idek now

In reading it and getting to know the female protagonist it made me think of the ways that Black women often negotiate romantic partnership in very mercenary ways rather than just out of pure emotion. Because of our marginalisation who we choose to date and fuck carries a lot of social weight to the point that picking a partner is rarely just about picking a partner. It's also about picking a lifestyle or a political statement or a form of access via osmosis. This especially becomes pertinent when the person we date is white.

Does the feminist kill other people’s joy by pointing out moments of sexism? Or does she expose the bad feelings that get hidden, displaced, or negated under public signs of joy?

Does bad feeling enter the room when somebody expresses anger about things, or could anger be the moment when the bad feelings that circulate through objects get brought to the surface in a certain way?

Feminists do kill joy in a certain sense: they disturb the very fantasy that happiness can be found in certain places. To kill a fantasy can still kill a feeling. It is not just that feminists might not be happily affected by the objects that are supposed to cause happiness but that their failure to be happy is read as sabotaging the happiness of others.

His career is literally such an eloquent picture of mental & physical burnout that only gets worse and worse. If you don’t take care of yourself as a creative, if you “push through” as you believe you can (and have done in the past), your body will not let you do that forever. “Ha ha it’s like I’m working on university deadlines again” except writing for a living is for life. It’s your life. Not just a hurdle you’ll leave behind you once you finish university. You can’t just go on with those shitty Redbull-fueled “pushing yourself too hard” life habits you had in Uni. You MUST develop good life habits. Otherwise you will self-sabotage, you will go too hard, and you will crash and burn in a huge way.

(This is why to me Griffith is the perfect embodiment of that overachieving high-performance-or-die part of being a creative for a living, and I can’t help but read these self-sabotage scenes & his own antagonism as maybe Miura venting about both self-sabotage and the exhaustion of running yourself into the ground? Burn-out leading you to become something monstrous & becoming alienated from your life and those you care about? Even the emblematic helmet which signified his achievements being turned to a torture device, etc… It’s a very personal take I know but everyone has a personal take on this manga so there you are)

Kentaro Miura’s notes at the end of his contributions to Young Animal Magazine:

I came down with a high fever of 40 degrees Celsius. Thinking about it, I’ve only had two days off this year. (1993, No. 12)

I’ve lost five kilos without doing anything. I wonder why? (1993, No.21)

In the past two months, my average sleep time has been less than four hours. Now I’ll be Mr. Satonaka soon. (No.23, 1993)