Death Notes on Camp: Repurposing a classic
New layers and new ways to appreciate the series emerge when it’s considered as a campy melodrama rather than the brooding thriller that writer Ohba Tsugumi intended it to be.
sexuality Tag
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Reading The Duke of Death and His Maid as disability allegory
The Duke of Death and His Maid takes what could be a cheap device for titillation and, intentionally or not, transforms it into something far more emotionally powerful. When looking at the show as a story with metaphors about disability and navigating disability in that space, it becomes difficult to remove the fanservice without making the story weaker.
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Love, Agency, and Androids: A Chobits Retrospective
Chobits uses its post-humanist storytelling to ask questions about the highly personal relationships that humans can develop with something that looks human or shares human qualities, but can never exactly be human. Because the persocoms are almost all built to look like young women, it also creates a space to ask questions about gender roles in relationships and how those perceived as female can be literally objectified. At times, Chobits presents a very compelling and empowering narrative around love, personal choice, and sacrifice. Yet, simultaneously, Chobits fails to reckon with the very questions it raises.
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Reconsidering Belladonna of Sadness: Still powerful after almost 50 years
1973’s Belladonna of Sadness combines a 19th century work’s vision of the liberated witch with second-wave feminist ideology to create a flawed but fascinating work that invites revisiting even all these years later.
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Daring to Speak its Name: Goodbye, My Rose Garden and the queer historical romance
Set in 1900 England and steeped in references to both the history and literature of the Victorian era, Goodbye, My Rose Garden draws on turn-of-the-century reality and fantasy alike to highlight the intersectional struggles of queer women of the period.
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Indie developer Foxglove Games on queer representation and their new visual novel Trouble Comes Twice
Foxglove Games, a new developer on the scene and based in Europe, is working to add to this diversity of representation with their forthcoming visual novel Trouble Comes Twice. This new game, currently in development, offers players two distinct queer characters to play as, twin siblings Jace and Hazel.
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Slut-Shaming and the Fetishization of Queer Childhood: A love letter to Alois Trancy
Since his introduction, despite the fact that he’s a character quite hated by the audience, I’ve loved the Earl Alois Trancy as a multi-layered character that carries many intertwined themes around child abuse, queerness, genre influences and slut-shaming.
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Pregnancy as the pinnacle of womanhood in TSF porn
Though inherently absurd once verbalized, “Abenime” are stories that speak to a nation’s plight. They are designed to manufacture consent by defining baby making as the norm. Women can make babies; ipso facto, their role in saving Japanese society lies in buffering the ever-shrinking population with young, healthy babies who will carry on the nation in the future.
And while this attitude reaches public discourse by way of popular entertainment, it also likewise prevails within narratives not often discussed out in the open. -
Queer Subtext and Representation in Kamen Rider
Much of the franchise’s homoeroticism is a result of the franchise’s severe gender disparity, which it has only recently taken steps to address; the series took 31 years to get its first female Kamen Rider. There have also been canonically gay, transgender and nonbinary characters, but the quality of representation is questionable. Regardless, many LGBTQ+ viewers have seen their own experiences reflected in the many characters of Kamen Rider, whether implicitly or explicitly.
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Is it Hot in Here? Consent, communication, and boundaries in Sweat and Soap
Even with a hefty dose of olfactophilia, Sweat and Soap is as heart-warming and nourishing as it gets. In a genre rife with toxic relationships and uncomfortable relationship dynamics, Sweat and Soap takes what seems like a fetishistic premise and turns it into a story about the growth of a healthy relationship. Throughout the story, we see Natori and Asako set boundaries, communicate clearly, and, most of all, grow as individual people.
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My Fave is Problematic: Samurai Flamenco
No one has ever asked whether Samurai Flamenco is good, because the question is a loud and simultaneous “no” and “yes.” But the question of whether it “counts” as queer romance has waged on for eight exhausting years now. Incidentally: yes, it does.
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Yuri!!! On ICE and the revolutionary portrayal of queer Slavic representation
Of all the amazing things about the show, one of the most striking to me was the revolutionary way it portrayed the intersection of queer and Slavic identity.
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Chainsaw Man’s beautiful depiction of platonic relationships
Chainsaw Man, a Shonen Jump series by Fujimoto Tatsuki, has its main character, Denji, realize the value in having a strictly platonic relationship with the leading female protagonist, Power. How Denji reaches this conclusion is incredibly messy and more than a little frustrating in places; which is to say that it epitomizes the uncomfortable struggle of navigating platonic relationships with someone you have the potential to be attracted to, a common aspect of growing up for many, and it’s both heartwarming and validating to see a character experience this part of life in a shounen manga.
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How BL and Yuri Helped Me Face My Sexuality
It took years of consuming BL and Yuri to finally face my truth: that I am queer.
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Blue Flag vs. Our Dreams at Dusk: A look at LGBTQ+ representation and its audience
Our Dreams at Dusk and Blue Flag are two series about queer characters, but it’s clear that each is aimed at a different target audience.
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My Fave is Problematic: Kakegurui
It soon becomes clear that within Hyakkaou Academy, it’s the women who get shit done. That was where I found what had first caught my interest in the first place: the women of Kakegurui.
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1122: For a Happy Marriage explores how prescribed gender roles can damage marriages
1122: For a Happy Marriage examines two different married couples that are pressured to adhere to gender and allonormative roles within marriage, which ultimately damages their marital relationships.
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The Surprisingly Queer-Friendly Narrative of Cybersix
Japanese animation has found numerous sources of inspiration, from comics and novels to video games and toys, located from both within and outside of its national borders. But when it came to the 90s, few have the unique history, and overwhelming queer vibes , that the anime adaptation of Cybersix does.
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ParaKiss Lost: The reductive adaptation of Paradise Kiss
Paradise Kiss is one of the great josei manga classics, but subsequent versions of the story erode the focus on its lead’s agency that make the original so special, serving as a prime example of how different framings can tell the same plot and lose all of the effectiveness.
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Against the World: Madoka Rebellion, saviorism, and abolitionist schooling
As somebody who has witnessed repeatedly the failure of would-be individual saviors to undo entire oppressive systems, I want to try to come to a deeper understanding than what is afforded on the surface by Rebellion’s final twist. What happens when hope is institutionalized? How do oppressive ideologies shape the worlds we can imagine? And the question that has haunted me most: if in the moment we destroyed an oppressive world we were given the full power to create a new one before we had any time to heal, would we like what we make?
