Zorume Star'

i've seen enough posts parroting this sentiment that makes me believe it's not just one person's dumb take, but a growing belief and that boggles my mind.

Because like, walk with me here. Generally speaking, One Piece women tend to come in two categories: Beautiful Babe and Ugly Hag.* And Sanji usually has two different reactions to this: either complete obsession and devotion to a Beautiful Babe or disdain towards the Ugly Hag for not being a Beautiful Babe. (See: his tossup in how he interacts with Shinobu in Wano when shes first introduced vs when Oda decides to blast her with his barbie beam.)

*for the sake of the conversation i am not considering the types of young girl archetypes (re kids and teens.)

Oda's design philosophy splits the idea of an attractive woman and an unattractive woman down the middle, and every version of an "attractive woman" looks, generally, exactly the same and follows the same principles of feminine attractiveness via the male gaze. Even attractive women who might be supposedly more "masc" are very much a tomboy archetype; kind of boyish in a very feminine way.

So theres this grey area of interaction with women Sanji never has, because the concept of an attractive masculine woman, much less a butch or a stud, is just Not something that has been shown at all in One Piece. There are no handsome women, and certainly no masculine women who aren't caricaturized so that the audience wouldn't feasibly consider them potentially attractive.

But if there was, if there was a woman who shows up and is so incredibly masculine, a true solid fuckin stone butch who is presented as being attractive the way One Piece presents its Beautiful Babes to be attractive, that. Would be interesting to me. In the context of Sanji and his interactions with women. Because Sanji will always have an opinion on a woman. If a character is a woman, and Sanji is aware of her, we will get brief passing knowledge of what he thinks of her.

So what does a handsome woman do to a guy like Sanji. What chord does an attractive, masculine woman strike in his brain. You know. Is there a sort of crossing of wires that happens when a character is still clearly very attractive, just not in the way he typically associates with femininity. Sanji is shown to be easily emasculated by other men, but not by women even if they are objectively more capable than him in the moment. He'll let a woman walk all over him as he attempts to provide them with things they don't need, he's never really dissuaded by their lack of need for him, he still insists upon it anyways. So where does the intersection happen. What reactions happen, what crossroads does his typical attraction to women come across. Is it the physicality of masculinity that emasculates or compromises him, or would the threat receptors in his brain shut off once his brain properly reroutes his view of this attractive, masculine person to "woman."

I won't even say Rebeca has a new outfit... because, you know, to have a new one, the previous one actually has to consist of CLOTHES. It's entirely based on Rome and the Colosseum.

For Bonney, I came up with an outfit that works for both versions—because, you know, she’s 12.

For the child version, it’s a dress worn with cuffed trousers; as she grows, the dress becomes a blouse and the cuffs are unrolled. I gave her pigtails and a hat because I think it makes her look like a tough kid.

But the most influencial and invisible part is my asexuality.

Because I almost never experience physical attraction, it took me TWO DECADES to figure out that I'm not romantically interested in men. I flip-flopped between genders in relationships, not understanding why I didn't want to have sex with people in the same way others did, not understanding what attraction really was and what it was supposed to feel like, and just not understanding why, at 35, I didn't understand what I wanted.

My asexuality has made me force myself to have sex that traumatised me. My asexuality has meant other people have forced me have sex they felt entitled to, and I just let them do it because I thought they were entitled to it, as well.

Nothing has made me feel more alone, unloveable, broken, and abandonned than being asexual.

While the big annual survey continues (until 13th August), I'm here to give you the results of the nonbinary name survey!

This is on the blog because it's technically a side survey for fun. The survey ran from 5th July to 3rd August, and there were 11,340 usable responses. You can see the spreadsheet of results here.

Top 20 names

Alex (1.01%, 204 people)

Jay (0.69%)

Sam (0.51%)

Charlie (0.49%)

Robin (0.48%)

Rowan (0.41%)

Ash (0.40%)

Max (0.33%)

Lee (0.31%)

Eli (0.31%)

Kai (0.31%)

Moss (0.29%)

Quinn (0.28%)

Wren (0.28%)

Aster (0.28%)

Jamie (0.28%)

Kit (0.26%)

Jack (0.25%)

Morgan (0.25%)

Ari (0.24%, 49 people)

Here's that top 20 as a graph, for the visual-brained folks:

The gender intentions of 18 of the top 20 names was "gender-neutral"; the two exceptions were Eli and Jack, where people were more likely to be aiming for something more masculine.

Here's the last name survey I ran, in 2023. The design was quite different, but the top 4 were the same names in the same order. The top 10 are the same names in a different order, but with one change: last time Kit was in the top 10 (this year it's at #17), and this time Lee is in the top 10 instead (last year it was #20).

This time I gave participants three slots to enter names. 20,118 names were entered in total, of which 2,358 (about 12%) were entered more than once. 22% of participants used all three slots, which seems like a lot to me, and maybe if I do this again I should provide more slots.

There were 8 names in the top 100 where people entering that name were more likely than not to be keeping a birth name:

Hannah (93.8% of Hannahs were keeping a birth name)

Elizabeth (93.3%)

Emily (91.3%)

Anna (86.8%)

Sarah (84.4%)

Emma (84.2%)

Laura (80.8%)

Claire (75.0%)

On the flipside, there were seven names entered over 20 times that were exclusively chosen by the participants themselves:

Aster (56 participants)

Rain (39)

Crow (29)

Niko (25)

Nyx (24)

Elias (22)

Briar (20)

Here's a graph of the gender intentions of each name:

Of the names that were not given at birth, here are the gender intention options and their top 3 names in each:

Gender-neutral:

Riley (74.2%)

Quinn (70.2%)

Sasha (68.8%)

Nonbinary:

Echo (50.0%)

Moth (35.3%)

Mars (34.1%)

Feminine:

Luna (64.5%)

Alice (34.3%)

Willow (30.3%)

Masculine:

Oliver (75.6%)

Alexander (70.6%)

James (65.9%)

Which means, this time, we have achieved our goal and discovered that:

the nonbinariest name is Echo! (24 people, 0.12% of participants.)

the most common name among nonbinary people is Alex, with an incredible ~1 in 100 nonbinary people going by this name.

And finally, despite the stereotype that nonbinary names are all three characters long, the most common number of characters in all names entered (including every name entry counted individually, and including names entered only once) is 4 or 5. Here's a graph:

As promised, the full spreadsheet of results doesn't contain individual responses, and any name entered only once is left out of the list. This is because names are identifying information and I don't want to risk anyone accidentally outing themselves due to having a very unusual or unique name.

Here's the results spreadsheet link again. Enjoy!

But you freely admit the system is bad. That it values the wrong things.

Première illustrations que j'ai dessiné dans ma quête d'illustrer mon roman !

J'ai beau aimé le résultat, ça reste un échec. L'ambiance ne correspond pas du tout à celle de l'histoire, j'avais juste envie de dessiner plein de détails dans une boutique magique.