Killing god is indeed a major theme, it seems that every JRPG ends with you killing god with the power of friendship, doesn't it? Even in Persona 4, that's the true secret ending, almost as if the game is saying, "alright, we have to do it."

Definitely not an obsession with kabbalah, haha, though that is creative anon. Not a reaction against Christianization either, because this colonizing force was exterminated in the Shimabara Rebellion and the development of a State religion took the form of State Shinto, which, although inspired by State Christianity policy, was not influenced by Christianity at all and merely sought to codify and standardize Shinto (fundamentally a pagan, syncretic, folk religion) much like scripture does for Christianity. The Japanese see Christianity, today, as supremely exotic, even sexy at times.

First, let's look at Japanese religion, Shinto, because it's very different from Christianity. Much like early Christianity (it may shock you to learn that this is true, haha), in Shinto, one may become deified, may become a deity. This means that a human has the potential, by whatever feature of their character or even simply fate, to become godlike: to give a Chinese example, look at the poet, author of the Li Sao, Qu Yuan. Multiple historical and pseudohistorical figures are likewise deified in Japanese religion, some of the most popular deities belong to this realm, such as Hachiman, who is indeed a deified Emperor Ōjin.

Second, Japanese deities die. Izanagi kills Kagutsuchi, the god of fire, because his beloved wife-sister Izanami dies of burns giving birth to it. The food goddess Ukemochi/Ugetsu-hime is famously killed to make crops, a Japanese variation on the Hainuwele-type myth whose mere presence in the Japanese archipelago has immense ethnographic implications. And so on, the kami aren't gods like the Christian god or even like the immortal Olympians or the Sumerian pantheon, they are deified persons, natural phenomena, even objects - Amaterasu's girdle of magatama beads is itself a kami, per example. The Murder Of God, then, does not have the same implications of metaphysical impossibility to the Japanese.

As for the emperor renouncing his status as a kami in the Showa period... I think if anything, the taboo of going against such an embodied representative of the State would make this type of ending/theme in JP media even more pronounced. To rage against God, to the Japanese conception merely the kami of kami, the supreme kami, a representative of the current order in all its manifestations, is to rage against the current order, which, again turning to the Japanese context, means the endless disillusionment of the post-80s bubble economy and its suicidal work-culture, the total loss of sex and intimacy in Japanese culture (look up those virginity and sex-having rates lmao), the grind of school-life that is replaced by a much worse grind in the workplace, etc. The Emperor is (symbolically, not in fact), the State, and the emperor was a kami. To rage against god would be to rage against all of these, embodied in god, and if he was still a kami, in the emperor by association.

In short, to the Japanese who come from the background of Buddhist-influenced Shinto, to kill God is to go against a set (miserable) fate, to remove divine backing from the current order of things and to go against the "Status Quo" in the most vaguely defined embodiment possible - He who Created It.

I don't know a lot of loli manga or what even counts as it - does all the Korean manwha about being a litol girl count, per example? Do you mean stuff like Fly Me To The Moon where it focuses on a relationship with a l0li?

In any case, if you want some recs on that front, I recommend Kaori Yuki's manga, a mangaka famous for her beyond amazing gothic artwork and whose work keeps coming back to bizarre themes of ρεdορhilia (sometimes acknowledged as such, sometimes not) due to what is (IMO) some unfulfilled childhood fantasy or another lol. Her manga Angel Sanctuary (my second fav of all time) has the young Kurai get seduced by the vaguely FtM Belial, a princely jester demon, and it goes real hard. In a shocking scene considering the audience for the manga was young girls, Kurai gets threatened with some Cannibal Corpse-esque fate by a vkei-looking androgyne. But that "Kurai in Hell" is the only arc in it to feature it prominently.

Much more prominent it is in Grand Guignol Saga which is about a lοlι dressed up as a boy with whom the main character, a young man (in truth a genderless castrati-coded androgyne who has not turned into a man yet - it's complicated but very relevant for the relationship, and also you may notice a recurring theme here lmao) who looks halfway between a vkei band member in gothic attire and one of those tall princely-type gacha males, Lucille, is in love with. Unlike in AS where Belial is unambiguously predatory if sexy and genuine in their affections, here Lucille's attraction towards the girl, Celestite, which is at least by implication sexual (another character arc's tells us that these androgynes turn male or female largely based on their own feelings, specially on what "role" they want to take with their partners - Lucille's past partner wanted to fuck him, so he develops into a man to be able to penetrate them when in the hope's they'd develop as a woman, but Lucille too wants to develop male, which he hopes his attraction to Celestite will be able to carry out that development, which is insane but treated as if it's normal).

In this manga Kaori Yuki truly gets taken over by her Shadow and just ignores all the outstandingly dubious implications bc she's fulfilling her little childhood lοlι/androgyne prince fantasy. In any case, it is outstandingly shoujo aesthetically, up there with the best as usual for Kaori Yuki, and is among the best manga (at least in the shoujo field) in the "straight pεdεrαsty" genre, where there is a sort of boy/youth mix of homosexual equality and age-graded interactions tied with pedagogy etc, but the boy is actually a crossdressing girl who later marries the youth in question.

Another good manga in that genre, also a shoujo (most josei manga with such contents belong to what I like to call the "female wife-husbandry" genre where a young adult woman raises a boy that she later marries lol), is Kaze Hikaru, about a crossdressing girl raised as a samurai boy. I don't think this one truly counts as a lοlι manga lowkey, it lacks in lοlιconisms, but it is among the most well known stories of the genre.

Some other ones off the top of my mind: Meiji Hiiro Kitan (not fully translated lol) and Dazzle (enormously long classic-style josei by the Maria Holic author of all people). Can't vouch for these quality-wise, it's been ages, tho I like Dazzle's style certainly.

Never read it because none of it is translated but what I know of it is that it has some of the finest old school shoujo loli art because the whole story revolves around an unhinged age gap a la CLAMP's most dubious moments, with lit0l g0rl and this enormous guy with the peak Youth Age-Caste build, as seen here link. I mostly just know it as the Youth/L0li Takemiya manga, which, very fine indeed, that is the finest type of l0lic0n art to me.

So that's a real haul, anon! But I know nothing about it, if you scan it you should post it somewhere permanent! Personally I'd read anything by Takemiya that's available.

You literally said it anon, you should in fact just pick up a book. Look at me, I'm a loser who only goes out very occasionally and you don't see me brainrotted like that I'm too engulfed in books - anything does it, novels, short stories, guro fanfiction erotica, academic works on all topics, royal annals, folk-epics, fucking cuneiform poetry, it's nice to have variety.

If you have trouble with reading a book, I suggest you do it with a friend - lack of discipline regarding it, as in most things, is often just a lack of a feeling of responsibility. If you do it with a friend because you both committed to it, and you have someone to share thoughts with and bounce ideas off of, it all gets much easier, and very soon a healthy habit is built. When I was more social I literally got multiple people back into reading just by doing it with them it is genuinely the easiest thing.

Like real junkfood, an excess of this will poison you, your brain rather than body granted but that's hardly any better anon... You will get needlessly pessimistic and jaded looking at those things because they start to appear as too prominent in the general media landscape due to how social media works.

TLDR yeah mane just pick up a book straight up

damn, reading Alphonsus Liguori as a queer teen? My kinsperson, same, I read a few of the ascetical works as a little catholic kid cause I wanted to show I was devout and serious about it, and most embarrassingly, that I was smart.

The analytical approach to proving belief is entirely circular: not even that the logic is wrong, it is often, if not correct, then at least correctable. But the actual foundations, the syllogisms that go into the logic, are unproven assumption that you can swat away safely. It is also, imo, simply undue to try to prove the sacred with logic: the sacred has always been what takes us beyond ourselves, the horror of human sacrifices, the taboo-breaking eroticism of the orgia, the terrible spectacles of sovereignty with their pomp that we subjects experience vicariously - in a word, all of those expenditures which go beyond everyday reason and logic which we use for effective and productive work, huge expenditures of resources and energy that seem pointless but bring us in continuity with the world at larger by literally forcing us out of ourselves, like a butterfly coming out of a chrysalis that was its body, metamorphosed.

To think one can "prove" this, or "experience it" even more so, with analytic logic, the logic of profane, day to day, useful labor... well, it is simply a very characteristically Christian bigotry, haha. So I say you should calm your nerves anon, though I know (from experience unfortunately) that rooting out childhood neuroses is hard... That said, to come to a rando like me with something like this, it's very Christian anon, I must say, it's very Confessional-esque.

That's honestly very understandable, and I do man it lol: the fear of the underworld is nearly as old as civilization itself. A Mesopotamian scribe, referring to the gloomy view of the afterlife they had as compared to the Egyptians who had a happy view of it, writes: "Tears, lament, anguish and depression are within me. Suffering overwhelms me. Evil fate holds me and carries off my life. Malignant sickness bathes me."

It is hard to shake off a notion that has been embedded in you since you were young and which, most likely, your human brain itself compels you to believe in, i.e. it prefers to think of hellfire than absolute nothingness, continuity with everything that has ever come and been utterly forgotten, even if you rationally understand it to not be real. I don't know you at all obviously lol but I would bet that there is a masochistic element to it too most likely: you probably feel that you should be punished, rather than just thinking you will be post-mortem, and that is why your brain is making you think of such things. I've seen this very often with people who believe in hellfire damnation awaiting them, and more secularly, of people who plain and simply want to be tortured.

I am deeply sacred of death, but not the afterlife. I simply do not believe it and in a sense lack the ability to believe it because despite my deep engagement with religion over my entire life, I do not share the capacity for irrational irreligiosity despite wishing I did.

As for religion, I will say this: the sacred is terrifying, is meant to be terrifying, and it has been so for almost all of human history. It is an Abrahamic-Buddhistic notion that the good and the pure = the sacred and the impure, dirty and evil = profane. It's an admirable effort to contain human impulses which is why these are the "final forms" of religion before the whole world fell into irrelegion, but they are pointless to contain how the human brain is actually set to see what's sacred: something as sovereign, taboo-breaking within its own sovereignly set boundaries and terrifying.

As such I do not fear religion because, in my eyes, religion properly said has ceased to exist: all that exists now is institutions ("organized religion"), religious justifications for bigotries that are ultimately actually secular but have no secular, rational justification that passes anymore as well as coping mechanisms to make oneself feel superior ("I am spiritual and enlightened, the others are not"). What exists that is religious now is human instinct which led to religious beliefs, but no longer is religiously understood, e.g. teen boys' fear of the opposite sex (in ancient times understood as a profound religious prohibition on Boy The Hunter, girls taking away your hunting (and warrior) prowess by ending your adolescent state).

Ultimately I think Celtic mentalities towards birth are indicative of fundamental human notions: Celts believed that a son was a reincarnation of the father and the daughter of the mother. Humanity rarely feels it as intensely as the Celts, but all of it feels that their children are how they reach a degree of continuity beyond their own discontinuity of being, i.e. their separateness from other people and the rest of time, and thus to have a child is to "continue". It is in a sense a real afterlife, even if, purely rationally speaking, merely a genetic one... but subjectively you can interpret how merely genetic it is, of course, most people do.

Good question! The truth is that there is no way to translate Homer to English, as Homeric Greek is an artificial language made up of multiple Greek dialects, of varying antiquity, all meshed together into a literary language whose feeling that cannot possibly be replicated in English or any other language.

Thus, what is a good translation will depend on what you want out of it!

Lattimore is probably the closest to Homer. He keeps the closest meter to the original, and the word choice too is very close to the Greek, but frankly I find some of his syntax and lines very stiff and gangly. Witness for yourself:

Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus' son Achilles
and its devastation, which put pains thousand-fold upon the Achaians,
hurled in their multitudes to the house of Hades strong souls
of heroes, but gave their bodies to be the delicate feasting
of dogs, of all birds, and the will of Zeus was accomplished
since that time when first there stood in division of conflict
Atreus’ son the lord of men and brilliant Achilleus.

Fitzgerald is also considered up there, but quite simply I hate how many liberties he takes with the original Greek. You may judge for yourself:

Anger be now your song, immortal one,
Akhilleus' anger, doomed and ruinous,
that caused the Akhaians loss on bitter loss
and crowded brave souls into the undergloom,
leaving so many dead men—carrion
for dogs and birds; and the will of Zeus was done.
Begin it when the two men first contending
broke with one another— the Lord Marshal
Agamémnon, Atreus’ son, and Prince Akhilleus.

Most unforgivable at all, he often deletes epithets for the sake of poetry, which is an unsurpassable sin in my eyes for so much of Homer, and of oral poetry and story telling in general, is epithets, seeing how they characterize the characters and deities, and how they are played with. I can literally tell you, if you wish, how "swift-footed Achilles" connects with thousands-year-old lore of "swift" characters being connected with the wind and thus the wind-god Vayu who is a "brutish" warrior as comparable to the "chivalrous" warrior Indra, and that this tells you something about Achilles and Ajax the Lesser, the only "swift-footed" ones in the Iliad. Overall I don't like it, but you may judge for yourself.

Fagles is very similar:

Rage—Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles,
murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses,
hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls,
great fighters’ souls, but made their bodies carrion,
feasts for the dogs and birds,
and the will of Zeus was moving toward its end.
Begin, Muse, when the two first broke and clashed,
Agamemnon lord of men and brilliant Achilles.

I think Fagles is even less accurate to the Greek than Fitzgerald, but he sins less in the epithet territory. It's still really fucked though and the epithets are very awkwardly, "poetically" translated. I really like this one as poetry honestly, but not as Homer.

Emily Wilson is one of the more recent ones, it's also one of the few by a woman - Wilson keeps a nice iambic pentameter beat, while keeping things both accurate and nice-flowing:

Goddess, sing of the cataclysmic wrath
of great Achilles, son of Peleus,
which caused the Greeks immeasurable pain
and sent so many noble souls of heroes
to Hades, and made men the spoils of dogs,
a banquet for the birds, and so the plan
of Zeus unfolded—starting with the conflict
between great Agamemnon, lord of men,
and glorious Achilles.

She switches her lines around freely, she plays extremely loose with her precision. She adds "great" in line 2, and merges the first two Greek lines into three of her own. She also replaced Atreus' son with "Agamemnon" in the penultimate line (a recurring sin), also adding "great" which isn't in the Greek. She replaces the patronymics at random, uses the anachronistic “Greeks” (!!! What!!! I'd rather she used Aḫḫiyawan, if you get that Hittitological reference) throughout, and uses “glorious” instead of “godlike”. That said, her poetry is absolutely superb and keep the pace unlike anything else I've seen. I like how she translates the epithets differently depending on context, i.e. γλαυκός as "owl-eyed" or "grey-eyed" depending on how it's most appropriate at the moment. But I speak here as someone who has knowledge of the original Greek, of course. One of my favorites in any case - if you are looking for poetics, with decent accuracy, this is the one to pick, and the one I usually recommend to people.

Lombardo is actually the one I read with my partner:

RAGE:
            Sing, Goddess, Achilles’ rage,
Black and murderous, that cost the Greeks
Incalculable pain, pitched countless souls
Of heroes into Hades’ dark,
And left their bodies to rot as feasts
For dogs and birds, as Zeus’ will was done.
   Begin with the clash between Agamemnon—
The Greek warlord—and godlike Achilles.

He is not so literal to Homer, much like Fagles and Fitzgerald, but I find the usage of quick and short sentences in place of high and elevated ones to keep the sentiment of the Iliad as war poetry to be an absolute peak on that level. On the other hand, I dislike the use of anachronistic "Greeks" throughout instead of Danaans or Achaeans, as well as the lack of patronymics, etc. It's still recommended though, specially on audio.

I'm very impressed with Merrill's literalist translation:

Sing now, goddess, the wrath of Achilles the scion of Peleus,
ruinous rage which brought the Achaians uncounted afflictions;
many the powerful souls it sent to the dwelling of Hades,
those of the heroes, and spoil for the dogs it made of their bodies,
plunder for all of the birds, and the purpose of Zeus was accomplished—
sing from the time when first stood hostile, starting the conflict,
Atreus’ scion, the lord of the people, and noble Achilles.

Imo as accurate as Lattimore but with better poetry - I would recommend this one if you value accuracy over English poetics, it might be the best there.

Speaking of, I was greatly impressed Barry Nurcombe's translation, even though he's not even a classics professor but a fucking psychiatry professor. Still, it's a fantastic layman's translation:

1 Sing, Goddess, of the wrath of Pēleús' son
2 Akhilleús, the accursed wrath that caused
3 Akhaíans countless woes and hurled headlong
4 To Hādēs a host of heroes’ souls
5 And left their bodies spoil for dogs and all
6 The birds of carrion. The will of Zeús
7 Was brought to pass from when Agamémnōn,
8 The Lord of men, opposed the consummate
9 Akhilleús.

The issue is that the publisher put the verse numbers before the verses which is incredibly unpleasant and distracting! Whatever, I still recommend it.

You may window shop for Homer translations, what you'll like - and I doubt people would genuinely dislike the Iliad - depends on your taste, haha.

If you want to see things stretched to their limit, check out Alice Oswald's "Memorials" - it translates only the funereal laments of the Iliad, as well as the "biographical" verses of the dead verses, which Oswald correctly recognizes as belonging not to the epic genre but being the type of poems sung by bard-priests at funerals to appease the dead with their memory (you can see these types of ceremonies in Mycenaean larnax/sarcophagi paintings; I suspect that the Minoans used eunuchs to do it, for reasons that I could go on about for a hour). This turns the normal war poetry of the Iliad into an unrelenting funeral ceremony of nothing but young men being cried over by their mothers, wives, curses sent by loved ones to those who killed them, etc. It's quite riveting, I recommend it as a poem.

I hope this helped!

I would say that at the start there was actually a clear separation and the dubious elements came mostly from publishers - I remember the reason such things stopped is because l0licons themselves demanded that they only publish drawings and so on... I think it is with the rise of hentai at once influenced by IRL pornography and yet going far beyond it in extremity and vulgarity where this uneasy field is found between "yeah I am a lolicon but also the people into this seem to be genuinely, you know..."

I'll be frank I think loliconism, the lolicon... "condition", if you will, comes down to childhood, gender, age[-caste lol, namely children and preteens], and cuteness and cuteness aggression ("moe") complexes, with countless variations of them between people, but clearly identifiable as that. Per example, I recently read a loli/older girl anthology and I was shocked that if I combed through it with a fine eye, I can put all the one shots into one of only two narrative types, almost as categorizable as folk-tale types, and they both referred to specific female complexes. Outside of this I think there is simply a sadist or better put "sovereign" element to it, to use Bataille's meaning of the words - the phantasy that one may do anything, and the appeal is the deliberate amorality of it, one that is purely phantastical, literary, imaginary.

I kinda believe - maybe controversial to admit - that when you get out of those phantasies and complexes, when you move into the field of pure pornography as one sees irl pornography, when you have that type of gooner mentality and you're looking at depictions of chιldren - real or not - the implications of looking at really depraved acts involving kιds, well, it just quickly gets very muddy, in my eyes, I see it online all the time, specially among those communities I mentioned who are as much lolicons as my fellows. But this is rarely acknowledged, in the fear that if one does, people will also go after harmless freaks who are just into shipping or exploration of complexes for purely internal reasons. Well, that may even be so, I think the normie mentality is to judge both as the same, and it is why I don't really bring it up; I don't believe anything that's just drawings or stories should ever be banned, but I can't deny it makes me uncomfortable that me and my fellows and artists and writers I like are technically part of the same "demographic", haha.

All that said, I think the reason there is little talk about it is because there is thankfully very little overlap between the two groups, which makes the silence on the matter tolerable. Women into anime little girls due to whatever complex don't wanna be around a bunch of unhinged gooners for obvious reasons, or people into the sheer moeness of it for the most part.

You can get a PhD for nearly anything in certain fields of "theory" lol, have you actually read Derrida and how much of it is just actual gibberish hahaha. I despise the call for legislation, it is just trying to augment, for likely personal-neurotic reasons, the authoritarian power of the state to persecute what people think, fantasize and write about as if that affects anything "like that". It is the impotent rage that comes with knowing that the potential for progress of the modern bourgeois progress has reached its limit a long time ago yet trying to appeal to it to solve deeper set social issues, like patriarchy, or the "distribution of women" in a society where gender relations have broken down into a state of near gender war - it is easy to blame it on XYZ minor thing that affected you personally and thus try to get Big Daddy the State to help. I detest the attitude.

I mean, on the one hand, from what I can see, this is just the same type of take I've seen countless times just with much more even-handed, academic-speak. On the other hand, I do think that there should be real criticism of certain subsects of lolicons, notably, not to bring politics into it, those associated with the "alt-right" and incel groups, which most kodocons do not want to discuss. There is a type of lolicon fan, universally male or nearly so, that does just seem to be into young girls or nearly so and for whom lolicon media does not serve as a fantasy space but as an outlet for very real desires which, due to the nature of such communities online, may be acted upon. I think most loli fans don't really like to acknowledge that and tbh while I disagree with the entire gist of Petit's argument on the matter, I can at least appreciate someone coming into it from a clear-minded pov (rather than moralistic, blind, judgemental one) to shake things up and make both otaku academics and otaku elsewhere question (or make others question by their violent rejection, as I've seen looking up her name lol) the things they take for granted. This is intensely hypocritical to say which is why I never do unless prompted but I do feel there are "certain types" of lοlι pornography that often feel they express a lust for real underage girls and the fans of it often seem to confirm this - however, because this is merely a subjective look at it, I tend to not speak of it, but it's curious I also never see anyone bring it up.

On the other hand, I find how she equates ρεdορhιlιa with shota/lοli stuff to be wildly irresponsible, wrong and gross, as I do the appeals to state intervention (in the form of legislation). That part of her argument, that shotacon/lolicon being queer is the "gay = ρεdορhιle" conservative argument, is indefensible and shockingly ignorant.

So yeah, not a fan at all, and her fixation with lolicon and hentai strikes me as obviously neurotic and personal (she admits to consuming it in the past, which makes me think this is personal - not to psychoanalyze further, but) but I also do think that kodocons should be more critical and look at what they like from different povs. I critique the representational way of thinking about media always, but I think that blindly pretending that media contains no ideology at all is just as silly. There's no shame in admitting that media, as an expression of fantasies, contains its own ideology often not consciously thought about by the author. Shoujo manga, as much as I like it, often serves as "initiation material" for young girls to accept life as a housewife in a nuclear family unit, per example. It's good to draw the line between fantasy and its expressions, and ideology, and try to see which is which. It's just that miss Petit's way is most certainly not it.