Starting with the most important part, the afterword, Shirow did in fact have a daughter. His life is now complete, God bless him. I bet her name is 'Ai' too but so far no confirmation on that. ^_^. It isn't ten kids like gutter trash Jacob Blake somehow manages, filling up the gene pool with nothing but piss, but it at least means the genes of such a talented, loving, thoughtful man will still be with us 100 years from now, ready to keep contributing to mankind in one way or another. The outsized impact of a genius means genes of just one daughter can mean more than the genes of ten lowlifes. There's an infinite difference between 1 and 0. Zero means the future has no future, but one still has infinite possibilities and can grow to any number.
As to the actual plot, I'm not very satisfied. Throughout all these novels Yaichi has shown very little interest in Ginko, even when she's thrown herself at him multiple times. He kept going on about his love for Keika and mooning over other girls with big breasts. So for him to suddenly decide to confess to her at her lowest moment when she's even more of a pain than usual doesn't make much sense. I suppose he did it to save her life but even that is unsatisfying. No girl would want to be confessed to out of pity. The timing is all wrong. If he was going to confess it had to be before now or well after, now, right after a suicide attempt, makes no sense at all.
But oh well, Yaichi can love whoever he wants in Ryuuou no Oshigoto!. In '100 Waifus,' the much better book, he pairs up with the proper partner, Ai Hinatsuru, who is infinitely more loving and more attractive than Ginko. Aside from the author, no one in the world would ever choose to pair up with Ginko, a violent psycho. I provide the true ending to the series, the only one that makes sense. Though I also hear in the later books he might break up with Ginko and get with Ai after all. That would be nice, but I'm not counting on it. Again, if Shirow wants to ruin his series he's free to do so, it has no impact on mine.
Ai and Ai will still be cute whether he's dating them or not, and I still want to watch them win at shogi. Actually, I like watching Yaichi play shogi too. He's dauntless and smart, a real slasher of a player. But locking away any prospect of a decent romance severely weakens the quality of the work. It's like kicking away one of the legs that supports a chair. Most people reading Ryuuou don't care about shogi, they care about lolis. Remove lolis from the equation and all you have left is shogi.
Like usual I have to wonder if Shirow chose Ginko for legitimate reasons, or simply to silence the wails of censorship that would have gone up if he had paired Yaichi with Ai. Did he really think Yaichi and Ginko were a good couple? Or did he resign himself to this pairing in order to get published? It feels like no decent literature can be made when everything is determined by censors pushing the authors to write things one way or another. Only in '100 Waifus' are the obvious pairings actually paired up. Everywhere else you get these weird distorted plotlines where people do what's 'proper' instead of what's obviously right.
Like in Bakemonogatari, no one would get with that weird sadist crab girl. Everyone would obviously choose the doting beautiful Nadeko. But Araragi went with Hitagi. Are we to take that choice seriously, or is it just an iron rule in Japanese publishing that you can't date middle school girls? It's kind of funny, Araragi's dating Hitagi, ie, the book is arguing that Hitagi is the better girl, and yet it hardly ever writes about her. Instead it keeps writing more and more about Nadeko. Even the author is more attracted to Nadeko, or why is the focus always on her?
In No Game No Life, would any serious person in Sora's situation not get with Shiro? Shiro is beautiful, understands him perfectly, cooperates with him perfectly, and loves him constantly and aggressively. What more could you ever ask for in a girl? And yet he's constantly chasing after all these nobodies that no one would ever reasonably prefer over Shiro. Is this really what the author felt was necessary, did the author really think this was the natural flow of the story? Or did he ram up against censorship rules that said Sora couldn't get with Shiro no matter what? Is that why the story keeps making obviously wrong turns?
It's difficult to get excited about stories that obviously make wrong moves not because the plot or the setting or the characters compelled it, but because of outside forces that arbitrarily ruin what the plot and setting and characters all demand happen. If it's going to be like that, I wish the author would simply avoid the subject entirely and not even tease it. If you don't have the courage of your convictions then don't even bother to present the issue.
Oh, also, this volume bows to political correctness and out of the blue, with no evidence, asserts that women are as capable of high level shogi play as boys. But obviously that isn't true. In the real world men are four times as likely to be geniuses, score high on IQ tests, ace the SAT, whatever. Any objective test of intellectual rigor women can't compete at all. Every now and then there's one woman, somewhere, who can play a decent game of chess or win a Fields medal or whatever, but that doesn't mean women are equal to men. It means there is a tiny, remote, possibility, that one or two women are equal to thousands of qualified men. That they can barely scrape up one talent that's a tiny bit like the real deals. If the book had said, "it would be a breath of fresh air to compete with a talented woman," that would be accurate and fair. But to say that women are as talented as men and only systemic sexism is keeping them back, 'barriers outside the game have kept them down until now,' oh give me a break. Women have had the opportunity to excel at chess, shogi, Go, whatever, for centuries. They haven't because they can't. They can't excel at anything. No one is holding them back except the very biological structure of their brains. Women were built to be normal and safe, because normal and safe is all that's necessary for a woman to find a lover and reproduce. Men are built to be all or nothing gambles, because one man can impregnate 1,000 women, so going for broke has the best chance of success. We make all or nothing bets on our brains and end up with a bunch of retards and insane people and misfits -- and a bunch of geniuses who can do things women could never dream of. That is our privilege as men. We win. We're the best. And so long as biology exists this will always be true of the sexes. It's basically the dividing line that defines the sexes in the first place. If women were suddenly the more talented group they'd be called men, and we'd become the women.
Greater male variability is true not only of humans but virtually every species on Earth. It is the true demarcation of the sexes, and emerges naturally from the ovum being harder to produce than the sperm. In every single species, whoever can spread more easily will start taking more risks. It's just game theory at that point. And so every single male species, up and down the entire evolutionary chain, will always exhibit greater variability, which means more at the higher end of any spectrum, than the females.
This claim, that flies in the face of known professional Shogi records, that women are as good as men, is as bad as Reki Kawahara's laughable claim that genes don't influence intelligence and every single person is born with the exact same brain at birth. It's as baldly untrue and as pathetically intended to satisfy the P.C. crowds.
Ryuuou no Oshigoto! got a lot of feminist hatred and pushback when it was published because it dared to tell the truth that women shogi players weren't competitive with men and there were no women shogi pros. Obviously the author took this to heart and eventually bowed to the pressure and wrote in, "oh, scratch that, I guess women are just as good as men." He folded like a coward, even though everything he had said was the truth and completely supported by the reality on the ground of the professional shogi world. You can just look at who are the title holders right now! There are 200 shogi pros in Japan and they're all male. No woman has ever won any title ever.
I admired this series for telling the honest truth about the gap between male and female shogi talent. Now that's out the window. It's as if he's apologizing for his earlier stance and quickly trying to take it all back. So in the same book he rejects lolis and sexual dimorphism. There's little left to care about now that he's rejected everything that made his work uniquely appealing. He's just another liberal. May as well write the script for Black Panther 2 while he's at it.
How much of this decision was his own, and how much forced onto him by others? Again, it's hard to say. In the current publishing climate for all I know he was forced to include this ridiculous assertion or he wouldn't be allowed to continue the series. In a sense anything that's published is bound to be worthless because to be published you must first pass the screening test of the censors, which require you lie about everything important in this world. How can a pack of lies ever appeal to anyone? And not just lies, but the exact same lies you hear every day from every source on every channel and every newspaper, etc. The same boring, repetitive lies, over and over again, forever. Because no one is allowed to say anything else.
Only unpublished works like mine can say anything interesting or new, which is why it's so easy to write the best book ever. I'm the only one allowed to say anything about anything, so I win by default. All published works have already eliminated themselves for consideration, since all they can ever publish is soviet propaganda. '100 Waifus' stands alone.
This book wasn't bad or anything, it actually had lots of entertaining scenes. It annoys me that such a clearly great writer is held back by society so thoroughly though. Ryuuou could be so much better and it's painful seeing all that potential dribble away.
Meanwhile, Love Live! Superstar's first episode aired. There's no doubt any longer. The first episode lived up to its predecessors and reputation as a Love Live! series. Even with an all-new cast and setting, this is clearly a great anime. It hit the first pitch out of the park. It makes the rest of the summer season look so pathetic in comparison. Sometimes I wonder why I even watch all these other shows when the greats so effortlessly pound them into the dirt.
Also, Rewrite Gaiden has been translated. These visual novels were bonus content for the purchasers of the anime blu-ray, but now they're translated in English and available to the world. Not very important, but for a Rewrite fan like me not something I can ignore either. I'll get to it once I've finished all my new Ryuuou.
Also, Tantei wa Mou, Shindeiru is dropped. The second episode is unbelievably stupid and annoying. A girl straight up assaults a guy and it's passed off as somehow okay. Then she claims he owes her for no reason and the guy goes along with her logic. Then she puts on a striptease show and complains when he looks. Then she kicks him for no reason and he permits it. And then on top of this worst of all females ever portrayed in history they go with the unscientific nonsense that hearts are the vessels of personality and by having a heart transplant she now has the memories and wishes of the previous person. Absurd and wrong. Just plain false. This is one of the stupidest and strangely most overused tropes in Japanese storytelling. It ruined Idoly Pride, Knight in the Area, and a thousand other shows and now it's ruined this series too.
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