millenomi
@millenomi

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.)


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in reply to @millenomi's post:

I am ascribing it to a combo of passive bigotry with regards to queerness, plus perceiving BL to be a set of tropes and not an access into queerness, and wanting to elevate and preserve those tropes at the cost of removing the insertion of a semblance of lived experience, which IMO is also bigotry.

Trying to figure out which boxes to check for Tengoku Daimakyou (Heavenly Delusion)

❓ The author seems so excited to have discovered that nontraditional gender roles exist

✔ Forcefem, but as reactionary as possible
(non-consensual brain transplant into a beautiful girl's body)

✔✔✔ These feels are rough, author buddy, you ok?

✔ Oh, no, the very cis author thinks it’s just a dramatic backstory, but this bit will become fundamental to your identity somehow

❓ TSF as a time-honored tradition but the author wants to get real weird with it
(beautiful girl body gets tons of sexual harassment and assault)

❓ This is exactly the lived, miserable experience of being, say, a non-passing trans man, so the main character has to utter “but I’m a boy” every 2-4 pages because everyone around is staring at his tits.

I am aware. I am also aware of my status as an outsider to this culture, that conceptions of gender are different across language and culture barriers, and am talking here purely about my own reactions in relation to the understanding of queerness I built from my lived experience in anglophone and non-anglophone queer cultures; we could talk about the semantics of the difference here, how sociopolitical interpretations of these actions have to shift across contexts, and why I think it's still good to point at blind spots of varying discomfort and harm and how no work really fits in the categories I have posted, including, say, how I wrote the two "TSF as a time-honored tradition" as a gentle rib about Zenbu Kimi to Sei, which is a work that has both magical TSF and actual-ass trans people in it at the same time, because I wrote this as a gentle rib to a genre I love and have read for twenty years while I was deeply insomniac around 4 am one morning. thank

well it comes off as less a "gentle rib" and more "i'm applying a bunch of criticism and literary analysis to several different and distinct bodies of fiction in the most bad-faith ways possible and framing it with jokey twitter-discourse-poisoned speak", but maybe that just makes me reactionary too.

sorry, this is just the shit i deleted my twitter to get away from so i get annoyed when i see someone bring it back. sorry if my replies hold no weight or meaning.