If you're engaging in overly-clichéd behaviour, surely at some point, if you have any level of self-awareness at all, you realise it. Obviously not every one does. Legions of hipsters still to this day sit in coffee shops perusing their Mac Books without the slightest sliver of irony at all (aside from the usual swathes of standard-issue irony that infuse everything they wear and do on a daily basis, naturally). Rafts of teenage girls still take mopey, wide-eyed black-and-white photos and stick them on their Facebook profiles next to whiny, self-pitying, attention-whoring status updates.
Some people just don't get it.
Above: People not getting it
Such seems to be the case with this story. Because seemingly not content with just falling into the Governmental-Sexual-Deviant stereotype slot, and not entirely satisfied by being a late 30s Japanese man taking illicit up-skirt photos of younger women, the hero of our tale then decided to blame the whole thing on video games as well. All we're missing here are a high-level media corruption scandal, a rigged election and a Gundam, and then I reckon we'll have wrung the maximum cliche potential we can out of this one.
But maybe I'm being too cynical about this guy's level of self-insight. Maybe he's actually some kind of high-level self-awareness genius, so in tune with the social tropes and platitudes of his situation that he's playing with us and them, piling on as many clichés as possible to as to become a deliberate, self-aware, post-modern ultra-cliché.
Still, his explanation for hiding a camera in a bag in order to take the offending pictures - despite having been arrested for similar behaviour before - is rather interesting...
Above: May not be the exact method used
"It wasn't that I forgot I was arrested for taking Peeping Tom photos, it's just that taking them was like playing a video game"
Not "Video games turned me into a deviant and made me do it". No, instead he said that his adventure was like a video game. So what kinds of video games is he playing?
Obviously a stack of hentai and pantsu-related games are available worldwide, but maybe he was actually talking about stealth games, given his methods. Maybe he was trying to create a situation more along the lines of Metal Gear, only with (slightly) more gratuitous titillation and bawdy content.
There's probably a cracking Metal Rear Squalid pun to be made here, but I just can't quite finish it in a satisfying manner. I blame my insufficient intake of coffee today. So I throw it out to you to do what you can with it in the comments. But let's stay away from any Solid Snake jokes. They're too obvious and we're all above them.
