Briathrail // Albert 2MNG

Once I got the noodles down, I chilled at the hotel for an hour. As I planned the day to be just around Ximending, I had oodles of time. I went back down the lounge to grab some snacks. There was this cracker snack with toasted sesame seeds that I liked. I also took some imitations of European choco wafers, some cookies, along with two orange juice packs.

Once I got cooled off in the hotel – I also took a cold shower – I went out to the second one in my itinerary, Comic Toranoana.

Now this one, I had higher hopes. From what I gathered from online lookups, the store looked “seedy” in a good way. Unlike the earlier store (Animate) that looked like a trendy underground store, Toranoana looked like that seedy pub that sold hooch that’ll make you forget your problems for an hour.

So I walked a few blocks down until Google Maps told me I was in front of the establishment. I was to go to the elevator but I was stopped by the security guard and he pointed me towards the stairs. Well, seems like it is the preferred path, the stairs were festooned with signages.

Once there, I was greeted by rows upon rows of doujin. Loads of… porn. I declined to take pictures inside as most of the displays were of the sexually explicit nature. Take a pic and there might be a stray tit somewhere, so no. There was even an exhibit to the right of the entrance that showed various artist exhibits of tastefully drawn nude females with almost-impossible breast sizes. Man, what made it hilarious in a way was that there were people inside the exhibit room looking at them like they were in the Lourve or something. So no inside pics.

I liked it though 😉 😉

But what was nice of the place was that it had slightly older items. Unlike Animate that made me feel like they tried to keep some items at least current and kept the older items as inconspicuous as possible, Toranoana was more liberal. I saw dōjins as far back as 2016. There were some helpful labels, and many of them were still in very good condition. There were also merch, pins and trinkets that were noticeably older but still very usable. And unlike Animate, they had tankōbon, of at least the same quality as the ones I saw in many Book-Off stores in Japan.

So what I ended up buying?

• A Hoshimachi Suisei shirt. It was the only shirt I found “decent” for casual wear. Toranoana had t-shirt merch, and I hoped I could find at least two. But only one was good enough. There was another I liked but I fear it might only be acceptable to wear in a friendly place like an anime convention. And there was a shirt that also basically screamed “weebs!” in a bad way, so I had no intention to buy. I can’t even regularly wear a Nier Automata shirt that I own because 2B’s in a slightly suggestive pose in the front.
• Four Honkai Star Rail doujin. Nope, not porn in any way. I will never bring one of those back to Singapore, no sir. It’s more like a comic slice of life of how the author imagined the HSR characters might do. One was an anthology-style book. The art was also extremely impressive, and one of them looked like it could pass for official HSR material.
• More pins and stickers. Toranoana also had those wacky stickers with messages like “Beware Man Inside”, so of course I grabbed some for a future laptop to festoon with. Lots of older pins, so I grabbed some of the old animes.
• Two more FGO doujin. Again, not porn. More of the anthology-style ones that are essentially “slice of life” piecemeal comics. One also has Mordred in the cover, so I had to get one. I had to admit these were hard to find, as the porn is just *chef’s kiss* too many.
• Two plastic folders. One was of Gundam and one was of FGO.
• One anime notebook.

Once I was done, I thought I sped through it until I looked at my watch. Fuck me, I spent almost two hours in that place. So I exited the place to at least plan my next steps.

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