your tags on the yulma post made me so emotional, thank you for sharing ;; itβs honestly disheartening to see their representation either get completely dismissed or met with absolute ignorance,, i do think the fandom has come a long way since then even tho thereβs still discourse around how βvalidβ it is but if people dug more deep, itβs honestly undeniable no matter how u look at it
aaah glad it was a worthwhile read then π₯Ί
and yeah definitely :( fandom changes and there's been a lot of changes in the last twenty years in the way an audience can accept a queer narrative, and while it's for the better, it does also mean that sometimes there's people who aren't going to see what was the big deal or how it was groundbreaking. They often approach their dynamic by modern standards of queer representation that i think can sometimes be a disservice to how huge it was in 2010 when it came out.
I remember talking about this story with a friend once and they were like "so it's queer because one of them is actually a woman in a man's body. that seems cowardly to me" and it frustrated me a little both on the angle of what it means for Alma to be in this situation to start with (if Alma is in a situation where they can accept the change to their body or not, and how no matter how you look at it Alma is fundamentally genderqueer), but also on how i remember the anger against "Kanda being gay" to start with
And i think about how Hoshino had to work for this to start with, having to set up that Kanda was looking for someone very early on, someone implied to be a lover, and then build the Alma arc in such a way where Alma=Person Kanda Was (Romantically) Looking For became unavoidable and no editor could go back on what she wanted to say. It was huge at the time, and i hope we can remember it like that.
but between the way lots of fans abandonned the manga then, the hiatus following afterward, and the new anime not really being beginner friendly, dgm's legacy in term of queer representation ended up kinda buried under it all and difficult to get new people to see.
and now i sometimes see a lot of scrutiny on the Kanda/Alma storyline on "can we even consider it queer" that makes me sad in the sense of, sometimes it circles back to similar argument i've heard at the time to cut down the ship, which also have people say "but if this argument can be made then it means it wasn't obvious enough", while no, it's obvious, people just were seeing it in bad faith because they were looking for their own confirmation basis, but in the end those specific people ended up leaving because even if they wanted to make up excuse to erase the queerness, it was too late, the queerness was here to stay.
like idk i'm just rambling but i so vividly remember how people reacted then that i can't buy into any "it's not queer enough" complains from the modern perspective. It was groundbreaking at the time and it was the real first popular Shounen i personally read where one of the main character was confirmed to be in a queer love story that is the important focus of a full arc, and tbh i haven't truly seen that much ever since (but i also don't keep a close look at modern Shounen so that's on me)
but yeah and in the end i really come back to the feeling of "if they're not queer enough why did homophobes get this mad about it when it happened" yaknow
anyway thank you for the ask and i'm glad the perspective was a nice read <3
i just hope one day people can really realize just how special dgm was at the time for that.
