It’s that time of year again, when all nerd-dom will turn its collective head to my hometown for the San Diego Comic-Con, the largest celebration of super-hero comics, sci-fi movies, animation, manga and all other forms of popular culture. We’ll have a big booth this year, with lots of great anime figures, plush toys, hentai grab bags, plus the awesome limited FAKKU x J-LIST Hentai Boxes and other items you can only get by visiting our booth. Can’t make it to the show? Then enjoy our new contest, and a 5% sitewide sale!
The story of the growth of the San Diego Comic-Con has gone hand-in-hand to a degree with J-List’s own development as a company, and we were lucky to launch not just as the Internet was really starting to hum, but also just as animation and comic conventions really began to become one of the most important engines for making fandom such a fun place. I used to attend SDCC back in high school in the 80s, when it was at its former (much, much smaller) facility, and we’d regularly express shock that so many fans (6500 in 1986, the first year I attended) could be interested in comics and anime. Today, of course, nerd culture reigns supreme, and all the world’s web servers couldn’t function without us. What a time to be alive!
Whenever a new anime season starts, it’s fun to browse Facebook and Twitter to see which female characters will be anointed this season’s “waifu” by fans. One show that’s sexy-fun this season is Hajimete no Gal, or My First Girlfriend is a Gal, about a high school youth named Junichi who’s obsessed with getting a girlfriend, so he ends up confessing to Yukana, a flamboyant gyaru, or gal. The word — formerly known as kogal (literally, child-girl) before it got officially shortened — describes a specific kind of ultra-fashionable girl who chooses specific kinds of loose fashions, speaks with a specific dialect of Japanese that can only be compared to the “Valley girl” speech of the San Fernando Valley in the 80s, and is often tanned. The rise of guaru is related to the explosion of popularity of JPOP star Amuro Namie back in the mid-1990s, as a generation of impressionable girls were transformed into “Amullers” (the label for girls who imitated Amuro’s style), which later morphed into gyaru-ism. While these girls have a bit of a reputation for being thots sexually promiscuous — though we love that Galko isn’t that kind of girl — I’ve got a suspicion Yukana might not be so pure. So, will you be watching Hajimete no Gal?
In addition to all the awesome anime figures, Plush toys, English visual novels and other products we will have for you in San Diego, were also doing a FAKKU x J-LIST Hentai Box. Only 50 will be available each day of the con, so visit booth 4929 early each day! We’ve also got free items to fans who stop by our booth, a 5% instant savings sale using code SDCC2017 on the site through Sunday, plus a contest here!
