meow_d

Hey everyone. Before we begin, a few things to keep in mind:

1. You'll notice my writing here is quite a bit different from usual. Uh... don't worry about it! I'll explain why it turned out like this at a later point in time.
2. I generally tried giving brief overviews of what happens in the scenes I talk about here, but by and large, the post still assumes you've seen the episode.
3. This is not going to be the norm for my writing from now on lol
4. There are some 5.3k words below the cut, so I suggest opening this in a new tab.
5. I'll be discussing some highly suggestive/sexual themes, as well as posting screencaps that you might not want to be looking at in public, so keep that in mind.

Hmm, yeah I think that's it. Enjoy the fruits of my excruciating labor!

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Scene 1: Introduction

• Hah! What a statement of intent to start the show with. The significance of this shot isn't clear on a first viewing, but in hindsight... the light coming in through the gap in the curtains cuts through the darkness of Mahiro's otaku den, and lands squarely on the bottle of soda, of all things. Hmm, I wonder what this story thinks about gender and transitioning?
• Also, the sheer serendipity of Onimai starting with a shot like this in the season immediately after Bocchi! These two shows are already alike in so many ways, and to have this little continuity between their visual languages on top of that...

• We're introduced to Mahiro, who quickly establishes the premise — she used to be a guy, is a NEET, turned into a girl somehow, etc. etc. Pretty basic stuff that unsurprisingly leads to the above moment... but here's where it gets interesting.
• You know that thing where a character goes "ehhhhhhh?!" or some such, and the camera quickly tilts up towards the sky as they do? The sudden movement emphasizes their reaction, and therefore the absurdity of their situation; meanwhile, the shot of the sky serves to mark the end of the scene. Combine these two points, and what you get is the message that whatever development the character is reacting to is the punchline to the scene's joke. Something like "Whoa, how could something this wacky happen?! Find out after the OP!!"
• I bring this up because... well, it's embarrassing to admit, but I thought this would happen right here! Even though that's obviously not going to be the case. The camera's quick zoom out does emphasize Mahiro's shock, but it stays inside the room, and the music is still building up to its high point anyway. No punchline yet.

• Ah, that's more like it. Between the even more dramatic framing of this shot and the soundtrack's imminent climax, it's obvious that this is where the OP will kick in! Which would make the cliffhanger mystery of Mahiro's genitals into the punchline. "What could possibly be in her pants now...?! Find out after the OP!!" Yeah, surely this is how it's going to go, right?

• No. The show doesn't want something like that to be its first joke! And we know this, because Mihari's sudden arrival and casual reaction to the situation completely undercut the tension from moments ago. Just compare that dutch angle when Mahiro was about to check her crotch to the matter-of-fact framing when Mihari does the same, and it should be clear: the punchline here is not "how could something as ~wacky~ as a guy turning into a girl possibly happen??", but "lmao, look at this dumbass making a huge deal out of this".

• Mihari reveals that the transformation was caused by a drug she created and snuck into the soda... and I'm really interested in the exact parts of this reveal Mahiro focuses on. You'll notice that she takes issue with being experimented on — but says nothing about how such an absurd and fantastical drug could exist in the first place?? This thing is so beyond the realm of possibility it instantly characterizes Mihari as a mad scientist of sorts, so that neither of them seems to think how it works is important stands out as very odd!
• ...unless we look at it as a plot device first, rather than a literal part of the story's diegesis, in which case it makes perfect sense. Mahiro doesn't care about the drug itself because we, the audience, aren't supposed to care either! It's just a MacGuffin — it kickstarts the plot, and yeah maybe it doesn't really make sense, but don't worry about it, okay? The details aren't important.
• She does care about being drugged against her will, though, so by the same logic, this must be important. And it is! But not for the reasons you might think. While this nonconsesual setup does reflect somewhat poorly on Mihari, the practical purpose it fulfills in the narrative is once again what's actually pertinent here. To get a bit ahead of myself for a moment: this episode is all about Mahiro (and a presumed AMAB audience, by proxy) exploring her new gender identity in small ways, and this exploration is paradoxically made safer by her lack of consent! After all, if she ever finds her masculinity being threatened in a way that makes her uncomfortable, she can simply say "well, I didn't want to be a girl..." and all is well.^[1]

• Oh, and in case there were still any doubts as to whether or not any of the earlier moments were intended to be jokes or not, we're helpfully provided this example of an actual, cartoony joke. Combine this with the keen sense for comedic timing the episode already demonstrated, and it's clear Onimai's staff has all the chops required to make a capital-C Comedy if they wanted to. That they didn't here sure says a lot, then, doesn't it?

• I neglected to mention above that Mihari does say one thing about the drug: that its effects will wear off if Mahiro stops taking it. Which is, of course, the one detail about it that's likely to come up later (e.g. in a dramatic season finale where Mahiro transforming back actually becomes a possibility, and she has to explicitly declare she'd rather remain a girl).
• Oh, and... well, you know. The one thing we learn is that it's a continuous-use drug? Out of everything it could've been? Hmm.

• Alright, Mihari's character. Like I said before, the absurdity of the drug immediately paints her as a mad scientist, and with Mahiro being de-aged as well it's easy to assume she might be a bit of a pervert. These are completely understandable first impressions to have of her — so the show is quick to shoot both of them down! Her being a college student is played 100% straight in the rest of the episode, and you'll notice that Mahiro is the one who brings up the real otaku-brain-rot perverted stuff in response to her fairly normal suggestion to "stop being a shut-in who does nothing but play porn games all day". When she does say something like that at the end of the scene, it's only because she (correctly) identifies Mahiro as the kind of otaku who'd worry about something as stupid as dying from masturbating as a girl, and wants to get back at her a little for thinking about porn games even now! Again, this is the joke of the scene: that Mahiro is an idiot whose priorities in this situation are backwards. And with that established, we can finally get the OP!
• What a perfect introduction, huh? It not only sets up the premise of the story, Mahiro and Mihari's characters, and their relationship, but also teaches you how to interpret the show! We've already been shown that there'll be jokes, what they look like, what they'll be about... and how they act as commentary on Mahiro's situation, framing it as something she should be thinking harder about.
• As for the OP itself, yeah, it's extremely horny. There are a lot of close-ups of Mahiro's chest and butt and so on, which is the type of standard fanservice I initially expected from the series — and that was completely absent from the intro! Another thing we learned, then, is that this is not going to be the norm... at least for this episode.^[2]

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Scene 2: Toilet

• The episode's just barely started, and we're already 1/4 of the way through it! The intro being so long is another indication of how important it is.
• So, when it comes to the comedy... wait, is this game that Mahiro's playing based on anything in specific? The player character looks like a recolor of Riesz from Seiken Densetsu 3, but those enormous buttons on the UI scream mobile game... and "the boss is gonna spawn any moment now" makes it sound like an MMO? Hmm.
• Um, where was I? Ah, right.

• When it comes to the comedy, explicitly interrogating what the joke in a given scene is supposed to be will remain an instructive exercise. Here, for example: the easy assumption is that we're meant to laugh about Mahiro needing to sit down to pee. Yet the moment is presented quite matter-of-factly – by how the camera frames it, the lack of comedic timing and music – so that can't be the case. But the part afterwards, where she flops onto her futon and agonizes over having dome something so innocuous? Yep, it's got all of those! As well as another "seriously...?" reaction by Mihari.

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Scene 3: Shower

• Next... ah yes. Right away, we have another case of Mihari saying something, Mahiro replying in the most otaku-brained way possible, and Mihari shooting that down without missing a beat. More important, though, is the first indicator of Onimai's horny power level: this shot of Mahiro's stomach. In my (admittedly limited) experience as an amateur anime art critic, you only ever see stomaches like this (i.e. bulging a little, and especially with that much detail given to the navel) in art by high-level lolicons artists... but that's not everything! Oh no, far from it. The truly illuminating detail here can be seen when Mahiro turns around:

• You see that? Those little divots at the bottom of her back? Those are the dimples of Venus, and folks, this is literally the first time I've ever seen anyone draw these?? Or at least, in a way that drew this much attention to them. The back doesn't seem to be a body part that's fetishized all that often, but even when it is, the focus is usually on the spine or shoulder blades, right? I find it very curious that the dimples were given such attention here, then. Surely no one would've noticed if they'd been ignored.
• And the scene in the shower... if you're thinking it might be another one where the joke is on Mahiro overreacting, then you got it right! I only have two things to add. First: I'm a fan of that profile shot after she looks at the mirror while covering herself with her arm. That pose only really works from the point-of-view character's... well, point of view, so getting a different perspective here further drives home how silly it looks. And second:

• She literally spells it out, lmao
• Here's a better look at her back! And to go with it, the most exquisitely-illustrated panties I've ever seen in an anime. Once again, it'd be easy to assume this is merely business as usual for a horny show; and, once again, that'd be wrong! The sheer attention to detail – on the three-dimensionality of the fabrics, their differing textures, the seams – is something you only get from hardcore lingerie enthusiast artists.

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Scene 4: Dress

• Ah-hah! Here's the main attraction.
• So you might look at these shots and think "wow! whoever animated this cut is a real foot freak". Well, far be it from me to presume someone's proclivities from their art, but if I had to hazard a guess? No. This is not the work of a mere foot freak. We're talking about the foot freak here, folks; the one foot freak to rule them all.
• In my (again, limited) experience, the most popular foot art tends to feature very specific kinds of feet. I mean ones that look soft, with rounder, shorter, and more uniformly-shaped toes; in other words, idealized feet. On top of that, the focus of a picture will often be either the toes or the soles (if not both).
• With that in mind, look at the shots above once again. For starters, you'll immediately notice (as you might have during the shower scene) that Mahiro has pretty long and bony toes. This alone would already make this sequence noteworthy, given that I can only think of one foot artist who draws toes like this off the top of my head^[3], but! Look also at where the greatest concentration of detail is. That's right: in the ankles, heels, and Achilles' tendons!! And, okay. I'm not into feet^[4], so there's a high likelihood I'm talking completely out of my ass here. But from what I've seen? No one cares about those. Like I said, people love toes and soles. But the heels?? With this kind of detail that makes the skin looks like it's realistically bunching up? Absolutely not.^[5]
• What does this mean? Two things. First, this is the work of someone who appreciates feet not as a perfect and idealized form, but as they actually exist in the real world. That's something I can get behind! Second: as was the case with the dimples of Venus, they didn't have to do this. If they simply wanted to be horny for feet, there was no need to go in so hard in this cut of Mahiro spinning around that lasts... what, two seconds? One and a half? Simpler, cartoonier drawings would've sufficed. So this doesn't make sense... unless the animator behind this cut is into feet in exactly this way which I'm not gonna deny the possibility of I mean let's be real here, but also — unless, through the aforementioned appreciation for women's bodies as they exist in reality, something else is being communicated here. Unless the message has moved beyond "don't you think girls are cute?", and into "don't you think girls are so cute, it'd be really great to be one?"

• Oh my god. Look at this shot!! Look at it! It says literally everything that there is to be said, but I'll spell it out anyway. This is not the face of a boy who was turned into a girl against his will. It's the face of a girl who never realized how much she wanted to be a girl. A girl who is, for the first time in her life, experiencing gender euphoria!
• And it's hard for Mahiro to accept this, because of course it is — she still thinks of herself as a man. But even as she claims the girly clothes weird her out, the adorably bashful smile on her face makes it obvious she's enjoying this! So when Mihari suggests switching to a more conservative outfit, she does so knowing that Mahiro will decline, even if she's all tsun about it.
• This points towards Mihari's pushiness coming from a genuine worry for Mahiro's well-being, too. If she's known on some level that Mahiro would enjoy dressing up, then it's not a stretch to imagine she believes she has to be pushy; if she wasn't, then Mahiro would take the path of least resistance through this, and not explore how she feels about being a girl! Just look at how bright her room is when she's trying out the new clothes, following that little push from Mihari. The complete opposite of the darkness from the beginning of the episode, isn't it?
• And we end this scene, of course, with a joke about Mahiro getting embarrassed from being seen having fun dressing up. Once again — it's no big deal, girl!

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Scene 5: BL

• Oh god, here it is. This segment doesn't even last two entire minutes, yet it's so absurdly dense with meaning that detailing everything it's evoking would be well beyond the scope of this post... so obviously I'm going to do about it anyway. A non-insignificant amount of the blame for this post taking as long as it has can be attributed to all the research I had to do to write this section, and I'll be damned if I let all that effort go to waste!^[6]

• On the surface, this scene is fairly straightforward. Mahiro plays a BL game in order to distract herself from wanting to masturbate (...because she's still worried about what Mihari said earlier, lol) but it actually ends up turning her on! Mihari takes this as an indication her tastes might be changing as a result of the transformation, and the scene ends. It's interesting that Mahiro's reaction to her own enjoyment of the game is framed as pathetic, rather than humorous, but there's otherwise not much of note going on here... or is there? This is something I only noticed on a rewatch, but once I did I couldn't stop thinking about it. To put it simply: if the message is that becoming a girl has changed Mahiro's preferences, and maybe even her sexuality... then why use a BL game to portray that, rather than an otome game? Wouldn't the latter be a more natural fit?

• Perhaps one might argue it's all a joke about the situation being ambiguously gay, but I feel like an otome game would communicate that just as clearly were it the case... which it isn't anyway, because again, her reaction is not framed as laughable! So we're probably meant to take this at least somewhat seriously, which in turn implies there's more going on here than might appear at first blush.

• Why BL, then? I believe the key here will be a comparison of how Mahiro might have engaged with both genres back when she was a man, and how she interacts with them now, as a girl. Given that otome games are not mentioned at all and little is said about her thoughts on BL pre-transformation, this will require me to extrapolate her opinions from how the demographics she'd fit into interact with those genres — and I'll have to extrapolate some of that as well, due to the limited scope of my research. I certainly could've spent longer reading academic articles, but I wanted to finish this post sometime this year, so this'll have to do. I think my logic makes sense anyway, but... you know, keep that in mind.

• So, back when Mahiro thought she was a cis/straight man, what did she think about...

  • ...otome games? If we assume players' default mode of engagement with fiction is by self-inserting into the protagonist, it would be easy to presume she'd be as averse to otome as she apparently was towards BL. A guy playing a game where you romance other guys? Kinda gay, isn't it?? But ah: what if we consider an alternate mode of engagement, where instead of self-inserting, the audience interacts with the narrative from outside — as themselves? In this case, our imagined male player now has a cute girl to latch onto in the protagonist, and the romance goes from "I'm romancing this dude (gay)" to "this cute girl is romancing this dude (straight)"! ...which might still be too much for some danseimuke erogamers to stomach, but at least it's no longer such a direct threat to masculinity (either their own or that of society itself). Indeed, I imagine not self-inserting into a female protagonist is easier for cis/straight male players than the alternative.^[7]
  • ...BL? Well, now we're in a pickle. Identifying with a protagonist of the same gender as yourself is significantly easier, in some cases perhaps even automatic; but even if it weren't, there's no escaping the fact that most of the characters in BL are gay men. Now, it's obviously possible for any demographic to enjoy any kind of romance — but in a society as patriarchal and homophobic as the one we live in, whose default masculinity is so fragile it can't stand the idea of touching anything that's "for girls"? This effort would require extra effort on the part of our imagined player, and it would not come naturally.

• Nevermind all that though, because Mahiro's a girl now! Has anything changed in how she thinks about...

  • ...otome games? Hm. It's hard to say exactly. She might find it easier to identify with the protagonist, but whether or not that'd be a problem would depend on her sexuality.
    • If she still likes girls... then the protagonist is no longer available as an easy object of desire, while the heterosexual romance with the heroes might now be unappealing on multiple fronts — most notably, in how it'd clash with the part of her that still considers herself a guy.
    • On the other hand, if she's now straight – which I don't think is the case, by the way – then... well, she's exactly the genre's target demographic! As such, her engagement with it would be notably different, regardless of whether she already liked it a little before or not, and bringing this difference up would be an extremely convenient way of showing how the transformation is changing her mindset. So convenient, in fact, that this not being the case feels to me like an indication she isn't straight.
  • Finally, we arrive at the situation that's actually in the show: Mahiro played a BL game and got turned on by it. What could this mean? (This is the part where my research pays off.) Following from the above logic on how players identify with characters, we can surmise that there'll be a distance between female audiences and the cast of a BL work; but rather than being a problem, this distance has been one of the appeals of the genre since its inception! Manga critic and gender theorist Fujimoto Yukari has noted that "for [girls], and also for women, being a woman is the most insurmountable symbol of reality" (2014) — a reality that easily forces its gender/sexual dynamics into romantic fiction, making it difficult to engage with casually. Transposing these narratives into male-male relationships, then, allows authors to "[cast] off the tarnished trappings of heterosexual relationships" (Welker 2006) and focus instead on "ultimate love or pure, genuine relationships" (Fujimoto 2014); or, alternatively, to "[remove] gender as a site of power and inequality" (Popova 2018), enabling exploration of darker themes that would otherwise be "all too realistic if a woman were portrayed as the victim" (Fujimoto 2004). In essence, it matters less that these characters are men, and more that they're not women, as that is what creates the distance between audience and narrative that allows all this^[8]. So when Toppington and Bottomsley getting it on arouses Mahiro, instead of instinctively threatening her masculinity as she was expecting, it's because she no longer sees them as "two dudes, like me (a dude)", but as two characters in a hot sex scene. In other words: because she's begun thinking of herself as a girl!

• This development follows naturally from the previous scenes, where she was happy to try on the dresses — and it'll continue to be explored in what comes next.

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Scene 6: Outside

• Now here's a shot that's straight out of Bocchi. Mihari suggests that Mahiro clear her head by going on a jog, and though our hikkikomori of two years initially resists the idea, she relents when Mihari "threatens" her with the possibility she'll get deeper into BL (once again demonstrating that she knows exactly how to push Mahiro's buttons).
• But that's not what this scene is actually about, is it? Of course not. Think back to the earlier scenes in Mahiro's room and the associations they made – between the darkness and and her prior masculinity, and between the light and her embrace of femininity – and it should be obvious that Mihari is pushing her to not just leave the house for once, but to accept that she's enjoying being a girl. As you might expect, this is initially framed as a joke (because, you guessed it, being so averse to leaving the house is silly), but! That humorous tone is quickly discarded.

• Oh man. The emphasis on Mahiro's eyes calls back to the sundress scene, when she first took a proper look at herself in the mirror, and what do these two moments have in common? They're the only times, in the entire episode, where she lets the mask of performative masculinity fall from her face! With the mirror it was clearly an accident, as she wasn't expecting to feel so good from being cute, but here... she's scared. And this fear – the fear of having been wrong about yourself your entire life, of not knowing who you are or how to be your new self – this is the first fear Mahiro expresses that the show recognizes as a completely legitimate one to have. So when she takes off the mask and, as the real Mahiro, begs Mihari to help her because she's scared and confused and doesn't know what to do... oh god, I'm crying again.

• Of course Mihari will help her. That wasn't ever in question, because Onimai is not just a cute genderswap show — it's a transfem wish fulfillment fantasy! And it doesn't stop at including only the obvious elements such a fantasy would have, either, like Mahiro's transition having been instant and perfect. It also includes Mihari, an enthusiastically supportive family member who pushes her sister to be her better self even when said sister didn't know she was a "sister"!

• And this line!! It so succintly evokes the idea of queer people having a delayed adolescence, due to not experiencing our formative years in our own terms. With children today having the opportunity to figure themselves out earlier and earlier, this might no longer be universally the case, but for an adult like Mahiro? In an experiential sense, yes, she literally is the little sister here!
• And this, in turn, elucidates the reason for the premise's age regression element. It's... well yes it's a lolicon thing, but it too is part of the fantasy! Because if your childhood was unsatisfactory and you only figured out why years after the fact, it only makes sense to wish you could have a do-over. Of course, this is impossible in reality, and I imagine coming to terms with this must've been part of the journey for many of us... but that's precisely what makes it such an appealing fantasy to explore in fiction.

• The next segment expands on how these points relate to Mahiro. She talks about her inferiority complex as stemming primarily from being compared to Mihari back at school, but god! The mood, the fact this comes right after the "who's the younger sister here" line, the direction with its match cuts and symmetrical shots separating the two of them... it all creates an extremely clear impression of her unspoken (and likely unacknowledged) feelings: that she could never catch up to Mihari not only academically, but as a woman as well.
• After an offhand comment about her underperformance compared to Mihari not being the sole reason she was judged at school^[9], Mahiro recognizes that she's ok with things as they are now, and that maybe being the little sister wouldn't be so bad—
• But then she realizes where this line of thinking is going.

• That fear I mentioned earlier; the fear of not knowing who you are. There's a joke right after this, and it'd be easy to think it undercuts this tension. But notice how this moment, with the overwhelming noise of the train and the shots that isolate Mahiro, lingers just long enough to let the mood sink in. The complete opposite of Mihari's introduction of the beginning of the episode!

• Really, just... this whole last third of the episode. I was already fully on board with what the show's doing, but this sequence elevates this singular episode, by itself, into being one of the most resonant and cathartic trans stories I've ever seen. The care and respect with which Mahiro's real fears are treated here shows that, even if the series' primary focus will be on her gender euphoria, and how good it feels to be yourself... it understands. That the sunshine and rainbows it's depicting are not all there is to it — that even in an ideal world with no transphobia, accessible healthcare, and no dehumanizing bureaucracy, the process of reconceptualizing your entire identity would still be frightening! And it is this understanding that makes its choice to center Mahiro's joy ring that much more true to me. At its core, what Onimai is saying is not simply that cute girls are good, or even that it'd be great to be one. It's saying that being the cute girl you've always wanted to be is so existentially fulfilling that, even if becoming that girl is difficult and terrifying, you should do it anyway because it's worth it. Because being who you truly want to be is worth anything.

• Well, the episode doesn't want to end on such a heavy note, so we're back to light-hearted comedy for the last few minutes. And look at that! Even the jokes fit these themes perfectly. Mahiro didn't wear a bra to this jog because she thought it was "too much", then Mihari takes her to a lingerie shop and adorably introduces her to the super nice clerk by saying it's her first time...! And to cap it all off, our girl helpfully summarizes everything we've gone over so far:

• But, just in case. Just in case there's anyone watching who still doesn't get it, that line is immediately followed by the shot at the very top of this post. Remember? The one of a butterfly? You know, the most well-known species of insect to undergo metamorphosis? Do you get it yet???
• Guys. Guys. Transness isn't something you "can" read into Onimai. It is the literal text of the story.

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Conclusion

Holy shit I'm finally done. This took way longer to write than it should have, and... to tell the truth, it wasn't only the fault of the research I did. This post started off as a direct response to all the awful reviews this episode got, and I got as far as ~2 drafts into it like that! But I eventually realized that immersing myself in people's insultingly idiotic criticisms of it was being legitimately bad for my mental health. So I scrapped the whole thing and started over from the beginning, and that's this version of the post. Yep, sure was a lot more fun to write!

My hatred for those reviews cooled over time, too. I still think they're complete garbage, but well... I get it. Of course they're garbage; they were written by well-off white cis liberals. Onimai is not for them, nor is it trying to be, and that's fine! What's not fine is that these people missed this and went off on their self-righteous tirades against it, but that's beside the point. This show is clearly, first and foremost, for the Mahiros out there. It's for all the women living miserable lives as men, unaware that it doesn't have to be this way. And these folks? Even if they've bought into the likes of incel ideology as a coping mechanism, they get it. So it's really no wonder that the first review of this episode that actually identified what it's doing was this one:

I think we could use more dangerous shows.

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Notes

1. "Boy is turned into a girl against his will" is a storied genre, as you might know; there's even another such anime (Ayakashi Triangle) airing this very season. I have the feeling these works similarly use their noncon genderswaps as a convenient "out", but unfortunately the literature on the genre seems to be quite limited. At the very least, Fujimoto Yukari has noted that "when a boy dresses as a female he not only is able to enter the world of women but has the extra benefit of being able to get intimately close to the girl he likes ... That is, in these stories when a man cross-dresses or transforms into a woman, it is for the purpose of voyeurism." (2004) I'm not entirely sure this tells the whole story, but with this in mind, Onimai does stand out for going further — past the voyeurism, and into the territory of explicit gender identity exploration.
2. Don't get me wrong; Onimai is still turbo horny! Just not in this really basic way.
3. That would be 鳥茶丸, if you're curious.
4. Despite what this entire section might lead you to believe. I just like good art, and what do you know: foot fetish artists are pretty good at drawing feet.
5. If I am wrong about this, and there actually are foot artists out there that focus on these things and I simply haven't heard of them, then please do let me know! I'd be very interested in expanding my knowledge here... for purely scholarly purposes, of course.
6. Though I'm still far from an expert on these subjects. If you'd like to learn more, I recommend at least taking a look at the next section, where I list the academic writing I read for this post.
7. I've lost count of how many times I've seen comments to the tune of "I can't relate to a female protagonist" from gamer/otaku dudebros. Hell, I even heard that about the aforementioned Ayakashi Triangle after its first episode aired.
8. Some important things to note here is that, first, this is not the case for all BL works, either historically or as the genre has evolved over time; and second, shoujo and otome works have managed to explore similar topics in their own ways for a long time as well.
9. A comment that's not only begging to be read into, but also apparently not present in the manga?? It really makes you think.

Bibliography

1. Cascalheira, Ijebor, Salkowitz, Hitter, Boyce (2021): Curative kink: survivors of early abuse transform trauma through BDSM
2. Darlington, Cooper (2010): The Power of Truth: Gender and Sexuality in Manga
3. Fujimoto (2004): Transgender: Female Hermaphrodites and Male Androgynes
4. Fujimoto (2014): Where Is My Place in the World? Early Shōjo Manga Portrayals of Lesbianism
5. Ho (2021): Categories that bind: Transgender, crossdressing, and transnational sexualities in Tokyo
6. Kinsella (2020): Cuteness, josō, and the need to appeal: otoko no ko in male subculture in 2010s Japan
7. Popova (2018): ‘Dogfuck rapeworld’: Omegaverse fanfiction as a critical tool in analyzing the impact of social power structures on intimate relationships and sexual consent
8. Welker (2006): Beautiful, Borrowed, and Bent: “Boys’ Love” as Girls’ Love in Shôjo Manga
9. Welker (2011): Flower Tribes and Female Desire: Complicating Early Female Consumption of Male Homosexuality in Shōjo Manga
10. Welker (2015): A Brief History of Shōnen’ai, Yaoi, and Boys Love