December 2021 Patron Newsletter and Staff Picks (Patreon)

Happy Early New Year, AniFam! 

It's been a busy end to a busy year. We wrapped up 2021 with two new projects:

• The AniFem Store went live at the beginning of the month, bringing with it a selection of cute, geeky merch by indie artists for your enjoyment. 
• We launched our first bonus podcast (with transcript) for all patrons donating $5 or more per month. For this first episode, we talked anime backlog resolutions and recommended some older gems for our audience. If you're curious to hear what we liked (or didn't), come join the $5 tier today!

Our next big project is a proper AniFem logo redesign, but that won't kick off in earnest until mid-January.  More on that story as it develops. For now, we've got our hands full with the end-of-year "best of" list and the winter 2022 season right around the corner, so get ready to be buried in recs and reviews in the coming weeks.

And if "buried in recs" ain't a proper segue, then I don't know what is. On to the month's staff picks!

This Month's Recommendations:

Nier Replicant ver 1.22474487139…

Format: Video game (PS4/Xbox One/PC)

Picked by: Vrai

What’s it about? In 2053, a young man fights monsters called “shades” in a dying city to protect his sickly sister. 1,412 years later, a young man searches the ruins of a long-forgotten world, seeking a cure for his sister’s illness and an end to the shades that threaten his home.

Content warnings: Fanservicey character design (justified in-narrative, but your mileage will extremely vary on how well); one party member slut-shaming said character; a shitty transphobic achievement (added I suspect outside of the dev team’s control, as it’s new for the remake); body horror; mild gore; depictions of genocide, infanticide, animal death, existential dread, child abuse/medical abuse (implied), cannibalism (implied), bullying/misgendering (implied).

Why we like it: It’s difficult to fit my complicated love for Yoko Taro into the space allotted for this recommendation. He’s the guy who became a meme for asking fans to send him horny fanart of Nier Automata protagonist 2B, and in whose work “angry, foul-mouthed white-haired woman in lingerie” is a basically ironclad expectation. They’re also, to a one, sad as hell—with a little kernel of hope maybe 30 hours in. Maybe.

But Yoko is also an unabashedly political director making beautiful work that, for all the sadness I mentioned, is also funny and human and bright. This particularly applies to Nier, originally released in 2010 and heavily influenced by Yoko’s observations on 9/11 and the Iraq war. The game’s structure plays with multiple genres and encourages multiple playthroughs that change and evolve the narrative, constantly threading in new perspectives on a seemingly simple tale of righteous vengeance. It’s a tale of outcasts and misfits, and your party includes both a gay young man and an intersex woman who are the absolute heart and soul of the story.

This rerelease also does wonders to make the game more accessible, reworking the original’s somewhat stodgy controls with Automata’s smoother combat and lots of easy mode help for people mainly interested in the narrative. This might be, at the end of the day, not just my favorite Yoko Taro game but my favorite of all time. It’s more polished than the fascinating trash heap of Drakengard and more character-focused than the sometimes abstractly philosophical Automata, and I will never, ever forget it.

That Wolf-Boy is Mine!

Format: Manga

Picked by: Dee

What's it about? After a difficult time at her old school, Komugi hopes for a peaceful, fresh start in Hokkaido. Things get complicated in a hurry, though, when she finds out the school's four heartthrobs are animals—literally! Can she keep their secret while also navigating new friendships, a fox-lad with a grudge, and a blossoming crush on Ohgami the local wolf-boy?

Content considerations: Death/grieving; bullying; child neglect (all fairly restrained in depiction).

Why we like it: Despite its aggressive title, Wolf-Boy is a sweet, warm-hearted little supernatural shoujo featuring good kids trying their best. While many of its elements will feel familiar to long-time fantasy shoujo fans—tension created by mingling the supernatural with the mundane, a bullying subplot, forgotten childhood meetings, unrequited love, troubled parent-child relationships, and meddling authority figures—the series handles them with charm and grace, avoiding drawn-out melodrama in favor of communication and kindness.

Komugi is spunky, Ohgami is sweet (and saaaad!), and the supporting cast are sympathetically flawed with distinct personalities. Complete at 4 volumes, Wolf-Boy won't be the deepest or most original series you've ever read, but if you enjoy sweet supernatural rom-coms then this is an easy commitment and an overall good time.