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eleanorfenyx · 4 months

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I have finished Mysterious Lotus Casebook, and here are some of my thoughts! (Obviously not spoiler free)

The cases are absolutely batshit insane and I loved it every single time they were like 'we totally collected this evidence that incriminates a secret suspect, just believe us and also don't question when the fuck we had the time to do this or when we figured out that we needed to look for it'. 10/10 no notes, that's a hilarious way to have a genius detective. Show us nothing, tell us everything, YES king.

That being said, I could have done with a lot less standing around having the supporting cast repeat whatever Li Lianhua and Fang Duobing announce, maybe in an attempt to make sure their genius is clear for the audience? I get it, but at the same time it felt a little too hand-holdy for me, especially in scenes where LLH and FDB had already discussed their findings between themselves before presenting them to the concerned bystanders. I can read between the lines (or else understand what has just been explicitly stated) without having every conclusion filtered through a slightly different sentence structure to make sure I got it.

Di Feisheng amnesia arc my fuckin beloved

Di Feisheng destroying his 'father' and freeing everyone in Di manor in a vicious act of catharsis that tied nicely into the main Nanyin bug-mind-control-thing narrative my beloved

Di Feisheng my beloved

The amount of times I was like...genuinely surprised he and Li Lianhua didn't kiss is both embarrassing (because I do in fact understand censorship and what I sign up for with these dramas and yet and yet) and numerous enough that I could...possibly...theoretically..write a 5+1 fic of every time I want them to kiss about it. No one hold me to that but it's something I think I'd like to do.

Re: the above point: because what the FUCK was that ending?!!! EXCUSE ME?! I gotta FIX THAT SHIT.

There will come a day when the strength of my hope for an unambiguously happy ending in a queer(-coded? is the source originally bl or is this its own thing?) wuxia drama is rewarded....but it is not this day. I must fix this myself.

Jiao Liqiao's laugh is one of the most annoying things I've ever heard. I was reaaaaally hoping someone would just up and stab her during one of her little evil laughing fits. At one point I was shouting "KILL HER, KILL HER" at my screen because I could NOT take anymore of her (unfortunately, I did in fact have to take more of her).

I still think her insistence on being obsessed with DFS is hysterical when he is so VISIBLY only interested in LLH. Explicitly STATES that his only life purpose is to fuck fight LLH again. Babygirl (derogatory) he is so fucking gay let's get you a nice knife to the gut instead, okay?

I thought the whole Shan Gudao plot was interesting, going from looking desperately for his body -> putting him to rest -> hunting for his murderer -> finding out he's alive/the mastermind behind everything going wrong (which I was proud of myself for realizing before the reveal, I'm normally bad at that) -> thwarting him with sass and superior martial arts at every possible turn -> killing him stone fuckin dead with beginner level skills because he's so up his own hole he can't see that's what's happening - was really fun!

He also has a SUPER annoying laugh he can fuck off

OH OH OH MARTIAL ARTS SKILL OF TRANS YOUR GENDER?! I MARRIED HER SO HER AFFAIRS ARE MY BUSINESS NOT YOURS??? ASKING YOUR WIFE FOR HER FORGIVENESS AND UNDERSTANDING AS YOU LAY DYING AND SHE GIVES IT TO YOU?????? OKAYYYYYYY

The twist at the end that LLH is the one with royal blood was so funny to me. Like it's a good twist and I love that Shan Gudao was just quite literally always a fuckin try-hard loser in ways he didn't even know, but also it was SO funny. Granny coming in clutch at the last fuckin minute with secret knowledge she just literally never shared.

LLH is such a smooth motherfucker. Shame about his insistence on dying when quite literally everyone (bar the people who suck) is begging this man to just live. Just LIVE DAMN IT!!!!! I really liked it when FDB begs him to just consider his own life as important for ONCE and remember that people care about him because YES his self-sacrificing and committment to Chilling Out Farmer Style was not the mercy he thought it was!

LIVE AND GROW OLD WITH DI FEISHENG YOU DAMN IDIOT (the likelihood of me resisting the urge to write at least the one fic for them is zero to none)

Unironically love spitting up blood as a plot device and this show is no different. The Drama. The Panache. The desperation of everyone around you because you have BLOOD coming out of your MOUTH and you are FAINTING. Poison acting up? Spit blood. Someone bitch slap you with their magical palm ability? Spit blood. Get stressed? Spit blood. Get stabbed? Spit blood. It's always good!

Okay I think that might be all I've got for now, if I think of anything else I'll add them in a reblog. I thoroughly enjoyed it, would definitely recommend!

#mysterious lotus casebook #my thoughts #for whatever they're worth #it was nice too because unlike say Word of Honor I didn't mind the overarching plot about the jianghu #and the magical cures/objects that everyone is racing/fighting each other to get to first #WOH was just plain boring outside of the interpersonal relationships in my opinion #but in this there were only a few times I really just did not care about the latest fetch quest and wanted to get back to the relationships

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caffeineandsociety · 3 months

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The most insidious thing about intracommunity transphobia is how much it still relies on stereotypes of someone's AGAB - trans women and fems and other presumed-AMABs are scary, creepy, burgeoning, sex-obsessed perverts; trans men and mascs and other presumed-AFABs are frivolous, selfish, shallow airheads who just want attention and can't handle REAL problems and/or gross ugly creepy girlfailures who are lashing out and preying on other people because it's the only way to get control over their lives -

And very few people are willing to acknowledge this, because they will SAY "trans women are women, trans men are men, trans people are who they say they are" until they're blue in the face - or rather, until they come up with justifications for these stereotypes that fit into that framework.

It's not subtle misgendering and deep-seated queerphobia to immediately believe the worst of any trans girl who happens to like My Little Pony and Sailor Moon and exists in the general vicinity of teenagers; no, it's TOTALLY a one-off, pay no mind to the fact that the person in question has uncritically believed every single one of these claims that's crossed their social media feed. If anything, it's fighting the idea that women are all weak, powerless, delicate flowers who can never actually hurt anyone! Right?

It's not subtle misgendering and deep-seated queerphobia to write trans men and mascs' issues off as a lesser, "diet" transphobia that's never done anything worse than making people sad on the internet, that's not a persistent stereotype of women from both outside of AND within the queer community; it's just a means of trying to get men to stop talking over women, nor is it transphobia try to talk trans men and mascs out of transitioning because "testosterone is poison" - nor does that idea rebound back around to hurt pre- or non-HRT transfems for that matter - it's TOTALLY true that T will cause roid rage but ONLY in trans men and mascs for, uh, some reason. Absolutely none of this "sit down and shut up and let people insist you're just confused or be written off as a screeching predatory harpy who's an inherent danger to women and children" is a recycled lesbophobic stereotype, how dare the person calling out this behavior misgender trans men by implying as much!?

But of course, pointing this out is just "trying to have it both ways", trying to claim the authority presumed of a man AND the fragility presumed of a woman, right?

Just. Fuck. On the one hand, I need to reiterate, as I always do, that queer people are NOT the primary source of queerphobia - these root ideas aren't born within the queer community, and in fact despite the loud minority, ARE less common here than within cishet society, however much it may sometimes feel otherwise because we're basically each other's captive audience.

On the other hand, we have to look at what's happening here. When this happens as an intracommunity thing, it REALLY fucking sucks because 1) someone who will double down into infinity on any of these ideas does, indeed, have basically a captive audience that they're free to abuse, and 2) it's all predicated on the idea that the MOMENT you come out as queer, you're totally incapable of holding queerphobic ideas, or at the very least you can't REALLY HURT people with them. "What, you're really accusing me, a flaming faggot/a whole lesbian/an actual trans person, of being queerphobic?" says the guy who insists on sticking to the narrative that most gay trans men are obnoxious screeching yaoi fangirl chasers who just want to trick him into straight sex disguised with one degree of abstraction; or the girl who's constantly trying to get her trans girlfriend to quiet down and stop asserting herself, flinching in terror the moment she shows the slightest negative emotion, despite never having acted this way with her cis exes; or the person who immediately pivoted from seeing their nonbinary friend as totally fitting into their "women and nonbinary people" community to seeing them as a creepy predator trying to invade the space the moment they found out they had a deep voice and facial hair. While these are NOT things that all queer people do, they ARE things that most if not all queer people will be on the receiving end of at some point or another if they spend enough time in the community, and that's a problem! Especially since people who have a queer-positive- and feminist-sounding justification, and especially who think of themselves as incapable of doing this kind of harm, are sometimes even capable of justifying saying and doing shit that, coming from anyone else, would be blatantly obvious as a hate crime.

And once again, in conclusion, I must repeat, this is not an identity-linked issue, because guess what - assuming it is is part of the problem!

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littleladymab · 2 months

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FebruarOC - Uriah

Hey hi hello did you know i'm obsessed with this guy? As I said in SWBC, I can't stop spinning him around like a rotisserie chicken in my head.

I created his counterpart Kaedmon a few months ago (and I'll talk about her at the end of the month as a bonus character) and came up with Uriah in January! He's only slightly less new than Quin and Horatio, but I named them all at the same time.

For January in SWBC, we read Phasma. My thoughts on the book aside, the framing narrative was someone in the First Order apprehended a Resistance pilot and then fudged the paperwork or something I guess so that there was no record of her being arrested and held on the ship and dragged her away to question her about Phasma. I have so many questions, but the biggest one came down to: Why are you going to nickname your rival Resistance spy/pilot Starling and the all-red armored NOT Elrik Vonreg from SW Resistance First Order guy Cardinal and NOT DO ANYTHING ABOUT THAT? Honestly I got a lot more mad about that than I did anything else in the book, because everything else I just shrugged off but that was the biggest missed opportunity. Also his "I love the First Order and everything it stands for" to "what am I doing with my life (but I still love the first order)" took a grand total of like 48 hours TOPS and wasn't... good. It just wasn't well done.

So I came away from that book CRAVING spy v spy content. And, well, my Jedi OC is also a Fulcrum agent, so like, it made sense, right, to then make an ISB agent to be against her?

I settled on his ISB designation before I did a name and it was mostly as a joke that had made sense to me at the time?? But now he's ISB-789 and Kaedmon calls him "Hungry 8's" and when he goes "???" she says "you know, because seven ate nine?" and he asks "Not to encourage this but then shouldn't I be hungry 7's?" and she says "No :)"

He's 20 at the end of the clone wars, and a full agent of ISB by 25, so that makes him about 40 by the end of the galactic civil war. He's from a planet at the far end of the Outer Rim, close to Wild Space but still part of the imperial "jurisdiction" (I haven't settled on any currently existing planet or not), but because he's great with accents to help him blend in, he's able to immediately adapt the core world accent. (he's not that great with the languages tho) He has a younger sister who he helped put through a fancy school on Coruscant and she's a nature photographer; their parents still live back on their home planet, despite Uriah offering to help them live in the Empire.

More recently for SWBC we read Battlefront II: Inferno Squad and that is truly what made me start rotating him around even faster in my brain -- they're not ISB, but they're working for ISB and they go undercover into a rebel op to try and destroy it and/or find a data leak and now THAT IS THE SPY SHIT I WANTED and so instead of creating a character out of frustration I just started spinning him at warp speeds to pick up any of the stray pieces of inspo floating around. But more to the point, it was a good exercise at listening to Imperial minds in a way that didn't make them see like big joke clowns like can happen.

So it'll be fun to lean into that when writing for Uriah because you get to see him fully believing in what he's working for, as a field operative infiltrating smuggling rings and drug gangs etc to make the galaxy a better place in the early part of the Empire -- but then as it goes on longer and longer and he gets more involved (tangentially) with the rebellion through Kaedmon, and ISB/the empire being less and less interested in investigating corruption in certain aspects, that building disillusion with their place and so on.

And not to "diversity win!" the empire, but he's a trans guy! He gave himself the gift of top surgery after being accepted into the Imperial Academy.

In my thoughts about how they interact with canon, I did jot down that Uriah probably knows Kallus as they're about the same age and ISB agents -- though while Kallus went on to be as you see him in Rebels, Uriah does mostly undercover work. So when Kallus joins the Rebels, Kaedmon will get to know him... and when Uriah finds out that Kallus is also Fulcrum, he about loses his whole damn mind and probably pulls a muscle laughing so hard.

I did write like 2200 words of an outline for him and Kaedmon, and I was fully going to sit down and write how the two of them met but my brain has been absent like all evening so I'll probably do a double big drabble for the two of them at the end of the month.

#star wars oc #februaroc #a lil miss original #lil miss writings #he's my new favorite little guy!!

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mitskiesques · 2 years

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i love the way you talk about daemyra and i would like to hear more!!!

well this is surprising i dont think i've spoken much about daemyra but lets begin by saying my #daemyra gothic tag 1) is 100% inspired by benjicotblackwood’s targ gothic tag and 2) functions similarly to an epithet for hellenistic greek god worshipping. it's an ‘aphrodite pandemos/aphrodite urania’ situation. am i shipping daemyra? perhaps. in which capacity? in a genderfuckery incestuous codependant mutually destructively enabling one.

now well. most of this will be rambling bc i only have Ideas but not a single coherent analysis to make but that's okay because i am simply talking about it which is what anon asked for. peace & love <3

THE most fucked up hotd dynamic by far and i think its very interesting to see it and analyze it beyond the framing they receive bc its quite. lukewarm? everyone involved is aware that this is not a healthy or functional romantic relationship for obvious reasons but they all also seem to be too scared of targfanatics to outright say it or portray it clearly.

but looking at the text and the dynamic as it is their relationship has very interesting but classic gothic vibes, through a narrative of abuse in which ultimately the abuser (daemon) is nothing without the victim (rhaenyra) bc the victim holds a certain sort of unchangable power over them, and whats more the same abuse they give, reveals the abuser to have little to no real power over the victim at all. that's daemon choking rhaenyra after she tells him of the prophecy and grooming her to get the throne/restore 'targaryen greatness' whatever that is. rhaenyra is the key bc she is the heir and the one that was chosen by viserys (whom they are both sort of obsessed with lmao). she didn't have to keep choosing and make him consort and give him a part of her power, or a tangent of her power, but she did. which is not to say daemon doesn't hold her down to some degree — he does. he is A Man in A Society and she's not. he holds her down politically socially emotionally etc that's what grooming and the patriarchy is about. the point is it's extremely nuanced bc he can't do any of that. he's not Allowed. it's crazy.

and speaking of viserys it's fascinating to think of the implications of daemon being so obsessed with rhaenyra and the question → is it because of viserys? is it more because of viserys (house targ) than it is about the throne itself, or to rhaenyra herself? this family is already beyond saving morally speaking and daemon being psychosexually obsessed with/in love with his brother wouldn't sound strange to me personally. arthur/guinevere/lancelot situation but 10 times more fucked up. but what do i know right.

i also think it's interesting to see of their relationship through trans lens. rhaenyra is in all levels except physical, a son. the REAL aegon ii. the king's beloved firstborn and heir who was treated with every bit of spoiling and unconditional forgiveness a son would've been granted with. rhaenyra wasn't just chosen as viserys’ heir she was also chosen as viserys’ firstborn son, and that gives her a closeness to him that daemon could never reach bc he didn't have credibility among court (albeit bc of all his politically unsavvy decisions but this is about the Implications), whose place was entirely skipped within the succesion line, who was married off against his will to someone he hates (and kills. oh well), who wields visenya’s sword, etc etc my point is. if daemyra is m/f it's because rhaenyra is the (m) and daemon is the (f). truly the world's worst t4t couple.

i think daemon resents her a whole lot. for being the heir and viserys’ favorite and all that. he also wants to control her and regain the power and status her mere existence took from him. (hey this is almost like rhaenyra's perception of aegon ii what do u know). i also think daemon adores her and wants to burn the world down with her bc he sees her as the clearest mirror image of what he considers himself to be/wants to be. i think rhaenyra is the only woman ever he cares about even if he doesn't entirely respect her as a woman nor his niece or wife — just as his future queen. as a fellow targaryen.

that's another thing. they're both very firm believers on targ supremacy and i think the only reason daemon had children with laena was bc she had targ blood/was a velaryon LMAO he doesn't want to taint his precious old valyrian blood. rhaenyra of course is an enabler bc she is just as much of a targfanatic as daemon is she just also happens to be into women. also it would be very interesting if daemon didn't like jace and luke also bc they aren't inbred enough for him. but since teamblack's internal dynamics are shrouded in Compartmentalization And Repression of years and years they're a bit more difficult for me to dissect.

anyway here's some of my favorite daemyra gothic posts/how i mostly perceive their dynamic to be: x x x X x X X x

#asks #anon #n #daemyra gothic #hotd #nothing about my answer is normal.

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my-gf-is-kazuichi-soda · 11 months

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Sorry if this has been asked a whoooole bunch before, but why do you headcanon Kazuichi as a trans gal? :0/gen

No worries and you're actually the first person to ask!

I'm attracted to her and I'm a lesbian, so literally one of the first thoughts I had when playing the game was "can I headcanon this character to be a girl? The lesbians (aka me) should be allowed to have this one." So I was biased from the start xD I wanted her to be my girlfriend

Her character ended up fitting a lot of queer/trans narratives, from the backstory about how she changed her appearance to the attraction and internalized homophobia implied with some of the Hajime scenes (Kazuichi: Wait, this can't be a date! What if I dream about it tonight?!)

Felt like she had a lot of toxic masculinity that was from trying to fit in. Being a girl gives her an excuse to break away from that.

She doesn't like her appearance right now, and from the fact that it was born out of a teenage desire to fit in, I think she has such a Temporary Teenage Phase Appearance. Of all the characters, she's the one who would be most in-character to get a re-design if there was a sequel. Okay but imagine a spinoff game where there's a scene of all the D2 characters as adults meeting for a reunion, and almost all of them just look The Same But Older and Kaz is in the background as a woman, and there's zero explanation the game doesn't even point it out and most players might not even notice that's Kaz until she has a couple of lines and they see the sharp teeth or hear about her being the Ultimate Mechanic and go "hey! Wait a minute!"

More like an extension of my ideas, but I wondered what to do with the Sonia obsession, because I really didn't want to ignore it. I found it interesting. It seemed superficial, like she has a love of princesses and that's all she really saw Sonia to be, and she tried to accept Sonia having "other hobbies" in like Chapter 1 but after that not as much. She didn't seem to actually like most of Sonia's personality except for Sonia's kindness and her potentially being the braver one in the relationship who could protect Kazuichi (I swear there was a scene where she wanted to hide behind Sonia so Sonia could protect her while the gang was walking in the dark or something) (which wow that character trait appealed a lot to me, someone who's always wanted to be a strong superhero and protect my girlfriend, so free food I'll take it!) I pondered that maybe she wanted to be a princess herself, and it seemed to fit with everything else. She idolizes Sonia and tries to frame it in a heterosexual crush.

Whew thank you for letting me go on about that. I hope you enjoy the read.

#anon

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discoscoob · 3 years

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Disagreeing with the straight cis female Slash shippers is very dangerous on SM but there indeed are lots of issues with the straight women taking up such a large space of the gay fandom. Like, you are a hypocrite if you do not see the problem with having the large proportion of gay fanart/fanfics being produced by the straight cis women while understanding that the straight men being obsessed with the lesbian women is fetishization. The issue is obvious here: you have a representation of minorities through the straight lenses.

Need a proof? Take mpreg for example. These fics are not always the exploration of futuristic medicine/alien biology and rarely even include trans men. There is a parody video on youtube by Nicholas Black titled "when a gay fanfiction is obviously written by a straight woman". It is embarrassing how point on this parody is.

The thing is, yes, talking from the point of view of our irl experience, the straight men fetishizing the lesbian women have the horrible and criminal consequences. The straight women fetishizing gay men does not have such consequences but this does not change the fact that fetishization of the entire community by the outsider party is still objectifying.

Some of these women feel entitled to ownership of the male homosexual representation. They gaslight the gay men who voice their discomfort with this situation.

And regarding the controversy with Anthony Mackie... i think his reaction was understandable. I do not remember exactly how he worded his opinion tho. But people were not really invested in SamBucky's relationship. They did not see a love story in it. They saw sexuality and eroticism. They reacted to every single SamBucky interaction with "uWu they wanna FuCK, probs can't keep it in THEIR PANTS". They reduced the potential romantic bond between these two men to simple and primal sexual desire while being quite childish and immature about it.

Same goes with Lokius. Lokius shippers will puritan-wash the Twitter threads with their moral superiority but then ignore JUST HOW PROBLEMATIC IT IS TO SHIP AN OLDER WHITE COP WITH HIS PRISONER. It just shows how they lack awareness for the gay experience and do not understand how some narrative choices would be harmful considering how the age gap and power imbalance is a huge issue in the irl gay relationships. Or, lets be real here, these ppl do not see how having the ex-villain be the very first ever Marvel character in a mlm relationship is not exactly the purest, fluffiest, healthiest representation choice.

So, yeah, i do not know whether they project on Mobius or Loki but i do know that they see the threat in a woman who could take away their fave male character because, "if i can't have him, no other woman can". But another male character is fine, because in the end of the day, fetishization is dehumanizing. For these people, whether it is conscious or subconscious, the mlm relationships are never really "real". They will always be the projected caricature fantasies. A man can't truly "have" another men because, for a straight cis women obsessed with the gay men, the gayness will always be something out of fantasy.

Let me finish by saying, it is ok to ship the gay pairings if you are a straight cis woman. It is ok to draw homosexual erotica and write the gay fiction too. But sometimes we should talk critically regarding these things as well.

I have nothing to add you made several good points. I just want to also clarify that it goes without saying that this is clearly calling out straight cis women, as stated several times in the post, it’s just all too often that whenever I see posts where someone is clearly calling out a certain group someone who the post clearly wasn’t directed towards comes along to complain because they feel like the post is targeting them when it clearly isn’t.

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misterbitches · 3 years

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i wish more than anything he could have had this. i love you man

i really fucking do

my love for nirvana and immense respect for kurt isn't something i ever expected. after being a huge fan of jonghyun too as a musician, a person who had things to say, a human being. the people around him. i fucking hate that kurt is gone and i was like...2. i got into hole when i was like 25 really heavily and refused to listen to nirvana. didnt' care about these white boys. but there's a reason why people love this band and why they loved kurt. i get mad sometimes at his death—selfishness—and then i make jokes to deal and cope. we all do with everything. it's just that and this is from a cis person...but i know so many trans people or people on the gender spectrum who have read his journals see him as someone struggling with gender. and after years of thinking and becoming such a huge fan i think that was honestly the truth. i think at this point we're all pretty sure he was gender queer or struggling with identity.

his aversion for oppression, his stand with the marginalized, not accepting racism, homophobia, transphobia BECAUSE THAT IS THE HEART OF DIY (spurred by my black people cos ofc it is and we do everything) and i wish that he could have beeen better.

to me it seems like his pain with his crohns (or wahtever he had) lead to his intense struggle with drugs because that's pretty common when needing pain management. on top of that, his family's history of MI. on top of that, his life being hounded and not being prepared for it (this i think is the idea of white privilege at work and wasn't naive of him necessarily, but...it's just something he thought wouldnt happen to him. that's whiteness at work as who they were as a diy fucking anti pop anti capital punk band. sonic youth said 'we didnt sell out, we made them buy in') and his rship with courtney. he said without court he might be gay or bi.

i won't read his journals, it's too fucking much for me and i dont feel allowed or maybe i will when i can handle it, but i know reading about them and him and hearing the way he changed his songs and his abhorrence for bravado, for men that talk about women as disposable and sex objects, for not being able to enjoy a punk band, for the whiteness and maleness. krist novoselic was a 6'7 fucking bassist and dave grohl is a sizeable dude with hideous tattoos. back then, no one said a fucking bad thing about them. come as you are.

we know that suicide is a state we get into. when you go to a psych ward you see that it's actually calm and an ebb/flow. it is extremely fucking boring. the thing is we don't know if these feelings last forever. we can't go back and time and history cannot change. it was his decision, like jonghyun's, to end his life. but i know there could have been longer. if they got help. i try not to resent courtney especially not now with people being irresponsible and unearthing the FBI report on him. he killed himself but it was definitely emotionally sparred by her and she should have told people what happened weeks before his death.

but no one failed him per se. his suicide note is full of hope and it kills me to see. he should have been able to be whoever he wanted. been a son, been a daughter, been anything.

whenever i hear the changed lyrics or see him in a dress or hear distress i dont know. i wish we didnt lose him but i also know that no one wants to go back to that time. it wasn't necessarily great but it wasn't all bad. and i wish commodity didn't destroy legacy. i wish we werent's so obsessed with the death and gore instead of the liveliness and hilarity of this band and of kurt. and i wish we could talk about him more and the idea that maybe there's so much going on with it; i have many critiques for things they have done, things kurt has done as well.

i'm talking in circles but i genuinely just get bummed. every day he is still dead. but this dude man......i love him a lot. i'm so glad nirvana gave what they did to the world. getting to know kurt so long after the fact is fucking hard sometimes. it is frustrating. but focusing on the positives too or trying to understand another perspective has given me a lot of insight. and i always try and remember that it wasn't just one thing, that nirvana were a band, it wasn't just him, and he could have been better but it just didn't work out that way. it's not solely about his internal pain and the narrative of a tortured artist is suffocating.

he wanted to be a star, make this insane pop song, and when he got it he didnt realize it became everything he hated. he was already struggling and all this shit hit a point. i have mad respect for them still. dave grohl said billie eilish is the kurt of her gen (about 2 yrs ago) and that drives me up a wall for various reasons. antiblackness and class. fuck that. these dudes were poor as fuck trucking it through washington with other bands and the basis is blacness and black art they were trying to fight and make it and give a shit man. it didnt turn out the way they could handle but they were not PRIMIING themselvs for musical stardom. no artist who cares would do that. but if you get the recognition you want because who doesn't, it comes at a price too.

this is why i critique commodity and capital so intensely. i participate, and i will have to as an artist. i don't have a desire to be poor because i've lived a life that gave me space to see what i want to do. i have class privilege (and a lot of debt) and i am grateful. but it isnt like i dont want peopl eto know. it's just that i know that i can't give in and accept and demand nothing and then decide to hoard it to myself. taht money that goes in funnels out and is not for me to keep. there is no trickling down. dont paly yrself.

artists like kurt and in a sense like MF Doom (rapper who only came out to be seen when he wanted to) or DMX even it's like....man u came out fucking fighting to be heard you know. do your thing. make your shit. be amazing. esp black people. DMX had a fucking face for a camera. hopefully i'm gonna watch belly at my best friend's house on the 28th.

i wish everyone who deserves to stay can stay until their body releases them in the most pleasant way as possible. jessica walter's death made me sad, but she was older and i'm so happy she got to live. same with cicely tyson. at the same time, the young deaths over drugs, suicide, accidents....id on't really get it. why is kissinger alive but these people can't stay? how did this come a somber tale of death instead of just i fucking love kurt cobain lmao

he's def one of those ppl that im like u rock. him, robeson, seberg to an extent. hm who else. wong kar wai, jenkins, joe (thai filmmaker whose name i cant spell.) all those people who are running forward on their own and beating their chest. yea i like that. an award is just another award. what matters is possibility and action.

RATHER BE DEAD THAN COOL

#a thot

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flipflap-flipflap · 3 years

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[Alright take-two on this damn post. First one got eaten by post editor right as I was ready to post. You see how long this is? Save to drafts, kids.]

I’m here to shove a manga on you: Ookami Shounen Wa Kyou Mo Uso O Kasaneru (The Boy Who Cried Wolf Also Told a Lie Today). It’s a gender bending romance. Despite how awful that probably sounds, it’s actually really fucking good and I do not say that lightly.

(No spoilers, this is all in the first chapter) A high school boy insecure about his intimidating face, Itsuki, has fallen for a shy loner girl, Tokujira, who does not seem specifically phased by his naturally scary face. So he takes a risk and confesses, but she turns him down brutally. Itsuki goes to his sister to lament his insecurities about his face, which he (more or less correctly) attributes as why he can’t make connections. To give him a new perspective on his appearance, his sister (trans btw) gives him a makeover while he’s sleeping and then kicks him to the curb of her salon - fully crossdressed. On his way home, Itsuki (♀) ends up bumping into Tokujira, and she mistakes him for a boyish girl. Under this misunderstanding, she asks "her” for a favor...

She has androphobia, and she has it bad. So much so she can’t even look at men without snapping violently or becoming physically ill. And Itsuki (♀) is just boyish enough to trigger her, but not enough to lock her down. So she asks for “her” help, to see if she can desensitize herself to her phobia. Itsuki’s in a bind for a couple obvious reasons, not the least being the guilt of deceiving Tokujira. But nonetheless, he genuinely wants to help her. So, he decides to continue crossdressing, diving into a lie that he soon finds he has no easy exit from.

I really recommend this manga. I cannot say that enough times. It is phenomenal, shattering tropes left and right in fun and interesting ways. Do yourself a favor and give this manga a try.

Personal feelings and meta analysis below the cut. It’s, uh, ungodly long, and will get very spoilery. But I will flag spoilers. And there will be pretty pictures?

(Also, no, I did not go into this planning to compare a manga about crossdressing to the abolitionist writings of Frederick Douglass, but reality deserves to be a bit absurd sometimes.)

Before you think I’m getting spoilery, with the intro I gave or anything I don’t mark as spoilers, I’m really not. Everything outside of spoilers is right on the package at the start. It sounds like I’m spoiling late-game stuff, right? That’s something that was really fantastic to me: this manga doesn’t spoon feed you. There’s no arcs of pure silent angst, even at the lowest point in the story. These kids are smart, they think and intuit on the spot, and they share what they’re feeling with each other like good friends do. Like that next panel down there with Itsuki introspecting about his confidence level while crossdressing? That’s from the first chapter! These kids are smart. And god damn that is so nice to see.

There was a lot I liked about this manga, but at the top is how compelling the protagonist and his internal conflict are. Right from the first chapter he’s already wracked with guilt about what he’s about to do: deceive this girl by pretending to be a safe space. But Tokujira told Itsuki (♀) she hopes to one day be able to fall in love, and Itsuki wants to ensure she can have that - even if it’s not him that gets to confess to her. He’s fully aware of exactly how fucked up what he’s doing is, and is appropriately beating himself up over it in a really realistic way. But although the guilt never fades, it slowly gains company in happiness. He enjoys this new, fragile life he has constructed around the two precious new friends he's made as a girl.

It was probably easy to gloss over in the synopsis, but arguably the biggest part of Itsuki (♂)’s conflict is his complex about his face. He looks dangerous, and because of that he is afraid to even lift his head or smile in front of others. But as Itsuki (♀), he smiles and laughs without fear. It becomes immediately clear to him on the first day that he's a more confident person while crossdressing. Happier in a way he can't be as a man.

Botan is easily my favorite character in the series. She’s introduced early on, as Tokujira’s first and only friend before Itsuki (♀). At the start she’s a dangerous third wheel, a serious threat to Itsuki’s ability to keep up his lie. And though the situation is (thankfully) defused rather quickly, she becomes a massive source of internal conflict for Itsuki. Nonetheless, she becomes a dear friend for both Itsuki ♂ and ♀. She’s just so...*chef’s kiss*

^This face is the repository of all my love and affection.

Mark my words, this is the first and I assume last time I will ever say this: love triangle good. You know it’s inevitable in a romance genre piece, but this manga approaches the trope in a new and compelling way. [Spoiler] Needless to say, it’s between Itsuki, Tokujira, and Botan. But...there’s two Itsukis involved, ♂ and ♀, and in the center of it all is this lie. His lie stops being about him: it's about not hurting these two girls he cares so much about. [/Spoiler]

On a more personal note, I saw so much of myself in Itsuki’s older sister, Ibuki. She runs a salon, catering especially to crossdressers and transwomen. She’s a self-described “Youthling”, an alien from the planet Youth, obsessed with observing the exciting and turbulent lives of the youths of earth. For more or less for the same reasons most of us do: transpeople don’t tend to get the youths we want, if we allow ourselves to experience youth at all. So it’s nice to be able to enjoy it vicariously, through this younger generation that is able to more fearlessly pursue the lives we couldn't.

^Incidentally, one of my favorite interactions in the manga.

Despite getting Itsuki into this crossdressing mess, she’s someone he can always return to and confide in, and get good, helpful advice from. Her whole philosophy is to give young people agency to explore their identities and find themselves, and though she tells Itsuki the road he's taking is dangerous as soon as she learns what he's doing, she'll always support him however she can.

That, I feel, is what separates her from other, more creepy/pedophilic enabler types, like Sawako from K-On! or Lucoa from Dragon Maid. It’s a refreshingly honest and respectful portrayal of a quirky adult just trying to be a good older sister.

The last thing I want to say, and I’m not going to even mark this as a spoiler because of course it’s going to happen and if you can’t predict that then you’re not my problem, is that Itsuki of course eventually has to drop his lie. All I’ll say about it is that it is probably going to live in my head for years. Everything about it, the lead up, the execution, the fallout, and the recovery, are all so masterfully crafted for maximum emotional impact.

That’s all I want to say exclusively about my personal feelings. On to analysis. There will be a lot more contextual spoilers here that, even without reading the parts I’ve specially blocked off will probably leak through. Read at your own risk, but I would recommend revisiting after you have finished the manga.

One thing I really want to talk about is language. That’s right, I’m going to compare a crossdressing manga to The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, the autobiography of a freed slave turned abolitionist. Douglass talks about a concept that has remained imprinted on my mind ever since I first read it: how and why slaves struggled to comprehend the concept of freedom. This wasn’t anything to do with fear or “racial inferiority” like pro-slavers would argue, but rather with a lack of vocabulary. They have all of these feelings and things they know to be true, but lack the words to make meaningful sense of them. For Douglass specifically, his life completely changed when he learned the word “abolition.” It was like a floodgate burst, as he was suddenly able to put meaning to feeling, create context from chaos.

And that’s right, we see that happen in a big way, with Tokujira. This should be an obvious development, but as it happens late in the manga I will mark it [Spoiler]. As Tokujira and Itsuki (♀) practice things like talking, eye contact, holding hands, etc., Tokujira naturally starts to fall for Itsuki (♀). But she doesn’t understand that. An important part of her character is that, growing up, she focused on expanding her vocabulary as much as humanly possible in the hopes of being able to better articulate herself. So words are very important to her. It’s not until she sees a work of lesbian fiction on display that she finally realizes that’s the word she’s looking for. The floodgate bursts, and all of her emotions suddenly make sense. She realizes she loves Itsuki (♀). [/Spoiler]

And I think that is a vital and underexplored concept when discussing LGBT youth, especially in countries where even knowledge of these concepts is taboo. The reason so many LGBT youth struggle with their identities, especially trans youth, is because we do not have the vocabulary to conceptualize our feelings. I am always excited to see this concept play out, especially in this context. It’s such an important thing that needs to be addressed more broadly.

Moving on, I want to talk about historical context of the genre as it relates to what the author did here. Notably, I want to talk about a specific trope rampant in Japanese queer fiction, specifically early lesbian fiction: the idea that queerdom is a meaningless, youthful phase that children will naturally and inevitably grow out of. It’s problematic for obvious reasons.

[HELLA HELLA SPOILERS] My kneejerk reaction to the ending of this manga was that the author fell into this trope. In the end, Itsuki comes to the conclusion that he does not need to crossdress. So again, kneejerk. But...it really wasn’t like that. He never had any dysphoria; crossdressing was always just a necessity of his circumstance. Nonetheless he learned to analyze and value his experience crossdressing as a woman, and because of that grew as a man. And as part of his journey to understand his identity we, through him, see why some people crossdress. Along with his example, we see why his sister, a bona fide post-op transsexual, has made it a permanent change to her life. Likewise, we see Miyama, who crossdresses purely for the gender euphoria, but has no (stated) interest in going all the way. These are all presented as valid and meaningful. [/Spoiler]

Crossdressing, and gender nonconformity in general, is portrayed not as some one-dimensional fetish like cultural taboo would depict it to be, but rather a meaningful exercise for exploring and critically analyzing your own identity. For some, yes, it’s a phase, but an importantly transformative one when done right. While for others, it is a gateway to a new way of experiencing and enjoying life. Or, it’s fun just for the pragmatic reasons...

I honestly cannot recommend this manga enough. Tragically, I cannot imagine it ever getting an official english translation, so you’ll have to settle for a scanlation like the one I linked in the title up top (and here, again). It’s a really good translation, though the site is predictably sketchy. Warning for lots of NSFW ads.

Read it, and then come talk to me about it!!! There is basically zero fan community and I need to fangirl with someone!

#long post #and I mean REALLY long post #Ookami Shounen Wa Kyou Mo Uso O Kasaneru #The Boy Who Cried Wolf Also Told a Lie Today #the boy who cried wolf tells a lie today also #analysis

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