Yuru Kuruttabesu🧸🪀♂️
@yurukuruttabesu
dude i think one of the femboys i follow on instagram is being groomed into trooning out. fym you're a "prettyboygirl"? you called yourself a prettyboy before (1/2)
Minerva P Kelley
@doubleca5t.bsky.social
Chuds who are into femboys are so funny to me cause it feels like they're the only ones blind to their own absurdity. Jerking off to a femboy and then getting mad when she comes out as a trans woman is like going to a strip club and getting mad when the women take their clothes off.
Lesbian Death Bed: The Bed that Eats Pussy (pro orph)
@bitterkarella.bsky.social
genuinely, i don't get why so many chuds think jerking off to "femboys" is somehow less gay than jerking off to "trans women." like what is the logic.
~
Two thousand replies under the cut
kalina2hu.bsky.social
@kalina2hu.bsky.social
you aren't gay if you fuck a boy
you're gay if you fuck a faggot.
👁️🍄🪸
@bloomfilters.plus
the logic is misogyny. the womanized transfeminine object of heterosexual desire (shemale, femboy, ladyboy, futanari, etc) is a type of girl that exists as a sex toy so objectified that calling herself woman has implications she is trying to assert her interiority & politics as a conscious being.
a lot of ppl i think stumble on this because they're too fixated to the presumed assumption of the categories of assigned sex as perfectly rationalized when it's far more often that a feminized thing with a dick is just girled (with a dick). the better comparison to make here is the desire to possess the procession of images of women (feminized objects) as superior because they do not talk back or possess internal growth around their subjectivity vs something as political as the "troon". it's like people thinking heterosexual misogynists are secretly gay guys.
finally theres a coercive element to trying to continually retain transfemininity in "the border of maleness" insofar as it keeps the transfeminized to be the objects of exchange between the whole brotherhood who share her body and its labours. the most extreme version of this is v coding of course.
👁️🍄🪸
@bloomfilters.plus
also obligatory repost.
Femboys in the Factory
Trans Labor beyond Abjection?
Alexis Davin
Abstract This article aims to explore the political economy of trans life through an examination of the category of the “femboy” as a means for understanding the concrete processes of sexuality and social activity responsible for the internally differentiated valuation of kinds of trans labor and the wider regime of accumulation of which these valuations form a part. Following Kevin Floyd’s historical materialist account of gendered performativity, it details the femboy’s historical emergence within hierarchies of racialized sexuality. Using the case of online streaming, the article argues that femboys’ disavowal of transness, and intelligibility to dominant regimes of sexuality, subtends their higher valuation than trans women in comparable lines of work. Making use of the case study, the article argues that identification itself appears to affect the judgment and valuation of individuals within the labor process and that such aesthetic judgements—the contours of how capital “sees” its subjects—are both ineliminable and constitutive of the concrete differences that emerge in the process of production. Aesthetic judgment and the process of abstraction therefore offer an entry point into both the analysis of the labor process more generally, and the relations of desire, abjection, and identification that enforce the present subordination of trans people.
Keywords femboy, political economy, labor, abjection, reification, performativity.
👁️🍄🪸
@bloomfilters.plus
you gotta remember how much the heterosexual regime simultaneously trains men to get off to women(-ized people)'s bodies and to control and be disgusted by them. misogynistic men think cis women's genitals are gross and scary. misogynistic men think trans woman's genitals are gross and scary.
the logic is misogyny. the womanized transfeminine object of heterosexual desire (shemale, femboy, ladyboy, futanari, etc) is a type of girl that exists as a sex toy so objectified that calling herself woman has implications she is trying to assert her interiority & politics as a conscious being.
at all points the thought of complex interiority is treated as nonexistent compared to acquiring a maid that serves a as a masturabtory aid you use to navigate relations with the brotherhoods. this must sound extremely cynical a view but what else can i call a thousand year history of rape as a disciplinary technology of gendered violence and institutions that intentionally kept women and any people with some gender marginalization or peripheralization or resistance to this under such control of body and labour.
themboy insomniac
@riotliturgist.bsky.social
cw: mentions of csa
same reason pederasty is wide spread in patriarchal societies. most famously ancient greece & rome but also all over the world & history, the position of "boy" as acceptable object of desire and the the violent NON-acceptability of "man" as object of desire are one and the same.
anyway there's a reason i always become a party pooper whenever people start going on about the gay greeks or roman towel boys as if these were awesome queer societies. they were homophobic patriarchal rape cultures which exhibited quite common anxieties & fixations about the figure of the "boy".
trans women, meanwhile, are people who seize control of their own identity and claim personhood in a way that sex objects are not supposed to. lots of people also note the existence of trans priestesses in ancient rome/greece as if they were "revered," but if you read ancient sources, they're described derisively as "half-men," sexual degenerates, "cindaedi" or "pathics" (slurs also used for adult men who submit to penetration) having makeup smeared on their faces to hide their facial hair etc, it's a very familiar to anyone who's seen a tr**njack.
back in the twitter days i had a thread where i analyzed a poem by i think martial, in which a man and a runaway slave boy, described as beautiful (i.e. sexually desirable) but wicked, take shelter with a group of "semivir" (half-man) galli (transfem priestesses).
in the poem, the galli attempt to castrate the boy in the night, to make him one of them (to uh… "groom" him into being one of them, in the modern language). but he guesses ahead of time and switches places with his traveling companion, resulting in the adult man being castrated by mistake.
rich text, much to unpack, etc etc
anyway imo it's a particularly instructive example of how patriarchal societies build transmisogyny and the fetishizing of "beautiful feminine boys" together as one thing (with the important note that i'm not talking about people who self-identify with the term "femboy," but the ways patriarchal society views young, beautiful, feminine boys as acceptable objects of desire and why that's not gay, or at least generally within the acceptable bounds).
cw csa
additional important note: obviously things shift back & forth over time, even in patriarchal societies where pederasty is acceptably practiced in the open there are often anxieties & discourses about how "gay" or "not gay" it is, sometimes it is kept "under the table," an open secret etc.
Alex P. 👹
@saddestrobots.bsky.social
hetero identity is mostly patriarchal identity.
in the chuds' eyes, "femboys" have been discursively transformed into the ultimate form of obedient and non-emancipated queer, someone who adopts all the disempowering aspects of femininity without claiming any form of personhood or self-determination.
i don't think there's ever been a form of anti-queer politics that doesn't include "also the boundary-crossers and misfits need to be maintained in a state of marginalization, subjugation, and crushing poverty, so i can fuck them patriarchal-style whenever i want without them talking back".
to be clear:
i do not believe that the actual experience of self-id'ed femboys is 100% "look at me, i'm an obedient sex object for the patriarchy" (i figure a lot of them are just, umm, "trying out" girl stuff in a psychologically safer way, given how many eventually do just say "i'm trans") but the people consuming them as porn while flipping out about trans women? 100% just doing patriarchal sexuality:
Alex P. 👹
@saddestrobots.bsky.social
Nov 28, 2024
people forget this because there aren't a bunch of Roy Cohn types front-and-center in the conservative movement anymore
but "it's not queer if i made a teenager feel utterly violated" is the centerpiece of how social conservatives actually treat same-sex attraction.
Alex P. 👹
@saddestrobots.bsky.social
i keep running back to this article because i think this particular dispatch from the borderlands — being the activist gay guy getting simultaneously wooed and threatened with destruction by the patriarchal cabal — is really informative about the whole thing.
("Filthy Peckers" or: The Story of My Exile from Russia. Essay for Jaanus Samma's Not Suitable For Work. A Chairman’s Tale at the Estonian Pavilion, La Biennale di Venezia 2015.)
(by Slava Mogutin.)
Alex P. 👹
@saddestrobots.bsky.social
Nov 28, 2024
your dumbass aunt might be convinced that "it says blah blah blah in the bible," but everyone with an ounce of power is just operating on "the meat shouldn't be allowed to talk back".
ratarchy ΘΔ
@maya-klenger.bsky.social
I started my queer/trans journey id'ing as a femboy I think mostly because it was much more readily available and legible (trans)feminine/androgyne identity in Eastern Europe, because trans people were almost seen as aliens and the way gays often behaved towards exploring youth was less than ideal.
Vitoria, Lamashtan Mage
@vitoriafaria27.bsky.social
There are excellent responses to this, but there's something else I need to point out:
Actual real life femme boys look and behave nothing like the femboys of porn.
Watching trans gals subjecting themselves to the strict gender binary is most of the sadistic high that chuds get out of this.
The high is only there if they are transfem and obviously so.
A transfem that call herself one is empowered, the chuds don't want that, they want the extra humiliation of having them call themselves femboys.
Actual femme boys exist, but they don't jerk off to them either, it's all so very transparent.
And oh my fucking god we got the girlies all out here doing advanced gender and transfeminist theory and the asshole who started it is a literal Bridget denier
Yuru Kuruttabesu🧸🪀♂️
@ yurukuruttabesu
black/normal/♂️/artist/bridget♂️ lover (he's my idol)/i wanna be pretty
i'm here because i saw people i agree with.
[Simpsons "Do It For Her" iconic frame edited to be misgendering Bridget Guilty Gear.]
Alex P. 👹
@saddestrobots.bsky.social
Nov 28, 2024
[In response to an unfortunately deleted post]
this is an entirely coherent worldview.
see, in conservatism, there's only two kinds of sex: patriarchal abuse and that gay shit.
treating anyone like a coequal person? gay shit.
abusing your wife, your stepson, your ten-year-old niece, a queer sex worker whose boundaries you ignore? patriarchy.
people forget this because there aren't a bunch of Roy Cohn types front-and-center in the conservative movement anymore, but "it's not queer if i made a teenager feel utterly violated" is the centerpiece of how social conservatives actually treat same-sex attraction.
your dumbass aunt might be convinced that "it says blah blah blah in the bible," but everyone with an ounce of power is just operating on "the meat shouldn't be allowed to talk back".
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
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Yuru Kuruttabesu🧸🪀♂️
@yurukuruttabesu
dude i think one of the femboys i follow on instagram is being groomed into trooning out. fym you're a "prettyboygirl"? you called yourself a prettyboy before (1/2)
Minerva P Kelley
@doubleca5t.bsky.social
Chuds who are into femboys are so funny to me cause it feels like they're the only ones blind to their own absurdity. Jerking off to a femboy and then getting mad when she comes out as a trans woman is like going to a strip club and getting mad when the women take their clothes off.
Lesbian Death Bed: The Bed that Eats Pussy (pro orph)
@bitterkarella.bsky.social
genuinely, i don't get why so many chuds think jerking off to "femboys" is somehow less gay than jerking off to "trans women." like what is the logic.
~
Two thousand replies under the cut
kalina2hu.bsky.social
@kalina2hu.bsky.social
you aren't gay if you fuck a boy
you're gay if you fuck a faggot.
👁️🍄🪸
@bloomfilters.plus
the logic is misogyny. the womanized transfeminine object of heterosexual desire (shemale, femboy, ladyboy, futanari, etc) is a type of girl that exists as a sex toy so objectified that calling herself woman has implications she is trying to assert her interiority & politics as a conscious being.
a lot of ppl i think stumble on this because they're too fixated to the presumed assumption of the categories of assigned sex as perfectly rationalized when it's far more often that a feminized thing with a dick is just girled (with a dick). the better comparison to make here is the desire to possess the procession of images of women (feminized objects) as superior because they do not talk back or possess internal growth around their subjectivity vs something as political as the "troon". it's like people thinking heterosexual misogynists are secretly gay guys.
finally theres a coercive element to trying to continually retain transfemininity in "the border of maleness" insofar as it keeps the transfeminized to be the objects of exchange between the whole brotherhood who share her body and its labours. the most extreme version of this is v coding of course.
👁️🍄🪸
@bloomfilters.plus
also obligatory repost.
Femboys in the Factory
Trans Labor beyond Abjection?
Alexis Davin
Abstract This article aims to explore the political economy of trans life through an examination of the category of the “femboy” as a means for understanding the concrete processes of sexuality and social activity responsible for the internally differentiated valuation of kinds of trans labor and the wider regime of accumulation of which these valuations form a part. Following Kevin Floyd’s historical materialist account of gendered performativity, it details the femboy’s historical emergence within hierarchies of racialized sexuality. Using the case of online streaming, the article argues that femboys’ disavowal of transness, and intelligibility to dominant regimes of sexuality, subtends their higher valuation than trans women in comparable lines of work. Making use of the case study, the article argues that identification itself appears to affect the judgment and valuation of individuals within the labor process and that such aesthetic judgements—the contours of how capital “sees” its subjects—are both ineliminable and constitutive of the concrete differences that emerge in the process of production. Aesthetic judgment and the process of abstraction therefore offer an entry point into both the analysis of the labor process more generally, and the relations of desire, abjection, and identification that enforce the present subordination of trans people.
Keywords femboy, political economy, labor, abjection, reification, performativity.
👁️🍄🪸
@bloomfilters.plus
you gotta remember how much the heterosexual regime simultaneously trains men to get off to women(-ized people)'s bodies and to control and be disgusted by them. misogynistic men think cis women's genitals are gross and scary. misogynistic men think trans woman's genitals are gross and scary.
the logic is misogyny. the womanized transfeminine object of heterosexual desire (shemale, femboy, ladyboy, futanari, etc) is a type of girl that exists as a sex toy so objectified that calling herself woman has implications she is trying to assert her interiority & politics as a conscious being.
at all points the thought of complex interiority is treated as nonexistent compared to acquiring a maid that serves a as a masturabtory aid you use to navigate relations with the brotherhoods. this must sound extremely cynical a view but what else can i call a thousand year history of rape as a disciplinary technology of gendered violence and institutions that intentionally kept women and any people with some gender marginalization or peripheralization or resistance to this under such control of body and labour.
themboy insomniac
@riotliturgist.bsky.social
cw: mentions of csa
same reason pederasty is wide spread in patriarchal societies. most famously ancient greece & rome but also all over the world & history, the position of "boy" as acceptable object of desire and the the violent NON-acceptability of "man" as object of desire are one and the same.
anyway there's a reason i always become a party pooper whenever people start going on about the gay greeks or roman towel boys as if these were awesome queer societies. they were homophobic patriarchal rape cultures which exhibited quite common anxieties & fixations about the figure of the "boy".
trans women, meanwhile, are people who seize control of their own identity and claim personhood in a way that sex objects are not supposed to. lots of people also note the existence of trans priestesses in ancient rome/greece as if they were "revered," but if you read ancient sources, they're described derisively as "half-men," sexual degenerates, "cindaedi" or "pathics" (slurs also used for adult men who submit to penetration) having makeup smeared on their faces to hide their facial hair etc, it's a very familiar to anyone who's seen a tr**njack.
back in the twitter days i had a thread where i analyzed a poem by i think martial, in which a man and a runaway slave boy, described as beautiful (i.e. sexually desirable) but wicked, take shelter with a group of "semivir" (half-man) galli (transfem priestesses).
in the poem, the galli attempt to castrate the boy in the night, to make him one of them (to uh… "groom" him into being one of them, in the modern language). but he guesses ahead of time and switches places with his traveling companion, resulting in the adult man being castrated by mistake.
rich text, much to unpack, etc etc
anyway imo it's a particularly instructive example of how patriarchal societies build transmisogyny and the fetishizing of "beautiful feminine boys" together as one thing (with the important note that i'm not talking about people who self-identify with the term "femboy," but the ways patriarchal society views young, beautiful, feminine boys as acceptable objects of desire and why that's not gay, or at least generally within the acceptable bounds).
cw csa
additional important note: obviously things shift back & forth over time, even in patriarchal societies where pederasty is acceptably practiced in the open there are often anxieties & discourses about how "gay" or "not gay" it is, sometimes it is kept "under the table," an open secret etc.
Alex P. 👹
@saddestrobots.bsky.social
hetero identity is mostly patriarchal identity.
in the chuds' eyes, "femboys" have been discursively transformed into the ultimate form of obedient and non-emancipated queer, someone who adopts all the disempowering aspects of femininity without claiming any form of personhood or self-determination.
i don't think there's ever been a form of anti-queer politics that doesn't include "also the boundary-crossers and misfits need to be maintained in a state of marginalization, subjugation, and crushing poverty, so i can fuck them patriarchal-style whenever i want without them talking back".
to be clear:
i do not believe that the actual experience of self-id'ed femboys is 100% "look at me, i'm an obedient sex object for the patriarchy" (i figure a lot of them are just, umm, "trying out" girl stuff in a psychologically safer way, given how many eventually do just say "i'm trans") but the people consuming them as porn while flipping out about trans women? 100% just doing patriarchal sexuality:
Alex P. 👹
@saddestrobots.bsky.social
Nov 28, 2024
people forget this because there aren't a bunch of Roy Cohn types front-and-center in the conservative movement anymore
but "it's not queer if i made a teenager feel utterly violated" is the centerpiece of how social conservatives actually treat same-sex attraction.
Alex P. 👹
@saddestrobots.bsky.social
i keep running back to this article because i think this particular dispatch from the borderlands — being the activist gay guy getting simultaneously wooed and threatened with destruction by the patriarchal cabal — is really informative about the whole thing.
("Filthy Peckers" or: The Story of My Exile from Russia. Essay for Jaanus Samma's Not Suitable For Work. A Chairman’s Tale at the Estonian Pavilion, La Biennale di Venezia 2015.)
(by Slava Mogutin.)
Alex P. 👹
@saddestrobots.bsky.social
Nov 28, 2024
your dumbass aunt might be convinced that "it says blah blah blah in the bible," but everyone with an ounce of power is just operating on "the meat shouldn't be allowed to talk back".
ratarchy ΘΔ
@maya-klenger.bsky.social
I started my queer/trans journey id'ing as a femboy I think mostly because it was much more readily available and legible (trans)feminine/androgyne identity in Eastern Europe, because trans people were almost seen as aliens and the way gays often behaved towards exploring youth was less than ideal.
Vitoria, Lamashtan Mage
@vitoriafaria27.bsky.social
There are excellent responses to this, but there's something else I need to point out:
Actual real life femme boys look and behave nothing like the femboys of porn.
Watching trans gals subjecting themselves to the strict gender binary is most of the sadistic high that chuds get out of this.
The high is only there if they are transfem and obviously so.
A transfem that call herself one is empowered, the chuds don't want that, they want the extra humiliation of having them call themselves femboys.
Actual femme boys exist, but they don't jerk off to them either, it's all so very transparent.
And oh my fucking god we got the girlies all out here doing advanced gender and transfeminist theory and the asshole who started it is a literal Bridget denier
Yuru Kuruttabesu🧸🪀♂️
@ yurukuruttabesu
black/normal/♂️/artist/bridget♂️ lover (he's my idol)/i wanna be pretty
i'm here because i saw people i agree with.
[Simpsons "Do It For Her" iconic frame edited to be misgendering Bridget Guilty Gear.]
[scoffs] You couldn't PAY me to jack off to Brian Griffin! [remembers the state of the economy] Well, you could, but it would have to be a four figure amount. [remembers to be honest to myself] Three figures. [remembers not to devalue my own labor] Four figures.
IT'S LITERALLY TWO WOMEN FUCKING LIKE NOT EVEN IN METAPHOR THEY ARE PHYSICALLY SWAPPING SPIT AND EXPLORING EACH OTHER'S BODIES IN THE EXPLICIT TEXT OF THE SERIES WHAT IN THE HELL COUNTS AS NOT BAIT TO THIS DISCOURSE
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the “why are so many yuri manga set at an age of intense self-discovery and change? Are they pedophiles??” discourse you see pop up every now and again is unbearable.
Why are yuri manga set at the age of dealing with the stereotype of lesbianism being a "practice" relationship for the real thing? Why aren't they set in college so they can deal with the American stereotype of lesbianism being an experiment you do and move on from?
the positioning of transfem hypervisibility and transmasc invisibility as two opposing forces is so insidious and dangerous because it reinforces the status quo where trans men's voices are already valued over trans women's
trans women can never speak because we're already apparently soaking up all the attention... nevermind that the "attention" is fearmongering government propaganda
trans women can take up no space, because any amount of attention is further proof that we hog the spotlight from trans men. our visibility is thought of as coming at the cost of that of trans men. so if a trans man speaks over us or silences us, he's just seen as balancing the scales. but our visibility and theirs are not actually opposing forces. a decrease in visibility for trans women is not an increase for trans men. it's just a decrease
transfeminists get blamed for "sowing division" all the time, but the transandrobro urge to position an equal and opposite transmasculine issue for every transfeminist issue reinforces actually divisive shit like this. gonna start blaming transandrobros for "dividing the community" every time they frame visibility as an issue of scarcity
trans men actually have a lot of visibility you just gotta look into any issue affecting exclusively or primarily trans women and you'll see that people loooove platforming trans men when it's at the expense of trans women which to be fair does seem to be their preference a lot of the time but it's fucking surreal and bizarre, like
court decision defending specifically transfems being excluded from from playing on women's teams? no transfems interviewed but here's some trans men we interviewed one of whom just wants to push his new book
panel on the transfem experience? no transfems speaking on it but here's three trans men larping as experts one of whom is just detailing his fetishistic fantasies about them with open contempt for transfem lesbians in particular
in the face of all the backlash against letting trans women play sports with other women, here's a story about a women's team letting a trans athlete on the team! no, trans women still can't play with other women, this is a trans man and we interviewed him while we and he and everyone else pretended it was a progressive cultural victory
hey OP I understand you are upset about the US women's sport shit and as a transfem woman myself I Get It, but can you not start a fucking fight with our brothers??????? Is that like chill with you?????????? We already have people that want us dead maybe don't do their work for them???????????????????? Not even joking this is some bootlicking CIA plant type shit.
hi sorry i'm just a stupid tranny can you answer a couple of questions for me so I can understand
so first! can you explain to me how a neutral reaction to something that frequently happens and continues to happen "starting" anything let alone "a fucking fight"
and second question, why do the trans men getting to speak over us about issues specifically targeting us who use the opportunity to push their book or present their sexual fantasies and contempt for us get to be our """brothers""" but when I so much as simply mention the indisputable fact that these are things that have happened I am a "bootlicking CIA plant"
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I'm as much for getting rid of gendered roles, expectations, and standards as the next gal. But isn't it funny that for an uncannily large number of so-called progressives, "gender abolition" amounts to telling a trans woman the most helpful thing she can do for the cause is degender herself and not talk about The Signs? That being a gender-nonconforming man—almost invariably described in ways indistinguishable from a hateful cis cariacature of a non-passing trans woman—is the ideal embodiment of progress?
What passes for gender abolition rhetoric is often little more than the creation of a gender you can feel good about forcibly assigning to someone, because it's simply being done for the Greater Good.
Heard this stupid dad joke that killed me: Which Chinese word takes the longest to write? "Friend" (朋友) because it takes two months just to write half of it
Sex scenes in movies are just avenues for men to display their fetishes. Women, on the other hand, do not have fetishes. They are big happy and sexually normal. So sexually normal that sex disgusts them. In fact, being turned on? Inherently male trait. Being titillated? Only men experience titillation. Because being a woman means not experiencing dirty horrible sexual feelings like enjoyment at seeing a boob. Women are pure. And good. And virginal. They understand that sex is sinful and degrading. Surely this is a progressive stance.
I think it comes from a place of wanting to see more lesbian representation. But the western yuri fandom sets the bar for "lesbian representation" so high that it becomes obvious that the fandom just views everyone as het by default.
That assumption's deeply baked into the term "yuribait", which straight-up accuses artists of acting in bad faith and disguising the heterosexuality in order to emphasize that lesbianism is just a phase to the audience. I can think of a few cases where that term might apply (Wonder Egg, Eupho), but on the whole it's basically just holding yuri works to a higher standard of romance because again, the audience views heterosexuality as the default. Despite yuri being a genre where lesbian and f/f queerplatonic relationships are the norm.
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It's really neat how Otherside Picnic uses the aesthetics of (early) generative AI* to dig in to the fundamentally human question of self-expression. It uses the patchwork nature of the output as a metaphor for the imprecision inherent in communicating important aspects of ourselves that are nonetheless incredibly hard to define.
Sorawo is a character who has a difficult time understanding herself or others, and the Otherside becomes the bridge through which she builds and strengthens her relationships with the people around her. In the Otherside, fragments of ghost stories get broken up and stitched back together into semi-comprehensible conversations, as if output from a Markov chain generator or early GPT output. Alien buildings of the Otherside represent seeing without understanding, mirroring form but not reflecting function.
These aesthetics mirror the behaviors we often fall back on when we lack the understanding or knowledge to handle a given situation. If we lack for words, we leave the heavy lifting to the imprecise language of labels and/or descriptive phrases we've heard before. If we doubt the appropriate behavior for a situation, we often attempt to mimic what others do without understanding why they do it.
Throughout the series, we gradually see Sorawo gaining a better understanding of her feelings for Toriko and how to be more open with her growing friend circle. Simultaneously, she rejects societal templates for relationships in search of something that allows her to express her feelings without attached preconceptions. As Sorawo learns about herself and her desires, the Otherside slowly becomes a more advanced imitation of humanity, as if Sorawo's experiences are generating the training data for the model.
As Sorawo readjusts to dealing with others in her daily life, the bizarre, cartoonish entities imitating humans give way to entities that pass for human so long as you don't look closely. As she gains a better understanding of Toriko's feelings and how to reciprocate them, empty skyscrapers give way to richly detailed amusement park haunted houses. As she finds the language to express herself and her feelings to others, her communications with the Otherside evolve from broken, imprecise creepypasta fragments to long sentences of nonsense that nonetheless communicate something.
Otherside Picnic's use of generative AI aesthetics masquerades as sci-fi/horror set dressing, but its presence is used it to ask deeper questions about how we communicate things about ourselves. How much do we need to learn from others to be capable of expressing truly original thoughts of our own? Is it even possible to express certain core aspects of ourselves, or are our attempts doomed to be little more than highly structured nonsense?
*there was a post about this almost a year ago that got me thinking about this, but unfortunately I wasn't able to find it to cite it. if anyone has a link, lemme know!
otherside picnic is very interesting in the way it mirrors the disconnect between technology and humanity. sorawo, as our protagonist, has a deep connection to technology, the medium by which these ghost stories she's obsessed with propagate. early on, her narration makes it seem as if she thinks more like a computer than like a person:
this sounds confusing to most people! it sounds like the kind of gibberish sorawo thought of as meaningless nonsense when she first began exploring the otherside. her struggle throughout the story has always been understanding people and being understood by them. the more time she spends with toriko, kozakura, akari, natsumi, and runa, the more she learns how to find mutual understanding with other people. and the more she learns to understand other people, the more human the otherside entities seem to become. even satsuki, the person who has haunted the narrative all this time, who once seemed impossible to ever understand, became someone sorawo could speak to and understand. the wall preventing communication between sorawo and other people breaks down more and more as she learns about the otherside, and it breaks down in tandem with the barriers between her and the otherside entities.
and it seems like you can see this more and more as the story progresses! in the beginning, sorawo views the otherside itself as full of "glitches". to her, it seems like something of a digital world filled with the entities from the stories she reads on the internet. dodging glitches and surviving against the entities is extremely difficult at first, but the more and more she explores the otherside, the more she's able to understand its rules, and following them become second nature to her, and the more it begins to appear as almost a part of nature. she met todate, a hunter, and found animals living in the otherside that have adapted to its conditions. the otherside becomes not an enigma, but a fundamental part of who sorawo is as a person.
if you consider the fact that sorawo's arc is about coming to see the people around her for who they really are and accepting them, then you must realize her eye is the perfect tool for her. the otherside very likely changes its state entirely for every single person who interacts with it - that's why it at first seems digital to sorawo; that's the world she's most fascinated by. what must it look like for someone like toriko, or kozakura? her eye lets her see the various perspectives. in observing what they see, she's coming to understand them.
