Reading Report: 15 March 2026

マブラブ

有害図書の本

I finally finished this book. The final parts for the week didn't really touch on anything particularly interesting to me. I finished up the prefecture-by-prefecture gallery of regulated books and read two interviews at the end, plus the final chat between Nagayama Kaoru and Kimi Rito. To be honest I don't have much to say about them, though I did like one thing Nagayama said right near the end.

「...私は『表現の自由を守れ』ってスタンスではなくて、あくまでも 『表現規制に反対します』っていう立ち位置なんです。」

新・キューティーハニー

Decided to watch this after finishing Zambot 3. I was going to watch Mazinkaiser, but it turns out the version I had access to had hard-coded English subtitles... so I decided to give another Go Nagai series a watch. This anime is really really good, though it's sort of lacking in the story department. It's sort of a reboot of Cutie Honey, but it's also a sequel that takes the events of the original series as canon. The first half of this series is a contained story about the threat of an organised group of baddies. Kisaragi Honey awakens to her true power as Cutie Honey and has to take down the bad guys with her transformations and the power of love. The second half felt a bit less focused, but continues with a monster-of-the-week format featuring a bunch of fun enemies and great fights.

マブラブ

When I detected that my robot fixation was going by the wayside and I was entering a new 美少女 (beautiful girls) arc, I decided to split the difference by playing a VN that is sort of about girls and robots. It's been on my radar for a while, so why not?

Muv-Luv is about Takeru, a robot otaku whose life is turned upside-down by the appearance of the aloof, wealthy, and powerful Mitsurugi Meiya. Takeru's daily routine involves spending time with Meiya and his childhood friend Sumika. Other girls in Takeru's class also make regular appearances and are offered as potential love interests by the storytelling, though it's clear that only Sumika and/or Meiya belong to the true timeline.

In true Ruby playstyle I've done everything in my power to avoid the core story. I've run away from the extravagant lunches that Meiya and Sumika prepared for me and enjoyed a store-bought Yakisoba Pan given to me by the silent, mysterious Ayamine Kei. Just because of the chance encounter I had with Kei on the rooftops one day, I decided that she's the girl I want to pursue. It feels a bit like leaning into a long joke storyline, but I'm kind of hoping she'll open up eventually and I'll feel something deep about her.

Outside of scenes where I have choices the story has given me a bunch of very sweet flashbacks to flesh out Takeru's relationship with Sumika. One story involving a Santa toy already made me feel quite sentimental. If I had to choose between Sumika and Meiya I think I'd easily favour Sumika.

人間昆虫記

This is an older Tezuka Osamu manga. The cover piqued my interest and I started reading it last week. I made a concerted effort to finish it this week, though it took a bit more effort than I expected. The whole thing is almost 400 pages and features a handful of "old manga" conventions that make reading it a bit slower, so I almost feel like I read 3-4 modern manga while reading this.

The story explores the ambitions of a young Japanese woman called Tomura Toshiko. Tomura steals, cheats, lies, and eventually kills in her quest to find an identity for herself. She's the kind of person who can never be pleased. Once she's "drained" one person she seems unsatisfied until she can find another, and she obsesses over failed conquests, like in the case of Mizuno, a designer whose work she plagiarises early on. She's never able to fully capture the heart of Mizuno, and it seems to weigh her down right to the end of the story.

Overall I liked the story, though I found it a bit chaotic and overly long. I think it could have found a more interesting ending by focusing more on the Mizuno drama in act 3 and not bothering with Yamato the photographer, a character introduced in the final act who gives Tomura a way out of Japan.

分校の人たち

Another one of Yamamoto Naoki's manga. This was just another one available on CMOA alongside BLUE.

This manga is much more of a standard erotic story than BLUE. It features three characters who explore their budding sexualities together. The storytelling is a lot more subtle, showing how naive people balance their interest in sex against their simplistic understanding of its risks and forms. It's sort of interesting to compare the assumptions that the characters hold with our own assumptions as readers.

GOLDEN BOY さすらいのお勉強野郎

This is an anime that has been on my radar since forever, but I never really thought about watching it. Not out of disinterest, it just sort of felt like a "thing that exists". Possibly because I was watching Cutie Honey, the next time it came to mind I decided it would be nice to watch it and see what the hype was all about.

I'm only two episodes into it so far, but I've really enjoyed the writing in the episodes I've seen. The story is about a horny, down-on-his-luck Japanese guy called Kintarou who is trying to take every opportunity he can get to skill up and become a proper member of society. The story of both episodes I've watched basically involve Kintarou falling in love with various women, being kind of creepy about it, but also trying to lock in and focus on his current job. The women around him tend to treat him poorly (mostly as a reasonable reaction to his prior creepiness), but by the end of the episode there's always a "turn", where Kintarou surprises these women with some act of talent, or kindness, or traditional charm, and they wish that they treated him better in the end. It's very funny. The absurdity and escalation throughout the episodes is really well written, and the payoff is unbelievable and funny. I like it so far!