Update Two Hundred and Thirty-Seven: 5 October 2018

☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆

I’ve been playing this off and on for the past few months, just kind of puzzling when I needed to keep my hands busy while my brain was doing something else. This is the second game in the Japanese-themed Animated Puzzles series - the first one being just Japanese scenery in general. This one had different short, looping videos of pretty Japanese women wearing traditional kimonos chilling, waving fans, sitting in a forest. One is wrapped in a towel in an onsen testing the water, one’s playing with a windchime. It’s cute! - and absolutely non-sexual.

When I first fired up the game I got three - three! - messages from friends going ‘whoa buddy what GAME are U playin’! with identical wink wink nudge nudge jokes. Of course, the teaser image IS the most ‘risque’ puzzle in the game - and it reveals… a bare arm and leg up to mid thigh of a woman simply sitting and reaching into water, you know, as one does. There’s a whole conversation to be had about the fetishization of Asian women in general and Japanese women in specific, and just how primed we’re taught to think that if something is focusing on women it’s for sexual titillation (of men), but I don’t have the knowledge and/or bandwith to hold it. (Let me tell you how disappointed young me was when I found out the bright neon ‘GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS!’ signs did not mean what I wanted them to mean) Regardless: the women are just chillin’ and acting like people, feel free to play this jigsaw puzzle game with yer grandma.

Otherwise it’s the same as other jigsaw puzzle games, for good and for ill. Check it out if you like some puzzlin’!

Next up: Still workin’ on NepNep, and I think Madison and I will make an effort to crack into AER this weekend.

See you soon!