Rosario Vampire: From Plus To Cross.         Rosario Vampire: Her Shoes.        Rosario Vampire: What Butters the Bread. 

Farting Around and a Vampire.


     Did you know that the words, phrases, and questions that you type into a search engine shows up in a web site's statistical analysis? What are web stats? Web stats are the number of visitors that visit a site, the pages they go to, and the key words that brought people to your site. Now not all reports are created equal. My web site provider does a good job of telling me the first two, but not the third. There are independent web sites who grab up little tidbits that my provider misses, but are over a year behind in the facts it reports. In addition to my provider I use two tools made by Google: Google Analytics and Web Master Tools. They don't do a very good job on the first two, number of visitors and popular pages, but do a better job on the third, keywords and phrases.

    Oddly enough the best analytics I have seen has nothing to do with my web site, it's the one used by my blog. It gives me visitors, popular posts, key words and phrases, and even the exact Google search that brought them to my blog. It has some major drawback though. You can get a daily, weekly, monthly or all time reports, but you can't go to a specific point in time and look at the figures. My web site provider does this. With Blogger you have to check nearly every week or you will miss things like:

     
(For a whole day two (more than likely one person clicking twice) found my blog because of these images. Another neat thing about Blogger's web stats is that it tells what specific country people who visit are from.)

    Now what does all this mean for me? I'm not one of these people that troll forums and blogs to get visitors. My plan has been to let people find my site for themselves. It has been a very slow process. SEO helps me to up the probability of that happening. What that pretty much means that instead of wasting time talking about Oh My Goddess I can concentrate on the stuff that is actually bringing people to my site. (I like OMG. I have all the manga and anime. I would talk all day about it. But SEO tells me if I want people visiting I need to spend time on Rosenkreuzstilette and Rosario Vampire.)

    Right about now would be a good time to talk about implementing SEO, Instead why not just post a link to my 6th RKS article. No real need to rewrite all that out here.

So how about I finally get to the point of this whole meandering meander?

    Don't you just hate it when you type in a question to Google or other such search engine and the page you click on doesn't even one word of your search on it. I'm frustrated by that too. When reviewing stats for my blog I often will see questions people are asking and they are not finding the answers to them. I don't want that. So what I'll do is answer these questions at seemingly random times. One day this question came in:

"Why did Yukari say old farts in Episode 6 of Rosario + Vampire?"

    I was incredibly perplexed by this. In the couple of articles about Rosavam I had posted at the time sure I had the words Rosario, Vampire, and Yukari in them, but not at any time did I use the word "fart." I followed the link to the actual Google search the questioner had posed. It brought me to the page the Rosavam posting was on, but I discovered that off to the right is a drop down menu where all the titles to the posts on my blog. In one of them was the word fart. I got an answer to my question, now to answer the caller's question. So I watched both episodes Six of the Rosario Vampire anime. (At the time the anime was split into two different seasons with episodes labeled 1-13 in each. Now Rosavam is considered one series with episodes labeled 1-26.) In neither one did I hear Yukari say the word fart. I gave what I thought was the best answer I could and thought it was done.

Not so.

    A year later I started researching for this third article. I re-read the entire manga series. All 20 volumes; and re-watched the anime. Imagine my surprise when in Episode 7 Yukari did indeed say "old farts." I almost immediately made some corrections to the blog post and the first Rosavam article. Looking at the situation, it is totally understandable why Yukari would say that. Ever been to an old folks home? As to the mistake in the episode number, more than likely what happened is that the caller accidently hit the "6" key instead of teh "7" key.

    Sure made for an interesting discussion and gave me a lot to fix. Of course the ultimate in ironies is that no one has ever since asked about Yukari and her potty mouth. (Boy she sure loves saying titty pie.) Interestingly if you were to type that question into Google now, a page on Television Tropes and Idioms called A-Cup Angst comes up.

Merry Moka Mixer and a Vampire.

    In an earlier article I talk at exhausting length about how I thought it was odd that the silver haired Moka is always called "Inner Moka" and the pink haired Moka is always called "Outer Moka." Since then new evidence has shined some light on what is going on and arises a new theory.

    This new theory came to mind in Season 2 Volume 7. To catch up. Most everybody goes on a trip to China. They almost not make it because they have to fly through a Twilight Zone episode. In a seemingly forgotten side story energy sucking eggs have been planted at spiritual sources all over Japan. While trying to repair the Rosario Seal Tsukune, Moka, Tohofuhai, and (for some reason) Mizore are dragged into a dream world of Moka's repressed memories. There is where we get to meet Moka's mother for the first time.


The point would get reinforced several more times over the course of four volumes:


    To help explain let's look back at similar examples of this. This one is a stretch, but y'all know me, I will make the connection.

(Only cannon to the manga. Not in any way to the anime. Hell, the OVA's aren't even cannon to each other.)

    After quite the interesting secret visit by the Jurian Queens, Sasami feels quite lonely and homesick. To comfort her little sister, Ayeka reveals to Sasami that indeed this is her true form and she looks just like her and their mother Misaki. (Okay, I don't get it. How is that supposed to help with depression? Then again when it comes to Tenchi, you just have to accept everything it throws at you at face value.) It is explained that at a VERY young age Ayeka had her genes changed so that her father's allele would be dominant in order to make her look more like her brother's mother in order to get his attention.

    Applying this to Rosavam. The first thing the Rosario is doing is sealing off Moka's memory of the Alucard incident at her father's castle. These were very tragic times could lead to a total mental breakdown. Secondly the Rosario seals off Alucard's powers. Thereby keeping the monster asleep and preventing Moka from utilizing her full powers and waking up Alucard. One of the side effects is that the allele Moka inherited from her father are suppressed and her mother's take over making Moka look like Akasha.

    There of course a big major difference. Between Ayeka changing her looks and Moka's Rosario effects: Which I'll get into with this next example:

Let's not forget that there are actually FOUR Transformers movies.

    If you weren't scratching your heads before... After crashing into the planet eating monster Unicron, Hot Rod has to confront the evil leader of the Decepticons: Galvatron. Just as Hot Rod was about to be defeated, he grabs the Autobot Matrix of Leadership and is transformed into Rodimus Prime. He uses the Matrix to destroy Unicron. However, can he overcome the greatest of all threats: an animation studio that gets paid more for Dragon Ball?

    I know what you must be asking: "Is this guy ever going to get fitted for a straight jacket?" Or maybe: "Is this some lame attempt at SEO?" Perhaps: "Does he have a social life at all?" (Rest assured I know what it is like to have a woman in a G-string giving me a lap dance.)

    The Matrix and Rosario seal are similar in two ways: The Rosario changes Moka's appearance and the Matrix changes Hot Rod's look. Most importantly both alter personalities to some extent. Inner Moka tends to be brash and never hesitates to fight while Outer Moka is shy and needs a lot of provoking to raise a hand. Hot Rod always had a shoot first and don't even bother with questions later while Rodimus Prime trends more towards level headedness with loads of second guessing.

    The effects of removal have strange effects. As narrated in almost every episode of the anime, releasing the Rosario Seal increases Moka's strength, and (with lots of close-ups,) makes Moka bigger. In only three episodes, if Rodimus loses the Matrix he gets smaller and weaker.

    Another similarity is memory access. The Rosario seals away memories and the Matrix stores memories. The memories can be seen by knocking oneself out. Another difference is that while Rodimus and Optimus Prime could do this, Moka could not. Only her friends could view them.

    Okay now my main point. My theory is that is not "Outer Moka." It is in fact Akasha. She is hiding Alucard's powers and her daughter Moka in plain sight.


    Then again I am probably, completely wrong on this account. I know all I have to do is just go online and read Volumes 11 and 12. No need to embarrass myself again with my wild and crazy conspiracy theories. Then again a long time ago I promised not to do that and enjoy the series like most people do: One at a time on the official release schedule. I WILL NOT engage in any spoiler alerts.

    Besides, if this is totally wrong, I've kept a couple things to myself that I could talk about replacing this subject.

Season II Volume 11 and a Vampire.
Panty Shot: 2. Nudity: 2. Other: 10.


    With thanks once again to Hastings for releasing this way ahead of schedule. (Okay I admit it, I've spent a couple of days trolling all the bookstores in my area and checking the iPad to see if there was any hope that there might be an early release again.)

    Continuing where we left off last time: Our heroes continue on down to the deepest depths of the Fairy Tale's headquarters. Bit by bit the team is split off into different groups to fight on their own against the mightiest of Fairy Tale's division leaders. Fangfang and Yukari team up in a very personal battle with what happens to be an unwilling Xilong. Yukari uses Fangfang's own magic much to his chagrin and much to her detriment. In trying protect her Fangfang realizes his true abilities and calling in life. After the dust settles another Fairy Tale leader brings the roof down on top of everybody.


    Meanwhile Tsukune, Kurumu, Ruby, and Mizore are stopped by Miyabi Fujusaki. They turn down his offer of help because of the way he treated Mizore in the Snow Fairy village and then are set upon by Kiria Yoshi. He has orders from Gyokuro to dispose of the heroes and traitors to Fairy Tale. Kiria sends Tsukune and Ruby to an alternate void but is stopped by Miyabi when he tries to fight Kurumu and Mizore.


    Meanwhile the B Team is on its way in. However they underestimated Gyokuro's detection abilities and are beset upon by a flock of dragons. Worse yet, they have no idea what is really going with Team A.


    Meanwhile at the urging of Miyabi, Kurumu and Mizore go on ahead. They are the first to reach Moka, and her sister Aqua. Meanwhile Tsukune is trapped in a void where he has to fight an old enemy and sees the true leader of Fairy Tale for the first time.


    Meanwhile I'm not going to complain about the boss rush format because I already did in the last article. I didn't have very high hopes for this volume and my expectations were met. The art was still tops, but it seemed as if things were a little rushed. Not as much attention to details. I'll admit the backstory of Fangfang and Xilong was interesting, but it really didn't add much to the story. The individual physical battles felt more as if they were filler. Then the battles of emotional discovery gave the impression of being a bit forced. Kurumu had a big revelation in Volume 9 about the depth of her love for Tsukune, then a little personal moment with him at the beginning of Volume 10, now she has a sudden change in her feelings towards Moka and how that now can fulfill her life.


    I'm now more worried about Volume 12. Akihisa Ikeda has alluded there to being maybe a total of 12 volumes to Rosario Vampire Season 2. I am perplexed as to how he is going to pull that off at this point. Is he going to have a mass extinction of villains in a chapter? Is B-Team going to crash right on top of them? How are the heroes going to meet back up? Is B-Team going to crash a tunnel right to Alucard? Doing a little research on Wikipedia and a manga scan site tells me that there have been at least 61 total chapters at this point. For the most part volumes have no more than six chapters in them. Some as few as four. There's a possibility that there could be a Rosario Vampire Season 2 Volume 13. At this point it looks as if it is degrading into a fighting series.

    That scares me even more. I don't particularly like fighting anime or manga. It is just one pointless fight to another pointless fight with chapters of pointless exposition between punches with any character growth forgotten about in the next episode.

    Unfortunately it is a winning formula. How big a residual check does Akira Toriyama still get after thirty years?

Naughty is as Naughty Does and a Vampire.

    I've mentioned throughout that for this article I endeavored to go back and read all the manga and watch the anime. What on Earth possessed me to do this? To be honest, one of the most frequent queries I see in my web stats are people asking about the nudity, upskirts, yaoi, yuri, and bunches more of the adult orientated comedy that abounds in Rosario Vampire. Now I am going to pretend that these are concerned parents looking up information on what it is their kids are wanting them to buy. (More than likely the kids are already on those manga sites clicking on the ecchi tags.) For some strange reason when people type their questions into Google they are finding my sites (I guess it helps being that Blogger is a Google product) and not finding what it is they want to know. They're only seeing me bitch about it.

    Quite frankly I think I have done the series an injustice in the way I talked about it in the past. You would think that every page is all nudity. Not so. In Season One I counted only four instances of nudity. That sure doesn't cover ten volumes or forty chapters. There is however the overall feeling you get from a series. What sticks out in my mind is all the panty shots. It bugs me because of the age of the characters. Most are 15, 16, and 17 years old. If was just a college of some sort I wouldn't have much of a problem. (I am well aware that Japanese customs and law are a bit different than American ones.)

    Reading from the beginning two things stand out. The first is the drawing style. Over the years it went from simplistic to painstaking attention to detail. A rather generous use comedic facial expressions and backgrounds to only the occasional use of such. The writing has certainly changed. Starts out as mostly a comedy with stories only going for a chapter or two. Then going into multiple volumes and tugging at heart strings.

     

    Now back to my main point. After seeing how on occasion I get visitors based on some of the questionable content of Rosario Vampire, I decided I really needed to do a research project and count all of the instances of upskirts. It's the right thing to do. I mentioned earlier that I don't like it when I type a question into a search engine and getting thousands of results and not one has the answer I seek. (I've been pulling my hair out trying to figure out a way to keep the background images used on pages like this from scrolling on the iPad.) While I don't mind getting a person or two finding my sites, I need to give them something of what they are looking for to get them to stay a while.

    First is the anime because it will the take the shortest time to get through. You see my methodology in counting the content of the anime was the exact opposite of the manga. The manga is full of groping and pillowing. I had watched the anime before and already knew trying to keep track of it was a lost cause. So I decided to see if there was ONE episode that a friend of mine would allow his fifteen year old son watch.

NOT ONE.

    That's right. EVERY episode has nudity, upskirts, panty shots, cursing and almost everything else on the upcoming lists. I watched the original DVD Funimation dub releases. Two volumes of two disks each. Rosario Vampire and Rosario Vampire Capu 2. Total of twenty-six episodes.

    Next is the manga. I started reading the original hard copies, but decided instead to read it on my iPad. I think the iPad is better in many ways. Keep in mind that the pages are illustrated on a large white sheet of paper. Unfortunately paper fades. Some of my volumes are starting to turn gray and yellow. If you get good scans of the original work it will be preserved much longer. Plus who ever did the scanning of Rosario Vampire was able to get high quality with rather small file sizes. Also you can get decent enough close ups with out too much distortion. In some cases in the hard copy manga it is hard to see some detail. With the iPad I can take my thumb and forefinger and enlarge it to see what it is I'm missing. On top of that the iPad screen is bigger than the manga pages. Making it all look better. I mentioned before about flat paper. When you bind pages up into a book the words and pictures acquire a bend to them. Of course with a scene that runs across two pages there is a crease marring everything. That isn't present at all on the iPad. (Unfortunately the original drawings used in cross page scenes were not scanned and the manga pages were. You can see the seems where the images were cut apart.)


I think the iPad gets you back to the artists' original intent and makes for a much more enjoyable experience on the reader's part.

    Now back to my main point. Up next is a list of things in Rosario Vampire that some people may find objectionable. This list is totally arbitrary. What one person may find out of bounds may not be for others. Some may have included things I didn't, or have a much higher or lower count. Take what I say with not just a grain of salt, but a whole 55 gallon drum. I am not going into much detail as to what I mean by each item or give explanation as to how I came up with the the numbers that I did. I am NOT going to tell you where to find each instance because I don't this to become a hentai-wiki on Rosavam. I am NOT going to show any pictures what-so-ever. I would have to post the whole series. Other sites have already done that.

    One thing I tried to be was fair. If say a character was running around in her bra and panties (Why is it that panties are plural and bra is singular?) like in Season 2 where Akasha is fighting Alucard in her lingerie for a couple of  chapters that only counts as 1. It is one continuous action. Where as if Yukari is groping Moka in one panel, then in the next isn't, then goes back to groping her in the third then that counts as two. It's not the same action. There is a clearly defined break between the two gropings.

    So without further to do:

Season 1 Naughty Count and a Vampire.

Almost Upskirt: 50.
    I gave up at 50. I believe I reached that total around Volume 4 or 5. To explain that it is when a character is bending over almost a little too much, but, not showing anything.

Shaded Upskirt: 43.
    No character wears tights or pantyhose, and only Akasha wore black underwear. Could be called a bit of censorship, or just happen stance of the way lighting throws shadows whenever Moka gives one of her kicks.

Upskirt: 23.
    Surprising that it took until Volume 5 to get ten of these.

Panty Shot: 39.
    There is a difference between an upskirt and a panty shot. One involves camera angles and the other can involve wind.

Underwear: 10.

Pillowing: 10.
    That's when a woman presses a guys head into her chest. (Doesn't always have to be a guy.)

Accidental Groping: 2.
    When someone trips and falls on another person and gets a "handful."

Purposeful Groping: 11.

Butt Shot: 1.

Boob Shot: 2.

Side Boob: 1.

Peeing: 1.

Wet T-Shirt Contest (no bra:) 1.

Wet T-Shirt Contest (with bra:) 1.

Almost Nude: 2.

Hidden Nudity: 2.
    Long hair used to cover up or conveniently placed statue.

Nudity: 4.


Season 2 Naughty County and a Vampire.
This will be updated as new volumes are released.

Almost Upskirt: 55.

Shaded Upskirt: 24.

Upskirt: 4.

Shaded Panty Shot: 2.

Panty Shot: 28.

Underwear: 8.

Pillowing: 15.

Attempted Pillowing: 1.

Accidental Groping: 1.
    Amazing.

Purposeful Groping: 10.

Side Boob: 4.

Attempted Boob Shot: 1.

Wet T-Shirt Contest (with bra:) 1.

Almost Nude: 2.

Nudity: 8.

Topless: 1.

Tentacles: 3.

Suggested Yaoi Moment: 7.

Humping Animals: 2.

Masochism Tango: 16.


Yuri Moment: 3.


    The one thing that really stood out in the counting is how much less of the things such as upskirts and panty shots there were from Season 1 to Season 2. I think it could be because the second season tended to focus more on story and character development and stuff like pillowing were saved for comedic effect.
Though it seems that by halving the number of times a girl is "accidently" groped has led to a doubling of the nude scenes.
   Rosario Vampire: From Plus To Cross.           Rosario Vampire: Her Shoes.           Rosario Vampire: What Butters the Bread.