Hmm. I have been looking at this thread for some time now, and I am gladdened that someone happened to bring this particular theme of tickling into the limelight. However, it saddens me slightly to consider that, as was mentioned, there seems to be a little confusion as to what exactly 'desperation' means. In this case, as I believe (correct me if I am wrong) it is a situation that is constructed to make a victim's reaction to tickling turn into something even worse for him or her. For example, a situation where one is supposed to remain quiet and the victim must fight the urge to laugh, or where the victim must fight the urge to react from the tickling. Allow me to elaborate;
Okay, in this first animated gif, we have a girl apparently in a library, we all know that libraries are places for quiet (and just in case, the scenario is reinforced with the Quiet Please sign). In this case, the victim in question is trying not to laugh (and thus violate the Quiet Please stricture) while the tickler tries increasingly difficult-to-resist methods to make her burst.
On this second (and third) I ask with you to bear with me and give credit to Kamikuzu for his excellent drawings, and hope he will forgive my rather sketchy ability to interpret Japanese and the drawings in question. Here, on the right, Mara (the dancer, I'm pretty sure: a check of my DQ4 rom seems to bear this out) is having her feet tickled by some shadowy demon thing, and the action of her feet and toes wiggling is operating an unseen pulley system that causes feathers to stroke her sister Nara. Mara is apologizing to Nara, because she can't resist the reactions that the foot tickling is causing.
Here on this third drawing, the victim in question is Nina Williams or so I am told (not my area of expertise), and the premise of this is more than a little inferred and guessed at; however, my guess is that in this situation, the victim is a spy sneaking through a ventilation duct, and she has her feet somehow stuck to the floor while this machine tickles them; she has to fight the urge to laugh and struggle and give herself away (and presumably be caught for further torture =P)
Fourth here we have Battle Athletes (I think) and the situation here is straightforward; the girl (whose name I forget at the moment) is trying to raise the dumbbell and keep it raised under the pressure of tickling that threatens to make her drop it.
Finally, we have who I am fairly sure is Sakura from Card Captor Sakura (or Cardcaptors, in the Americanized version) who has admittedly little detail to her picture, but I would venture a guess that the transparent plane is supposed to be her desk, from beneath which are coming hands to tickle her and try to make her laugh, which she is resisting; presumably, she's sitting at her school desk, where interruptions of class are not exactly tolerated.
I hope this interpretation of the thread's point was valid and that my points are similarly so; if not, it looks like I've wasted a lot of time looking things up and typing, but enjoy the pictures anyway. ^_^
EDIT: Because of the way TT arranged my pictures, the 'first' picture is on the second row (the animated gif) and the 'second' picture is the first on the top line.
