I have to admit that one of my favorite themes in pop culture is the scantily-clad female fighter. It’s not as common a motif as it used to be, I think, which is sort of unfortunate, but it can still be found in anime properties like Queen’s Blade or video games like Code of Princess, which I sadly doubt I’ll ever get to play, given my general bias against handheld systems (though I do actually own a PSP, purchased mainly to play Persona 3 Portable, but I’ve since lost the UMD somewhere). It’s never been a frequent theme in dakimakura cover artwork, though, so when I saw this pillowcase, my interest was piqued straight away.
This dakimakura cover was originally sold by Kisshoya, and I liked it enough that I planned on plunking down the money for it via a proxy service. However, to my surprise and good fortune, Hobby Search carried this pillowcase (it’s still in stock as of this writing), so I didn’t need to spend the extra cash. Like many doujin pillowcases, it measures 160 centimeters by 50 and is made of two-way stretch pearl roica. Unlike many dakimakura covers, the depicted character is not an existing character; rather, she’s an original creation of an artist named Nakajou. He doesn’t seem to currently have a webpage, but he does have a Pixiv account; looking at his uploaded art, this pillowcase is a bit of a deviation from his usual subject material, which is primarily Touhou stuff.
Unfortunately for this character, she doesn’t even get the courtesy of a name; she’s simply described as “bishoujo kishi,” which means something like “pretty young girl knight.” She is not, however, dressed very much like a knight; indeed, her clothing is in a state of obvious disarray, and her facial expression shows obvious consternation for her circumstances. She is, however, clutching a large weapon – it looks a bit like a big, two-handed sword, but it could perhaps be a polearm with a rather large blade.
This dakimakura cover does follow the usual form in aggressively sexualizing the depicted character. It’s not as overtly explicit as some – or most, even – but the depicted bodily fluids are unmistakable and elevate the appeal – or crassness – of this pillowcase.
The reverse side is, happily, actually a reverse view of the character. She’s wearing a different costume here, and the coloration gives it a very different tone than the opposite side. On the front, she’s clad in black and red, and the effect is to give her almost an evil look, which contrasts sharply with her face. On this side, she’s wearing white, blue, and gold, which gives her more of a heroic look. The different colors reminds me a bit of the two warring factions from Warcraft, whose principal colors are respectively black and red versus gold and blue.
We’re treated to a generous view of her rear, which looks very nice. She’s wearing a thong of some sort, which appears very uncomfortable but looks great on her.
She has a crossbow between her feet, and it appears she also has an axe, too. She is, evidently, handy with an assortment of weapons.
I really think her arm ought to be larger here; it looks pretty skinny. Admittedly, one probably isn’t meant to be looking at her arm on this side, but that kinda bothers me, as does the positioning of her shoulder. Then again, that could simply be an exaggeration of perspective, since she’s supposed to be raising her rear, and in that context it’s sort of unfair to assess only the upper portion of the illustration.
Regardless of all that, I really do like this pillowcase a lot. I’m a big fan of its subject theme, and that instantly biases my opinion in its favor. I also like the artwork a lot, particularly the colors; it’s rare to find a dakimakura cover this colorful. And the view of her backside is quite nice. Hopefully we’ll see more pillowcases featuring this sort of material in the future.
Sexy, especially the ‘back’ side. I’m getting some Noel/Mu-12 (I never played BlazBlue) or the generic blonde female knight/princess (Not a bad thing!). If I had the guts to own 18+(or near it) Dakis, I would definitely consider it.
When I was editing the pictures, I was reminded of Taiga Aisaka, of all people. It’s mainly just the messy hair – I’m not familiar at all with Toradora but I’d imagine that that character would not be caught dead with this expression, nor would she ever have a chest this substantial.
Funny that you should mention that, I should actually have a blonde female knight/princess pillowcase here pretty soon.
It’s good to see you’re still alive and kicking.
I resisted very hard making it “Alive and beating” with some pun about beating. Ho ho ho.
While I do prefer art that teases rather than shows, this one doesn’t do it for me, not sure why.
Holy crap, it’s you. It has been a while! I hope you’re doing well. Yep, still alive and still kicking; I think this website is my way of measuring time. Back when I was in school, I could measure time by each school year; now, every day is pretty much like the last day, so I measure time in paychecks and website posts.
Now I have to know what’s your memory of me, with that response 😀
Interestingly enough, I can relate very much to what you say. After I graduated from high school I’d usually not torrent shows that were on TV such as House M.D. and The Office, because my main way of differentiating one day from the others…
But also, sometimes I really enjoy reading back one of my blogs, especially my personal, private blog, and just marvel at well crafted prose, or my thoughts, and such, my political posts, my analysis of various topics, poems… especially if I’d forgotten all about the entries until re-finding them. Some also seem like the past me wrote them especially for the sake of the current me.
I have a very powerful sense of nostalgia – maybe even an overriding sense, as every time I speak to one of my college friends, the conversation always focuses on reminiscences rather than current events (aside from repeated, regretful assertions about how we are old as fuck now). However, I hate going back through old sections of this website; the photographs are bad and I can instantly see problems with my writing – clunky attempts at humor, poor narrative structure, and self-indulgent verbosity. I cringe whenever I look up the site stats and see that people are looking at older material.
I feel sadness when I look at some of my older entries. I see my Mai-Hime post which I really liked had only ever garnered about 180 views, up until today, under 150 for my Shigofumi and Code Geass posts.
And there’s no way they’d get people to look at them again unless I just repost them :-/
I think that’s a damned shame. If anything, I’m glad when I read my old blog posts, have the same thing with my old personal blog, where sometimes I’d forget I’ve written some entries there which analyze life/are prose/short stories till I read them again, and some which seem like they were written by past me for the current me.
As a long thoughtful editorial anime blogger it seems there’s not much need for me, too many words, I guess. Or not good enough words? My blog had a lot of hits over the years of dormancy, and it’s probably not surprising most search engine hits had come for the figure posts, which were never what I truly cared for, even if Figure Friday is probably what garnered me the most readers (aside from people whose blogs I was also reading, like yours :))
Well, I hope I don’t get to stay within nostalgia, and just this morning walked to my work with someone I’d gone to HS with, since our HS for its 25 year anniversary is doing a big re-union, and yeah, we’ve finished high-school 9 years ago, we’re not young :-/
Wow, this is hot! I like this a lot, the color coordination on both sides are very appealing to me. As we previously discussed in twitter, I think we share the same attitude with knight girl with huge weapon, Valkyrie Sasara and Tohka Yatogami come to mind, and this is pretty close to what I call an ideal characterization for me. While I do like the back side a lot, but the over exaggeration of the thong being buried in her butt is sort of a distraction for me, otherwise, a great find once again.
Indeed! It’s one of my favorite themes in anime and anime culture. I wish it showed up more often … instead, we get themes like, uhh, incest. Man there’s a lot of incest in anime these days.
I really like this cover. The colors are great and I like the design of the girl. It is also nice to see a front and rear view on the case. I have to say that I prefer the front image more than the back image mainly due to the color choice. The red background just seems to work better with the black outfit than the blue and white theme of the reverse.
Overall I think this cover is great which is weird because there are a lot of things I think look really funny in the design. The first is her leg placement on the front side. To me it looks like she is trying to go to the bathroom rather than being in a sexy pose. And this is personal preference but I am not fond of overly large nipples because they always look funny to me. The second is the tiny arm on the reverse. I didn’t notice it at first, but once you pointed it out, I cannot help but notice it now. I also don’t like how her thong is engulfed by her ass. Anime thongs drawn like this always make me think their ass is a sentient being since it looks unnatural.
Like I said, even with all of the odd things happening, I think the case look great.
I think the aesthetics compensate for the technical problems – which there are quite a few of, as you point out. I would be a lot less forgiving – which is to say, I probably wouldn’t have bought it at all – if this pillowcase depicted a run-of-the-mill schoolgirl or something. However, I’m fond enough of the theme that I’m quite happy to overlook those issues.
Now that I think about it, it’s sort of odd that, to my recollection, Queen’s Blade never got any official dakimakura covers, and there aren’t that many doujin covers of its characters either. That’s a bit strange, since I recall that Samurai Girls – also a Hobby Japan property – got pillowcases for most of the main characters, and Hobby Japan has never been shy about licensing out either of those series. An Irma pillowcase would be very, very high on my wishlist, if such a thing existed.
You’ll just need to buy the 100 (or whatever it is) case from Evening Call so you have enough points to have your own made.
Indeed! Actually, I bet I could commission an artist to just draw the images and find a print shop or something to make the pillowcases. I would be surprised if it’d cost more than a G for two relatively simple, full-body images.
oooooh..she’s very attractive
I’ve noticed that quite a bit of daki cover art has strange or sometimes downright incorrect anatomy. It is weird since the other artwork by the artist(s) seems perfectly normal. I can only assume that they rarely draw the poses present on daki covers so that’s why it comes out less than perfect. Or perhaps the pricetags make my critical eye much more sensitive. Even so, its a nice cover.
Also I too enjoy the scantily clad female fighter theme, though I prefer them initially well dressed/armored/covered, like in the visual novel Valkyrie Romance. Unfortunately armor is not a requirement in Japanese high schools, and that’s where most settings occur in anime/mangos/games/lightnovels/etc. Quite honestly I don’t really remember encountering the female fighter theme/trope in media of western origin, though admittedly I’ve never played any console games. The only one I can think of is Samus Aran. There are superheroes, but that is a separate thing altogether.
I’ve noticed that a lot of pillowcase illustrations tend to stretch the characters out, as if the artist wanted to fill out all the available space. Sometimes it makes the characters look more lanky than they ought to.
(I still enjoy looking at pillowcases to make sure that they have the proper hands and feet, though; it’s pretty funny when you see a character that has two right hands or something.)
The theme doesn’t show up quite as much in western culture, I guess, though the comic book and movie character Red Sonja might be one of the most famous and iconic examples of the genre (there are others in comics, like Lady Death, but they tend to be the province of smaller, niche publishers). It also shows up in a lot of video games, particularly MMOs, though I’ve noticed a lot of game makers are sort of moving away from the theme. I’ll be honest, the main reason I had no interest in the new Tomb Raider title was because they said something about wanting to deemphasize her physical attractiveness, and I thought that sounded pretty dumb. I don’t understand why people think that an intelligent, well-crafted female character needs to have her physical attributes toned down in order for her to be effective.
I didn’t follow the hype surrounding Tomb Raider, but I’m guessing they said that to try and make Lara less of a sex symbol and more accessible to the female demographic. Personally I think she’s even more attractive in this newest game than in previous ones, though I haven’t actually played any of them. I did try out Tomb Raider Underworld, but that game was the continuation of some long story or whatever so none of it made any sense. I’m guessing the whole “Lara is a sex symbol” thing started back when she had massive polygon breasts, because in the game I played (Underworld) she looked completely normal with average sized boobs and wore weather appropriate clothing.
In MMO’s, do you mean the player characters or generic NPC’s? In the MMORPGs I’ve tried that is indeed the case, and I myself always go that route, however the problem is that the character development in those games is nonexistant really. Its the same with sandbox RPG’s like Skyrim/Oblivion/Fallout 3. I don’t have a problem with imagining my own backstory, but doing that constantly because that is the most common option is kind of lame.
I guess I can somewhat understand why developers don’t make female protagonists; the statistics are wonky. In Mass Effect, over 80% of players played as male Shepard, and Bioshock Infinite had man with a gun on the cover because people found Bioshock’s cover confusing. On the other hand, Tomb Raider sold pretty well, and I think Heavenly Sword didn’t fail either. Mirror’s Edge did well enough for a sequel, so did Bayonetta. I guess the only real and conclusive evidence would be if Rockstar made the protagonist of their next GTA a female. That would certainly be an interesting thing to see, both the game and the market reaction.
I tried out Tomb Raider Legend but it made me sick (a number of games do that; I’ve never been able to play Morrowind because it induces a dizziness so debilitating that I have to lie down). Oddly, besides that game, I’ve never played a Tomb Raider game before; the first few games in the series came out at a time when I was more interested in PC games.
I mainly mean player characters; it’s an option in a lot of games I’ve played (though that’s mostly because it’s also a precondition for me to play such games). I enjoy a lot of games for their storylines but for MMOs, I mainly enjoy them for the statistical character progression. It’s the same reason I played games like Diablo and The Bard’s Tale (the gameplay in World of Warcraft and EverQuest and such is not very different than those old RPGs).
I have to admit to being puzzled when I heard various game developers (like the Bioshock makers and Epic Games) say that a female-fronted game is not commercially viable; I tend to buy games especially if they feature a female main character. In fact, I didn’t initially buy the third Deus Ex game because you were stuck with playing a dude and I didn’t want to do that, having played a female character in Invisible War (I later bought the third Deus Ex game heavily discounted on Steam; I still haven’t played it). I have the feeling that my gaming philosophy is not one that is all that common, though.
I am going to buy my first dakimakura from Cospa. Im wondering what one is better for hanging on the wall Polyester (Smooth) or Polyester (Twill)? I have heard that the smooth is all around better but without a pillow in it you can sometimes see the other side showing. Anyone got suggestions?
For hanging on the wall? I’m not sure that it matters either way, but I guess I’d get the smooth version. Some makers use a relatively thin material that allows you to see the other side; I would maybe cut up a sheet of posterboard (taking care to round off the corners) or something and fit it inside the pillowcase to prevent this.