When I first watched Love, Chuunibyou and Other Delusions I had no idea what “chuunibyou” was, but the anime quickly made me think: I was definitely a chuunibyou as a kid! While not a form of mental divergence in and of itself, I contend that for neurodiverse kids, chuunibyou can be a coping mechanism.
I’ve been a fan of shoujo manga for 20 years, and for much of that, I’ve been fighting to get other manga readers to take it more seriously. I even started a podcast, Shojo & Tell, where I talk to other fans and industry professionals about it. Even so, the word “shoujo” for me evokes knee-jerk stereotypes and assumptions that I have to consciously fight against.
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.
One of the most clever anime/manga series of the 2000s, Ouran High School Host Club is best known for the gently satirical way it engages with classic shoujo tropes, with its characters performing and overexaggerating certain traits for an audience of squealing female clients. It examines twin tropes through Hikaru and Kaoru, playing up certain stereotypes while dismantling others, and creates a more human portrayal of twin identity than most of the media it parodies.
I studied storefront displays too, the Aeropostale mannequin sporting the same dress as my lab partner. What did my peers see in these clothes that I couldn’t? I didn’t know, but I hated it: clothes, fashion, school, my classmates, all of it. I was better than the other girls. Fashion was shallow. I’d stick to tennis and The Prince of Tennis instead.
Toxic thinking? Absolutely. But in 2006 I didn’t know better.
Tsukushi faces more than just bullying from her peers and the controlling grasp of Domyouji. She also must carry the additional burden of financial instability and the pressure from her parents to marry a rich man in order to resolve their money problems. This situation forces her through the psychological process of parentification, molding her into a spirited and resolute character that I came to love.
Ruminations on everyone’s favorite motorbike anime, the pandemic, and my favorite topic: liminal spaces.
Many criticisms of moe characteristics stem from the idea that these girl characters are created to be appealing to male viewers, and therefore cannot be relatable to any real woman in the audience. However, so-called moe series have yielded several characters that are extremely relatable to the neurodiverse female experience.
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.
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.
You wouldn’t expect an otome game like Code:Realize to have themes that resonate so strongly with common queer experiences. In many ways, the game follows genre conventions, with a heterosexual romance story following a singular heroine and a cast of attractive men. Yet it spoke to me, an enby transgender man, by exploring themes of inner discovery, found family, and self-love.
It took years of consuming BL and Yuri to finally face my truth: that I am queer.
Gender identity, self expression, and ethnicity are so intertwined that it would be hard to discuss one without discussing the others. As a Japanese trans man, all of these things have come into play in relation to my self-expression and identity. One of the things I found solace and euphoria in, as a teenager, was clothing.
The Love Me for Who I Am manga is educational on how not to treat nonbinary people, but it’s not enough and needs to do better.
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?
Black women always have to be strong. Society thinks we have some superhuman ability to withstand trauma. We are depicted this way all over the media to devastating results. I want to talk about Casca, a character who stands as the antithesis to this extremely harmful stereotype.
Even now, with the vast increase of explicit queer womxn’s representation on television over the past decade, I still see myself in Sailor Moon and The iDOLM@STER more than I see myself in Orphan Black.
Satoko and Nada’s friendship is a great example of why friendships between women with disparate lives are necessary, as the two embrace their differences despite their vastly different backgrounds, protect each other, and offer one another a semblance of family when they’re far from home.
At first glance, Ashinano Hitoshi’s 1995 sci-fi world seems no more than a quiet and rural part of modern Japan, but the easygoing protagonists live amidst ruin in what would have been the metropolitan Tokyo Bay. Entire cities have sunk and an untold number of lives have likely been shattered, yet the comic takes solace, even joy, in depicting the beauty of the world as humanity sits back to accept its fate.
When I played Kingdom Hearts Union X Cross (then called Unchained X) for the first time in 2016, I felt pressured to play as my assigned gender (female), due to the lack of options for both Black female video game characters and non-binary characters. As someone who was still exploring their gender identity and expression, this was extremely stifling.
