Apologies for how awkward this looks, but posting it as one post seemed to trigger a bug where the post would close on itself when you clicked "Read more". Rather than attempt to debug a Cohost post, I decided to post it in a thread of three posts.
I don't want to make this an actual newsletter post because my subscribers already get these stories emailed to them; it'd be redundant.
The best and most exhaustive thing I wrote this year was my deep dive into, of all things, the cult violence OVA Angel Cop. Around this time Angel Cop had just gone up on Crunchy and there was a very small controversy on social media and in the anime's comment section about its anti-Semitism. Of course, as this was online culture war discourse, absolutely nobody involved in the discussion cared enough to actually look at the material being discussed.
I'm very familiar with both the English and Japanese language versions of Angel Cop-- the latter of which is quite anti-Semitic and the former of which has that content scrubbed-- and I found there was no accurate description of the actual material.
But it also proved to be such a big job that I needed to make it a pay article. So uh, sorry. The anime is anti-Semitic, if you want the spoilers. It's not ambiguous.
I did a bunch of retro game writeups when I bought the Taito Arcade Memories expansion for my beloved Egret II Mini. I always want to do more retro game material but find myself playing fighting games instead. Anyway, even if you don't have the pricey toy-- I am currently weeping because I simply cannot afford the Cyber Stick for Arcade Memories volume 2-- Taito digs up a lot of odd gems from its library, and any one of these games is worth checking out in emulation or whatever.
I talked about what it's like to play and place high at an IRL riichi mahjong tournament. The English-speaking IRL riichi community has made such huge bounds in the last two years, especially here in New York, and I'm so happy and proud to be a part of a welcoming and chill community.
Reviewed the absolutely bizarre CG Prince of Tennis musical movie. I try to throw some full-on curveballs to keep you guys entertained! Also a sub-only post.
Sub-only post again, but the best thing I wrote about movies was another deep dive into the Battle Royale duology. The first film is a must-see, and the second film is, while undeniably a failure, also extremely daring: it's a War on Terror movie that sides with terror. In 2003.
And to slide in at the very end of the year, I did a pretty exhaustive review of Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name, a game that's a jumbled grab bag of parts of other LAD/Yakuza series games and which only kinda justifies its existence by the end, when you're weeping over the credits. It's a game I very much enjoyed playing through, because of the hands-on action combat, but I don't think it's a particularly strong entry in the series. In a sub-only post I did an even more exhaustive review of Daytona USA 2, which was released a mini-game in LAD Gaiden.
It's been another very productive year for the newsletter, and while I doubt it will ever become a living (I have 27 paid subs and I'd need more like, uh, a thousand?! where do they even find all those people? if you know them, tell them to sub to me) that support still puts food in my mouth and means a lot to me personally.
Relatedly, I am starting to put the paid Substack posts on my Kawaiikochans Patreon. This was specifically in response to a KKC supporter who understandably didn't want to sign up for Substack (I wish I'd known about their "we love bigots and Nazis" policy before I started the newsletter). The Patreon version of the post frankly looks ugly as sin, but it's something. This is a reminder that if you sign up for the KKC Patreon at $5, I'll comp you for the Substack as well.