For best results, please select the category that most applies to the manga you’re reading:
🔘 The author seems so excited to have discovered that nontraditional gender roles exist
🔘 Forcefem, but as reactionary as possible
🔘 These feels are rough, author buddy, you ok?
🔘 Oh, no, the very cis author thinks it’s just a gag but this bit will become fundamental to your identity somehow
🔘 Tragic, Wandering Son-style horseshit again
🔘 Porn, fortunately and/or unfortunately
🔘 TSF as a time-honored tradition without someone getting weird about it
🔘 TSF as a time-honored tradition but the author wants to get real weird with it
🔘 This is exactly the lived, joyful experience of being, say, a trans woman, but the author seems to be under a terrible curse that prevents them from even thinking the words “trans woman”, so the main character has to utter “but I’m a boy” every 2-4 pages in case we and/or they forget it
🔘 Autobiographical manga but if they were in your circles you’d have to take the author aside and have a real deep talk about internalized essentialism and binarisms
🔘 Being trans and both explicit, not for cis consumption and Regular about it? Like, what are you reading, Love Me For Who I Am again? (If this category fits your manga, please stay on the line and an agent will be dispatched to catalogue this incredibly rare event.)
as someone from asia: sometimes i feel like folks in the west dissecting media from here can miss how deeply baked gender essentialism and the binary is to cultures all over the region up to this day. its a deep, deep seated thing that wont vanish overnight, as much as i wish it would. i guess at this point i've learned to take what small victories i can in media from Japan and other countries in the region.
i've read a bunch of these sorts of manga and honestly a surprisng chunk of them feel to me like the author is struggling with Feelings but... just doesnt have the words or cultural context to express them, likely because they haven't really been in touch with the queer communities in their country.
Maybe i'm too forgiving and should expect better but... idk. i can't bring myself to be too harsh on a lot of these. when i sense a whiff of Authorial Gender Vibes... all i can really feel is "i hope they figure it out one day"