h. struggletweets

mytho could have gone rogue ai mode on those fuckers. and i dare say he should have, even.

I feel like there's got to be a detailed queer reading of Duck in relation to trans-femininity¹, but it's hard to articulate when there's... a noticeable lack of transfem voices in the fan community offering personal reads, at least on Tumblr. Far more cis women and transmascs.

In truth, I would like to see more analysis of intended and unintended queerness in Princess Tutu, beyond just one-sentence observations like "wow it's so gay that Duck reacts like that to pretty girls" or "Fakir's kind of homoerotic with Mytho." I also crave cross-textual analysis with Itoh and Sato's other work in the Magical Girl genre², and with the European ballet, fairytales, and operas Princess Tutu draws so much material from.

1. This reading is inherently made problematic by her turning back into a duck "because it's her true self" at the ending; one of my complaints with Tutu's ending is that it feels like it believes "the true self" is something that is determined by the circumstances of one's birth. It's an ending that feels ripe for subversion, following from how S2's finale is itself designed as a subversion of the conclusions drawn in S1.³ Nonetheless, queer analysis and re-interpretations of fairytales that were intended to reinforce a cishet patriarchal status quo are a Whole Thing; why should this "new fairytale" be excluded from that?

2. There is so much to unpack just in Magic User's Club alone. It is both textually gayer and much more overtly homophobic than Tutu just from Aburatsubo being one of the main characters. What does it say about Sae that her "feelings about magic," both her love of its potential and her fears that if she doesn't properly police herself from using it selfishly ever she'll turn into a "bad witch", manifested as a flirtatious bisexual prettyboy who can pass as a girl when crossdressing but is shown using a urinal and thus unambiguously has a dick. Does Sae want a dick? Sae re-absorbed Jurika, rather than him being destroyed and thus symbolically exorcised from her psyche -- how does that factor into analysis of Jurika's coding as an amoral queer character?

3. Even though the show tells us, on the one hand that Duck should become a duck again because the Story disrupts the natural order, it also treats Fakir having the power to manifest stories as part of said natural order, rather than something inherently evil that needs to be suppressed: Fakir is shown writing "a new story, filled with hope" in the very last shot of the show, with Duck by his side. The audience is also primed by subtext and shoujo conventions to view Fakir and Duck as the endgame romantic couple, and therefore the average viewer is primed to want Duck to be a human girl again in order to fufill that.

kingdom hearts and cardcaptor sakura???