the nightmare of The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses

This one shot from the anime The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses absolutely fucking haunts me.

The show itself is like, bad, from what I've seen of it, a one-note fetish show where an unlikably bland boy gets paired up with a similarly bland girl who has some minor gimmick, in this show's case the fact that she wears glasses and frequently forgets them and thus spends much of the show stumbling around like an abandoned baby. I dropped the anime because Yeah Duh, but what makes it notable is that the show was animated by space-warping deranged animation masters Studio GoHands, and while their more out there tendencies are not IMMEDIATELY obvious from looking at this shot, in the context of the series itself this image becomes a totem of dread to me.

Let me break it down for you, OK? First, there's his facial expression, a mix of deep anxiety and confused arousal that knows that he's feeling something he shouldn't because of these glasses but not quite knowing why. Makes sense, given that the guy is a teenager and is thus not old enough to be properly informed about what a fetish is. The tissue being taken from a tissue box is, I'm sorry, the most obvious symbolism on earth. He Is Going To Whack It To The Glasses, there is no other way to interpret the shot. Note also how the bookcase---empty, by the way, reduced to a pure prop devoid of any purpose---cuts the image sharply in half, imposing an invisible barrier between the boy and his object of desire. And of course, there are the glasses themselves, shoved way in the forefront in much the same kind of shot comp you'd see in a more "normal" (I use the term lightly) ecchi series applied to boobs or an ass or something similar. Here it is of course redirected and rewired, the object of his lust is not a woman herself, it's the object she adorns her face with. This image is so Freudian that the man himself would pass out.

I am conflicted on how to interpret GoHands' work in general but this shot alone is a case for them as unsung geniuses. The overall effect is unpleasant, don't get me wrong, especially given the age of the characters in question, but it's such an effective imposition of deep discomfort onto the viewer that it's hard to believe it's not on some level intentional. Or, perhaps, if you're also a glasses fetishist, this is just the sexiest picture on earth to you. I'm not one, so I suppose I wouldn't know.