I love ponytails.
Impression
Ahh, I want Kae to pull on my cheeks~
I hate to say this, but I actually enjoyed this episode. It was good. But by ‘good’ I do only mean relatively to the other episodes (particularly the fiasco that was last week’s) and only in the sense that it was interesting. Ponytail Chika also helped a lot. I didn’t even know it was something I wanted until it happened.
Haruta was Haruta, as usual. I’ve slowly come to accept him now, it’d be beating a dead horse to repeatedly talk about how insufferable he is at this point. I also get the feeling that this is how Chika feels about him, as his long-time childhood friend. In retrospect, it does feel like a stretch to establish a link between a voyeur and the class president moving her seat around multiple times, but the way the seats were arranged made it a little more plausible. That, and the fact that the president was a real qt. So many nice character designs are being wasted on this sub-par show. At least they’re not having all the girls fall over Haruta though, I’ll give them that. As for Asmodeus being a girl, I have to admit it never crossed my mind until the possibility was brought up – the fact that they were lewd pictures (is it bad that I wanted to see some) automatically made me assume it was a guy, on top of the fact that the name ‘Asmodeus’ implies the motive was lust. But of course, it being a girl is a very real option – they could be lesbian, but motives which come to mind now include humiliation, jealousy or revenge. Especially because the president was a qt. I was also content with how they never ended up revealing Asmodeus’s identity in the end – it wasn’t ultimately all that relevant, because the real focus of the episode was Sakai-sensei and how he was willing to go to great lengths to protect his former students.
It did come at the expense of his current students, as Asmodeus was left at large – I guess it’s a balancing exercise, really. Should gorilla have prioritised his current class and called out Asmodeus on her blackmail no matter the consequences, and at the expense of Ogawara? Or was it the right choice to cover for Ogawara and allow her to finally get started with her teaching career after all the trouble she ran into in the past? What I really didn’t understand was why the tattoo was such a big deal – I can understand it not being appropriate for a teacher, and it might also be an issue that it’s a female teacher with a tattoo given Japan’s cultural norms. But it’s not like it was clearly visible – it was on her back, she was in the process of removing it and most of all, Asmodeus had wrongfully and covertly taken a picture of it even though she had it covered up. Sakai-sensei reacted as if that picture’s existence was going to hurt Ogawara more than Asmodeus – are tattoos really that much of a taboo? Is it the whole yakuza connotation? Everyone in that room seemed to immediately understand when Ogawara revealed that she had a tattoo, and I was just confused. Oh well. This was definitely a better episode than obscure, ‘deep’ metaphors about forest children and bears, so I’ll take what I can get.
Finally, as for Haruta’s tactful question, the answer is yes. Yes it does, okay?
Especially if it’s ponytail Chika. Or the twins.
This tattoo thing reminds me of a “lovely” thread I’ve seen on /a/ once that was filled with large amounts of hate for tattoos and piercings, for reasons that mostly involved the origins of such habits (in other words, racism) and how such habits shows you’re a degenerate.
I’ve heard about men kicked out of job interviews because they had tattoos cuz looking nice and clean makes the costumers trust you more.
Though I suppose in Japan the whole Yakuza connection is the biggest problem.
That sounds like a standard /a/ thread. What do you think of Google hiring moot by the way? I’m still wondering how it’s possible to even build a career off associating yourself with… that place, even if you’re the founder. Surely they’d want to distance themselves from the uh, unique culture.
I can understand being kicked out of an interview because they sported tattoos – but presumably they were visible, if the issue was them not looking presentable enough? Ogawara had a fully covered-up tattoo on the back, and literally no-one would have known anything about it unless they all went to the beach or something. It felt like her having a discrete tattoo like that was more of a scandal than the fact that a pervert lesbian student has been taking lewd photos of all the girls, which is incredulous to me. I guess it’s a cultural thing, since I can’t imagine a teacher ending up being more in the wrong than the student in this scenario.
Ok, I said men, but I only know a single guy. I’m sure there are more stories like these though.
His tattoo is on his forearm, he had long sleeves that day, and the guy doing the interview asked all the men taking it to pull their sleeves back. It’s standard procedure to check for a few such things unfortunately, things that show you’re not good with self-respect or rules or managing time or… something. And it’s said that inked people tend to get even more over time, so maybe they are afraid of that too.
I just got a lecture today from one professor on how important looks and first impression are so like it or not, understand it or not, it’s pretty much everywhere. UGH.
Yeah, the case in this episode felt ass-backwards to me too.
About moot: I feel that he was gone from 4chan before he actually left. I think he tried to move on and distance himself from his creation for a while now, became someone respectable and start over. It’s not like he’s actually bringing any of the unique culture over to google. And hey, more publicity for google by taking in a controversial guy.
Asking them to roll up their sleeves sounds weird, what role was that interview for? I could understand if it’s the service industry and if you wear short-sleeved shirts at work. First impressions are extremely important, apparently during interviews people decide whether they like you or not within 30 seconds or so. You definitely have a chance to change that first impression (be it good or bad) but it’s definitely harder to make someone turn their negative opinion of you into a positive one instead of vice versa.
True, I’m sure Google hired moot for his skills. But HR or whoever hired him would definitely have poked around the site, and I find it really hard to believe that they wouldn’t immediately think twice after spending no more than a dozen seconds on /b/ or one of the more… unreserved boards. I guess in the end it is a ‘successful’ site with influence and they decided to get him to prop up and redesign Google+ or whatever it is he’s working on.
Bank.