just-a-zuki

[just-a-zuki]

Nothing but the Girl: the Blatant Lesbian Image (1996)

Think this is from On Our Backs? Sourced from@dykedeviance on Instagram. Awesome account.

[just-a-zuki]

From Dagger on Butch Women by Lily Burana & Roxxie Linnea Due

(read it for free on archive.org)

[just-a-zuki]

Morning cuddles 💞

[just-a-zuki]

I’m offering some tepid distraction with my special interests of Epic and acting techniques. If it’s inappropriate, I’m sorry, but I’m tired and I know everyone else is too.

[just-a-zuki]

my family is fucking addicted to macgyvering and it's becoming a problem. every time something in this house breaks, instead of doing the sensible thing of replacing it or calling someone qualified to fix it, we all group around the offending object with a manic look in our eyes and everyone gets a try at fixing it while being cheered on or ridiculed by the rest.

it's a beautiful bonding activity, but the "creative" fixes have turned our house into a quasihaunted escape room like contraption where everything works, but only in the wonkiest of ways. you need a huge block of iron to turn on the stove. the oven only works if a specific clock is plugged in. the bread machine has a huge wood block just stapled to it that has become foundational to its function. sometimes when you use the toaster the doorbell rings. and that's just the kitchen.

it's all fun and games until you have guests over and you have to lay out the rules of the house like it's a fucking board game. welcome to the beautiful guest room. don't pull out the couch yourself you need a screwdriver for that, and that metal rod makes the lamp work so don't move it. it also made me a terrifying roommate in college, because it makes me think i can fix anything with enough hubris and a drill. you want to call the landlord about a leaky faucet? as if. one time my dad made me install a new power socket because we ran our of extension cords

[just-a-zuki]

the Nerima Wrecker Crews' Guide to Ranma Fandom for Newcomers

With the release this month of a brand new anime adaptation of the eighties manga Ranma ½, a lot of new fans are joining an older fandom that may leave them...confused about some details.

See, when the Ranma manga began in 1987, series creator Rumiko Takahashi was already solidly-established from her success with the runaway hit Urusei Yatsura. It only took two years for an anime adaptation to begin airing....for a mere eighteen episodes, before being canceled. If you go back to the '89 anime, you will almost certainly notice some drastic shifts in art style and tone from the first eighteen episodes to the remainder, and that's because only a single season was produced by Studio DEEN before production shifted to a new directorial crew, who dubbed the following season Ranma ½ Nettōhen (Fierce/Hot Battle Chapter).

The thing is, between the original eighteen episodes being made while the manga was still relatively early in its nine-year run, attempts to draw in better ratings by heavily promoting fan-favorite characters, a need for filler episodes to let the manga catch up to the pace of the anime's releases, and even the biases and friendships of the respective directors and writers...some things wound up being different.

And as a result, the Ranma ½ of the Eighties and Nineties is very different from what we're going to get with the 2024 anime. The 2024 series is based on a manga that had been finished for decades, and between the official releases so far and some unfortunate early leaks, it shows plenty of signs of being far more faithful to the original manga.

So, we of the Nerima Wreckers' Crew are here to introduce you to a few of the things you might run into as a new Ranma ½ fan exploring the existing fan content that has accrued over the past few decades!

Be aware: you're about to read spoilers for a four decades old manga. Questions about something that we don't cover in this post? Leave a comment asking for more, after the jump!

Something to get out of the way first: we're the NWC as an in-joke: as both Transformers and Ranma fans (and in some cases, fictive introjects), we wanted to combine the 'Wreckers' group name from Transformers with the English-language Ranma ½ fandom's nickname for the group of martial artists, students, teachers, monsters, and other characters who populate the series:

The Nerima Wrecking Crew.

The principal setting of Ranma ½ is Nerima, a ward of the metropolis of Tokyo. There are 23 special wards, and Nerima is a real-life one that is found in the northwest of Tokyo—in fact, it was the 23rd and final ward! In English-language communications, the local government identifies the ward as Nerima City, so that's how we'll speak of it here.

Nerima is a large city that still retains a very suburban, even exurban character stretching back to its history of farming. There are even still farms within the city limits, including at least one dairy farm last we checked! It's part of Tokyo, but it has a kid of old-fashioned peaceful character...that makes it the perfect place for anime characters to disrupt. That kind of disruption led the English-speaking fandom to dub our favorite crew of violent martial artists the "Wrecking Crew", presumably after their propensity to bust down walls and buildings.

A lot of anime and manga take place in Nerima. Takahashi's previous hit series Urusei Yatsura, the cat-robot classic All-Purpose Cultural Cat-Girl Nuku-Nuku, the anime adaptation of Stop!! Hibari-Kun, even Tokyo Ghoul...okay, some of these are not quite the same genre as the others.

This is often attributed to the large number of anime studios based in the city, but Ranma's adventures in Nerima have a special bond with the environment that seems to go beyond, stretching back to the original manga. Ranma is often seen walking along (or falling from) fencetops above canals just like the above image from Wikimedia, and scenes set in nearby parks map fairly well to specific ones in Nerima City, so we can generally assume that the neighborhood where the Tendō Dojo is found is roughly in the Ōizumi area along the Shirako River seen above.

More specifically, it's in an imaginary neighborhood somewhere nebulously within those boundaries, a neighborhood that parts of the older fandom know as Furinkan-chō, AKA "Furinkan Town", after the Furinkan High School that Ranma and Akane attend—drawing a connection to the more official identification of the cast of Urusei Yatsura as living in Tomobiki-chō and attending Tomobiki High School.

A sober, dignified edifice to education...populated by a bunch of martial arts lunatics.

Some of whom are probably going to be pretty different in the new anime!

Meet the principal of Furinkan High School. Yes, this is a native Japanese man. Yes, he has problems.

Principal, Headmaster, or in Japanese Kunō-kōchō (no given name provided) is, unfortunately, the unfortunate father of the equally unfortunate series mainstay Tatewaki Kunō. The Principal here visited the USA for a while in order to learn from our education methods and came back an even worse problem than he'd left, becoming obsessed with the trappings of Hawai'ian tourism and the English language. In the original Japanese, his dialogue is heavily peppered with random English words and phrases (and an obnoxious Woody Woodpecker-style laugh).

The thing is, it's hard to translate a character randomly speaking English...into English. So, the official English translations of the original manga and anime had the Principal badly pepper his speech with Hawai'ian Pidgin phrases. It's going to be a little while before he shows up in the new anime, so it's hard to say for sure how he'll be translated...but it probably won't be that. So, new fans: you're probably going to encounter a few fanworks where there's a random fake-Hawai'ian man threatening teenagers with bad haircuts.

Teenagers like Hikaru Gosunkugi.

This is Gosunkugi. You'll probably see him next season, because we're going to perform acts of supervillainy if they don't make a second season. He shows up pretty early on in the manga, and has an important role to play in a major storyline...but he didn't show up in the original anime for 94 episodes after he was supposed to appear.

What we got instead was Sasuke Sarugakure. There's some debate about exactly why the anime-only character Sasuke was added: a diminutive ninja with thick eyebrows, prominent whiskers, buck teeth, and a miserable lot in life as the Kunō family servant. Seemingly...the only servant. Sasuke's role in the original anime seemed to have been not only to fill in for Gosunkugi in an early storyline, but to act as a comedic foil to the overblown antics of the Kunō family—especially absurd since the anime took the already comical wealth of the Kunōs from the manga, and exaggerated it to an absurd degree that seems all the more ridiculous when you learn that Sasuke sleeps in the crawlspace and gets by on fewer than three meals a day.

Oddly, this characterization as a comically impoverished ninja is a recurring bit in Takahashi's stories: Urusei Yatsura featured the job-hunting missing-nin Kaede, and the last few volumes of the Ranma ½ manga introduced the threadbare kunoichi Konatsu.

Get used to this image. It's probably all you're going to see of Konatsu for a good few seasons...because the original anime never got to that part of the manga.

Konatsu is a thorny topic in the fandom due to matters of gender that aren't helped by the original anime never getting to those stories, and the original manga chapters taking forever to be available in English. What can definitely be said is that Konatsu A: identifies as a kunoichi, specifically a title for female ninja, and B: is AMAB.

But this is a series that's all about playing with gender.

For example...

The Girl. An anime-only episode of Nettōhen presented a story of Ranma taking a blow to the head, waking up not long after and insisting on actually being a girl—identifying her life as a boy as being something akin to a bad dream. This version of Ranma knows she was assigned male and turns back into a male body when splashed with hot water, but she demonstrates a visceral dysphoria about it that is painfully relatable. The episode's plot is concluded and the status quo is restored when the pacifistic girl is struck once more in the head at the end, restoring the Ranma who is a confident martial artist and self-identified man among men...but an increasing number of highly-rated fanworks reference this single-episode anime-only story.

This isn't the only time an anime-only episode touches on the idea of Ranma who is solely identified as a girl:

Ranma and the Evil Within starts off with Ranma joking about staying a girl forever, only for it to be taken seriously by the recurring problematic antagonist Happōsai (seriously, he's just the worst, and for some reason the original anime production team decided to make lots of anime-only episodes featuring him). A magic incense is brought into play, splitting off all the femnine 'yin' from Ranma's masculine 'yang'.

This split-off half is characterized as unbalanced, magically powerful, and a threat to Ranma's life. So of course, she looks sick as fuck. But just like The Girl, she's a one-off character. Don't worry: if the anime runs long enough to cover all the manga storylines, we'll still get a story about a female-only duplicate of Ranma. But it's going to be a little while.

Speaking of girls in Ranma ½, let's touch on Akane's female friends!

Mostly going unnamed in the manga, Akane has several female classmates and friends who received more prominent roles in the old anime.

(gif by @roseillith)

The two most notable of these are Yuka (lighter brown hair), and Sayuri (darker brown, often in a ponytail). These names do get called out in the old version of the anime, though they don't seem to have much personality beyond "girls who are friends with each other and Akane".

This role is sometimes filled by others in the old anime. It's much harder to find episodes where any other girls in the class are named, but due to two of them recurring, fanworks often bring them up as Akane's other friends:

Meet Asami (wavy shoulder-length hair) and Hiroko (short hair and freckles)...or is that Makoto and Shikako? Sources vary on these names, and English language websites disagree on which are the 'official' names. If anyone can track down an episode where either one is named on-screen, we'd appreciate it!

Akane isn't the only one with school friends: Ranma's got a few recurring acquaintances among the male students, as well.

In the old anime, these two are specifically named as Hiroshi (lighter colored hair and wider eyes) and Daisuke (dark hair and narrow eyes). They're often treated by both the source material and fanworks as Ranma's sole "normal" guy friends, and in general behave like stereotypical high school boys...including openly lusting after Ranma's girl form, even after they learn that she and the male Ranma are one and the same.

Hiroshi and Daisuke show up more consistently as a pair than Akane's friends in both the manga and the original anime, and fanworks often pair them romantically with Yuka and Sayuri. But even with how common Hiroshi, Daisuke, Yuka, and Sayuri are (down to their incredibly average names), they deserve mentioning for new fans...

...Because the new anime renamed them all! "Hiroshi" is now "Shingo" (しんご), "Daisuke" is now "Kiichi" (きいち), "Yuka" is now "Noriko" (のりこ), and "Sayuri" is now "Tomoyo" (ともよ).

That's it for now, because there's a brand new episode out that we haven't had a chance to watch while we wrap up this post on our lunch break. Until next time, this is the Nerima Wrecker Crew, signing off!

[just-a-zuki]

the Nerima Wrecker Crews' Guide to Ranma Fandom for Newcomers

With the release this month of a brand new anime adaptation of the eighties manga Ranma ½, a lot of new fans are joining an older fandom that may leave them...confused about some details.

See, when the Ranma manga began in 1987, series creator Rumiko Takahashi was already solidly-established from her success with the runaway hit Urusei Yatsura. It only took two years for an anime adaptation to begin airing....for a mere eighteen episodes, before being canceled. If you go back to the '89 anime, you will almost certainly notice some drastic shifts in art style and tone from the first eighteen episodes to the remainder, and that's because only a single season was produced by Studio DEEN before production shifted to a new directorial crew, who dubbed the following season Ranma ½ Nettōhen (Fierce/Hot Battle Chapter).

The thing is, between the original eighteen episodes being made while the manga was still relatively early in its nine-year run, attempts to draw in better ratings by heavily promoting fan-favorite characters, a need for filler episodes to let the manga catch up to the pace of the anime's releases, and even the biases and friendships of the respective directors and writers...some things wound up being different.

And as a result, the Ranma ½ of the Eighties and Nineties is very different from what we're going to get with the 2024 anime. The 2024 series is based on a manga that had been finished for decades, and between the official releases so far and some unfortunate early leaks, it shows plenty of signs of being far more faithful to the original manga.

So, we of the Nerima Wreckers' Crew are here to introduce you to a few of the things you might run into as a new Ranma ½ fan exploring the existing fan content that has accrued over the past few decades!

Be aware: you're about to read spoilers for a four decades old manga. Questions about something that we don't cover in this post? Leave a comment asking for more, after the jump!

Something to get out of the way first: we're the NWC as an in-joke: as both Transformers and Ranma fans (and in some cases, fictive introjects), we wanted to combine the 'Wreckers' group name from Transformers with the English-language Ranma ½ fandom's nickname for the group of martial artists, students, teachers, monsters, and other characters who populate the series:

The Nerima Wrecking Crew.

The principal setting of Ranma ½ is Nerima, a ward of the metropolis of Tokyo. There are 23 special wards, and Nerima is a real-life one that is found in the northwest of Tokyo—in fact, it was the 23rd and final ward! In English-language communications, the local government identifies the ward as Nerima City, so that's how we'll speak of it here.

Nerima is a large city that still retains a very suburban, even exurban character stretching back to its history of farming. There are even still farms within the city limits, including at least one dairy farm last we checked! It's part of Tokyo, but it has a kid of old-fashioned peaceful character...that makes it the perfect place for anime characters to disrupt. That kind of disruption led the English-speaking fandom to dub our favorite crew of violent martial artists the "Wrecking Crew", presumably after their propensity to bust down walls and buildings.

A lot of anime and manga take place in Nerima. Takahashi's previous hit series Urusei Yatsura, the cat-robot classic All-Purpose Cultural Cat-Girl Nuku-Nuku, the anime adaptation of Stop!! Hibari-Kun, even Tokyo Ghoul...okay, some of these are not quite the same genre as the others.

This is often attributed to the large number of anime studios based in the city, but Ranma's adventures in Nerima have a special bond with the environment that seems to go beyond, stretching back to the original manga. Ranma is often seen walking along (or falling from) fencetops above canals just like the above image from Wikimedia, and scenes set in nearby parks map fairly well to specific ones in Nerima City, so we can generally assume that the neighborhood where the Tendō Dojo is found is roughly in the Ōizumi area along the Shirako River seen above.

More specifically, it's in an imaginary neighborhood somewhere nebulously within those boundaries, a neighborhood that parts of the older fandom know as Furinkan-chō, AKA "Furinkan Town", after the Furinkan High School that Ranma and Akane attend—drawing a connection to the more official identification of the cast of Urusei Yatsura as living in Tomobiki-chō and attending Tomobiki High School.

A sober, dignified edifice to education...populated by a bunch of martial arts lunatics.

Some of whom are probably going to be pretty different in the new anime!

Meet the principal of Furinkan High School. Yes, this is a native Japanese man. Yes, he has problems.

Principal, Headmaster, or in Japanese Kunō-kōchō (no given name provided) is, unfortunately, the unfortunate father of the equally unfortunate series mainstay Tatewaki Kunō. The Principal here visited the USA for a while in order to learn from our education methods and came back an even worse problem than he'd left, becoming obsessed with the trappings of Hawai'ian tourism and the English language. In the original Japanese, his dialogue is heavily peppered with random English words and phrases (and an obnoxious Woody Woodpecker-style laugh).

The thing is, it's hard to translate a character randomly speaking English...into English. So, the official English translations of the original manga and anime had the Principal badly pepper his speech with Hawai'ian Pidgin phrases. It's going to be a little while before he shows up in the new anime, so it's hard to say for sure how he'll be translated...but it probably won't be that. So, new fans: you're probably going to encounter a few fanworks where there's a random fake-Hawai'ian man threatening teenagers with bad haircuts.

Teenagers like Hikaru Gosunkugi.

This is Gosunkugi. You'll probably see him next season, because we're going to perform acts of supervillainy if they don't make a second season. He shows up pretty early on in the manga, and has an important role to play in a major storyline...but he didn't show up in the original anime for 94 episodes after he was supposed to appear.

What we got instead was Sasuke Sarugakure. There's some debate about exactly why the anime-only character Sasuke was added: a diminutive ninja with thick eyebrows, prominent whiskers, buck teeth, and a miserable lot in life as the Kunō family servant. Seemingly...the only servant. Sasuke's role in the original anime seemed to have been not only to fill in for Gosunkugi in an early storyline, but to act as a comedic foil to the overblown antics of the Kunō family—especially absurd since the anime took the already comical wealth of the Kunōs from the manga, and exaggerated it to an absurd degree that seems all the more ridiculous when you learn that Sasuke sleeps in the crawlspace and gets by on fewer than three meals a day.

Oddly, this characterization as a comically impoverished ninja is a recurring bit in Takahashi's stories: Urusei Yatsura featured the job-hunting missing-nin Kaede, and the last few volumes of the Ranma ½ manga introduced the threadbare kunoichi Konatsu.

Get used to this image. It's probably all you're going to see of Konatsu for a good few seasons...because the original anime never got to that part of the manga.

Konatsu is a thorny topic in the fandom due to matters of gender that aren't helped by the original anime never getting to those stories, and the original manga chapters taking forever to be available in English. What can definitely be said is that Konatsu A: identifies as a kunoichi, specifically a title for female ninja, and B: is AMAB.

But this is a series that's all about playing with gender.

For example...

The Girl. An anime-only episode of Nettōhen presented a story of Ranma taking a blow to the head, waking up not long after and insisting on actually being a girl—identifying her life as a boy as being something akin to a bad dream. This version of Ranma knows she was assigned male and turns back into a male body when splashed with hot water, but she demonstrates a visceral dysphoria about it that is painfully relatable. The episode's plot is concluded and the status quo is restored when the pacifistic girl is struck once more in the head at the end, restoring the Ranma who is a confident martial artist and self-identified man among men...but an increasing number of highly-rated fanworks reference this single-episode anime-only story.

This isn't the only time an anime-only episode touches on the idea of Ranma who is solely identified as a girl:

Ranma and the Evil Within starts off with Ranma joking about staying a girl forever, only for it to be taken seriously by the recurring problematic antagonist Happōsai (seriously, he's just the worst, and for some reason the original anime production team decided to make lots of anime-only episodes featuring him). A magic incense is brought into play, splitting off all the femnine 'yin' from Ranma's masculine 'yang'.

This split-off half is characterized as unbalanced, magically powerful, and a threat to Ranma's life. So of course, she looks sick as fuck. But just like The Girl, she's a one-off character. Don't worry: if the anime runs long enough to cover all the manga storylines, we'll still get a story about a female-only duplicate of Ranma. But it's going to be a little while.

Speaking of girls in Ranma ½, let's touch on Akane's female friends!

Mostly going unnamed in the manga, Akane has several female classmates and friends who received more prominent roles in the old anime.

(gif by @roseillith)

The two most notable of these are Yuka (lighter brown hair), and Sayuri (darker brown, often in a ponytail). These names do get called out in the old version of the anime, though they don't seem to have much personality beyond "girls who are friends with each other and Akane".

This role is sometimes filled by others in the old anime. It's much harder to find episodes where any other girls in the class are named, but due to two of them recurring, fanworks often bring them up as Akane's other friends:

Meet Asami (wavy shoulder-length hair) and Hiroko (short hair and freckles)...or is that Makoto and Shikako? Sources vary on these names, and English language websites disagree on which are the 'official' names. If anyone can track down an episode where either one is named on-screen, we'd appreciate it!

Akane isn't the only one with school friends: Ranma's got a few recurring acquaintances among the male students, as well.

In the old anime, these two are specifically named as Hiroshi (lighter colored hair and wider eyes) and Daisuke (dark hair and narrow eyes). They're often treated by both the source material and fanworks as Ranma's sole "normal" guy friends, and in general behave like stereotypical high school boys...including openly lusting after Ranma's girl form, even after they learn that she and the male Ranma are one and the same.

Hiroshi and Daisuke show up more consistently as a pair than Akane's friends in both the manga and the original anime, and fanworks often pair them romantically with Yuka and Sayuri. But even with how common Hiroshi, Daisuke, Yuka, and Sayuri are (down to their incredibly average names), they deserve mentioning for new fans...

...Because the new anime renamed them all! "Hiroshi" is now "Shingo" (しんご), "Daisuke" is now "Kiichi" (きいち), "Yuka" is now "Noriko" (のりこ), and "Sayuri" is now "Tomoyo" (ともよ).

That's it for now, because there's a brand new episode out that we haven't had a chance to watch while we wrap up this post on our lunch break. Until next time, this is the Nerima Wrecker Crew, signing off!

[just-a-zuki]

[just-a-zuki]

"Magic cares about what something means, not what it literally is. So when we adopted you into this family, when you truly accepted us as your parents, you became part of it in the eyes of magic. Which is why you've begun to manifest some aspects of our bloodline."

[just-a-zuki]

If there's one thing I've seen over and over again in the Dracula Daily + Re: Dracula fandom, it's the desire for an animated adaptation. Not of media-inspired-by, but of Dracula itself. And so, I've made:

...something that is decidedly not animated.

Yet.

I'm hoping to get Dracula Reanimated (tentative name) in exactly 1 year from now, by the end of DracDaily's 2025 run, perhaps even the beginning of it if I'm really good. But in all honesty, it could take till 2026 given the teeny complication that 1) I've no animation skills whatsoever 2) fulltime job.

So, I hope you'll stay around for the next 2 years at least to see this completed.

In the meanwhile, if you'd like to support a project by actual professionals, try @theholmwoodfoundation . It's a found footage horror fiction podcast by @georgiacooked and @fiotrethewey set in a time long after the events of Dracula, and yet the characters find themselves haunted (literally) by vestiges of the past.

Goodnight, stay safe, and rest well.

[just-a-zuki]

I forgot I have to be active here so here’s my Twitter tutorial on how to draw folds I made a while back to help a friend!

[just-a-zuki]

if a number divided by itself is always equal to 1, surely this holds true for 0/0 as well

[just-a-zuki]

Surely nothing bad will happen to me as I try to sleepys in my cabin in these dark woods

[just-a-zuki]

You unlock secret dialogue by being open about your kinks with friends

[just-a-zuki]

*grabbing young queer people by the shoulders* listen to me. radical feminism is inherently transphobic. you cannot rehabilitate it or reclaim it or make it trans inclusive, I don't care what the people on twitter who claim to be authorities on queerness say. the foundation of radical feminism is nothing but bio and gender essentialism and biphobia and aphobia and anti-kink rhetoric and intersexism and yes, misogyny. it does not offer a future, not for bi people, aroace people, sex workers, not for kinksters, or intersex people, cis women, or trans people regardless of gender and you should care about those people. it will never result in queer liberation because it is an ideology of exclusion and hatred. you gain nothing by buying into the idea that half the population is evil by birth or by transition. you gain nothing by acting like women are perpetual victims who can't think for themselves and are tainted by their association with men. being a man or being attracted to them is not a sin. if we truly want to stand a chance of dismantling the patriarchy we actually NEED men on our side especially marginalized men. they are our allies.

the problem with terfs is not just transphobia, it never was, the radical feminism is also so unbelievably harmful. you cannot save it and it will not save you, stop drawing lines between queer people and join hands with them instead. remove people who are actually harmful, not innocent people who happen to have the wrong sexuality or gender or job. we get there together or we don't get there at all. we need each other now more than ever. do not listen to those who seek to divide us even if they are queer. we all deserve so much better than the hell radical feminism pretends is a liberated future.

I do not blame anyone who fell prey to this rhetoric, I know it feels good to have a common enemy and lash out at those you think are siding with them however they do it, but men, especially marginalized men, are not your enemies. and it's never too late to realize that and change for the better.

[just-a-zuki]

most young queer people/progressives online can't understand the difference/nuance between fetishization and appreciation/attraction and when you tell them that some marginalized people actually feel represented and celebrated in kink art/kink spaces their brain short circuits. lol.

[just-a-zuki]

“tumblr” “grindr” do the gays not like the letter e for some reason