Illustrated English teacher suddenly has legions of fans and even an unofficial theme song, but her visual creator is hoping the good-time ruckus won’t lead to a backlash by parents and educators.
With the school year getting underway in Japan, earlier this week language learners and anime fans across the nation suddenly noticed that Ellen Baker, one of the illustrated characters in the new edition of widely used junior high English textbook New Horizon, is pretty darned cute.
Locked on to a new 2-D crush, the country’s amateur artists sprang into action, with almost instantaneous fan art…
,,,parodies of the baseball-loving Ms. Baker’s enthusiastic bat-swinging pose…
…and even handmade figurines.
Budding musicians have been inspired too. Nico Nico Douga user Gun-SEKI created and uploaded an unofficial theme song for the character, with the synthesized voice-sung lyrics all in English, in honor of the character’s native language and subject she teaches within the storylines of the New Horizon text.
▼ Although with lines such as “I like every classes” and “Because I’m sure of your dreams will come true,” having an actual English teacher proofread the lyrics would have been a good call.
Meanwhile, YouTube user Akkii created a slightly different audio/video tribute to Elen-sensei with this hyper-charged pop number.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqQ_d6QZVjU
While the video is reminiscent of the up-tempo opening sequence of an anime series, Akkii had an even more specific image in mind, as the video is titled Ellen-sensei: An Erotic Video Game-Style Opening. In addition, the tweeted fan art seen above, with Baker looking flustered, was shared along with the message “I want to tell Ellen-sensei she’s cute and see her be at a loss for what to do.”
Now it’s a well-known fact that any darling of the Internet or anime fandom runs the risk of being used as fuel for sexual fantasies. But the fact that Baker is a character whose primary purpose is to appear in textbooks for adolescents means she’s in quite a delicate position.
Denchubo, the artist behind the design of Baker and the rest of the updated New Horizon’s cast, recently touched on the subject in an interview with Buzzfeed Japan. While the artist said he was incredibly happy to see Baker getting so much attention, if the character starts getting too much notoriety for things other than her academic contributions, parents and guardians might not take kindly to it. One imagines their complaints would be all the louder if Baker becomes fodder for sexually explicit artwork, and in an unusual case of a fictional character having to worry about her job security, a sufficiently negative reaction from parents and teachers could theoretically lead to Miss Baker being deemed no longer fit for the position of (fictional) English teacher and being removed from the next edition of the textbook.
In other words, while it’s great that the character’s booming popularity is also making people more enthusiastic about the text and its subject material, if fans want to see more of Baker in the future, it’s probably best for them to keep their admiration chaste, and focus on things like latte art instead of huggy pillows.
Casey admits to feeling a little sad that no one wrote a song about him when he taught English, but at least he’s got a Twitter account.
Related: Denchubo website
Sources: Narinari, Jin (1, 2, 3), Buzzfeed Japan