On the Time I Gave Sendai-obasan My Money

This is a bit awkward, and I hesitated for a long time over whether to bring it up.

But since I was going to write a Galgame impressions post today and don’t have the time, I’ll just use this story to fill the slot.

As a Sendai-obasan anti-fan, I spent a while grumbling about how “basically every heroine in every game has the same voice,” but she does have the talent, and I’d jerked off to her before, so when I heard she was crowdfunding a music album I figured I’d support it. After all, I wasn’t spending money on her—I just wanted to hear the songs.

The crowdfunding album thing was around 2019, ages ago. I backed it the moment it went live. Then COVID hit, and what was supposed to ship in 2020 got delayed, delayed, delayed all the way to the second half of 2021. And for at least half a year in there, Sendai-obasan said absolutely nothing about the crowdfunding. It felt like a straight-up scam.

So around the second half of last year, I finally got an email from Sendai-obasan saying the album was almost done and about to ship. I started getting all ワクワクする—then I read the email more carefully and noticed a problem…

I’d backed the 6,500 yen tier, but to my surprise, that tier wasn’t for an album at all. It was for:

What the hell is this? What do you mean, “a game releasing on Friday is see-through”? I use a black plastic bag just to buy mouthwash, okay? Is there some dumbass out there who’d actually carry an eroge around in this dumbass bag? Is this some new generation of humiliation play? Then I noticed the line underneath:

“こちらは、グッズのみのプランです。” (This tier is goods only.)

lol, so a tier this expensive doesn’t even come with the album?

I scrambled to contact Sendai-obasan, but none of the contact routes worked, so I had to go through the official site’s DM and explain that I’d misclicked, that I didn’t want their fancy bag, I just wanted the album. And to show I was sincere, I threw in a bunch of stuff like “どうしてもそらちゃんの歌を聞きたい” that made even me cringe.

Nearly a week later, Sendai-obasan actually replied, and it was pretty long. But reading through it—well, once you strip out all the boilerplate keigo, the gist was: I understand how you feel, but there’s no way to change your tier at this point. Since you want to hear the album so badly, I’ll try to put it up for individual sale in the future, so please keep supporting me then ♥.

I was speechless.

So after nearly half a month in transit, this colossally dumb bag finally reached my hands.

I find it hard to believe that a piece of crap bag you could buy on eBay for 30 bucks costs 6,500 yen, and what’s even dumber is that I paid 6,500 yen and still didn’t get the album.

Maybe this is heaven’s punishment. As a Sendai-obasan anti-fan, I ended up handing her 6,500 yen of real, hard cash. Sendai-obasan becoming a company president—everyone bears a lot of responsibility for that, especially me.

Recently I got another email from Sendai-obasan saying her album is going up on Booth. Of course it’s 500 yen more than the crowdfunding price—3,300 yen—which is obviously consumption tax being tacked on. The notification has a mocking tone to it:

“Didn’t you say you absolutely had to hear my singing? Well, here it is. Aren’t you going to buy it?”

Heh. You think I’m buying it again?