February 2004's Fucking O-Link-u! Honoree:
angelfish / luvu-luvu.net

Otakuism, like many other epidemics, knows no age. While the stereotypical otaku is one in their mid-to-late teens, or twenty-somethings who have yet to mature beyond their mid-to-late teens, it's often not too hard to find people who fall along the edges of the spectrum, from senior citizen cosplayers, to the webmistress of this month's Fucking O-Link-u, "emi."

We know we're in trouble by the splash screen. Besides being a severe web design faux pas, it tells us a "love for anime :3" is a requirement for entering the site. This will be the first of approximately 824 :3 emoticons on emi's site. We also need a "mild understanding of japanese." Oh, yeah, and did you notice the picture of Shinji and Kaworu? Wow, cliche and homoerotic at the same time! I don't know about you, but I can barely contain my excitement about having the opportunity to peruse what must be the greatest web site since the badger mushroom thing. Let's enter.

Oh.

Okay, now first, a little history about myself before I continue. I have been designing web sites for eight years now... heck, since I was emi's age. I even got paid for it once. There's enough horror on angelfish if you just stick to the content, but being a webmaster, I can't help but notice the page design first off, because, good God, is it awful. Really, if your site breaks in the Mozilla-based Camino (Screenshot - Those white blobs on the far right are supposed to be the content), the Mozilla-based Firefox (Screenshot - Content? What content?), and the Konqueror-based Safari (Screenshot - Close, but no cigar), then you have problems. That's right, emi clearly designed her site specifically for Internet Explorer and only Internet Explorer, and the code confirms that by containing lots of IE-specific code that does such wonderful things as changing the look of your cursor to a crosshair (except when you mouse over the links; then it logically turns to a "help" cursor) and changing the colors of the scroll bar. Bad webmistress! Bad!

But even if you are using Microsoft's shitty browser (or Konqueror proper, which, oddly enough, shows the page "correctly" save for the IE-specific stuff), it's still ass ugly. White text on a light orange background. Brilliant! It kind of helps if you select the text so that the background changes to a darker color, but I came up with an even better solution; the black-and-white, text-only web browser Links. Take that, emi! I can mock your site and save my eyesight at the same time!

All right, enough of that. Odds are nine out of ten of you are using Internet Ass-plorer (okay, sorry, that was a stretch) right now anyway... you don't care. Let's see beyond the broken layouts and eye-straining colors at what angelfish has for us.

I couldn't make this stuff up.

Is this where I need a "mild understanding of japanese?" Of course, I can see it now...

Reporter: Mr Koizumi, President- Elect Sharpton has stated he intends to reverse America's position on the Kyoto Protocol, and will encourage third-world countries to do so as well. What is Japan's response, Mr Prime Minister?
Koizumi: X3 waii!!! sankyuuuu!!!!!! XDDD veddy genki~ deshuuuu!!! :DDDDDDDDDDDD

The pages in the "verb" section (which are actually mostly nouns) mostly feature emi's artwork. It's all pretty much better than my non-artistic ass can do, so I guess I can't bitch; though it is all kind of trite, right down to lots of "bish" and a kitty-girl Rei Ayanami. And look at what we find on her "Projects" page...

love love land XDDD;;; that's a tentative title, thank gawd. anyway, this is going to be a typical romantic comedy--one boi, millionsa girls. problem is, the main character, kousuke, is a major otaku, and the girls are virtual girls... eeto, see, kousuke was sucked into a dating sim game he was playing, and he's stuck there infinitely. very typical, but also has a twist, considering the girls arent real.. >:3

The pages in the "adjective" section, which again are titled mostly as nouns, allow us to delve deeper into all that is emi. Lucky us. From the "rants" page:

I don't know about you, but I totally agree with emi here. How dare the sequel to a cheap fan service anime have even more fan service than the original! US OTAKU WILL NOT STAND FOR THIS! WE DEMAND ANIME WITH TWO BOYS GOING AT IT INSTEAD OF THIS CRAP!

emi appears to be going through that special time in a teen's life, as evidenced by her "sessiest" page, in which she highlights her "top list of sessiest bish! XD". Staggeringly, two of them, "Draco Malfoy" from the Harry Potter movies and some "azn pop singer" ("*_* he looks like a living bish!"), actually exist; but the rest are anime characters, because it would only be typical for an otaku to show romantic interest in cartoon characters. The most disturbing, though, are the last three on the list.

10) loki [matantei loki:ragnarok] i turned pedophilic because of him *_* he's so yummy as a kid and even yummier as an adult XD 11) hiro sohma [furuba] another one of my pedophilic obssession ;D he's too sekshi for his age *-* :molests: ooh...100% wool panties, hiro-kun? ;D 12) tao ren [shaman king] another pedophilic obssession u.u; his unispike turns me on ;D

But wait! There's more. It turns out angelfish is just a small part of luvu luvu, emi's collection of sites. They all have Enter pages, all kinda look the same, and many make me wonder if little emi is colorblind. Her main site ("Hawawa! You've stumbled upon my rant space! :D Luvu-Luvu.net e youkoso deshu! :hands yew onigiri plush:") has purple text upon a purple background. Oy. There's a shrine to "genjo sanzo" (who?) entitled toilet paper and a shrine to "the blade children of spiral" (what?) entitled burechiru. That's "blade children" pronounced in Japanese. You see, because if you take an English phrase, take the first sounds from each words, change all "l" sounds into "r" sounds, and put a "u" at the end, it becomes Japanese.

Her reviews page is predictable:

Just like a FnO to put Evangelion over Mobile Suit Gundam, don't you think? We also learn on this site that she is a big fan of Chobits. Good God, where are this kid's parents? Who's letting this child watch a cartoon where a horny eighteen-year-old pushes a preteen-looking robot's clitoris to power her on?

In Wai Wai Graphics, emi shows off some of her avatar work, all of which looks very cliche, and also offers to make us a layout for our site. 

"I, uhm, don't do hentai images o_o Yaoi or yuri stuffs are okay, just keep it below NC-17 >>;"

God. Okay, emi, so homosexual pornography is okay, but none of that heterosexual stuff, eh? (I don't care if that's not really what she meant. I'm making that joke anyway.)

But you know she has one, and here it comes... emi's blog, narcissistic. Feeling masochistic today?

... :: 10.29.03 omg. and just when i thought our friendship couldn't go any more down the drain, she removes me from her friends list. ...omg. im seriously saddened by this. because we were such good friends before. and i was on her friends list. but she removed me. and i dont even know why. now i cant even comment on her journal entries anymore. why? why did this happen? i want to be her friend so much, why doesn't she want me? ... sorry for angsty monologue >.>;

There are other parts of this site, too, but I won't go into them. Let me just sum them all up for you: Deshu deshu deshuuuu, o_O' XDDDD X333333, yew yew yew yew yew yew yew yew yew yew (taxol?) yew deshuu, sesshi yaoi wai~ baka, X33 yew deshu.

Before I finished writing this, Chiriko told me that I should try to go gentle on young emi; she is, after all, only a kid. And, really, I guess it is less shameful for a fourteen-year-old to do this than a full-grown adult. Emily Hu, these are your formative years; please reconsider the direction you're taking with your life!

Allow me to conclude this article by stating I myself have a younger sister whom I am quite close to, probably because I live 200-plus miles away. She is a couple of years younger than emi, but I swear, the first time I hear her utter the words "sessy bish" or "deshuuu," I will be exercising my brotherly right to beat the crap out of her.

~Albright