Complicated Age: Passion, hobbies, and aging through the lens of Complex Age
In their unexpected 33rd year of life, Cy reflects on passion and what it means to like, love, and fully engage with hobbies.
Perspectives Category
Results-
-
Throw the Man Away With Me: Rejecting heteronormativity in Run Away With Me, Girl
Much of Run Away With Me, Girl is focused on how heteronormativity cruelly forces queer people to diminish who they are. Thank goodness that the story also envisions so much more for its heroines.
-
Orb: On the Movements of the Earth and imagining radical futures
As I watched Orb’s various protagonists stake their lives against a violently oppressive religious institution, my real-life government grew alarmingly hostile toward my existence and those of my ilk. Watching Orb became an acutely personal experience, demonstrating the force with which established power structures will suppress truths that threaten their authority and how hope for radical change can be found through community and collective action.
-
Kamikaze Girls: An alternative and queer retrospective
The story of lolita-meets-biker-girl was formative to me in my high school years, and rewatching it recently with the Discotek release made me realize the impact it had on my gender, my sexuality, my friendships with others, my self-expression, and self-acceptance.
-
Press Start to Begin Again: Mental Illness, Adulthood, and Recovery of an MMO Junkie
We might have only one life but the chances we have are limitless. Thankfully, Recovery of an MMO Junkie demonstrates that there’s infinite ways to meander the path of adulthood, no matter what life throws at you.
-
A World That Can’t See You: Otherness and disability in Tsukihime
When thinking of “disability representation” a dark urban fantasy and a former eroge like Tsukihime may not be the first thing that comes to mind, but its unfiltered depictions of Shiki’s experience with his curse, and its overall themes of otherness, isolation, and perspective speak profoundly to the marginalized experience.
-
Nagata Kabi and the Mundane Pain of Sickness; or, That Time My Body Broke and I Had To Figure Out How to Keep Going
Nagata Kabi’s sixth autobiographical entry is a story about what happens when your life falls apart and you can no longer escape. That last bit is what this article is about: falling apart.
-
Becoming Monstrous: Yurikuma Arashi and transmisogyny in the school system
Everything in Yurikuma Arashi is more symbol than literal representation, and I have often mulled over its meaning as I’ve navigated entering the teaching profession as a nonbinary Chinese person. Like the bears, I’ve often asked myself: what do I sacrifice to be allowed to exist within the school?
-
Curses and True Forms: Reading Fruits Basket as a lesbian
As a lesbian, Fruits Basket was not written for me. Even so, the romance between Kyo and Tohru resonates deeply with my experience of queerness.
-
Many Ways to be a Warrior: Illness, martial arts, and seeing myself in Kojirō Sasaki
By watching how Record of Ragnarok told the origins of Kojirō Sasaki, I reminisced about my time wrestling. The samurai would lose his matches; but Kojirō uses his defeats to study and learn the way of the sword, playing the matches and possible outcomes in his mind, analyzing how adversaries move and think.
-
Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou and Transgender Cyborgs’ Experience of the Apocalypse
The story of Alpha Hatsuseno, an android girl in a collapsed world, serves as an allegory for what many transgender people went through during the pandemic. In the solitude and desolation of COVID-19, cut off from the pressures and expectations of society, there was a silent wave of transgender people coming to the realization that they no longer needed to pretend to be someone they were not, beginning their transitions in the midst of death, despair, and loneliness.
-
Forcing Yourself for Love: Hotaru, Sailor Moon, and “Overcoming Disability” Narratives
Hotaru’s story represents the tension between our desire for comforting narratives of disabled people healing and the reality of disabled life as shaped by capitalism and the limits of our bodies.
-
Akiba Maid War and the rare representation of disabled joy
No amount of blood splattering across the screen or sudden, emotional character deaths hit me quite as hard as the post-credits scene of the finale. It took just fifty seconds to make me squeal out loud and cement Akiba Maid War as one of the most impactful shows of 2022.
-
The joyful affirmation of plus-sized leads in yuri
In a media landscape where there are seldom women who have a body type like mine, seeing two very different series, in terms of genre and presentation, showcase plus-sized sapphic women as people worthy of respect and desire, was so impactful for me.
-
Airborne Onnagata: Viewing Macross Frontier’s protagonist through a genderqueer lens
After an initial viewing of Macross Frontier, most viewers would comment on a handful of topics. Not limited to, but including: the series’ back-to-basics approach reminiscent of the original 1982 Macross, its tendency to adhere a bit too closely to then-current trends, and unending talk of how awful Alto is. However, on a recent rewatch, a new thought clicked with me: what if Alto was fighting with some intense dysphoria?
-
The Walls That Contain Us: Transition, change, and I Want to Be a Wall
Thoughts on name changes, transition, and how Shirono Honami’s I Want To Be a Wall is a reminder that we can shape our own barriers and boundaries.
-
Bayonetta 3 Validates Every Insecurity About My Life, Relationships, and Sexuality
Between my feelings about the ending of the third game, the drama surrounding its production, and the series’ long-standing controversies, I just felt drained as I watched Bayonetta 3’s credits roll. Which sucks, because the previous two games left me feeling nothing but energized and wanting to be a bolder, braver version of myself.
-
Finding models of healthy masculinity in BL manga
In retrospect, I recognize those first fanfics as something that let me safely imagine myself as a boy in a relationship with another boy. That desire to find media that would let me project myself into the positions of these male characters was what led me to discover BL.
-
I’m Not Okay (and That’s Okay): Happy Sugar Life and the comfort of “bad survivor” narratives
Reading through Happy Sugar Life was a therapy I didn’t know I needed. With its wild-eyed, camera-spinning melodrama, it managed to capture so many unwanted feelings of anger, sorrow, desperation, resentment, anxiety, and at times, a truly aching nothingness. I joy-rode this tour-de-madness, but even I still spent a week afterward somewhere between “destabilized” and “no bath or shower will make me feel clean.”
-
Ribbons for the Win: Battling internalized misogyny with Pokemon Diamond & Pearl
I watched Pokemon: Diamond & Pearl during elementary and middle school, and Dawn became one of my all-time favorite characters. This might seem a little strange given that Dawn was a girl who loved pink and dresses, while I was a girl who rejected all things feminine, including my “girly” classmates. However, I realize now that I adored her so much because she challenged my conceptions of what femininity could be.
