rose

Or: When and why did Japanese culture divorce the bunnysuit from the Playboy company and turn it into more of a General Thing? As an eminent bunnygirl myself, this is of course important scholarship for me.

I had always been under the impression this was an 80s thing--indeed, a friend of mine recently mentioned she thought it took off with the Daicon 4 opening animation (1983) (figure 1). But then I saw someone post a screencap (figure 2) from an episode I'd apparently seen once but completely forgotten about of JAKQ Dengekitai (1977), and I got to wondering.

maddi and i started playing madou monogatari i for the mega drive / genesis and it's really good. the precursor rpg series to puyo puyo, the game features arle trying to climb a big rpg dungeon crawler tower as a test to pass magic kindergarten. it's both simple and mechanically surprising / creative in a way that made me feel like when i was new to video games and didn't know how they're supposed to work. the battles have fighting game input-style magic spells and instead of hp/mp numbers they say things like "tired, but doing my best." or "i'm done for!". the fan translation's super charming, and the character sprites / ui are super cute and the game has a sparkly magic orb in the corner at all times. highly recommend