Katsura Kotaro Enthusiast

by tshirt, for my friend kile :)

i’ve been daydreaming obsessively about an excretory reading of gintama lately. the thing about gintama is that because they can’t show onscreen cock dick balls (running in jump as it did), they have to censor it. so the phallus, rather than being generative of truth, itself obscures it—via its own censorship. this is a thing that the characters themselves acknowledge as a weak—flaccid, if you will—joke, though certainly still enough enough to gag on. 

but gintoki, for example, when the comic uses censorship as the punchline two weeks in a row, comments that readers will think they don’t have any other jokes. and, well, do they? and what actually is that joke?

join me, now, on a close reading of a couple arcs in the chapter 400s. we here take “filler” as our key object, that long middle between gintama’s serious arcs. this essay remains in dialogue with gintama’s overarching story to come as well as the events that preceded it, but frankly put, most of life is filler and then you die. so we zoom in on a couple random weeks in the year 2013, on the basis that those few weeks contain as much meaning as our lives can ever hope to have had. 

we, more importantly, study gintama’s filler because filler is responsible for some of the most dramatic cultural detritus gintama has produced (e.g. sword in ass merch). it is critically underrepresented despite the fact that it’s how the average person encounters the series. therefore, i’d like to read it in dialogue primarily with guy hocquenghem’s seminal text, homosexual desire, for the bare fact that the mundanities of gintama are so centrally concerned with homosexual anxieties and desires (that is, the anus), such that it forms a bit in itself. here, we commit to it.

Sign-ups are currently being accepted for our GinZura exchange event !! Sign-ups are open until next Monday (Feb. 13)!!

If you are interested, please sign up with this form:

Sign up form

The event is happening mainly on Discord and Twitter, though main communication between mods and participants might take place mostly in Discord in the case Twitter keeps changing in a way that makes interactions difficult.

For the time being, there is a Twitter account designated for the event: Twitter , and all the relevant information is stored in the hashtag #ginzura_exchange2023

In principle, the schedule is like follows:

1. Participant & pitch hitter sign-ups (Jan 19-Feb 13)

2. Participant matching (Feb 14 - Feb 15)

3. Match up announcement (Feb 16)

4. Creation period (Feb 17 - Apr 1st) So a month and a half. 

5. Cancellation deadline: March 10 

6. Check up dates: i. March 3(general idea and draft) ii. March 17 (To check everyone's advancements) iii. April 1st (Submission date)

older kags (like 20yo?) design bec i honestly think she wouldn’t wear something that far off from what she currently wears. laughs

bonus: