It is so rare to find fiction that speaks to your Otherness and to truly connect with it. As a trans woman, I more often than not feel disappointed after opening my soul up to allow for validation and comfort. So perhaps you can imagine the tenderness with which I turned the pages as I read Nagata Kabi’s My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness.
I started watching anime because of cool action scenes and interesting characters, but connected to it for many other reasons. As someone with Selective Mutism, one reason that’s particularly meaningful to me is my personal connection to dandere and kuudere characters: quiet girls who speak very softly, if at all.
LUPIN THE 3rd PART 5 wants to explore Lupin as a folk hero of sorts. Unfortunately, it has very specific ideas about the audience to whom Lupin is a hero, and it doesn’t seem to include queer people.
“Once upon a time…” Those first words of the opening monologue of Revolutionary Girl Utena captivated me. And every time it repeated itself, I learned more about how stories have power.
How do you react when you find out one of the main creative forces behind something you love is, to not mince words, a completely shit person?
Throughout my ever-growing love for all things manga and anime, there have been a lot of pretty good and some downright horrible portrayals of Latinx people.
Last year, Yuri!!! On ICE took the anime community by storm. Whether it was from the passionate portrayal of figure skating, the queer romance, or the sincere way it cared for its characters, it resonated with many. I’m no exception.
I love many things about being a geek: reading or watching different media, researching their histories, and talking to others about it. These activities are viewed as essential to being a geek. But replace the word ‘“geek” with the word “autistic,” and suddenly all the traits that were so readily accepted get read as strange and negative.
As a Southeast Asian, there are days when I wonder if my feelings are real and worth caring about. Where I live, videos blare about what it means to have a family and to be proper husbands and wives. Heterosexual families are the default unit in Asian societies, and going against them is considered not just sexually deviant, but morally wrong.
For a movie to appeal to me as a woman, female characters had to be more than just caricatures and stereotypes. They had to make mistakes and learn from them; they had to have bad hair days. I think that’s why I fell deeply in love with Princess Mononoke when I first saw Lady Eboshi.
