2009 Moment of Anime 7: The Strange Realism of Delusion

Yuri Monogatari Vol.5's only 4koma story, 'On the Road Where the White Flowers Bloom', by Sakuraike Kana is my favourite of that anthology. It is hilarious on some many levels: as a meta-comment on the world on doujinshi, the two distinct leads with two supporting charas and the dynamics between them, the ironies of in-comic charas protesting about being treated as a doujinshi pairing, the surprising degrees of understanding and tangled webs of misunderstanding and so on.

In one of the 4koma, a (female) doujin buyer shyly asks Cotton-san if her work is based on actual experience; it's a question she gets asked often because, as her circle partner (who is actually one with the experience) opines, her work seems strangely realistic to outsiders. This line reminded me of how often we describe something as realistic even if we don't have the faintest clue about the reality of what we are describing. And when the real doesn't match up to the delusion, we reject the former instead.

Another one for the project.