event however:

● 10 a.m.-11 a.m.: Staff entrance and setup
● 11 a.m.-12:15 p.m.: Exhibitor entrance and setup
● 12:30 p.m.: General admission
● 12:30 p.m.-3:30 p.m.: Independently produce dojinshi art/manga sales
● 3:30 p.m.: Crossdressing (men dressed as women) cosplay contest
● 5 p.m.: Event closes

[JoshuaFH]

I've been ignoring it so I'm new to the Bowsette craze, is this a normal internet fetishism thing or did Nintendo accidentally tap into the transgender market?

[USEC_OFFICER]

I'm 95% certain it's a normal internet fetishism thing and little to nothing to do with transgender people. People just really like evil sexy Peach, I guess. _{And if anyone is thinking about transgender people here it is mostly to laugh at how Mario is dating a guy or something along those lines.}

[Frumple]

It's more or less entirely normal internet fetishism, as that sort of thing goes, yes. The design involved just happens to hit quite a few metaphorical check boxes for no few amount of people.

E: Though, do mind, everyone else is getting in on it, too. The driving-est force behind it all just seems to be sexy punk princess, heh.

[Reelya]

It's got the monster-girl thing too as well as being a take on one of the best-known franchises. So it's an excuse for a lot of those monster girl / youkai / touhou artists to do their thing, but with a big franchise now.

As a sign of how fast this blew up, Bowsette has 20 million hits on google, whereas the main character from Touhou, Reimu only clocks in at 2 million hits. In fact "Touhou" as a search term itself is already exceeded by the Bowsette thing. So, yeah, already bigger than Touhou.

That's the power of having one of these memes attached to a big franchise.

[Cruxador]

Japan is interconnected enough that having a convention at the drop of a hat makes a lot more sense than in the west. People can just go to the event on a train without spending ages in transit or needing a hotel, and although they have coordination and stuff, it's still fundamentally predicated on commerce, which keeps the cost down. That means that potential goers can just swing by on the weekend, and only big nerds need to plan ahead for it since there isn't undue logistical or financial impediment. I think it's more like what we'd call an expo over here than the massive risky money sinks that we call conventions. So it's not as bizarre there as it would be here to capitalize on a sudden phenomenon like that.

It's got the monster-girl thing too as well as being a take on one of the best-known franchises. So it's an excuse for a lot of those monster girl / youkai / touhou artists to do their thing, but with a big franchise now.

As a sign of how fast this blew up, Bowsette has 20 million hits on google, whereas the main character from Touhou, Reimu only clocks in at 2 million hits. In fact "Touhou" as a search term itself is already exceeded by the Bowsette thing. So, yeah, already bigger than Touhou.

That's the power of having one of these memes attached to a big franchise.

Well, it'll also be bigger than a lot of niche things. I don't think it's meaningful to categorize it as a characteristic of particular fandoms, except perhaps the Mario fandom, but that's like the Disney fandom or whatever in that to one degree or another it includes nearly everyone in the technologically connected world.

[Reelya]

Wow, Maxim just ran a story about Bowsette* however they managed to get the story completely wrong:

Meet the Gamer Girls Behind Super Mario #Bowsette Cosplay Trend

Anyone familiar with the Super Mario franchise is surely aware of the all-evil Bowser. But what if the heroic plumber's spiky arch-nemesis was a softer, more feminine creature named "Bowsette?"

The thought probably hasn't crossed most (normal) people's minds, but that hasn't stopped Nintendo fans from turning the admittedly freaky idea into a viral cosplay fashion trend—just watch the videos below

Huh, cosplay girls invented Bowsette, according to Maxim. However, it plays into Maxim's mission statement of showing as many images of hot chicks as possible. Apparently showing anime-girl artwork is too much for them so they structured the story as to avoid mentioning it at all, merely mentioning that it's a new trend in cosplay.

* For the record, at this point I'm far more interest in analyzing the "meme" phenomena in growth than Bowsette herself, since I usually find out about these memes way after they've already died. The number of Bowsette google hits grew by 10% / 2 million since I last posted. At this point I'm interested in whether this thing will exceed the number of google hits for vocaloid (62 million). Halloween could be a good flash-point for that, given that there might be a lot of people going out as Bowsette.

[Cruxador]

For the record, at this point I'm far more interest in analyzing the "meme" phenomena in growth

That's not likely to provide you with a lot of generalizable conclusions since this straddles the boundary between Japan and the Anglophonic world (without being limited to weebs) in a way that is kinda atypical.

[Folly]

I've been ignoring it so I'm new to the Bowsette craze, is this a normal internet fetishism thing or did Nintendo accidentally tap into the transgender market?

Nintendo recently announced a new feature in an upcoming Mario Bros game wherein a Toadette character could grab a princess-crown power-up item and transform into a princess, who looked very much like peach.

Shortly thereafter, some aspiring web-comic artist made a strip depicting Bowser donning a princess-crown to change into Bowsette.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

After that, as USEC_OFFICER pointed out, people just really liked an evil sexy version of Peach. Also I guess there are a lot of Mario fanboys who have been waiting entirely too long for a new female character from the series, so they took this opportunity and ran with it.

So no, I don't think we can credit Nintendo for tapping into the transgender market. At best they were standing nearby when it happened. It is noteworthy however that Nintendo has since released old sketches of ideas for previous games which include Bowser turning female with a magic hat, and looking very similar to the current incarnations of Bowsette; basically trying to take credit for coming up with the idea first.

[Rose]

Actually, no, the sketches Nintendo released were peach with a Bowser hat, not Bowser with a peach hat.

But yes, the trans community has embraced it.