Chatty AF 219: Recovery of an MMO Junkie Retrospective (WITH TRANSCRIPT)

CY: Yeah, because it’s… I think it’s easy to read this— I mean, it is het, but I now understand what people on Twitter mean when they say “straight yuri” or “straight yaoi.” I understand it because I’ve seen straight yuri, and it’s called Recovery of an MMO Junkie.

CAITLIN: [Laughs]

SAM: Yes!

[Introductory musical theme]

CAITLIN: Hi and welcome to Chatty AF: The Anime Feminist Podcast. I am Caitlin, one of the editors at Anime Feminist. And today we are talking about Recovery of an MMO Junkie, the 2017 10-episode series about a woman who gets really into playing MMORPGs after quitting her job. Today we have with us the returning hero Cy…

CY: Hi!

CAITLIN: … and a longtime friend of the site but first-time podcast guest, I believe, Sam Ferreira of Anime Herald.

SAM: Hello!

CAITLIN: Do you guys have anything you want to promote? Your Blueskies, for example?

CY: Yeah, sure. I’m on Bluesky @pixelatedlenses dot… is it bluesky.social? Just Google “pixelatedlenses,” and then you’ll find it. And you’ll see me talking a lot about how Abbott Elementary is giving me a lot of feelings, and also soup.

CAITLIN: I have to catch up with that show.

CY: Oh, it’s so good! [Chuckles] But there’s a character with my deadname, so it’s really awkward!

CAITLIN: Oh, no!

SAM: Yeah, I’m also on Bluesky, @sam-animeherald.bsky.social. And usually I’ll be either griping about local politics or talking about anime history. Way too much anime history lately.

CAITLIN: And I am @alltsunnodere—no underscores this time—on Bluesky. I am finally making the jump because Twitter is a ghost town now. No one’s using Twitter now, except for a couple of people.

CY: And, like, the alt-right. The alt-right has taken over Twitter.

CAITLIN: Well, a couple of people I still care about.

CY: Ah, ah, yes, yes, yes, yeah.

CAITLIN: And I am usually talking about, I don’t know, whatever the fuck pops into my head. So, yes, we are talking about Recovery of an MMO Junkie, which is about Moriko, a 30-something-year-old woman who quits her office job due to burnout and devotes her time to playing the MMO Fruits de Mer as Hayashi, a male character, because, she says, if she’s going to be staring at a character’s ass the whole time, it might as well be a cute boy. While she’s playing as Hayashi, she makes a lot of new friends, especially Lily, a lovely young female, seemingly, healer. But it turns out that Lily is Sakurai Yuta, a 27-year-old man who lives in her neighborhood. As she plays the game, she makes connections with other people and gradually starts to recover from burnout.

So, this is based on a web manga by Kokuyo Rin, which actually ran and then went on hiatus before the show even started, back in 2015, and then it was canceled in 2018 due to her failing health, which makes me kinda think that maybe a lot of it was based on her personal experience. It was never completed, but she did post art of Yuta and Moriko having a happy ending, getting married, having kids, et cetera, et cetera. It’s very cute.

CY: It’s incredibly cute.

CAITLIN: It’s very cute.

SAM: It really is.

CAITLIN: We are talking about MMO Junkie because it is a really unusual kind of show. There’s not really anything else out there. For one thing, it’s about a woman in her 30s, which you don’t really see a lot of anime about. What else is there? There’s Moribito…

CY: I mean, Akiba Maid War [Chuckles] has a 30-year-old!

CAITLIN: Mm, yeah. Yeah, you know, yeah, she’s 37 years old, just like me. Just like me for real.

CY: And she’s playing the game of life—and guns. There’s so many guns in that show. Lotta guns.

CAITLIN: There are. But yeah, the list of shows about that age are extremely short. And then you think about shows about women that age that are relatable, and the list gets even shorter because, I don’t know about y’all, I’ve never been a gun-toting maid in Akihabara participating in gang wars, although, Sam, you do live in Rhode Island, so maybe it’s a little closer to home for you.

SAM: Yeah, I live in a state that still has the quote-unquote “local aristocracy,” if you catch my drift. [Chuckles] Still not super relatable because I’m not, you know, wearing a maid outfit and beckoning people into the barnyard-themed café of my choice.

CY: I mean, I’m a Texan so I feel like an ancestor has got to have fulfilled that role, just by proxy of being a Texan. You know. We’re all born with a gun in our hand.

CAITLIN: I’m Californian, so…

CY: Oh, my God, you’re not from Washington actually? Okay, I’m sorry. This is a whole different conversation.

CAITLIN: I feel like every time we do a podcast together, you’re shocked by some basic fact about me. No, I grew up in Los Angeles.

CY: I’m so sorry that my ADHD does not allow me to remember a goddamn thing.

[Laughter]

CAITLIN: No. I’m from Los Angeles, and show business is basically like the mob.

[Chuckling]

CY: Yeah.

CAITLIN: But anyway, that’s neither here nor there! I think the fact is that we all find Recovery of an MMO Junkie to be an intensely relatable story for reasons that we will get into later. But for a while in the community, there was this really big question of “Can we really talk about Recovery of an MMO Junkie?” because, guys, we have to talk about Yaginuma Kazuyoshi.

SAM: Fucking Yaginuma Kazuyoshi. Sorry about the curse. It’s just…

CAITLIN: No, you can curse here. That dude fucking sucks. He is the director of the show. And it is a very well-directed show, I will give him that. And sometime around when the show ended, it came out that he was liking tweets and making tweets with conspiracy theory–level anti-Semitism, xenophobia, Japanese nationalism… Like, every horrible, horrible Nazi-adjacent opinion that you can think of, he was tweeting about and liking. And fandom had to really wrestle with how to respond. I wrote a whole article about it that you can read, “The Problem with Problematic Creators.” I link it a lot. Were you guys around for that discovery? How did it go for you?

CY: I feel like I probably saw it, but honestly, I was not really as active on Twitter as I thought I would be while living in Japan, and I didn’t watch as much anime as I thought I would while living in Japan because full-time jobs are full time.

CAITLIN: It’s so much harder to watch anime in Japan than it is in the US too.

CY: Tell me about it, as someone who had to VPN in Yuri on Ice and almost miss their bus and, when they got to school that morning, had to explain to their principal, like, the biggest lie instead of saying, “I wanted to see Yuri and Victor kiss.” [Chuckles]

CAITLIN: I lived in Japan when the streaming revolution happened, so coming back to the US, where it was a whole different ball game, was…

CY: Yeah. But I do feel like I vaguely saw this, though.

CAITLIN: Sam, you were a fan of the show at the time, right?

SAM: Oh, yeah, absolutely. And it was something that really did rock through the community because a lot of us, especially in Anitwitter, were just like, “Okay, so how do we approach this? How do we even touch this? Is this going to be another situation like, um…?”

CAITLIN: Are we talking about Rurouni Kenshin?

SAM: Yep.

CAITLIN: I believe it was after, because I did mention Rurouni Kenshin in my article.

SAM: Yeah, because I remember it was like, is this going to be another one where, like Rurouni Kenshin, we’re going to have just burn this and the creator, because it is going to be toxic forever, because that person is going to be making money up until the day he dies? It was kind of a relief when we learned that he was not going to get a royalty and, more than that, his own ham-fisted, boorish way of approaching anything that came regarding this basically made him toxic to the anime industry. So, not only was he completely going to be not making money off this; he was completely out of the industry because he was just completely gone. So, it was a really intense couple months, especially after Lynzee’s article came out at first.

CAITLIN: There definitely was a period where a lot of people were like, “I don’t know what to do.” Rebecca Silverman, who is an incredibly lovely person… she picked MMO Junkie as one of her top anime of the year, and she was horrified. You know, she had faced a lifetime of bullying because of her religion. And over time, it became clear that he was not going to work very much anymore. He’s had two credits in the last seven years. And also, it’s not his story. It’s Kokuyo Rin’s. You know, it’s this woman’s story that is intensely relatable to other women. And so, I think gradually… And this is something that I thought about when I saw the Blu-ray on sale, something I thought about when I watched it again, something I thought about when I said, “Hey, we should do a podcast about Recovery of an MMO Junkie. Is this something that we can ethically engage with anymore?” And I think the fact that he fucked around and he found out is a big factor in—you know, clearly not just me because you two are here, as well—the community being ready to say, “Okay, this is not something that we have to just discard,” because there really isn’t anything else like it out there. But also, it’s totally valid not to want to engage with it anymore and to feel like it is tainted by his association.

So, part of the reason—and I’ve said this several times already—it is a narrative that we have clung to despite the issues, despite the garbage person who worked on it, is because it is such an incredibly… it is a show that people have connected to because it is about a topic that is very familiar to a lot of people. It is about burnout. It is about making connections online. I was the same age as Moriko when it aired. I haven’t experienced burnout on the same level that she has, but I have to a degree. Actually, we were originally going to record this podcast about two months ago. And then I lost my job. You know, and it had been a really, really difficult year. And I had spent months working with these children who had a lot of challenges, in a location that was difficult to work in. Like, we didn’t have a playground, so we had to take 2-year-olds for walks on busy streets, extremely dysregulated two-year-olds. And so, the fact that they let me go left me feeling just so lost and burned out and not sure of what the next step was going to be. 

So, I had recently watched this show, and so I was able to take those feelings in it and find comfort in… “Okay, this is not like an actual roadmap, but this is what it can look like,” and how Moriko has these really positive, affirming relationships that she makes with people online. It treats— You know, I met my husband, the infamous Jared—who I mention very often on this podcast because I love him very much—online. You know, I wouldn’t be talking to you two here if it weren’t for online friendships. I wouldn’t be writing for Anime Feminist if it weren’t for online relationships. A lot of my most important relationships that I have here in Seattle with me are people who I met through the internet. You know? Even though I didn’t meet them through MMORPGs like in the show. I’ve never played an MMO, so that part was like… I got it a little bit through osmosis, but it wasn’t exactly like my experience. You know, these are real and true and strong relationships. Also, as an aside, the characters Himeralda and Pokuto [sic] are so adorable. They are a married couple. And what’s implied is that Pokuta [sic] has to commute a really long way for his work. So, instead of coming home super late and Himeralda is already asleep, he goes to an internet café after work and they play together for a while so that they can spend some time together. And then he heads home, and he goes home and she’s asleep and he goes to sleep and he wakes up and they do it all again. But it is a space where these spouses are able to connect in this really harsh work culture, and I think that’s really cute. But also, I know this is a show that has spoken really strongly to experiences for both of you as well.

SAM: Yeah, absolutely. This started right after I started my transition, so I immediately picked up on Yuta’s… egg vibes, just to put it lightly. [Chuckles] Like, I think I even posted on Bluesky this morning… After a rewatch of this, I can say with like 99% certainty that, in at least the reality of the anime, Yuta is going to transition within one year.

[Laughter]

SAM: But this was a show that really spoke to me back in the day because I am no stranger to, unfortunately, that toxic work culture that Moriko has been a part of. I had just recovered from a minor nervous breakdown caused by burnout in my previous job that saw me basically just kind of falling into video games, so this really hit different. It hit differently again about a year later when I had the big one, a full, complete nervous breakdown where I was just unable to literally function for three to four days, and then I just kind of disappeared into Final Fantasy XIV: Stormblood for close to a month before I could do anything else. 

So, this is one of those shows that it just hit different. Like, that scene in that first episode where it showed Moriko just being surrounded by those faceless people in her nightmares… They were all dragged off the cliff to oil the capitalist machine. That was like what I saw in reality for a good six months of my life at that point. So, I really appreciated them kind of going there and saying, “Yeah, the toxic work culture will absolutely ruin you, ruin you.” But the same time, I also appreciate how it approached online communities because, like you mentioned with Pokuta [sic] and Himeralda, but also with just the guild leader and just the various guild members, the company members that kind of popped in throughout, each, while not quite as engaged, still finding some way to have a positive impact on both Moriko and Sakurai’s lives in their own clumsy ways really kind of spoke to how I saw online communities, especially going back to, say, not just gaming communities but online forums, IRC chats, things like that back in the day, because, I’ll be honest: I’m a 40-year-old woman in Rhode Island. 99% of my friendships are online now. [Chuckles] So, it just… it hits different.

CAITLIN: Yeah. So, Cy…

CY: Yeah.

CAITLIN: With everything going on in your life, I actually actively said, like, “I think this show will be really healing for you to watch right now.”

CY: You sure did. [Chuckles] You sure did and you were right! It was super healing and it made me cry a lot.

CAITLIN: Do you want to talk about it?

CY: I… You know what? I think it would actually be helpful to talk about it. And I also just want to interject with, like, I’m sorry, y’all, if my audio is weird. I don’t understand how to work this Yeti Blue microphone quite yet. But I’ll learn.

So, when this show came out, I would have been in my second year of teaching in Japan, and I was 25 at the time, and I thought I was cis. I was like, “I am AFAB, I have breasts, so I’m a woman!” And I think Yuta’s egg vibes would have taken me out like a Victorian child. They would have been the crispiest mental Sprite on my little “No, I’m cis!” brain. And now, I am 32 and I am watching this the week that I am ending my medical leave, but also the week that I am likely not returning to my job—for a lot of reasons—which is hard because my job is something that I care about. I try not to emphasize my value in regard to work because the reason why I had to take medical leave was that I had the big one, and it was very bad. And I’m not going to go into detail there, because it’s a very… I don’t know, it’s a very intimate thing that happened, but I was really unsafe for a long time, and I scared a lot of people because I was not safe in my own head. And now I have the stability, but I’m coming back to a place where that stability is not in my work situation. And I’m in a situation where I’m actively being harmed by work, by what I do. And kind of like Moriko, I have spent a lot of time playing video games. I’ve played a lot of Dokapon Kingdom Connect on Switch, because if you ever want to be mad, just play Dokapon Kingdom.

CAITLIN: [Laughs]

CY: You will find that anger healthily releasing. And part of my medical leave has been really intensive therapy and kind of reintegrating into the community so that I can start going back out on my own, so that I can do things independently. And so, this show kinda… So, I don’t know a lot about WWE, but I do know there was that time where I think is a… um, the lich man? What’s his name? The lich man. The Underchaser? The Undertaker. The Undertaker, I think, watched as one of the guys fell through the cage onto the ground, and it was horrific and unplanned. So I feel bodied like that, like if I were in WWE and a tall, middle-aged white man in a trench coat just bodied me to the ground of the… the fighting ring. I don’t know a lot about wrestling.

Because this show is so much about, kind of, the second adolescence we have as adults where you hit your 30s and it feels like suddenly you don’t have control of anything. But you’re supposed to. Like, we’re all told we’re supposed to have control, and we’re all told this narrative that you’re supposed to know what to do and you should have the ability to handle everything and all this, and you actually find out that what you’re doing is entering the first stages of being an adult. And I’m really in that stage where this show kind of… It brought me a lot of comfort because I have to make a really hard decision, and that’s I’m going to quit my job. And it’s scary because I’ve never quit a job without a plan. But I’m also at a point where the burnout… the burnout was really bad. And without saying the words, there was a situation where there was a high possibility I would not be here to even talk about this series. And so, you know, I am here, so it’s kind of like, what do you do with the pieces when they’ve all fallen apart? And unfortunately, I don’t know that my favorite MMO—which did make a cameo in the show, it’s Mabinogi—I don’t know if it exists anymore. So, I don’t have an MMO, but I do have Dokapon Kingdom, and I do have Shin Megami Tensei V, and I have a community around me that I am trying to reintegrate into. And that does matter. And that’s kind of a lot of what I took from this, because… yeah, Caitlin was right. I did need to see this. I super needed to see this, and it gave me the most… it gave me the most cathartic cry. [Chuckles]

CAITLIN: I believe in the healing power of fiction. And I think that that is something that you also feel.

CY: Oh, absolutely.

CAITLIN: And so I am always happy to try to redirect you towards stuff that’s like “I think this might hit a little hard for you right now.” But so, I think what you said about the second adolescence is really interesting because that kind of brings me to… Do you mind if we step forward into talking about the show’s…?

CY: [crosstalk] Let’s do it.

CAITLIN: Yeah. Okay, so it kind of brings me into what I see as the show’s relationship to the isekai genre. Because it’s not an isekai. It’s always very clear that even when we are seeing the MMO characters emoting and stuff that it’s kind of artistic license and that they are the little avatars on screen, and they only emote if you hit certain buttons or whatever. I don’t know how MMOs work with that.

[Chuckling]

CAITLIN: If you enter certain commands. I don’t know, how does that work?

CY: You can put, like, a colon and then, like, “smile” and close colon. You can, like, have hotkeys that will show emotes or actions. I used to play a lot of League, and so I’m just taking my knowledge from there. That’s definitely still around.

CAITLIN: [crosstalk] Yeah, does that sound about right?

SAM: That’s about how it works in Final Fantasy. It’s like /joy for a happy pose and things like that or /dance to make them just dance.

CY: I mean, you’ve played Animal Crossing, so it’s like that.

CAITLIN: Barely!

CY: It’s like that.

CAITLIN: No, not— Barely. I’ve played like a total of like two hours of Animal Crossing.

CY: Stop taking me out with facts about yourself.

SAM: [Chuckles]

CAITLIN: Okay, it’s stressful to me. We can get into this later. We can talk about this later! [Chuckles]

CY: I’m giving you a look.

CAITLIN: Animal Crossing stresses me out.

CY: I’m giving you a look. [Chuckles]

CAITLIN: But anyway… But anyway… So, it’s not really isekai, but… It’s not isekai but it plays one on TV, because a lot of isekai now are very informed by games, right?

CY: And cis men.

CAITLIN: The kind of thesis of most isekai is “Wouldn’t it be cool if that game you were really good at was what it was like in real life? Wouldn’t it be nice if everything had levels and it was really straightforward?” Right?

CY: Mm-hm, mm-hm.

CAITLIN: So… And they’re generally escapism fantasies. And Moriko withdraws from the world, and she throws herself into the fantasy. She doesn’t get hit by Truck-kun and actually literally get transported into another world. But that’s kind of the feeling, is like “I can’t deal with real life right now, so I am just going to be in this fantasy world, where I have my friends and things are simple, and that’s what I need.” Right?

CY: I do think there is an argument to be made that she does get transported into another world, though, because society still structures mental breaks and burnout as a markedly different existence. So, like, she kind of gets shut off from society. Because I’ll say, when I lived in Japan and I had a little menty b, as the kids called it, I got treated very differently until that period was over, and it was a little bit like being removed from society, enough that I had to leave and go to a different prefecture for therapy. So I would take the train to my therapist and literally exit the place I lived. So, like… yeah. Yeah.

CAITLIN: So you were transported to not another world but another prefecture.

CY: Yeah, my title would be Seeing My Therapist in Sendai. [Chuckles]

CAITLIN: But yeah, so, I mean, that is a really good point. So, it can be read kind of as an isekai. And unlike most modern isekai, she’s not reincarnated in another world. She is still here, at her computer, and she has the choice to, when she is ready, walk out the door and start talking to people. And it feels almost like kind of a grown-up twist on the coming-of-age isekai that we all grew up with, you know, the Fushigi Yugis and The Twelve Kingdom— well, no, not Twelve Kingdoms: that’s not there and back… Escaflowne… where, when she feels ready… She’s not coming of age but she is entering a new phase of her life after she spends this time outside of society and when she feels ready. Wouldn’t it be fucking nice if that were possible for everyone?

CY: It really would, because the thing that I kept thinking about throughout this watch was… I was like, wow, it really would be nice if you could just take your time. And I mean, there is a history in America of… There was a period of time where a mental breakdown was considered like a serious medical condition, and you would basically… you would step back from society for about a year, and the expectation socially was that people would treat you differently, like they would accommodate you. And I guess that’s just flown out the window, because when I had my breakdown this time, I’m still expected to go to Kroger. And I just think that’s rough. [Chuckles] Just think that’s real rough. Like, everyone deserves the ability to have this kind of liminal space where things aren’t okay and be able to go to Cowson and get yourself some good konbini food. Everyone deserves that.

SAM: One of the things I did really pick up on on this watch-through was: in those first couple of episodes, the only time you really did see her outside of the RPG at first were when she was reacting to something on screen, which was just a cutaway, or when she had to go to Lawson—or Cowson in this—to get food. I mean, it’s actually really telling that this does fit into that idea of being an isekai, to an extent, because, as Cy said, once you have a mental break, you are literally treated like you’re in a different world in some ways. Even if you’re expected to function in the same way, the same role, people do look at you differently, because… I think the best way to put it is you cease being a part of the world that you’re living in and become a part of an existence where… I don’t want to say you’re treated as a burden by people, but you are looked at very differently, much less charitably, I’d say.

CY: Yeah. It’s like you lose maturity.

SAM: Exactly. That’s the best way to put it.

CAITLIN: It’s like you sit around in your sweats all day.

CY: Yeah. Because like I said, I’m experiencing that currently with my medical leave because I’m in an outpatient program, and I’ve had people remark, like, “Oh, it must be nice,” and I’m like, “I am in therapy 12 hours a week!” It’s a job.

CAITLIN: Yeah. I can count myself as very fortunate because, I mean… So, when I lost my job a couple months ago, it was probably the worst I’d ever felt in my entire life. Unfortunately, Jared was out of town. He had literally flown out the day I was fired.

CY: Jared, no!

CAITLIN: It was really bad. Yeah. And a lot of the narrative, once Moriko starts reintegrating into the real world, is driven by coincidence, because it turns out that all these people in her guild just live close by! How convenient! And I was going to trash on that for being kind of unrealistic. But then I remembered, first of all, while Jared was out, three days I had three different friends come over and help me just function. You know, I had friends come over and take me to the store, even though the store was two blocks away, and buy a bunch of survival food because I wasn’t getting… like, I could barely open a jar of peanut butter. I had a friend come over and help me clean up. And those were friends who I had met online. And yeah, no… And so, usually, the people you meet online are not going to be the people who live super close by. It is not going to be that convenient. However, one friend who came over one day, I met them because their partner… well, I met their partner through AniFem, and it turned out that they literally took the same bus route to work that I did. You know, there was another friend who… I mean, unrelated, but I did, a few weeks ago, learn that an AniFem community member lives in a building that shares a parking lot with mine.

CY: Wow! The world is wonderfully small.

CAITLIN: [Chuckles] You know, so maybe it’s not that crazy unrealistic that there’s that much coincidence in it.

CY: Yeah, because I just figured they were on regional servers.

CAITLIN: That regional, though? They live so close to each other.

CY: Yeah, I mean, okay, it’s a little too coincidental. Okay, yeah. Okay, that’s a stretch. [Chuckles] I tried! I tried.

CAITLIN: Kanbei works at the convenience store that she goes to.

CY: Yeah, okay, okay, okay, yeah.

CAITLIN: Yuta worked at the same company and also lives in her neighborhood. I think there’s also the implication that Lilac lives pretty close by, too. It’s pretty intense.

CY: Okay, okay, yeah, okay. [Chuckles] You got me.

SAM: [crosstalk] I could see one. I could see one, but the entire guild is a little bit much.

CAITLIN: It’s just… I think that’s the most fantasy part of the show.

CY: Yeah, because I guess in reality Moriko’s friends would just be scattered across Japan and like one of them would be abroad. Yeah.

CAITLIN: Yeah. Or, you know, one of them lives on the other side of the country and one of them lives two hours away, but neither of you have a car so you can’t go hang out with each other. Anyway, [Pretends to cough] ahem, ahem.

CY: Oh, no! Oh, no, you don’t have a car either? Shoot!

CAITLIN: No!

CY: Oh, my God. I gotta be brave and use the train and come down to you, then. I just gotta be brave. I’ll get to see the sea.

[Chuckling]

CAITLIN: But now for something completely different. I’ve talked a lot so far. I am going to take a step back and let you guys talk about the gender of it all, because this show’s got a lot of gender!

CY: It does in a way that I didn’t expect it, because I… So, even as someone who’s transmasculine, I’ll fully admit I still play as the female characters because they have better clothes. The only game exception is Animal Crossing: New Horizons, which, like, now you can wear all the clothes inclusive of your body shape, which is how they define gender. But when I play Pokémon games, I still play as the female model because they’re cute. And so, I kind of really can relate to both of them as someone who currently plays as characters that are… I don’t have a gender, so, not opposite my gender but opposed or outside of my gender. And so, I’m glad to know that Yuta as an egg is a really common reading because I believe I was sitting on my couch the other day when I was watching, with a saucepan of queso that I’d made, and I was like… I said out loud… I was like, “Gay?” and then I amended it and I was like, “Uh-uh. Trans!” because I was like, “What’s the word I actually meant?”

[Chuckling]

CY: Because I love that Yuta has just a whole collection of clothes for Lily and [his] computer is kinda Lily-fied and [he] feels comfortable in that gender representation.

CAITLIN: He does love pink.

CY: He does! It’s good.

SAM: It really is.

CY: I was just gonna say more people should like pink.

CAITLIN: I’m sorry!

CY: It’s a genderless color. Literally. The whole pink and blue thing only came about in the 20th century, y’all.

CAITLIN: I just don’t like pink very much.

CY: That’s fair.

CAITLIN: It depends on the shade.

CY: I was gonna say, depends on the shade. I like red pinks more than I like purple pinks.

CAITLIN: I factually have more trans friends than cis friends, but I am still a cis person and I was watching and I was like, “Wow! Yuta’s throwing out some vibes here!”

[Chuckling]

CAITLIN: I saw that pink keyboard, and I was just like, “I have friends whose keyboards look like that! There’s a commonality between all of them.”

CY: Like, Yuta is one Amazon order short of having, like, the trans girl pink Razr keyboard. I love that for Yuta. It was also nice to find out that Yuta’s English voice actor— Because who was Yuta’s English voice actor? Because I did watch this in English.

CAITLIN: Jessie James Grelle.

CY: Oh, yeah, trans, yeah, very trans. And I like that the show does not… It doesn’t really push or deny that reading. I mean, it’s the fact that there’s art that shows that Yuta and Moriko get married and have kids and that Yuta is still presenting as male. It hurts my little heart, but that’s what AO3 is for.

SAM: I mean, I’ll be very blunt. The first time I saw this, I think my initial reaction was “Yuta is literally just one set of cat ear headphones away from the trans girl starter pack.”

[Laughter]

SAM: Yes, I do have a pair. No, you can’t see it. Anyway. And honestly, in this current reading, this complete rewatch, just every time I saw the two come together, it’s like, alright, yeah, I can definitely see this. I see a lot of my pre-transition self in Yuta, and that’s both impressive and terrifying at how accurate it is.

CY: Yeah, because it’s… I think it’s easy to read this— I mean, it is het, but I now understand what people on Twitter mean when they say straight yuri or straight yaoi. I understand it because I’ve seen straight yuri, and it’s called Recovery of an MMO Junkie.

CAITLIN: [Laughs]

SAM: Yes!

CY: I get it now. I get it! Like, I’m hip. Because there’s a future in my head where they have a shared office and Yuta has some cat ear headphones and they’re just living a queer life. And I mean, I guess you can still present as a variety of genders and be queer. But I have to wonder, if this show had gotten made with the context of all of those things and if the series had gotten written in a different context, what could be.

SAM: Absolutely. In relation to that, I actually liked how they put in Koiwai playing as a female character to kind of show the difference between the two as they approach playing a character of a different gender. Koiwai just went straight-up dudebro.

CY: [Chuckles]

SAM: Like straight-up dudebro.

CAITLIN: Oh, Koiwai’s character is so much.

SAM: He is so much.

CY: Koiwai’s character in 2024 is rough. [Chuckles]

CAITLIN: Yeah, we’ll talk about Koiwai in a bit.

SAM: Yeah, he is. But I appreciate that they actually put that in, because I have been playing MMOs for… oh, geez, since that time I broke down and just lost myself in Stormblood, so that’s six and a half years now. Anyway, it was something that kind of struck me as remarkably accurate because you can tell the dudes that pick female avatar just because they like the way it looks more than something that they want to actually embody and play as, as representation in a sense.

CAITLIN: Yeah. I mean, it’s like Moriko chose Hayashi for reasons… It doesn’t feel like gender reasons for her.

SAM: Exactly. Exactly. I appreciated them having Koiwai as that contrast.

CY: Yeah. Yeah, I do love that he was like, “I’m gonna be a hot, buff woman.” Like, good on you, dude. Feminism!

CAITLIN: [crosstalk] With enormous jugs.

CY: Oh, my… Oh, my God. Yeah, because this show also… Koiwai’s character also helped me understand the term “mommy milkers” finally, because I was like, “Whoa!”

[Laughter]

CY: So, he has a you-know-what. But it is nice to see that representation because he didn’t just choose a generic kind of socially acceptable pretty; he chose what he likes. [Chuckles] And I guess the same goes with— You know what? I mean you could say the same goes with Yuta and Lily, but I… Cypress wants to read it as Yuta chose the ideal girl mode to be and the ideal trans body to be.

CAITLIN: And I think it’s really interesting how… You know, there’s a version of this show where it does read very het, where Moriko is like, “I have a crush on this female character? Oh, God! Thank God it’s a guy!” and we get the reverse with Yuta. But it doesn’t feel that way. It feels like Hayashi and Lily are both honest expressions of aspects of Moriko and Yuta, but also they’re not the same as who they are. Well, Yuta, the line’s a little blurrier. [Chuckles] But, you know, there’s no moment where Moriko’s— Well, actually, I haven’t watched the show for a couple of minutes. Moriko doesn’t spend a lot of time going like, “But she’s a girl?”

CY: She has a moment in Episode 3, but it pretty quickly becomes apparent that it’s more like her shock at having feelings with a girl more than the weird thing that actual yuri does where it’s like, “Oh, I can’t like a girl.” Yes, you can! Did you not see the genre label on the spine? Did you not flip open a copy? [Chuckles]

CAITLIN: So, I think that even if we’re gonna go with the manga canon where Yuta does not transition, there’s still kind of a queer element to it because they had crushes on each other when they thought they were different genders than they actually were. So… I’m… You can’t see. I’m gesticulating, I’m shrugging, making a face.

CY: [crosstalk] And maybe they’re just Japan to catch up on the same-sex thing. You know, like they’ve had the discussion and at home Yuta’s got a gender-affirming name. It could be the same name, different kanji. They’re both just waiting. They’re waiting. But at home, Yuta’s who… Yuta’s their true self.

SAM: That is my headcanon now.

CAITLIN: Yeah, so we’ve talked a lot about, kind of, the meta of the show. Before we go—because we are running a little bit out of time, we’re running low on time—I want to talk about something a little more concrete, which is Koiwai.

[Sinister chuckling]

CAITLIN: And he kind of sucks! Doesn’t he?

SAM: He does suck.

CY: He sucks so much.

CAITLIN: He kind of sucks.

CY: I knew this guy in Japan.

CAITLIN: And I can see him as, like, the friend who sucks but he doesn’t suck enough that you stop hanging out with him. You know, he always walks right up to that line and he never quite crosses it. He’s super aggro at… I mean, not aggro aggro. but aggressively hitting on Moriko at the convenience store, and she’s like, “Wait, what? What? What?” And he’s like, “Okay, alright, yeah! We’re gonna go on a date, right? Yeah! We’re gonna go out.” And she’s like, “What? I— O-o-o-okay?”

CY: I feel so bad for her because she’s just probably trying to get her little… If she’s like me, she’s trying to get that Lawson beef bowl or some carbonara, and she’s just minding her own business, existing, and this guy, this absolute chud, comes up and just invades her personal space.

SAM: He is so terrible.

CY: And this guy definitely exists in real life. There’s a lot of him.

SAM: Oh, yeah. Back in my previous life, I think I can name at least one shitty friend like that, whom I haven’t… Yeah, they’re not my friend anymore, but anyway… because— But the dude took pictures of her while she was asleep! What the hell! What the hell!

CY: Yeah, it’s weird. I also don’t like his weird jokes about calling Yuta “Princess.”

SAM: Yeah, that was horrible.

CY: Let Yuta crack that egg on their own. Who do you think you are? The Gordon Ramsay of gender? Let Yuta figure it out. Also, it’s weird when men who perceive other people as male crack jokes about being feminine, and it’s just gross. Ugh. Weird.

SAM: It screams a lot of insecurity.

CAITLIN: Yeah. He’s like— I can recognize his role in the narrative, because he’s kind of presented as that final push to get Moriko out in the world, because they did have a connection before. They had talked on the phone at work at a time when she was feeling really lonely, and it was a comfort to her. So, I feel like if that convenience store scene had been just a little bit different…

CY: More normal?

CAITLIN: Yeah, if it hadn’t felt so much like he was pushing himself on her and it had been a little bit more like, “Wait, what? Wait, what, what? Oh, you’re that guy. Oh, oh, okay. I don’t really remember how to talk to people. But I’m feeling a little bit like, oh, I’m remembering who you were to me and this moment that you were there for me when I just really, really needed someone” instead of—

CY: [crosstalk] And instead he was just the weirdest dude possible. Like the weirdest handsome guy that clearly has read a lot of pickup books possible.

CAITLIN: Because she is clearly looking forward to their date. You know? She goes out and she gets a haircut. She cuts off like a foot of hair.

CY: And then she spends like 9500 yen on an outfit. I don’t know why I remember that number, but it stuck out.

[Chuckling]

CAITLIN: It’s a lot of yen.

CY: It’s a lot of yen.

CAITLIN: You know, she plucks her eyebrows. You know, she has spent all of these months— And we can talk about femininity and expectations, because she has this whole thing of, like, “I have to make myself presentable,” because her hair is going kind of crazy, her makeup has expired, her eyebrows have overgrown, and so, her spending money on quote-unquote “fixing” all of that is a symbol that she is ready to go outside. But she could also [have] just as easily gone on a date, brushed her hair, maybe gotten a trim to cut off the split ends, and gone with her bushy eyebrows and no makeup, and that would have been just as valid if that was how she felt comfortable. I don’t wear makeup on a daily basis. I mean, I do get my eyebrows done, but I’m also super lazy about it. So, there’s some gender stuff going on there.

CY: Though I will say this is maybe the first show I’ve seen— Mm, well, okay. Unfortunately, the other show that kind of represents this also has a problematic creator. But this is kind of the first show I’ve seen where I actually really liked that part of her reintegration was her deciding on, like, “I am gonna go get some clothes. I’m gonna do these things,” because while there is a heavy pressure in literally almost every country for women to look like quote-unquote “women” and for all women to fit within this ideal, I did actually like that she chose the medium-length hair, and I love her explanation for it, and I like that she seems to embrace the choices. It’s still fraught but there was something nice about that, and you don’t often see older women or girls at all… I’ll just say the anime I’m referencing is Galko, which… yeah.

CAITLIN: [Inhales sharply]

SAM: [subdued] Ooh.

CAITLIN: Yeah…

CY: That’s the other one— That’s—

CAITLIN: That is one that we had to throw right out. That one was unsalvageable.

CY: That’s the one where girls felt good and then, you know… it’s in the trash. But this is a nice example of… it felt a little bit more… not necessarily neutral, because I think any time women feel like they gotta gussy themselves up is always fraught because, like, who are you doing it for? But it felt more like part of a bigger whole.

CAITLIN: And it was kind of, you know, very accurate of how it is expensive being a woman.

CY: Oh, my God, so expensive.

SAM: It is.

CAITLIN: [crosstalk] It is. Our haircuts are expensive, makeup is expensive, clothes are expensive, and there are much higher expectations for how we present ourselves in the world.

SAM: All I can say is I’m glad I work in a coworking space because I can just stroll right in, wearing my baggy-ass sweatshirt and jeans, and no one blinks.

CAITLIN: Oh, yeah, working preschool, there are no expectations for my appearance. I don’t wear makeup to work. I am less likely to be wearing makeup on a workday than I am on a day off, because who’s gonna care? A two-year-old?

CY: [Chuckles] Yeah.

CAITLIN: But yeah. This is another thing where it felt very drawn from life, that this is very much Kokuyo’s story, because a male director is not going to get all of those things, probably, even male directors who are really good at female characters. That was experience. Talking about makeup expiring, that’s experience from living as a woman.

CY: Yeah, the makeup expiring really stuck out to me because, yeah, if you have not really had need for it… because that was actually what cracked gender for me, was I couldn’t keep makeup from expiring because I just had zero desire to use it. But I would because the expectation is, you know, you want that natural look. If you are someone who is socially perceived as a woman, then you’re supposed to meet these expectations. But what happens when you can’t? And all of a sudden she’s out of makeup and has to go out and get some and probably has to remember, “What shade am I?” and, like, “Oh, it says this, but—”

CAITLIN: Has it changed from not going outside for however long?

CY: Right. Yeah. Like, do I like berry red or do I like pink now? There’s all these things you have to balance. And even if you like makeup, there’s all those things you have to balance. It’s a very lived experience in a really (what’s the word?) intentional way.

CAITLIN: Okay, so, I think it is time for us to start wrapping up. Is there anything that you want to bring up that’s kind of fallen through the cracks? Yeah. I’ve got something, which is… Just another little thing where this show feels so charming in its treatment of gender, one scene that has always been funny to me, is when they’re all trying to get that particular outfit, and Kanbei gets it, and there’s a shot of him wearing it from behind, and the other characters are all like, “Oh, my God.” And it doesn’t feel like it’s making fun of it, like, “Ew! A guy in girls’ clothing.” It’s like he’s wearing this thing that he would never wear, and they’re all just goofing around, having a good time.

CY: Yeah, the dissonance is it just doesn’t match him, personality wise. It’s not like it doesn’t match because of gender. It’s just like, oh, it’s out of place for your personality. And that’s nice. That’s nice.

CAITLIN: Mm-hm. And he put it on as, you know, they’re goofing around. They’re having a good time. It’s cute.

SAM: Yeah, it was very warm, very happy. No malice in it at all.

CY: I do want to say that my thing that I think we didn’t mention is I just really like the display that adult romance can be full of anxious, exciting feelings and also that 30-something-year-old women are hot to younger guys.

[Laughter]

CAITLIN: That’s true. Yuta is a little bit younger than her.

CY: Yeah, I like that because, you know, I mean… And I feel like it’s the same, having lived in both countries. 25 really is the “peak,” quote-unquote, for women who are under a certain age range. And I think that’s really sad because your 30s are really when life begins. I was never more happy than when I turned 30 because I was like, “I don’t have these constraints anymore. No one’s expecting me to be a 25 under 25. I’m not gonna hit the Forbes 30 Under 30. I just get to be.” And I feel like, especially for cis women, that’s a really valuable experience. And I mean, for me, as someone who still has the body I was born into, that people can perceive somehow as a woman, it’s invaluable knowing, like, yeah, your 30s, you’re still killing it.

SAM: I’ll be honest. I’m just thrilled that we have a show, period, about people that are outside of high school. I mean, we need more shows about middle-aged people. I mean, we exist. Our stories are genuinely interesting. So, I’d love to see more stuff that… even if it’s not romance, but just something that tackles life after 30 because, like Cy said, life’s just beginning. There’s a lot ahead of you, but at the same time, it’s a whole new world of anxieties, pressures, worries that don’t ever really get explored very often in the medium today, because when you have a show, say, about teenagers, college kids, it’s a completely different world. I’ll be the first to admit that I can’t relate to a college kid anymore. I’m 40 years old. That life was, God, like 15 years ago for me now. So, yeah, I mean, we exist. And it doesn’t all have to be stuff like, say, Zipang, where it’s the driest military drama you’ve ever seen.

CAITLIN: Or Legend of Galactic Heroes. Oh, I said it!

SAM: [Chuckles] I like Legend of the Galactic Heroes but I’m weird.

CAITLIN: I know. I’m just [obscured by crosstalk].

CY: The people hate Caitlin because she speaks the truth!

[Chuckling]

SAM: See, that can be a thumbnail.

[Chuckling]

CAITLIN: Me: “Legend of the Galactic Heroes is really dry and kind of boring.”

CY: It is!

CAITLIN: Other person: ”Shut up!”

CY: It’s absolutely the truth. It’s very dry. I’m disabled. I can’t even fly a spaceship like that.

CAITLIN: I think it’s safe to say that we would all recommend this show to listeners. You know, the one caveat is if you can’t stomach the director, then that’s fine. But otherwise, our average listenership is definitely older than your average anime fan. I think that people will find a lot to connect to. And yeah, it’s just such a lovely, lovely show.

CY: It really is.

SAM: It is.

CAITLIN: So, that will wrap up our discussion of Recovery of an MMO Junkie. Thank you for joining us, AniFam. If you liked what you heard, you can find more from the team by going to animefeminist.com. And if you really, really liked what you heard and would like to support us, you can go to patreon.com/animefeminist or ko-fi.com/animefeminist. Patreon is kind of like our monthly fees, you know, paying editors, paying for our web hosting. Ko-fi, we raise money to be able to pay a little bit more. So, feel free to give us a one-off donation, or subscribe to us monthly. All of our socials are on our Linktree, linktr.ee/animefeminist. We’ve got Instagram, we’ve got a TikTok, we’ve got Bluesky, we’ve got Tumblr. We even have a YouTube channel, which I always forget exists. Thanks for listening, AniFam, and…

CY: If you love in the game, you love in real life.