The creation myth surrounding Ranma 1/2 is so fascinating to me.
Rumiko Takahasi wasn't sure she could properly write a male protag... and so created one of the most incredible deconstructions of toxic masculinity put to page on the *first go*.
She absolutely nails the very particular and often circular dynamics that make Ranma the character they are, a Man Among Men featuring deep insecurities about breaking those manly boxes, fighting off those feelings with fists and clearly feeling relief at being released from those strictures at the drop of a bucket.
The critiques of masculinity that men actually create, like Walter White, still have too many of the signifiers, are too unwilling to fully unleash themselves from the confines of masculinity, because the author isn't able to take that step. By being outsider art, Takahashi is able to fully encapsulate the problem.
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Ranma: "I should be a girl right now. These feelings for Akane can't be real or actionable if I'm a girl. Maybe I'll even give her a lil peck on the cheek, that's a thing girls can do together! Its not romantic if it's not a guy and a girl, so"
I gotta give @dumbingofage a lot of credit for managing to end every page turn for the last 1-2 months on something that very plausibly could have them kissing on the very next page.
Dorothy is going through the worst day of her life wanting to kiss her best friend and Joyce just keeps (seemingly unknowingly) leaning into it and this level of sexual tension should not even be *possible* to hold for this length of time and yet HERE WE ARE.
And I need to talk about it.
@catboymettaton 's "Would Estrogen Save Light Yagami" is a masterpiece. It has an incredible understanding both of what makes Death Note work as a series, and more importantly a rarely seen part of the transgender experience :tm: put on primary display.
Analysis and Link to the fic under the cut
Death Note is, at its core, *incredibly* camp. There is no way to discuss the Potato Chip scene without discussing its use of heightened melodrama to get a laugh at what should be (and is!) an incredibly dramatic part of the series' cat and mouse chase. A lot of the series' most powerful moments are ones that are undercut (I would argue intentionally) for humor by the sincerity of its drama.
Granted, I have not watched Death Note (beyond a 3 episode viewing in Anime Club) in almost a decade. But neither am I caught up in Fandom interpretations. When I think about Death Note at all it is almost entirely through the incredible youtube videos of people putting Light and L into different, sillier, confrontations and watching the drama as each of them tries to calculate a reaction. All reactions falling on the axis of being In/Out of character for Light Yagami's persona as Light Yagami, 18 year old college boy, and the axis of Matching/Dodging the presumed psychological profile of the serial killer Kira, all balanced on the knife's-edge third axis that Light is too much of a try-hard to ever just admit he was wrong or didn't know something, rising to the bait every time when the only winning game was not to play.
But that's just Death Note proper. The comedy of the parodies comes from the same camp as the source material, sometimes with a heightened comedy poking fun at how abstract the topics of these verbal jousts can be. Would Light Yagami like Charizard more? Would only a serial killer be a fan of Chikorita?
Which brings us to what makes Would Estrogen Save Light Yagami so brilliant. By ""pretending"" to be a trans woman (genuinely unironically a way better plan than his in-canon plan of reading a playboy while looking disinterested and fully clothed for 20 minutes) we get an entire extra axis to our silly verbal jousts. If Light Light, is Light Kira, and is Light Trans? She needs to drop hints to her transgender status, while not being so obvious that they are disregarded as a Kira ploy, but not so unsubtle that they go ignored as a dropped Kira ploy. And the secret morphing from fake decoy secret to real secret to eventually just out and public trans status redoubles these stakes yet again.
What Catboy Mettaton has done is write an incredible story making fun of essentially my life for the past 5 years. I started Estrogen 5 Years Ago, and then went about hiding that I was doing so, while trying to prod for tiny hints to see if it was safe to come out. As it turns out, everybody from my classmates at the religious college I was only at for literally a month after starring E, the congregants of my transphobic church I've since left, and basically every member of my family have individually deduced that something *like* "me being trans" is going on, but nobody wanted to talk about it so I spent the whole time thinking I was just really good at being stealth. The entire time, I was trying to navigate being true to myself and living in a way that made me genuinely comfortable (and advanced my plans of being a serial killer) and doing/saying things to assuage suspicion. "Oh no, somebody might be catching on, quick, say something normal and masculine" "So uhhhh how about that Sports Ball, huh?" "Nailed it".
Frequently the closeted life (which, reminder, I was incredibly bad at) felt like the exact sorts of cat and mouse chases seen throughout the front half of the story, and catching that parallel and plugging it back into Death Note is a work of pure genius.
This is the primary, but not even the only, form of extremely clever parallelism in the fic, especially in the front half. The forum posts debating Kira's gender wouldn't seem out of place directly adjacent to discourse surrounding any of a dozen transgender or gender-ambiguous characters in Japanese media (Lily Zombieland Saga, Brisket Guilty Gear, Astolfo Fate, etc).
Anyway I've now written about 800 words about a fanfic, and I have another tangential thought to throw into a reblog so I should probably do my homework or something.
10/10, would recommend, I laughed like a dozen times, I nearly cried at the ending, I'm ravenously waiting for the next major continuation.
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I don't frequently post original political content, but I have some thoughts about the Mangione case.
It is *really* interesting, in this case and in any of a half dozen other individual issues that social media gets in a tizzy over, to watch random people walk in, pick up the narrative tools activists have been championing for years, frequently misunderstand those tools, and then drop them and walk away when that single incident is over rather than actually get involved in activism.
Mangione is "innocent until proven guilty", as a legal regulation. He cannot be treated by the government or the press as a guilty man until he has been convicted, under threat of slander/libel. That doesn't mean that individual citizens can't have opinions, it doesn't mean you browbeat every comment section about how you can't say he's guilty. That's not what that *means*.
These are people who have taken a 101 class from Tumblr University about police misconduct, death penalty abolition, and how systems could be rigged against a defendant, so that they can try to protect this one guy. And ironically, they're only interested in him because despite their posturing they think he *did do it* and they want to get him off for it! Or worse, because he's a hot, rich, white boy.
And so they go through this case with a bunch of grapevine'd arguments for why the police are totaling screwing him over, ignoring that many of these things aren't unique and many more have no actual source in any reputable outlet nor from the defense itself. If half of your cockameme theories about how the court is illegally trying to push for this conviction were true, the defense would be raising those objections. That is the literal point of having a legal defense. The fact that they aren't should be implication to you that you're looking at this like an episode of a true crime podcast and not a real case where a man's life hangs in the balance!
If you were actually serious about these things, you would be getting involved in grass roots efforts to fix the court system. But I'm sure once this one flashy case about a murdered billionaire blows over you'll just go back to not caring. Because this isn't about trying to get justice, or making a more equitable society, this is about petty vengeance against the billionaire class, and *even if that is your driving goal, you can use that to fuel something better and longer lasting*.
So with the recent allegations about Neil Gaiman, it has suddenly become much more popular to criticize his works. Often to the point of claiming that they "always knew", that they'd always been critical of it. We've seen this pattern before with Rowling, among others. That's not what this is, I cannot claim that I wasn't a big fan of Gaiman's works. But I still have this concern that has been rattling around in my head for years now.
The way the trans woman Wanda is handled in Sandman trade 5, A Game of You. It opens with Wanda being nice, and sweet, and making me as an audience member really like her. Then, when the main thrust of the plot begins, she is excised from it and left on the outside of the dream realm explicitly for not being a "real woman". And then the space surrounding the dream dimension, where Wanda is, is all destroyed and she is killed, and the story ends with her getting buried under her deadname, misgendered, and the 2 small acts of defiance that Wanda's friend graffitis her real name on her tombstone, and that Wanda looks like a cis woman in the afterlife as a ghost.
So the question is, why is she here? She's one of the very early trans characters in Big 2 comics, so Wanda draws a disproportionate amount of analysis in talking about this arc, but her "purpose" in the arc is to be explicitly tertiary and unimportant to it! This is, in effect, her downfall, her entire purpose is to not be involved in the story and then to die, because her death is the direct result of the characters in universe cutting her out of the story. And *maybe* there's something to that, I suppose, but it's not enough to justify the outcome. This story would be roundly hated if released today, because it's just fridging a trans woman who was created for the purpose of being fridged. People traditionally cut Gaiman a fair bit of slack, because it was the 90's and best practices around trans characters hadn't been established yet, but he was told *at the time* that he shouldn't fridge her. Trans icon, contemporary comics writer, coworker, and purported friend of Gaiman Rachel Pollack told him before GoY was published that he couldn't kill her. He does so anyway, and has said numerous times that GoY is his favorite arc of Sandman as a direct consequence of the criticism levied against him. He recounted this story of going against Pollack *in the memorial article he wrote for the DC Pride issue following her death* and I've just kept seething over this ever since. It's so incredibly frustrating, he did nothing to really break the chain of trans characters that are there to die which would continue for years hence.
