Frieren, episode 24

I kind of wish they’d made all these other mages interesting before demanding that I care about them. As it is, I can’t keep track of their personalities and powers from week to week.

Verdict: the only thing I really liked was Fern’s jealousy. If she reacted like that around her boyfriend, one or the other of them might figure out that he is her boyfriend.

Community Pon-Service, episode 8

Apparently all the opening dream sequences are based on a well-known video on how to cheat at mahjong. After that, though, this episode has even less to do with mahjong than usual, with Our Lead Girl being volunteered to produce thousands of paper lanterns for a festival on very short notice. Naturally the gang joins in, and the rest of the episode is spent making them, setting them up, and viewing them. The mahjong references are restricted to drawing the tiles on some of the lanterns, which means they continue the welcome trend of no man-face jokes.

But hey, it takes place over several days, and they wear different outfits; it’s hardly like anime at all!

Verdict: my greatest disappointment is that they completely skipped over the part where Our Goth Girl slept over; they immediately cut to meeting up at the parlor the next morning. On the bright side, they promised Our Poor Little Riiche Girl a pajama party…

Related, last week’s golden birthday present:

1. the only way to get the tiles out is to dump the box, which is sure to damage the table.
2. putting a handle on the case is kinda pointless, given the weight. It should have wheels.
3. the box lid is as deep as the base, which makes no sense whatsoever.
4. she paid to commision solid gold tiles, but then had them engraved and painted with the exact same design as a $50 Chinese-made set?

Speaking of which, here’s a copper mahjong set that is, to be blunt, gaudy crap. It’s also one of the many phony “vintage” sets being sold on etsy and ebay. As in, “vintage last Thursday”.

While we’re on the subject…

It seems that last year The Forces Of Evil attacked an American mahjong company for creating whimsical tiles. Apparently they were whitewashing and culturally appropriating an ancient treasure of Chinese culture (that’s barely 150 years old, was banned in China for much of that time, and has been modified continuously by pretty much every other country in the world for roughly 100 years). It should surprise no one that the only people outraged were upper-middle-class white women, which ironically was also the target market.

I wonder if they’d have been equally outraged by this sparkplug set or this anime character set…

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