Fangirls: the fetishization of homosexuality and “authenticity”

Well, that title sounds far too formal and pretentious for what this post is, but I couldn’t think of anything clever. At any rate, I just wanted to write about something that’s been bugging me for a while about the fangirl community in general. As usual, this is just an unstructured, not really edited, collection of thoughts and not a pointed argument or indictment of anything. This isn’t in response to anything in particular, it’s just been mulling around in the back of my head for a while and I’m bored, so why not. This is all very generalized and obviously doesn’t apply to everyone. And in other things that should be obvious but mentioning it anyway: this is all anecdotal/etc.

So, over the years I’ve noticed a particular tendency among fangirls (I hesitate to call it a trend because it’s entirely possible that this attitude has always been there and I’ve only been deep enough recently to notice it) to basically straight up fetishize any and all gay male relationships. Now, I feel like there’s an important distinction between enjoying depictions of man-on-man relations of a romantic and/or sexual nature and fetishizing homosexuality (for the sake of brevity, for this post let’s just assume “homosexuality” refers specifically to male homosexuality––not that there aren’t ladies who fancy ladies gettin’ it on too, but that’s an entirely different discussion). And moreover the thing being fetishized isn’t the dude-on-dude aspect in and of itself so much as an, ultimately false, sense of authenticity.

More plainly: What is it with fangirls and this hangup about “real gay”? And why is it that everything with a hint of “gay” must be consumed?

Digital Manga Guild: Smells like Exploitation!

So, at AX I ended up sitting in on the Digital Manga Guild‘s panel explaining their “revolutionary” new approach to translating manga. On some level it’s actually a pretty clever idea, but the way they’re executing it is straight up exploitation of the (what appears to be mainly) teenagers they rope into working for them for free.

No. 6 Dropped; New Project: Schell Bullet!

First, new project news: I’m trying to acquire a copy of the Schell Bullet novels to translate. Assuming I don’t get outbid at the last second I should have them in a couple weeks. It was a collaboration between Ikuhara and Nagano in 1999 seemingly with the aim to turn it into an anime, but that never happened (not surprised considering how notoriously annoying both of them are to work with from what I’ve heard). Anyway, I don’t know much about it other than Ikuhara + Nagano robots and the concept album is pretty awesome, so yeah. Scans of illustrations + some description translations are up here if anyone wants to get a feel for the series.

Onto the “bad” news:

I know 99% of you are going to read this as a butthurt ragequit, so whatever, but I’m dropping No. 6.

I hadn’t intended to initially, but over the last couple weeks my interest in it has dwindled to basically nothing (largely a side effect of Penguin Drum being over 9000x more interesting, tbh). There are at least two other translators working on the novels now, so I feel like my apathetic and quite honestly half-assed TLs are no longer terribly relevant. This person has nearly overtaken me and skimming the prose it’s a lot more polished than my shit (though I do think I’ve got a few snappier bits of dialogue, but that’s about it, lol). I’ve also heard that someone on LJ is on Vol. 3 Ch. 1 already, but it’s f-locked, so maybe you guys should do some investigating on that!

I was going to post scans up through volume 5 as a gesture of good will, but I know the 9th-ave TL already has all 9 volumes and I’m having a moralfag moment about piracy (the books are dirt cheap and easy to acquire, there’s really no excuse).

And inb4 >butthurt >ragequit >homophobe etc. Whatever.

Also lol @ anyone who thinks I TL’d anything to be “less gay.” If anything, I did the opposite any time the opportunity presented itself.

Oh yeah, here, have what I got done of chapter 3 before I got distracted and lost interest (for the record I was working on this after I wrote that rant, but got bored):

Meanwhile at 19.04s

Cup: Royal Albert, “Rainbow”
Tea: Prince of Wales

No. 6: A Rant

I know I’m going to regret making this post, but fuck that, it’s rant time!

Listen up you No. 6 fangirls, who will never amount to anything, I’m talking to you! Let me dispel some idiotic myths about this series. No, I don’t need to tweet  Asano to make the following statements with an air of authority because these are just statements about the text in general (eg. “x has never been mentioned where are you faggots getting this from?”) and if you can read and put the fujoshi goggles down for two seconds these are perfectly logical conclusions anyone would come to. Anyway, I’m not in the mood to discuss any of this, I’m just putting it out there to satiate my rage as a survival strategy, take it or leave it––HERE WE GO:

1. No. 6 is not a romance and it is not “BL.”

“Romance” and “BL” are genre labels. I know this concept is beyond most of you, but it’s pretty plainly apparent that the story is not first and foremost about romance (if it is at all, but whatever)––whether you think it’s good SF or not and whether you think the only redeeming factor of the series is the relationship between Shion and Mouse is entirely beside the point. No. 6 is an SF adventure story with some BL fanservice/elements.

2. Neither Shion nor Mouse are “gay characters.”

They could come straight out next chapter and admit that they’re in love with each other and it still wouldn’t necessarily make them “gay characters” (unless that actually became a thing, but it probably wouldn’t). No. 6 has included 0 treatment of homosexuality so far (I guess you could argue Mouse’s “lol, actually, we’re gay” to the prostitute counts, but that’s such a common trope it probably has it’s own tvtropes page, plus there was insufficient reaction to draw any conclusions about anything, other than the fact that Shion clearly doesn’t identify as gay). Sexuality in general is only briefly touched on in the notion that children in No. 6′s elite are clearly not taught shit about sex and seem to be kept pretty ignorant about it. We spend most of No. 6 inside Shion’s head and not once has he had a sexual or sex related thought (outside of being confused/flustered by Safu).

Now, of course, this doesn’t preclude them being gay with or for each other in the single-target-sexuality anime “pure” romance sort of way (not saying there’s anything wrong with that). Honestly, I don’t care so much about this part. I don’t know why everyone’s so hung up on it either. If you think they’re in love (whatever that means exactly––I’m not gonna get into it here but “love” can mean a lot of different things), cool. If you think they’re bros, cool. If you just want porn of them, cool. Whatever man. Idk why everyone gets so butthurt and defensive about this. Just stop pretending this is some profound “treatment” of homosexuals in SF, because it really isn’t. Wandering Son is a serious treatment of gender and sexuality, No. 6 is not.

3. The inner social workings of No. 6 have not really been touched on in depth at any point, so stop making shit up.

I don’t know where this “No. 6 is a progressive society so they must accept gay people” thing came from. What book have you been reading? If anything, it sounds like homosexuality would be expressly discouraged since it seems like you need a license to have sex and only to have children (at least among the elite based on Safu’s whole I-wanna-bone-you speech). They may have robots and weather control, but everything points to a profoundly repressed and regressive society. If you’re going to make societal arguments anyway, why not actually look at the effects of No. 6′s social structure on Shion––he has no friends (except Safu), sex is something you only do with a license to make a baby, and it really doesn’t seem like people engage in many physical expressions of affection in No. 6 normally (especially among the elite).

P.S. I wrote all this before I saw that interview snippet. It doesn’t contradict any of this. plz2be keeping the shipper faggotry off this blog, I don’t care if you think they want to fuck.

Ooh Mister Ikuhara

Going to Japan Tomorrow

Like the title says, I’m going to Japan tomorrow. For a month. I apologize for not getting shit done on No. 6 since I finished the first volume, but I’ve been really busy getting things together for the trip (we had been planing it for a while and then we canceled and then it was back on so things have been a little nuts). There will be blogging about the trip here: http://hizakurige.net/ so check it out if that sounds interesting. I might cross-post some relevant things though (like the Star Driver talk report/etc).

I suspect I might get some of the second volume done on the plane though, lol.

Dinner through the glass

;A; Wasn’t gonna do it this year but I couldn’t help myself.

Kaioshin is literally retarded: the state of anime blogs and why they need to die

First off, let me repost this little gem in its full glory: 

Haters gonna hate

[EDIT] Since responding to individual comments is effort:

Obviously this chart is a generalization and it doesn’t apply to everyone. The point I’m getting at is that I think Star Driver is suffering from a bad case of genre (fandom?) clash. While you’d think that having elements of a wide variety of genres and anime “traditions” would draw in a broad range of viewers, what it seems to have done is just the opposite‚––elements from one genre (say magical girl) not only don’t appeal to fans of another genre (say mecha) but they actively turn fans of the second genre away/against the series. The primary (negative) reactions from the three groups I’ve pointed out tend to be as follows (in my experience at least):

The mecha fags: Either they say it’s too “gay” for them to watch or they’re bored and frustrated by the handling of the robot action (too short, too repetitive, etc). They also tend to complain about the lack of exposition on the world mechanics (ex. complaining that they didn’t explain what the Cybodies were in the first episode‚––would you complain that Gundam doesn’t explain what a Gundam is? is all I have to say to that).

The 90s nostalgia fags: Tend to complain about the characters, somehow they’re too “boring” and “underdeveloped.” They also take great offense when Star Driver is compared to a holy 90s show (eg. Utena) because Star Driver is apparently just some conglomeration of stuff that some producers thought would appeal to a lot of people and therefore make a shitton of money.

The FABULOUS fags: Admittedly this is a broader group than the other two because I couldn’t think of what else to call them, but they tend to have gone into the show thinking it was going to be a straight-up parody/comedy and are bored/frustrated as a result. They want the show to be more over the top and are troubled by people suggesting that it should/could be taken at least somewhat seriously. (Though this brings up a good question, just what is Star Driver? It’s not really a comedy, but it doesn’t take itself 100% seriously either. Something about that hard to define tone seems to put some people off too.)

Personally, I fall right in the middle-–I love the 90s anime I grew up on (but it’s not the be-all end-all of anime), I like robots and SF and I like ridiculous over the top craziness––and I have literally no complaints about the show (this is a very strange feeling tbh)––Star Driver feels like it was made for me. So, I’ve been trying to understand why it gets so much hate, and all I can come up with is that unless you have just the right mix of interests and/or are sufficiently open-minded (i.e. you’re not a mainline mecha-fag who can’t deal with anything vaguely effeminate) Star Driver just doesn’t make sense. I really don’t want any of this to come off as elitist BS about how those of us who like Star Driver are special because we “get it” and everyone else is too dumb or biased to “understand,” because that’s not even remotely productive. Yeah, idk what I’m trying to get at anymore, so I’ll just leave it at that.