Hey! A Groundhog!

It's been a baffling and annoying six months, and the world's probably going to blow up. Fine. Good. Whatever. It's hard to deny it was headed that way anyhow.

Regardless, I've been watching The Laughing Salesman NEW on Crunchyroll, and either I'm getting too old and liberal or that is one noticably anti-woman program. Five episodes in and women seem to be felled exclusively for flagrant vanity or treachery, while men (ever noble) meet with their ill fates for an excess of ambition in work or sport, or their adorable weakness for sentimentality.

Outside of the above, there's also a seeming disconnect between the graveness of the sin and the severity of the punishment inflicted - I'm going to chalk this up to a cultural gap or the writers' personal grievances (spoilers follow), because it just reads weird from my side.

Deliberately trying to cheat the titular Salesman and get around the restrictive rule placed on your 'infinite' credit?

Aged up what looks like eighty years into a wizened old geezer.

Fair enough, I guess, for intentionally trying to subvert the rule instead of just openly breaking it. Hubris: punished. Vintage Aesop there. But, of course, to a vainglorious womantype, this is a fate worse than Hell itself.

Seizing the role of a jerky boss and disrupting a new-age workplace merits

being driven literally frothing-mad and used as a theme park exhibit forevermore

- a little harsh, but in this age of everyone disturbing the shit and/or upsetting the apple cart just for the sake of it, one could argue it's not completely unwarranted.

Lying about loving your aging mother's cooking then trading lunchboxes on the sly (that and failing to come clean when given the opportunity), however, results in

public humiliation, your girlfriend leaving you, your mother being psychologically scarred for the rest of her days and your having to eat gludgy, unpleasant 1950s lunches for the same duration.

A runner sharing your explicitly-identified-as-secret speed boost item with the person you just started dating? Good going - thanks to that darned womanly capriciousness,

you're now trapped in an ironic Hell running against an unending crowd who all have the same power-up, because she just had to blab it on social media...

...seemingly forever, since the tale ends with a tellingly good-drawing'd scream. That just seems excessive.

Now, jumping into a marriage proposal based on an idealized mental image? That shit gets you

EATEN BY A FREAKING ZOMBIE.

Those womenfolk again, I tell ya.

Still, all in all not a terrible watch. The Salesman, Fukuzou Moguro, is a character kind of like if Dilbert's Phil the Prince of Insufficient Light had access to properly Hellish torments - although the penalty for excessive interest in clubbing, particularly on work hours, is more like a classic 'darning'. The cruel, ironic punishment inflicted on this poor protagonist is...

getting stuck with the (admittedly massive) tab.

It seems like there's a pretty wide range of penalties for "bad office behaviour".

I'd be amiss not to point out that the denouement always comes when, a la Willy Wonka or God, the episode's protagonist disobeys the one condition that Moguro places on their "gift". However, the same desires that lead the focal characters to accept in the first place invariably lead to this outcome.

And this, folks, is what studying Social and Political Philosophy ends up doing to your brain - it wrecks cartoons for you. That should be all the encouragement anyone needs to just say no.