Conventional Wisdom

(Historical Notes: Okay, THIS one just didn’t land the way I wanted it to, and part of the problem is baked right into the premise.  It’s totally fair for me to say “I don’t like fanservice-heavy isekai harem shows” when I generally don’t watch many… because why would I watch many of a genre I don’t care for?  However, if I then try to concoct a PARODY of that genre… well, trying to parody something you don’t know much about runs the risk of not turning out as funny as you think it will.  That goes TRIPLE  in a comic with as little room to get an idea across as this, while also trying to get a second abstract layer of meta commentary about memes across.  See, the bit with the coffee cups in the second panel is inspired by a number of ironic body pillow parodies I’ve seen over they years that play around with one of otakudom’s sadder staples.  In particular, I once saw a fairly brilliant pillow design where the “character” on the case… was a drawing of another body pillow.  And you know how there’s traditionally the “normal” pose on one side, then the more “suggestive” pose on the other side?  Well, THIS thing had a picture of the pillow laying straight on the one side, and folded over on the other.  I still think that’s really clever.

So, what I was TRYING to do here was introduce this very “not my thing” anime with a bunch of monster girls, but also lots of coffee for some reason, and then imply that the fandom decided to get all meta about themselves and fetishize the coffee instead of any of the characters.  The two coffee mugs are supposed to be two sides of the same body pillow cover, with the spilled one being the “lewd” side.  In my head, this was supposed to imply that the joke already told by that pillow described above had metastasized into a sort of “Loss”-style meta-irony where the form had utterly separated itself from any context… which is itself ironic, because context is exactly what this comic needs to work.  WAAAAY too much of the narrative I just described isn’t actually depicted in the comic above, and thus anybody not already privy to all this head canon won’t have any idea where I’m going with it.  Honestly, I still think the idea is sound, but a two-panel comic is just too short to get it across.

Well, that, and a coffee mug is way too short for the visual gag to click in the same way that the body pillow design that inspired all this works.  There’s way too much empty space for the “Oh, that’s supposed to represent a body” mental connection to take place.  Clearly, I should have made up an anime about Long Island Ice Tea or something else that’s traditionally served in a tall glass.)