Sometimes the Eiffel Tower is…

8 June 2005, 1651 EDT

My wife and I started watching 月詠 -MOON PHASE the other day. It is far from the best anime we’ve seen, but it is definitely entertaining.

The main female character is an adolescent vampire. Given the general idioms of vampire fiction, it should come as no surprise that Moon Phase is full of psychosexual themes that run from the interesting (e.g., awakening of adolescent sexuality) to the disturbing (e.g., sexualization of young girls). The latter is quite common in Japanese anime and manga. Even the relatively innocuous – and extremely popular – Inuyasha stars a female character, Kagome, who begins the series as a fourteen-year old student and is pictured naked on a number of occasions.1 And, of course, it is hard to get very far into anything Japanese without encountering the ubiquitous schoolgirl fetish.

The “interesting” aspects of the psychosexual content in Moon Phase have, so far, largely overshadowed the “disturbing” ones. But every once in a while you get something like the commercial-break still from Episode 3:


Now that’s just icky.

1In the Inuyasha manga Kagome has nipples, but in the anime they are either not drawn or effaced. I guess it isn’t only Americans who can suffer from nipplephobia.

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