>>2844
>Why do we, or at least some of us, get so emotionally invested in our oshi?
Well I'd say that's just love, quite simply. One knows to have effectively constructed a 'beloved' character precisely when one's sense of identity gets blurred with its source (or in other words, when you also sympathetically 'live through her life').

>Why do I even care for her so much when she can, and will, leave so easily?
Cause said joy of loving delivers a sense of completion and ephemeral is still better than nothing.

I've been away from the community for some time, and I just heard about Baito AKB. I'm getting tired of these promotional events. They need to focus on the members currently in the groups.

Putting /u/ in some perspective.
I overall agree.

>>2951
Did the poster take into the account the possibility of the other idol being male?
The concept is void to me unless it's a female idol with another female idol.

>>2954
Well, I think that was obvious. We're coming from /u/'s stand on the matter, so no men whatsoever. Except Ariyoshi: he can do as he likes and I'll accept it; he's my true idol...

No, seriously: the consideration of normal women as "dutchwives" and "incubators" clearly implied a general disgust about their role in heterosexual relationships.

Post edited on 5th Nov 2014, 9:09pm

>>2957
Ah, my bad. The presence of the word dick confused me. Are /u/ idol threads worth following?

pic: Paruru making an interesting facial expression.

>>2961
>Paruru

>>2961
>>2962
I'm now imagining Paruru with Aki's quads and triceps.

>>2963
>>2962
Sorry, I guess I'm officially blind.

>>2961
>Are /u/ idol threads worth following?
Not unless you're into that fetish yourself. Those posts were taken from /jp/ anyway (that is, from /u/'s alleged presence there).

Now that the Sapporo sister group is confirmed I'm worried about the direction 48g as a whole will go. Does this make older sister groups like SKE and NMB which are falling in popularity obsolete? Did Yasusu decide HKT was no longer young and fresh enough?

>>2992
I for one look forward to our new snow idols. But I hope it's not going to be full of 13 year olds like HKT was in the beginning. Even now HKT is still too young for me to really enjoy their performances.

>>2997
>Even now HKT is still too young for me to really enjoy their performances.
>he doesn't enjoy watching tanomiku and sakura being cute
Videos because why not
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/k3ISYy8EkyBTWx9qIAR
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/k2SHOUgoWLoQIJ9qKCj

Post edited on 24th Nov 2014, 1:26pm

You know? my life is a mess. I just happened to watch some Coney Island black and white pics and suddenly wished I was with Komi at Disneyland, free from worries, in that little artificial paradise. Then I thought that's what idols themselves are, like anime, this very forum, etcetera: all just fixes to delude ourselves with until that same addiction gets it back from us. Of course I already knew; I always knew, but built a huge postmodern philosophical justification for this as a legitimate and actually advantaged choice, since NORP ways were unknowingly alienating and fictional as well. But the naked truth is I'm clueless; I'm more lost than ever and way too old to even entertain such pathetic juvenile thoughts. I really just want out of the text and the wall; but a good man said there's no such thing as the outside, only layers and layers over the onion of signs. At any rate I don't know what to believe in anymore; but some of these girls' simple words somehow still manage to move me, breaking (into) my heart.

So on with the show, girls. I'm still watching, for better or worst.

>>3515
I don't see the problem. If you enjoy following idols and nobody gets hurt in the process, then why should you feel bad about doing it? For me, escapism is perfectly acceptable as long as it doesn't prevent you from reaching your goals or from being the person you want to be.

>>3518
But it's usually people who are not satisfied with their life and can't/won't change it that resort to escapism. You don't need escapism if you are satisfied with your life.

>>3519
Yeah, but how does that make escapism bad?

What do you guys think about 48/46G insofar as music?

Being a rock and protest music guy most of my life (plus the more cultivated tastes), it surprised me immensely to find myself enjoying several 48/46G songs and be genuinely moved by some lyrics. However, I don't think I could possibly stand them if it wasn't for the charm of the idol concept and the wota cult fueling the entire thing (also meaning that once they graduate their possible solo careers are utterly irrelevant to me). Another thing that hits me often is the impression that all Aki-P's songs are a rip off of some other popular work or the eclectic trivialization of famous past movements (disco, power ballad, happy punk, etc.), which could render 48/46G as legitimate kitsch music.

>>3535
>Being a rock and protest music guy most of my life (plus the more cultivated tastes), it surprised me immensely to find myself enjoying several 48/46G songs and be genuinely moved by some lyrics.
It's pretty much the same for me. I don't know why it is though. I like to think that AKB is less pretentious than most Western (21st century) pop music, and that it is because of that. Pop music was never meant to be pretentious, so when it happens, it's usually awkward.

I can even see myself listening to solo acts of the girls' though if the music was similar. But all the ones I've heard so far felt like Lady Gaga or Katy Perry.

Again, I don't know why, but even a song like Utaitai from the Kibouteki Refrain single, which seems like it's not idol-like enough to work, turns out just beautiful and in my eyes not pretentious at all.

The weirdest thing is, had I listen to these youth, innocence and hope themed songs as a teenager, I had despised them. It's only as a gloomy adult man that they have a contemplative, nostalgic and romantic charm for me.

So, apart from obvious nogi mannequins and the likes: are 48G's in general prettier in comparison to the average japanese teen/woman?

I ask because there was this saying that, initially, girls distinctly pretty didn't make it into AKB since the point was to take average girls and watch them turn into something more...

Do you think this still stands, or they were definitely picking girls way above average for latest generations?

>>3561
The first four or five generations had some pretty average girls in it, but even those generations were still above average in my opinion. Younger generations however are obviously above average to me. Management probably realized that prettier girls make more money. They just have to make sure that not all of them blindingly beautiful.

>>3561
better than average. not showbiz level cute, more like prettiest girl in your class. and the newer girls definitely started getting better looking.

I think the main difference is the eyes, a lot of them have nicer shaped eyes than the general populace, and then they wear all that makeup to exaggerate it.

OK, it's like this (it's not so easy to explain so bear with me for a while).

I don't wanna lose Komi. Without her I can no longer enjoy AKB and without AKB my life is dark and sour. But I can no longer respect her either and my love, which can't just vanish, turned into hate. I knew from the beginning that, as an idol, I was objectifying her and that was all good; but I made the idiotic mistake of letting myself identify my illusion of the character with the actual girl and couldn't help myself from trying to get even just a minimal (but hopefully honest) response from her. After failing hard, I suffered a lot for being rejected; but even then I still tried to endure it, suck it up and keep feeding normally from my distant idealistic take on her; however, with her recent declarations, her actual self (as expected) finally fully crashed with the idol character in my head, filling me with repulse and leaving me in despair.

So I wanted to die (I drank myself oblivious), or kill her as an idol by becoming an anti (even though doing so gave me nausea, literally), cause either me or her someone just had to go. However, amidst the pain I suddenly remembered that one also can and should live off despair... but how, in this case? The first seeming solution is to just hold on, wait for additional information and then try to reconfigure her character into something that I can at least tolerate; but that means lowering my ethical standards (i.e. selling my life cheap too) and, in any case, it obviously still waters down my AKB experience as a whole by being someone without an oshimen (and I have no intent of just switching oshi as if changing a pair of socks). Analyzing and narrativizing my current situation this sharply certainly gives me a bit of control back; but I know there is a huge danger in it, which is building another false arc, creating a weak idol character anew and being torn apart again; even worst, I could actually go full pathetic and make fit apologetic theories about her behavior just to fool myself into her innocence (e.g. "She's not fully aware of what Miichan or Milky represent and she doesn't really understand what a fisher is; she's just really shy and longs to be someone that can be socially smooth and loved by everyone, not realizing that she already has all that with no need of delivering affected and calculated poses that pander to hostess sluttery; she's never been too bright but she ain't bad either; she just needs some time to make up her mind and find the way"); that, appealing as it may sound, is something I simply can't allow myself to do, if only because being disproved again on that mode would melt my brain. The third and very last option is, well, selling my soul completely and going full christian/agape mode: to accept her as is, sincerely forgive her and keep loving her undividedly no matter what; but I'm not christian; they'll never catch me alive ("I'd rather die than go to heaven", like W. Murderface brilliantly said).

So, after all, I still don't know what to do. There are, however, other things that I absolutely should be doing right now and that I've neglected olympically because of idoling. My best option, I guess, is to fucking do those things already, distancing myself from this for a while. It's sure gonna be hard, though: I'm addicted. I don't even know if I'll be really able to. But here I go.

>>3773
You be retarded son, see a shrink.

>>3774
no u
>>>/jp/

>>3773
The way I see it you liked her because of what you thought she was like. But then you found out she wasn't really like you thought she was like, so now there's no reason to like her anymore.

I think it's time to cut your losses. If the "new Komi" (i.e. your new idea of her) is bad enough for you to make a post like that, it shouldn't be unlikely for someone better to come along. They might not be as good as the old Komi, but that old Komi doesn't seem to exist anymore.

Stuff like "oshihen is always bad" seems like a pretty arbitrary principle to me. If there's someone worthier of your support than your current oshimen, oshihen seems like the only sane choice to me actually.

And who knows, maybe Komi will change and allow you to oshihen back to her.


>>3774
Following idols can be serious business. It might not be from your (casual?) perspective, but that doesn't mean you should go around insulting people who think it is.

>>3773
I kinda agree with >>3774 you sound like you need some help bro

just keep in mind that having a fisher type personality doesn't inherently make someone a bad person

>>3780
Nowhere in his post does he say anything about her being a bad person. I think it's more about the guilt and shame of getting invested in someone who didn't deserve that kind of investment. That's a burden sincere people just have to live with. The only way to get rid of it would be to get rid of your sincerity, but why would you want to do that.

>>3781
yeah you're right i guess i did have an image of that person basically saying "komi is bad" in my head

>>3781

Sorry, but I think his actual problem is that the first thing he does when he sees a girl, he creates an image in his head of what the girl is like, instead of finding out who she really is.

These are living, breathing human beans we're talking about. The chance of anyone living up to his ideal perfect girl is slim to none, so he's just setting himself up for disappointment from day one.

The better approach is to learn about all the girls first, and THEN choosing an oshi based on things about them that you like.

Those who'll get it, get it.

>>4025
That's pretty elaborate, but wouldn't you divide by zero if an idol doesn't display any fishing techniques and also doesn't have any gravure published?

>>4026
You're right, as it could be the case of some prepubescent or very unpopular members, Nogis, etc.

I could give it more thought and force +FG to be non-zero somehow. However, the indetermination could provisionally stand and be interpreted as an extreme case of non convergence towards 1 as well, representing an image with no sexual charge and thus no ambiguity at all, which is all the model really tries to measure.

God, my life is so fucked up.

There are things I absolutely should be doing. Instead, I'm too tired all the time and the few energy I have left I spend it in idoling (which also got me drinking again). I had already given up on having a normal life when I became an anime otaku, but it wasn't nearly as destructive as this. I'm old and keep getting uglier by the minute. This might really be the end of the line for me.

I'll just leave this here for your consideration.

>>4135
>>4136
So how many posts did you have to cut out to get to such acceptable levels of conversational quality?

>>4137
Usually several.

>>4176
I don't think it's right to say idols are "man-made" fictional concepts of femininity, if "man" is meant to mean "male person" here. Girls look up to them as role models as much as guys look at them as the perfect girlfriend material after all. Our culture has concepts like that too. The difference is that in the West the female role model differs from the perfect girlfriend material. So isn't AKB actually doing something good in creating a concept both genders can agree on?

I don't see how it denies womanhood either, if we understand that word as having relationships and starting families. It just draws a stronger distinction between girlhood and womanhood. And that's not a bad thing either in my opinion. No idol is expected to be an idol for the rest of her life after all. It just shows girls to wait until the time is right before they start their transmission into womanhood. No one wants teen pregnancies and single moms.

I've always seen AKB as feminist too. They're not presented as toys for their fans to play with, even if the media likes to pretend they are. They're presented as strong girls with a goal, or girls that aim to become strong enough to reach their goals at least, and that's perfectly in line with feminism.

>>4330
>girls that aim to become strong enough to reach their goals at least, and that's perfectly in line with feminism.
No, that's a trivialized take on feminism. Although supposedly a vindication of womanhood, feminism, from 1st to 3rd wave, is merely about women becoming like men who constitute the historical and nomic subject (or neutral citizen and worker). Camille Paglia has a good nietzschean interpretation of feminism as this andreization of women, and of such andreization (insofar as apollonian forces, which include the virtue/areté as excellence and overcoming that you somewhat mentioned) as a necessary step towards cultural accomplishment as in ancient Greece (which achieved glory not despite but thanks to misogyny, since the woman is seen as the dionysian). Feminism merely actualizes and expands man's culture at the expense of any possible inquiry on true womanhood, which ultimately leads to women's extinction in the prospect of transhumanity.

>I don't see how it denies womanhood either, if we understand that word as having relationships and starting families
No, that's the feminine role: the servant and incubator of men. That's precisely the fine point here: womanhood isn't the same as femininity; womanhood (or Lilith, if you want, mythopoeically) is what should constitute their alleged specific qualities that would set them apart from men and could make them a valuable subject type to be defined (otherwise they're just man-surrogates); femininity (or Eve, if you want) is the aforementioned man-made concepts and roles they're assigned with in correspondence with their alleged "nature" (another equally blurry concept invented during french Enlightenment), but which only constitutes an artificial construct within the dialects of gender (be it cisgender/binary or transgender/continuum).

All in all, the deepest problem with feminists is that they, by embracing the sexual identity concept, unknowingly embrace too the very same base dialectics of genre (that turn the other into a type, a species, an alien) that have no objective ground anymore (nor biological) and which they instead should be eroding in order to achieve everyone's emancipation (as in the yet nonexistent 4th wave feminism). Michel Foucault has a similar view about homosexuality: sex between males has always existed (animals even has sex between species; some people do too), but the "homosexual" is merely a type or recent invention, therefore rendering the gay rights' fight as self-defeating by embracing as an identity something which is not (but, rather, an ipseity or alterity); it's similar to Nietzsche's idea of the death of God: the question is not if the bearded good guy in heaven exists or not (which is too pitiful to even consider anymore), but if the very set of platonic ideas and absolute categories (truth, beauty and goodness) that give ground to the concept of God still stands at all... and they don't; everything is a historical and contingent textual interpretation, so truth is merely the interpretation of the most contextually powerful.

TL;DR Idols being feminist or not isn't really about being emancipated women or not, but about being either man-servants or man-surrogates which are their only options.

So, in resume, after suffering madly, drinking heavily and deleting all her drawings, I decided to use a 3rd G+ account (she had blocked me twice before) and wrote her this, expecting the worst:

あなたの生き甲斐を見つけます、良かった。
自業自得。 これから、頑張って。
さよなら、榛香。幸せになる。

Then, after over 2 years of Hell, she not just didn't delete it but finally gave me +1 (i.e. acceptance, even if merely as a farewell) and my heart was complete again... thus ready to peacefully let her go. However, in order to really do so I must give idols a rest altogether, so I'll just watch the last episode of BINGO with the Bad Boys and that's it.

>>4594
Are you sure she really blocked you? A lot of people on G+ get randomly (but consistently once it's started) ghosted by some bad algorithm, even through multiple accounts (because, you know, it's Google, the master tracker), so that their comments only show up for themselves but not for anybody else. Maybe that's what was happening. And then the third account just happened not to be ghosted yet.

Just for the record.

Yesterday was special. I got to personally meet and thank the philosopher, mathematician and logician I admire the most (Graham Priest), and whom I own my entire posgraduate work. Also, pic related happened; maybe it's not a big deal for her, but it was for me...

I did it because she saved me. A couple weeks ago, I posted a making-of drawing of her that I planned to delete anyway. However, those days I was feeling really low, incompetent and desperate, regarding my Master, PhD project and future. And just when I was about to snap, she liked that one pic, right before I was to delete it. That alone transfigured my world enough to give me hope and strenght to go on. I felt indebted to her, thus decided to make yet another drawing for her birthday. I especifically tried to tone down the realism and went for something simpler, closer than what she seemed to like. I posted it, she did like it and, unexpectedly, also liked a little comment I did on her birthday long post, in which she thanked the fans for lifting her up during hard times:

あなたは俺も一度救った。
どうもありがとうございました。

She made me want to die once (unawarely, for sure); but she also gave me hope once more and I wanted her to know it. I am certain I do not deserve it; but I'll gladly take it, to be able to go on. By all means, come what may again, I'm very thankful for it.

>>4621
Based Komifag

>>4631
He just keeps rolling. That's his destiny.

Hopefully last update. I'd only dare saying this here.

She's kept ignoring my posts of her ever since. Say, on a certain date a few months ago, she said she'd like every tweet with a specific tag and she did, everyone's but mine (which including some drawings of her). That kept going and I really, really don't know why. I just very rarely comment anything on her posts and it's always short nice things. It kept hurting very badly so I decided not to make another drawing for her birthday, since I was also very bussy. But heck, I did it anyway and the result was crystal clear: she once again liked every post around tagging her, but mine. Today, she also not just liked but reposted (as an instastory) someone else's drawing of her, and a very bad one for any standard I could hold. And it wasn't just her, say, having bad taste but also a lot more people liking that drawing, far more than for any of what I've done. Something similar happened on an international contest I participated lately: far inferior works, technically and conceptually, made it to the finals while mine was utterly ignored...

I got not just very depressed and angry, but also very puzzled. It's like the world around me is upside down, or I myself am beyond deluded and gone. At any rate, it made me not want to draw any more, other than for work (and one more for Asuka, on December). I've cooled down enough already, but I'd still like to understand what's been going on.

>>4639
I remember some weird algorithm shadowbanning me on Google+ back in the day. I wouldn't even have found it out if it hadn't been for one of those "idol liking every single comment" situation. Mine wasn't liked, but that was only because it didn't even show up for other people. When I made a new account, the algo quickly figured it out and banned that one too. Barely any of my comments on G+ went through and eventually I just stopped posting them.