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Glossary of strange words used on this site

● Akanbe - (From here) A Japanese facial gesture, usually considered childish. It consists of pulling down one lower eyelid to show the red inside, while sticking out the tongue. It is sometimes accompanied by the sound べえだ (beeda, pronounced "behhh-dah"). The gist of the the gesture is an infantile taunt - the Japanese equivalent of thumbing your nose at someone, and/or yelling "Nyah nyah nyah" or "Neener neener" or the like.

● Angst - I don't really use this word the way the dictionary defines it. What I use it to mean is cases in stories where characters have grossly disproportionate negative emotional reactions to trifling events. In the real world it's a failing of the young, and in anime you most often find it in high school romance stories, whose writers seem to have learned story telling by watching soap operas.

● Bishounen and Bishoujo and Bijin - "Bishounen" are pretty boys, androgynous. (Often referred to derisively as "bishies".) "Bishoujo" are cute girls. "Bijin" is literally "a beautiful person" but it's only used to refer to women.

● Chibi - Literally "runt" or "dwarf". Sometimes it refers to a particular style of caricature in anime art where characters are drawn shorter and more neotonized and far more cartoony. Another term for this is "super-deformed".

● Cosplay - "costume player". Refers to fans who like to dress up as their favorite characters when they attend conventions. Quite often there are contests or organized cosplay shows at such conventions.

● cour - is 3 months, about. A 1-cour series will be 12-14 eps, and a 2-cour series will be 24-26 eps.

● DFC - "Deliciously Flat Chested". A very low "Rushuna" score. Often used as a noun. See also "pettanko".

● Doujinshi - fan-produced comic books. They're often sold at conventions. They're usually ripoffs of existing series. Quite often they're grossly pornographic. Usually they're pretty badly done, but some doujinshi artists have turned pro.

● DWL - "Don't Write Letters". It means "Yes, I know I'm being imprecise here, or making generalizations without noting specific exceptions, or not fully describing the situation. I'm doing it deliberately. Don't tell me about it." Or it means "Yes, I just asked a question, but it was a rhetorical question and I already know the answer." Or it means "I may be wrong about what I just said, but even if I am I don't give a damn. Don't tell me." In generic, it means "What I just wrote is making your email trigger finger itch. Resist the urge, and don't send me the email you were just thinking of sending me."

● Easter Egg - A special feature which is hidden but which may be cool. (Like the NSFW pictures of Mireille and Kirika on the first DVD of Noir.)

● Eroge -- is the Japanese abbreviation of erochikku geemu or "erotic game", essentially a seduction sim. Also known as "hentai games" or "H games". The genre is very popular in Japan and the goal is to meet girls and get them into bed and please them there -- or into a dungeon and rape them there; some eroge's are violent and abusive. Many eroge's have been turned into anime series, sometimes staying quite true to the original and sometimes rewriting the story completely. Popotan is based on an eroge but the only thing they kept from the game was the graphics designs of the girls. Everything else in the TV series is entirely new, including the plot line. (They even left out the player avatar.) This is distinct from a "dating sim", where the goal is to get one of the girls to confess her love to you. Dating sims do not include explicit sex as a reward for winning. There are also otome games where the avatar is female and the targets are male.

● Eye Catch - Brief image or animation at the half-way point in a TV episode. Sometimes there are two. They are used to bracket advertising.

● Fan Service, Ecchi, Hentai - These are different terms for varying degrees of sexual content. Fan Service usually refers to non-explicit titillation (i.e. panty shots, jiggle, skimpy bathing suits). Ecchi is more explicit and pretty much implies frontal nudity. Hentai is actual porn. Ecchi dialogue is off-color without outright using explicitly crude words. The words "ecchi" and "hentai" are also used to refer to mild or big-league perverts respectively. ("Ecchi" is the Japanized pronunciation of the letter "H", which is the first letter in the Romaji spelling of "Hentai".) Some say that these terms apply equally to male and female characters, but at least 90% of it is female fan service intended to please male audience members. I've begun to see the term "man service" used to refer to that residual 10%.

● Five-bladed razor - a case where a series includes ridiculous amounts of something just as a way of exceeding what came before. Examples: breast size in Eiken, the number of sisters in Sister Princess, the "loving violence" of Dokuro-chan, or panty shots in Najica Blitz Tactics. The term itself comes from the ludicrous ongoing competition between Schick and Gillette to see who can put more blades in their disposable razors, with five being the limit as this is written. (Word was that the other company had plans for an eight, but I don't plan to update the term as used here if that happens.)

● Henshin - is the Japanese word for "transformation". A "henshin deck" is a piece of animation which shows a person transforming from their normal form into their special fighting form. Almost mandatory in certain genres, especially shows about sentai teams. (Most of the princesses in UFO Princess Valkyrie have henshin decks, and you can also see them in Cyberteam in Akihabara.) Nearly always the henshin deck will get used several times over the course of the series. Sometimes it gets used several times per episode. It's a classic cheat to save money. When the character undergoing the transformation is female, the henshin deck will nearly always be ecchi and it can approach outright hentai.

● Illuminati - The dictionary says that they're "enlightened groups". Obviously those who wrote the dictionary are part of the conspiracy. The Illuminati are actually the secret powers which rule the world. (Steve Jackson has the scoop on these guys.) They work behind the scenes; they stay out of the spotlight. Sometimes they use innocuous front organizations to cover up their real activities. They have agents everywhere, and they exert subtle control over everything. Some of them aren't even human. Where did they come from? What do they want? Why do they do what they do? You aren't cleared for that. But pseudo-illuminati appear all the time in anime, mostly to put us off the scent.

● Iyashikei -- means "healing" and refers to a style of anime where everything is gentle, slow, warm, happy. "Someday's Dreamers" is an example of the genre.

● Joshikousei - a female high school student. That's the literal meaning, anyway. In Japan, it almost always refers specifically to a cute high school girl in a sailor uniform.

● Kawaii - "Cute". When applied to a kid, it means "adorable" or "precious". Applied to a young woman, it means "foxy". Applying it to a young man is demeaning unless the speaker is a young woman.

● Ki - (pronounced like the English word "key") is this kanji: 気. It means "spirit, mind, mood" but in anime it usually refers to a person's life force. It is thought that high masters of martial arts can gain control over their ki and concentrate it, for instance in a fist, to strengthen the flesh and permit them to strike with much more than usual power. In many shounen anime it goes much further and characters can use their ki to fly, to strengthen their bodies so that they can survive tremendous blows unhurt, and to fire various kinds of energy blasts. It isn't just shounen shows. In "Kiki's Delivery Service", Kiki tells Ursula that witches like her fly by using their ki.

● Lolicon - "Lolita Complex". It means that a man is attracted to young girls. Usally it's a term used in comedies, oddly enough. (A "shotacon" is an attraction to young boys.)

● MCSA - The Most Common Special Attack. Patterned after "the most common super power", the MCSA is the one that shreds the clothing of a panty-fighter without leaving a mark on the lovely flesh beneath.

● Mecha - Giant fighting machines. Usually they're robots, but not always. How big "giant" is depends on the series. In some series they give their giant robots a different name: "EVA" in Neon Genesis Evangelion, "Koubu" in Sakura Wars, "Arm Slave" in Full Metal Panic, "Aestivalis" in Martian Successor Nadesico.

● Meganekko - "Glasses Girl". (Otaku make passes at girls who wear glasses!)

● Miko - A shrine maiden. That's not really quite a correct translation, because there's no real requirement that they be "maidens". But they're usually young, at least in anime, and a lot of the time they wear traditional dress. Some of them have special powers, occasionally quite strong. E.g. Akina in UFO Princess Valkyrie (IMHO every series is improved by the presence of miko magic.)

● Nekomimi - Cat ears. The term is also used to refer to girls who have cat ears, i.e. catgirls.

● Nice Boat - Comes from the series School Days. Nominally a high school romance story about one guy and two girls (based on an eroge), it had a rather shocking ending. One of the girls killed the guy by stabbing him with a knife. The second girl found out, and killed and disemboweled the first girl using a cleaver. She then took the cleaver and decapitated the guy, and took his head away with her. The last scene shows her laying down, cuddling his head. That was apparently too much for some of the TV stations in Japan, especially considering that a couple of weeks before a teenage girl in Japan had killed her father with an axe. Instead of showing the final episode of School Days, they showed a half hour documentary which included scenes of a cruise liner (on the Rhine river in Germany). So a "Nice Boat" ending is the ultimate "bad end".

● NSFW - "Not safe for work". Something which, if your boss or your wife sees you looking at it, will get you fired or killed, respectively.

● omake - means "freebie" or "bonus" in Japanese. It's common for the studios to include short (or not-so-short) animated extras on the DVDs which were not included in the original TV broadcast as a way of encouraging DVD sales. Such extras are omake.

● Oujo - The spoiled daughter of a rich family. This usage is snide. Literally it means "imperial princess". Note that this is distinct from "ojou", which means "someone else's daughter" and is not considered either rude or snide.

● Onsen - A resort at a hot springs. A staple of comedies, especially since many of them support mixed bathing. An "onsen episode" is one where the audience gets to watch cute girls bathe together either at a hot springs resort, or at a neighborhood bathhouse (which is not literally an onsen).

● Otaku - Translates pretty well as "fanboy" or "fangrrl". (Otaku applies equally to both sexes.) In Japan it's considered to be a bit disparaging, and it is used for any kind of fanatic who doesn't have a life. In addition to anime otaku, there are military otaku, car otaku, computer otaku, etc. In the US, it has become a standard term for fans of anime, who proudly use it to refer to themselves.

● OP and ED - Refers to the music and animation at the opening and ending respectively of a show. OP and ED are sometimes are used to refer just to the music.

● OVA - "Original Video Animation". (Also sometimes OAV, "original animation video") This refers to anime produced for direct release on DVD and/or video tape. The episodes can be longer, since they don't need to allow for advertising and don't have to fit a time slot, and sometimes it means that there is more graphic sex or violence, since they don't need to worry about broadcast standards. Once in a while you see "ONA", "original network animation". That refers to material produced to be distributed on the web (e.g. the show "Magical Play"). The term OVA is abused sometimes to refer to series which are broadcast, but not on a weekly schedule.

● Pantsu - is how the Japanese have Japanized the English word "panties". Also Panchira means "panty flash", a glimpse of panties. ("...panties act as the gate-keeper to a mysterious world...")

● Punigeki - is a term coined by J in response to my need for a generic term to refer to obscene martial arts attacks in panty-fighter shows. It is short for puni-puni hakugeki which means "soft-and-squishy close attack". Anyway, punigeki is a collective term for the crotch-face attack, the marshmallow-hell attack, and the butt-to-head attack, all of which amount to a martial arts girl trying to take out an opponent by hitting him with her intimate parts. What a way to die!

● Refrigerator - According to James Berardinelli:

Alfred Hitchcock used the term "refrigerator movie" to describe a film with absurd plot twists that are recognized by a viewer only in retrospect - later in the evening, while getting a late-night snack out of the refrigerator.

Also known as Fridge Logic.

● Rushuna - is our local unit of measure of bustiness in sexy female anime characters. It's named after Tendo Rushuna, the lead character in the series "Grenadier", whose boobs are immense. Anything larger than 1.0 Rushuna (e.g. Mizuki in Gravion or some of the girls in Eiken) is outright gross. A rating of 0.1 Rushuna or below is referred to as DFC, "Deliciously Flat Chested".

● Seiyuu - Japanese voice actors and actresses. (The term is not used to refer to American voice actors/actresses who work on English-language dubs.)

● Sempai - Sometimes written "senpai". A term of respect used for someone else who is guiding you in some area. In Japanese schools, it is used by students for those in higher classes. It can be used as a noun, or as an honorific suffix to someone's name. (The inverse relationship is "kouhai".)

● Shounen-ai and Shoujo-ai - respectively "boy love" and "girl love". (That is, boys loving boys, and girls loving girls, respectively.) Not as explicit as yaoi and yuri, and sometimes only at the level of a heavy crush instead of full romantic love. Shounen-ai and shoujo-ai stories are nearly always chaste -- consumation is deferred and implied, not explicitly presented. The primary audience for both genres tend to be girls, so the emphasis is on relationships, hurt feelings, misunderstanding, and lots of angst. The goal is a high hanky-count, not titillation.

● Spoiler - A piece of information about a story you don't want to know before you watch it (e.g. Darth Vader is actually Luke Skywalker's father). Sometimes a brief spoiler appears in the middle of a non-spoiler article, or spoilers of varying length apear on the main page, and in those cases I set both text and background to the same level of gray. To read it, select it (i.e. sweep it with your mouse) or hit Control-A.

● Super-Saiyajin - a term from the series Dragonball Z. For those of full or partial Saiyajin ancestry (Goku, Vegeta, and most of their descendants), it's a transformation they can learn to perform which changes their appearance, drastically increases their speed and power, and affects their minds a bit, making them aggressive and cruel (until they learn to control it better). I use the term generically to refer to characters in other series who undergo similar power-up transformations of various kinds.

● Trap - Obviously this has its normal meaning, but in discussion of anime it is sometimes used to refer to an apparently-female character who is actually a male in drag. Bonus points if "she" is particularly gorgeous or attractive. Usually this is sprung as a surprise on the audience; occasionally it's known from the very beginning. Often the character art stretches disbelief to the breaking point (e.g. Otome wa Boku ni Koishiteru.) A girl pretending to be a guy is a "reverse trap", but I often call those just "traps" as well.

● Tsundere - In broad terms, it refers to the way some anime girls show their affection for the male protagonist in a harem comedy by beating the crap out of him. (In Japanese it's an adjective but English-speaking anime fans use it as a noun.) More specifically it refers the way such a girl begins violent and abusive ("tsun-tsun") but eventually becomes cuddly and affectionate ("dere-dere"). But the more broad examples of it attempt to use the violence for comedic purposes. More here. Some examples of tsundere: Naru Narusegawa and Lina Inverse. The extreme case is Dokuro-chan, who shows her affection by brutally murdering the guy with a spiked baseball bat, and then using her magic to resurrect him. The inverse is yandere, a girl who starts as loving and gentle and eventually becomes psychotically violent.

● Yaoi and Yuri - Stories concentrating on male and female homosexuality respectively. Yaoi is usually intended for female audiences and in such cases the guys will be bishounen. As the terms are currently used in the US, they refer both to explicit porn and to relatively non-ecchi love stories. (Yaoi is an acronym of the phrase YAma nashi, Ochi nashi, Imi nashi,  which means "no climax, no point, no meaning". That's because yaoi porn titles tend not to have any kind of story or characterization.) The terms are also used more generically to refer to any real or implied homosexual activity or thoughts in anime, often for comedic purposes. For instance, Shinobu in Ninja Nonsense is strongly attracted to Kaede, though nothing ever comes of it. That's an example of mild comedic yuri. It's something of an anime trope that nearly all middle school and high school girls are at least bisexual, and quite often have major crushes on older girls. In terms of common wisdom, the idea is that they practice on other girls, and then get serious with guys, later. So you'll quite often see some rather impressive girl walking down a hall, and then see reaction shots of lots of other girls blushing and with stars in their eyes. See e.g. Kan'u Unchou in Ikki Tousen or Ryoko in Real Bout High School.

● Zettai Ryouiki means "absolute territory" and refers to the section of uncovered skin on the thigh of a pretty girl that extends between the bottom of her skirt and the top of her thigh-high stockings. There is much debate about how large this should be for maximum sexual appeal.

Further information: ANN Lexicon