#Ranma Q&A period

[ask-ranma-and-ryoga]

[lechevaliermalfet]

West Across the Sand: A Look Back at Kazan

When I first got into anime and manga, I was in my mid-teens, and it was the mid- to late 90s.  And at least in my part of the world, it was a little like joining a secret society.  You practically had to already know someone on The Inside, and it was like getting initiated.  Whoever had been into it longer than you would want to show you the classics of the era: Ranma ½, Tenchi Muyo! (Which one?  All of them), Akira, Vampire Hunter D, or any number of choice others.  Soundtracks (if you were into that sort of thing) were hard to come by, and most of the ones I found locally came courtesy of either Son May or EverAnime – companies I later found out were Taiwanese bootleggers.  You could tell the discs were bootlegs because the prices were reasonable.

In those days, getting fansubs meant sending blank VHS tapes to total strangers you’d found online, and waiting weeks (or longer) to get them back with anime on them, and everybody had the Anime Web Turnpike bookmarked.  There’s still a website at its URL, though Wikipedia states it’s been offline as of 2014.  

If you want to know where anime got its reputation for violence and sex, this particular era is where you want to look.  The market for anime was small in those days, and the licensors and distributors really had no idea how to expand it.  So a lot of them (in particular Streamline, Urban Visions, and U.S. Manga Corps; now all defunct) catered to the exploitation-flick market – the gore-hounds and the porn junkies, and the people we would have called edgelords if the term had been invented yet.

This was a time when you could use the word “Japanimation” utterly without irony, and there was a good chance that nobody hearing it would cringe.

Manga, meanwhile, was a total wilderness.  You couldn’t find it in bookstores back then.  That you can today is thanks to Tokyopop.  Whatever their numerous and varied sins, they can claim to have done that bit of good, at least.  And Amazon and Ebay were somewhere off over the horizon.  So you had to go to your local comic book shop, and then you had to look around for yourself, because chances were that even the people who worked there didn’t know what in the hell you were talking about.

Most of the manga that was available came through Viz and Dark Horse (and maybe other avenues I’ve forgotten).  But mostly Viz.  Dark Horse got their hands on some great stuff (Ghost in the Shell and Blade of the Immortal, just to name two), but Viz got more stuff, and a wider variety of it.

At the tail-end of the 90s, there was the beginning of an anime boom that lasted until about the mid-aughts.  I was at one of Crispin Freeman’s Q&A panels at Anime Central a couple of years ago, and he likened it to a tide rolling in about every decade. The tide comes in, hits a high-water mark, and recedes.  Then it comes in again, a little higher this time, and recedes.  In the late 90s, the tide came in and largely stayed in.

A large part of this, I think, was Toonami, which took a crowbar (part Dragon Ball Z and part Gundam Wing at the start, followed by others later) to the whole situation and forced the door wide open.  A lot of what they showed was very commercial and fairly “safe” (or at least, could be made safe), but it accomplished what Astro Boy and Speed Racer and Starblazers and Robotech before had never managed, which was to make anime into a minor phenomenon.

In the wake of that sudden explosion, there were a ton of smaller and less established entities who got into the business.  More of these, so far as I can remember, went into manga rather than anime (though there were a few new anime companies, like SynchPoint).  It was probably cheaper than trying to get in on the anime side of things.  Suddenly, we had Tokyopop (first under their Mixx Manga label, then later their own name), and DrMaster, and ComicsOne (whose publications were later taken over by DrMaster when ComicsOne vanished into the ether in 2005; DrMaster would follow suit themselves, just four years later), and Yen Press, and Studio Ironcat, and Seven Seas…  Even reputable publishers like Del Rey got in on the act after a while.

It was an exciting time to be a fan, to have so many new avenues available through which to explore the hobby, each trying to find new and exciting material in order to carve out their own niche.  Today, a lot of these publishers don’t exist.  The market was growing, but didn’t ultimately grow enough to allow room for them all.  

A certain part of me actually misses the bad old days.  Like any rational person, I’m happy that one of my major interests is now at least sort of mainstream, easy to access, and at least somewhat cheaper (nowadays, companies like Aniplex only want an arm and a leg for a boxed set of Kara no Kyoukai; back in the day, they’d have demanded your firstborn).  If nothing else, the release schedules are infinitely better.  But there was something about being a fan back then that made me feel like I was a part of something, some group, some tribe.  There was a feeling of having some hidden, secret knowledge, of knowing a whole language of fandom that other people didn’t understand, of having a line on something other people didn’t know about and didn’t get.

Really, though, I think what I miss most is the newness of my hobby.  I miss it being strange and wonderful and full mostly of unknowns, of things yet to be seen and experienced.  I miss knowing that twenty years ago, if I’d come across a copy of Beast King GoLion in a vendor’s stall, I would have lost my damn mind.  Now, I just go “Huh. Neat,” and put it on my Amazon wishlist.

A few months ago, I was going through my old manga, and came across the three volumes of Kazan I owned, out of a seven-volume run.  They were some of the first manga I’d bought in what was, at the time, the newer (smaller) size format that’s now standard for manga. Mirror-imaging, or “flopping” the artwork was still common at the time, although that practice was on its way out.  If there’s one other thing we can all thank Tokyopop for, it’s normalizing the right-to-left format for manga in the U.S.

Kazan was written and drawn by Gaku Miyao, who was probably most famous for his character design work on the Devil Hunter Yohko OVA from the mid-90s.  It was published in the U.S. by ComicsOne from 2001 to 2005.  It’s out of print now, and it was never enough of a thing that anybody else cared to pick up the license after they vanished into the ether.

It doesn’t shock me that ComicsOne went under, really.  They didn’t only release total unknowns, mind.  They got Onegai Teacher and Onegai Twins.  There was also Tsukihime: Lunar Legend (though that franchise has played second fiddle to its younger sibling Fate for a long while now).  On the other hand, they also published Jesus, and the prophet from Nazareth has never really been what you’d call a favorite character in the anime fandom.  Then as now, almost nobody in the fandom stans Christ.  Except maybe Vic Mignogna, and, well...

I remember it being new and exciting when I was reading it.  Now, looking back, it’s very much a relic of its times.  Given that ComicsOne began U.S. publication of it in 2001, I’m guessing the manga was probably published in the mid- to late 90s in Japan.  The artwork is a lot closer in style to what you’d see back then, as well as the character tropes and archetypes.  

I’d always meant to pick up the remaining volumes – certainly I’d liked what I’d read – but I’d fallen behind on collecting them as they came out, and they were hard to find later on.  Kazan was never a major item on anybody’s radar.  It’s so minor that even danbooru has no images of it.  At least, none tagged.  Fucking danbooru.

My curiosity about the later events of the series had been going strong for close to two decades, so I finally broke down and bought the remaining volumes in an Ebay auction… and then didn’t read them, I guess because now that I had them, I could take my time.

I finally got around to re-reading the series just recently, and it’s been an interesting slice of nostalgia.

Kazan is a desert-punk story named after its protagonist.  Kazan looks about eight years old, is actually closer to eighteen, and is about ten-thousand percent done with everyone’s shit.  “Surly” doesn’t quite do it justice.  He’s searching for his childhood friend, a girl named Elsie.  

Back when he actually was eight years old, he was approached by a water demon who told him that his father Sheeroc had, in desperation at the prospect of dying alone in the desert, sold Kazan for just a cup of water.  Sheeroc, leader of the nomad clan known as the Red Sand, was at that time questing about for a way to give his people a more grounded way of life.  However, instead of Kazan, the water demon decided to kidnap his childhood friend Elsie, for reasons that go unexplained for most of the story.  The demon also decided to wreck Kazan’s entire village just for good measure, and Kazan winds up the only survivor that he knows of.

Since that moment, he has not physically aged a day.  The reason for this is also left unexplained for most of the manga’s run.  

Suffice it to say that some of his surliness comes from having to constantly prove to people that, despite all appearances, he really is not a child.  A lot of the rest of it comes from the whole “being sold to a water demon” thing.

His only traveling companion in the beginning is a giant white eagle with a red crest, named Kamushin.  The eagle is so large and strong (or Kazan is so small), that he can actually carry Kazan at least for brief periods.  Kamushin seems to be sentient at times, and whether he is or not, he tends to be the most level-headed one in the room.

Aside from the eagle, Kazan’s most easily distinguishable features are his shounen-hero hair, his tall red hat, and his knife, which he wields and throws with frightening accuracy.

It’s not long at all before he gains two additional companions on his journey.  One is Fawna, a young girl capable of manifesting water at will.  This power is a double-edged sword in a desert environment.  It’s helpful while traveling, but the things people might do to have control of her power �� and of course, by extension, Fawna herself – mean she has to use the power sparingly.  She and Kazan initially come to blows once her ability is revealed, or rather, Kazan comes to blows.  Fawna comes to bewilderment and confusion in the face of Kazan’s accusations that she must be the water demon who stole Elsie years ago.  Why would she have the same power, otherwise? Eventually, though, he calms down.  As he (and we) get to know Fawna, the idea of her kidnapping anybody seems laughable.

Fawna is making her way west across the desert to a country called Goldene.  She has been summoned there, as Water People (this is the manga’s translation, and we’ll come to that in a bit) frequently are, as they are necessary for the control and upkeep of Goldene’s water supply.  She’s around seventeen, and spends most of the story unaware of Kazan’s actual age.  She seems to not really take his claims of adulthood very seriously.  In fairness, “My name’s Kazan.  I’m not a kid,” – practically his catchphrase, and usually a good sign that someone has a beating on the way – is pretty much exactly what you’d expect a kid to say.

With Fawna having the same water powers as the entity that kidnapped Elsie, and Goldene seemingly a place where people of that sort are gathered, Kazan decides that his quest is pointing him in that direction.  Despite some misgivings, he decides to accompany her.  Luckily, the two of them happen across another companion, an old woman named Arbey who has a talent for making explosives.  She claims to know the way there, having been a citizen of the country herself at some point in her past.

So they go.

Along the way, they are beset by monsters and difficult situations with other travelers, as well as occasional tussles with Messengers, fierce and deadly agents of Goldene out kill Fawna (their reasons are initially unclear) and capture Kamushin, who turns out to be the White Eagle of Goldene, making him an item of high significance.

Part of what initially caught my attention about Kazan was that it reminded me in a vague way of Eden’s Bowy.  This was a show I’d first seen fansubbed at AnimeIowa in 2000.  If you want another really good example of just how different things were back then, there it is: Conventions would show fansubs, because the industry had virtually no presence at any of them except maybe the absolute biggest, so they could get away with it.  I was nursing a minor obsession with Eden’s Bowy at the time.  The three or four episodes I’d seen at the convention had grabbed my attention for reasons I’m not entirely sure I understand.  Part of it was the creeping doubt over whether the show would ever get picked up for U.S. release (it did, in fact), and I figured I was unlikely ever to see it again.  So anything that put me in mind of it got my attention.

As it happens, the similarities between Kazan and Eden’s Bowy run no deeper than the surface. There are the common elements of a boy in (mostly) white crossing the desert with a mystically empowered young girl and an older adult as companions, and in both stories, they’re seeking out a city that in some fashion lords it over the rest of the setting.  Beyond that, they couldn’t be more different.  For starters, Yorn, the hero of Eden’s Bowy, is kind of the quintessential Idiot Hero of shounen manga and anime: naïve, trusting, and ultimately kind of helpless on his own.  Kazan, meanwhile, is intelligent, self-reliant, and aggressively independent.  Cynical and deeply distrustful, he resists all attempts at friendship or other emotional connection with other characters, and the vulnerability that goes with it.

Kazan isn’t the most likeable character, but his attitude at least makes sense, given his background.  He’s a very (understandably) angry young man trapped in a child’s body, and a lot of his problems come about as a result of his hardening himself against a world that seems destined by turns to betray him and refuse to take him seriously.  When we see him in flashbacks, he’s a sweet kid.  A bit of a crybaby, even.  

Still, in the present of the story, he can sometimes be an unlikeable little shit. His early relationship with Fawna is rocky, and gets violent once or twice throughout the story, which makes me cringe a lot more in 2019 than it did in 2001 or 2002.  In the interests of fairness, I should point out that he gets violent with quite a number of people, and all for the same reason as Fawna, which is that he feels what they are doing is either very wrong or dangerously stupid, or else he sees them as enemies.  He’s an equal-opportunity asshole, I guess.  So I want to say there’s nothing inherently sexist going on there.  Still, it’s not a good look, and please understand I’m not justifying it by any means.  But I do want to lend context.  

The story does wring a lot of natural tension out of the relationship between Kazan and Fawna as natural foils to each other.  Where Kazan trusts nobody and prefers to operate alone, Fawna is naïve and occasionally trusting of the wrong sorts, which gets her into trouble more than once.  And she has a tendency, early on, to lash out with her power in anger or to harm others.  This is sometimes for self-defense, but sometimes also motivated by anger.  Kazan is – oddly, given that he’s otherwise the one more comfortable with the occasional necessity of violence – adamant that she not do this.  Memorably, one of the times he’s violent with her is to stop her from doing something of that sort.  

The manga doesn’t ever really spell out Kazan’s hangup about Fawna misusing her water powers, but I have a guess.  I imagine that it has a lot to do with his initial association of Fawna’s water power with the water demon that kidnapped Elsie ten years prior.  He has a strong (but never quite articulated) belief that in a desert world, anyone with the power to create water – in practical terms, the power to support and sustain life – should not use that power for evil ends.  Fawna using her power only for good helps to mark a clear distinction between her innate goodness and the wickedness of the water demon.

Kazan himself, perhaps surprisingly given his anger and foul attitude for much of the story, tends to pull his punches.  He’s not above beating his attackers silly and occasionally dishing out pain to those he feels are deserving.  But he goes out of his way to spare people on a number of occasions, and when someone sharpens his knife to such an edge that it can cut stones, he actually requests that it be dulled again so that he doesn’t kill someone by mistake.

Refreshingly, there’s no will-they-won’t-they pseudo-romance between Kazan and Fawna.  I don’t object to a romance angle in a story in principle, but it often gets teased in a story like this, where the two leads are each other’s foils and love interests both, and it’s just done to death.  It tends to get shoehorned in because the creators of these stories (perhaps egged on by their publishers) feel that it’s necessary.  Broadening the demographics, maybe?  But there’s a sort of obligatory feeling to it a lot of the time, as if it’s clearly being done because, well, that’s just what we do with stories like this, right?  It gets to the point where you wonder why anyone bothers teasing it.  We all know from long experience how things are going to end up.  But Kazan is clearly fixed on Elsie and Elsie alone.  He and Fawna are simply friends and partners who, by the end of the story, understand each other, and work together, very well.

Another thing that’s nice about Kazan is the refreshing absence of much cheesecake fanservice.  A few characters are dressed in provocative outfits here and there, but even when that’s the case, the “camera” doesn’t really leer like you might expect.  There are one or two moments that had me sighing and shaking my head – a couple instances of the sadly typical Faux Sexual Assault As Comedy – but at this point I like to think I’m an old vet when it comes to this. It’s disappointing, but it’s the kind of thing you learn to resign yourself to if you’re going read much manga or watch much anime at all.

The final chapters of Kazan rely on a lot of last-minute revelations to explain everything.  It’s not really a matter of deus ex machina exactly so much as it is a matter of insufficient foreshadowing.  It would go down a little easier if some of these ideas had been set up maybe a little earlier in the story.  But it’s hard to complain too much.  Even as it clanks a bit toward the end, it never quite feels like the creator is pulling it out of his ass.  The ideas are sound; it’s their tardiness that’s the problem.  But even if it stumbles a little toward the finish line, Kazan’s ending is ultimately satisfying, and earned.  The last few panels are pretty much perfect, and exactly what I spent most of the manga’s run hoping for.  And of course, there’s still the entire rest of the manga before it, which is certainly worth the read.

If there’s one place where Kazan actually falls flat, it’s the translation. And that, at least, you can’t blame on the original creator.  

You could most charitably describe ComicsOne’s English translation of Kazan as workmanlike.  It’s not really a machine translation, but it does seem at times to veer awfully close to that territory.  It’s there, and things basically make sense; that’s about the best you can say for it.  Ultimately, though, it’s just lacking something.  There are places all over Kazan’s seven-volume run where the phrasing seems bland or off, where it lacks real punch and personality, and where it seems just plain awkward and stilted. There are times when it seems like the characters lack a distinct voice.  Spelling is also inconsistent.  The name of Kazan’s father is spelled Sheeroc in the earlier volumes, but Shiroc in later ones. And there are placement issues as well, where sometimes lines that are clearly meant to be spoken by one character are lumped in with the dialogue in another character’s word balloon.  Overall, the translation is some real amateur-hour work.  This seems to be a trait of ComicsOne; the one volume of the Tsukihime manga I own has some of these same issues.

But this isn’t a problem I can really hold against the manga, since it’s a problem that (to the best of my knowledge) wouldn’t really have existed in the Japanese version.  And it’s hard to fault the original creator for how translators handled his work after the fact.

There’s not much like Kazan out there that I’ve seen.  I don’t have a lot of recommendations in the vein of “If you like X, Y, or Z, then try Kazan.”

Part of the reason I enjoyed Kazan as much as I did is nostalgia.  Not for the story itself, but for the times it puts me in mind of.  The kind of story it tells; the specific way it handles its characters, and manifests their archetypes and tropes; the way it’s drawn; all of it is intensely reminiscent of its time.  There is a certain Look or Aesthetic I’m fond of in anime, and it tends a little toward the particular stylization and combination of traits that was very stereotypical at the time I was getting into it.  But even as that’s a stereotype, there’s something about it that I actually find visually appealing.  I suppose it goes back to my nostalgia.  When this was a new hobby for me, that look was practically shorthand for everything anime stood for.

More than that, it’s a time capsule, a snapshot of how things looked when I was first getting into my hobby.  I’ll probably never again have that feeling of things yet to be seen and done, mysteries yet to be uncovered and explored, at least not with this particular hobby.  But reading something like Kazan, I’m reminded of those times with great intensity.

There’s also the setting.  I have a soft spot for huge, wasteland vistas.  As much as I can recognize that, say, The Weathering Continent is not really a good movie, I still find myself drawn to its world.  This extends into video games as well.  One of the things I loved most about Shadow of the Colossus (either version) was simply wandering its world.  Something about characters surviving in such a hostile, sometimes even decaying environment just grabs my imagination and runs with it.  But I’m picky about these kinds of stories, too.  I prefer my environments and my characters to look and sound and act a certain way.

Despite the inescapable influence of personal appeal, though, I still honestly think Kazan holds up, and is very much worth a read.  It’s not going to be the easiest thing to find, but on the flipside, Kazan was a manga published by a company that never really achieved notability and stayed in business for a grand total of maybe six years at most.  So while the supply has never been very great, neither has the demand.  The prices haven’t gotten exorbitant, and I don’t see that changing in the near future.  

In all, it’s worth the effort to track down if you can.

[m-aira]

On Being a Fake Queer

trigger warnings: childhood sexual assault, q slur

I have a lot of complicated feelings about being queer, the first being that most of the time, I can’t shake the feeling that I may be faking it. For the record, I identify as a Crazy, fat, nonbinary agender individual; I was assigned female at birth, and socialized as a girl - as such, I will be using feminine pronouns when referring to my past.

Let’s back up.

I am a survivor of childhood sexual assault. Although I am still learning how to cope with this, it permeates nearly everything I do in my daily life, how my brain functions, etc. I was assaulted by another little girl, and growing up, this confused the hell out of me, and led me to believe that anything but compulsory heterosexuality was Bad. When I was 11, I started using the internet, and it was here that I met my first lesbian couple. We would all hang out on Palace, they were in a long-distance relationship. I confided in one of them that I had been abused by another girl, and that’s why I felt weird about their relationship, but that I was really trying to wrap my head around it. She understood, and didn’t make me feel like a freak. Around this time, I also started masturbating for the first time, primarily to images of women. So all in all, it was a very confusing, very queer time for young me.

From a very young age, I was considered a tomboy. I remember very clearly getting a “skater” haircut for the first day of 5th grade (something that could easily be hidden underneath a helmet, although I didn’t skate). I was shopping in the boy’s section at stores, wearing my dad’s old hand-me-downs, and generally looked like a little boy. On the first day, our teacher has us line up, separated by gender. I was in line with the girls. My teacher said to me, “I think you’re in the wrong line.” Now, as I am older and far removed from the situation, I look back on it and think, “I probably could have sued that fucker.” Regardless, it didn’t do anything but fuel my confusing feelings about gender - I wanted to look like a boy, but still do traditionally “girly” things. At the time, my parents made me feel like I couldn’t have it both ways, and I was starting puberty, so I had to make a decision; I feel like this decision was mostly forced on me, but that’s neither here nor there right now, it simply is.

Beginning in junior high, I started having crushes on my female friends, but I was never sure if it meant I wanted to be like them, or if I wanted to be with them. I stifled all of these feelings and maintained that I was a heterosexual female. I started hanging out with a group of punk girls, and wanted to emulate them so badly. It was around this time that I also started reading the manga Ranma 1/2, where, if I remember correctly, the main character was able to swap genders (and turn into a panda?) depending on what temperature of water they were in. I thought that was super cool, and wished that I could do the same. This was also around the time when kids were using “gay” and “queer” as insults, and so I was definitely thinking “Nope, I am definitely a Straight Girl, no queer feelings here, that would be Bad.”

I grew my hair out and played the part all throughout high school. I still got crushes on girls, and wanted to be a boy sometimes, but I shut these feelings out as often as I could. 

Fast forward to my third year of college, when I finally moved out of my parents’ house and onto campus at San Francisco State. It was here that I really started exploring my sexuality and gender, and by that I mean I tried to look androgynous as possible, and made out with a lot of cishet dudes. I stopped talking to a lot of my high school friends, who were still using the f slur, q slur, and “gay” as insults; I started getting into social justice, going to bars, and meeting cute girls. I wasn’t identifying as queer yet, but I remember my first “open” crush on a girl - she was a friend of a friend that I had met at a bar for my friend’s birthday. We drank together. She took me outside and we smoked a bowl together. We were with each other the whole night, and I drunkenly confided in my best friend that I thought this girl was really cute, and to ask our friend if maybe she was bi? Turns out she was, but I didn’t find out til later when I was too chickenshit and closeted to do anything about it.

During my fourth year of college, some friends and I drove up to Portland for a weekend. It was there that I met the first nonbinary person that I’d have a crush on. We started talking after I got back to San Francisco, and I found out they lived in Santa Cruz, and I thought, “how convenient?” We went on one date, and I was too afraid to cuddle with them or show any sort of affection while we watched a movie in their room. My skin felt on fire, which I hadn’t felt in some time, and I mostly tied to the abuse; this, of course, concerned me. I felt wrong and bad and needed to shake those feelings. Because I didn’t know how to pursue anyone, I waited for them to pursue me. This didn’t work out the way I wanted it to, but around the same time, I started going on dates with a really cute cishet guy. I ended up making it “official” with him, and we’ve been dating since June of 2013, so a year after I graduated.

Around December of 2013, a lot of the confused gender feelings and mentally ill feelings and queer feelings all came rushing back to me. I would take days off of work, telling my boss I was sick, and just sit in the dark and cry all day. Something was off. Femaleness didn’t resonate with me anymore, and it was hitting me hard. However, even though I was Openly Queer at this point, I was still in what appeared to be a heterosexual relationship with a cisgender man. I remember very clearly making a tumblr post that said “I don’t know what I am, but I don’t think I’m a girl,” and showing it to him as we laid on my fold out couch in the living room. I started crying. He held me until I stopped, and then held me some more. He told me things were going to be alright. A few weeks later, after ruminating on it some more, I had accepted that I did not identify within the gender binary - I was now other. I made a Facebook status proclaiming this, filtered to a select amount of people who I believed would get it; some did, some didn’t, and I felt the need to explain myself, so I did. In January of 2014, my boyfriend and I traveled to Austin, TX, where he struggled with my new pronouns as I struggled with a virus and the worst case of dysphoria I think I’ve ever had. It was my first period after I had acknowledged my identity outside of being a woman, and it hit me hard.

Eventually, my boyfriend came around on the pronouns. But people still viewed us as a straight man and a straight woman in a straight relationship, doing straight people stuff. This made me feel, and still often makes me feel, invalidated in my queer identity. I’m much more open about my pronouns and gender identity now than I was then, but I still can’t shake the feeling that maybe, just maybe, I’m faking it. I’m a fake queer. I’m not queer enough to hang with the Actually Queer folks, and I’m too queer to hang with the straight folks. I walk a weird line between not talking about my gender with my parents or at work, and being very open about it in social situations. I still just feel weird about it. I have never been in a relationship with anyone but a cishet man, I have never been in love with anyone but a cishet man, I have never kissed or had sex with anyone but a cis man. So I must be straight, right? No!

The moral of this really long-winded diatribe is to never let someone else’s view of queerness shape who you know you are. You are queer enough. You are nonbinary enough. You can move past your trauma and into somewhere open and understanding. You are not a fake queer, even if you feel like you don’t fit into a socially accepted queer narrative. And you don’t even need to identify as queer if that makes you uncomfortable. “Not-straight” is enough!

My name is Maira, and I am not a fake queer. 

[fapangel]

post moar, fgt. I'm missing my daily greek fix.

“IT’S NOT MY FAULT I’M INTERNET POPULAR! - A LIGHT NOVEL BY PLONFEG”

Okay, just for you, check out this fucking amazing reblog reply to my big post on left-wing violence, wherein @ranma-official characterizes the attempted assassination of democratically-elected Republicans as “righteous revolution against a tyrant.” But the best part is when I checked his/her FAQ: 

Q: Who are you?

Russian Jew with German roots. Diagnosed by medical professionals as paranoid schizophrenic. Linguist by education. Coder by trade.

A Russian Jew with German roots. I laughed so hard at this I damn near fell out of my chair. Given the track record of Russia and Germany with Jews - and Russia with Germany, period - I guess I’d be a paranoid schizophrenic too! And then you get >linguist and coder. HOOOOOOOOOOO 

Now, I’m a writer - someone who makes up entire teams of imaginary friends and then details elaborate fantasies with them interacting with each other. I’m crazy by definition, but if I had to name someone hands-down crazier than me, a linguist who is also a coder is where I’d start. I was gonna give this guy shit for openly advocating murder, but now it just feels like punching down.