A recent post by Sat­ur­nity and some fol­low up enlight­en­ment by Shance of Rain­bow­sphere made me real­ize just how neg­a­tive much of the anibl­o­gos­phere is to the con­cept of anime/manga clubs and other sim­i­lar orga­ni­za­tions revolv­ing around Japan­ese Mod­ern Visual Cul­ture, to the point of estab­lish­ing that “the first rule of anime club is don’t go to anime club”.

I once thought the same way. For my first two years at col­lege I walked into my anime club only once each year. Then changes took place. Maybe it’s because my think­ing is dif­fer­ent, or my goals have changed. But before I knew it I devel­oped a cer­tain pride to my anime club: CAINE at the Uni­ver­sity of Vir­ginia (the Comics and ANi­ma­tion INtel­lec­tual Explo­ration club). Why? Because we’re not the anime club, we’re not the manga club, we’re Genshiken.

You think those peo­ple are weird? So are you.

Dis­claimer: the fol­low­ing are obvi­ously my per­sonal tastes and I do not intend to insult any animu/mango club out there that runs suc­cess­fully in a dif­fer­ent way: it all depend on the audience.

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While brows­ing Kotaku for amuse­ment in their only-in-japan cat­e­gory, I came across the Love Plus trailer. I swear I could feel a ter­ri­ble ache in my chest after watch­ing it…

The begin­ning I didn’t mind that much. I’ve seen dat­ing sims before. Trial-played one even, although it’s really not my thing since they sim­ply lack the char­ac­ter and plot val­ues their visual novel sib­lings have ( for the last time vis­nov != dating-sim!!! ). The first half of the trailer sim­ply dis­played Love Plus as a dat­ing sim with more ani­ma­tion than what my men­tal imagery gives.

Then she greeted dear player good morn­ing… (~1:45)

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At the Uni­ver­sity of Vir­ginia there is a club named CAINE, which stands for Comics and Ani­ma­tion INtel­lec­tual Explo­ration. We are the Gen­shiken of UVA in all but name and authen­tic­ity, and one of the tra­di­tions of our merry band is to draw yuri on the chalk­board prior to our weekly anime show­ings and leave them for the enjoy­ment of oth­ers. This has been dili­gently per­formed for mul­ti­ple semes­ters now by our Direc­tor Honya.

Except we had no clue what the recep­tion was, until now…

On Sun­day night, the Com­puter Sci­ence pro­fes­sor was host­ing a test study ses­sion in the same room. He has just fin­ished his pre­sen­ta­tion and lifted the pro­jec­tor screen to answer a cod­ing ques­tion via black­board… only to unravel Honya’s lat­est work of art. Amuse­ment was an understatement.

You can get a blow-by-blow account of it at Bread_and_Circus.

Full 10s, I say!!!

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