BOOTLEG BLOG

Review: This, in my opinion, is the best depiction of what it's like to live with mental illness and neurodivergence I've seen in any piece of media ever, particularly autism, schizophrenia, and OCD. Milk Inside A Bag Of Milk follows a simple story of an unnamed girl going to buy a bag of milk from the gas station, this visual novel showcasing how a simple task such as just going to buy milk is made an active hurdle for those suffering from neurological abnormalities they have no control over. I hope this visual novel could potentially help people at least feel more empathy for people like her and me.
SPOILERS SECTION
Something I enjoy a lot about Milk is that it's story can be taken both literally and metaphorically and still get it's point across well. Like taking the clerk who only speaks in "O"s for example, it could be taken literally as a hallucination of mental distortion, but also could be taken metaphorically to showcase the social discomfort and auditory processing issues that come with something like autism. My personal favorite scenes are when our protagonist struggles to understand the process of purchasing an item, the strange language of the clerk being a clear depiction of how having a brain wired completely differently from the norm can make what is considered 'basic knowledge' not basic.
Another being the genuine panic our main character feels when she realizes she's been walking 'unevenly' between the grass and pavement, this I feel is a great depiction of symptoms of OCD, particularly more 'abnormal' and honestly more realistic ones, remember that cleanliness isn't the only form OCD takes.

CONTENT WARNING LIST: Very detailed depiction of mental illnesses mentioned above

Review: Easily one of the most iconic Sonic games in the franchise, an amazing sequal and what would've been an amazing end to Sonic the Hedgehog if Sega didn't manage to climb themselves back up through making games for other consoles. SA2's gameplay hasn't aged perfectly, personally speaking I'd say mostly in the mech stages, but I still feel like the game as a whole has aged wonderfully. SA2 also sealing what makes Sonic truly different from Mario, it's willingness to be dark and, dare I say, edgier, and a lot more serious.
SPOILER SECTION
SA2 shows that you can infact take extremely heavy subject matter such as trauma and teach it to children in a way they can understand, Shadow very much being the highlight of the story. His intense rage, his grief, even if exacerbated by Professor Gerald, is still extremely real, children can handle more than people think.

CONTENT WARNING LIST: Death of a child.

Review: Wonder Egg Priority is an anime with a lot on it's mind and has it's heart in the right place, but is aggresively held back by strange pacing, questionable plot decisions, and a cliffhanger that'll never be fulfilled as it did not do well enough to get a 2nd season. We follow a girl named Ai Ohto who while grieving the loss of her only friend who took her own life, she finds herself in the midst of a program in which she can purchase Wonder Eggs, and said eggs allow her to meet other girls who have taken their own life and help them be freed from their demons and move on to their afterlife
SPOILERS SECTION
There is a lot that Wonder Egg Priority does right, for example; the entire character arc of Rika Kawai is fucking amazing. Rika being a former idol both struggling with a terrible family life and riddled with guilt over directly causing one of her biggest fans to develop anorexia leading to her own death, along with one of the best handlings of self harm I've ever seen in any media ever. Another amazing one is Momoe, a character heavily implied to be a trans woman who started presenting as male again after the trauma of the only girl who ever saw her as a girl forcing herself upon her, along with Momoe helping an explicit trans man move to the afterlife after helping him face his terrifying trauma of being raped after attempting to come out to his teacher.
Unfortinately, the stories inconsistencies, strange pacing, and extremely questionable stuff such as falling into the "trans suicide" trope, the fact that it's never actually confirmed or not if Momoe is a trans woman, constant need to vitimize it's female cast and never punish it's male cast for everything they do, and much more, make it hard to recommend.

CONTENT WARNING LIST: bullying, suicide, self harm, violence towards a trans man, rape, sexual assault, forced impregnation from rape, and a lot of scenes involving subject matter related to sexism

Review: You follow adventurer Laios Touden along side party members of an elf named Marcille Donato, a halfling named Chilchuck Tims, and a dwarf named Senshi, all on an adventure to slay the Red Dragon that ate Laios's sister before she gets digested. Dungeon Meshi is one of the very few pieces of media that properly displays the feel a DnD story has, a perfect blend of goofiness, believability, and genuinely gripping storytelling. A story so good that I binged the entirety of the manga within a week. It also takes the question of "this classic fantasy creature... what does it taste like?" and weaponizes it both for insane world building and genuinely great symbolism.
SPOILERS SECTION
Did I expect the funny food fantasy manga was gonna be about inevitable death and metaphorical rebirth from your body itself giving back to the world in some way or another? No, but oh my god I enjoyed every moment. The moment the Red Dragon plot thread ends earlier than expected Dungeon Meshi just keeps esculating and somehow makes it work.
Laios is easily my favorite character, him being this complete and total abnormality to everyone and everything around him causing him to feel intensely isolated and only truly connected to monsters, hits, it hits really hard.

CONTENT WARNING LIST: violent imagery, massive focus on food, non-sexual nudity, themes around death and loss.