Paranormal Powered Teenage Love Triangles

As predicted a couple of posts back, the traffic roller coaster ride continues - after several days of non-existent search traffic from Google, the past few days have been more robust.  It is still very patchy, though.  While Google traffic has begun to reappear after their most recent update, most of the visits seem to be being driven by DuckDuckGo and Bing - and China, mainly via Baidu.  Indeed, The Sleaze seems to be building a small following in China, though God knows why, as none of the content is targeted there.  But enough traffic talk.  My regular fix of sailor suited crime fighting Japanese schoolgirls has, at least temporarily, come to end, now that I've seen all of Sukeban Deka II - Legend of the Iron Masked Girl.  (Unlike the original Sukeban Deka series, this one didn't have a downbeat ending, with its heroine completing her mission and living to fight another day).  Courtesy of the same streaming channel that I'd seen the series on, I was able to catch up with the 2006 movie reboot of Sukeban Deka (released in the US and UK as Yo Yo Cop Girl).  Interestingly, it rather mitigates the first series' downbeat ending (which saw the original Sukeban Deka trapped in a burning building and presumed dead), by having the original lead actress turn up as the latest undercover girl cop's mother - and making pretty clear to anyone who'd seen the TV series that she was playing the same character.

The closest I've so far come to finding another piece of Japanese pop culture that intrigues me as much is the anime series Kimagure Orange Road.  Like Sukeban Deka, this is based on a Manga and has a high school background.  It even features a character who could be described as a sukeban ('delinquent girl'), although she most certainly isn't an undercover detective.  I've so far only been able to watch two episodes of the series, (one purely by chance), but it is intriguing.  The main plot involves a teenage boy starting a new school in a new city, having been forced to move (for the seventh time) because he and his younger sisters have various paranormal powers and the family doesn't want to draw attention to themselves, (unfortunately, one of the sisters is reckless and keeps using her powers).  The day before starting the new school, he briefly meets a teenage girl who he likes and seems to like him.  The following day, he encounters her again, when she turns out to be the school sukeban - the first episode climaxes with her single handedly taking on and beating an entire biker gang in defence of her best friend.  She denies ever having met the boy, leaving him confused.  Inevitably, rejected by the object of his desire, our hero starts a relationship with her best friend, (in truth, he just wants to be friends, but she is more enthusiastic as to the idea of being his girl friend), even though the sukeban girl (who also plays the saxophone), does secretly like him.  

This love triangle and the ongoing attempts by the boy and his family to keep their powers under wraps, form the basis of the series' ongoing story lines.  It certainly seems to take some bizarre turns: in the episode I saw by chance he somehow swaps his consciousness with that of a goldfish, which is won at a fairground sideshow by the two girls, before jumping to a cat, in which form he saves the sukeban's life before returning to his own body and inadvertently kissing one of his sisters.  It isn't easy to find episodes with English subtitles, but there were a couple of anime movie spin offs I've tracked down, both with subtitles, so I'll hopefully catch up with these soon.  So, maybe Kimagure Orange Road will become my new Sukeban Deka, in my accidental drift through Japanese pop culture.  Who knows?