#and everything about conventional masculinity is a prison but thats nothing new lol

[imadhatt3r]

There's a sort of small personal story arc happening in Koujaku's route that I haven't seen talked about much, and it is one relating to Aoba's struggles with his masculinity and his perception as a man by others.

This story arc heavily deals with cultural gender norms and expectations, and so I will be working with them; This doesn't reflect my personal view on gender roles and expectations in real life. This is also not for or against any headcanons regarding any character's gender- I have no opinions on them or problems with people seeing any character as trans.

Okay, without further ado:

The moment where Koujaku and Aoba canonically meet for the first time happens during their childhood. Aoba was bullied by other children for his long hair and for "looking like a girl". Koujaku stepped in to protect him, thinking that Aoba's a girl, and was allegedly suprised when Aoba turned out to be a boy, but his attitude towards Aoba never changed.

This event clearly had a big influence on Aoba, on how he views himself, Koujaku, and how he thinks Koujaku views him. When we first meet Koujaku in-game, he is seen defending himself from a woman's overly protective boyfriend and being a charmer to her in turn when she apologizes for his behavior. It's established that Koujaku has a lot of female admirers, and a bit later it's revealed that he attracts a lot of men too, but moreso as a kind of role model/aspirational figure- that's why benishigure exists in the first place.

Aoba is shown to be annoyed or downright kinda scared of Koujaku's fans; Of course, it makes sense- Aoba is shown to be a private person that dislikes attention, but I believe that there is a second layer to all that- jealousy.

Aoba identifies as a man in-game and asserts it multiple times. He is aware of his gender. Koujaku is shown to be both flirty and chivalrous towards women around him- he spends time with them, initiates physical contact, compliments them etc. Aoba is always annoyed whenever he sees Koujaku doing that, but his reasons aren't fully clear- it seems like he feels like Koujaku's behavior is, in some way, fake, or that he just dislikes PDA in general. Aoba isn't jealous of the female attention Koujaku gets- he doesn't want to be in his place, because, as we established, he doesn't like being the center of attention. This isn't a dick measuring contest with Aoba being salty that he's coming up short.

Aoba is jealous of the women. He's the one who wants Koujaku to flirt with him, touch him, be chivalrous to him, protect him, but he believes that it will never happen, because Koujaku only acts this way towards women. Men want to be him, women want to be with him, but Aoba is neither; He's not a man who wants to be him, nor is he a woman who wants to be with him- there's not a place he can comfortably occupy, in his mind.

Mind you, I don't believe that he is aware of his feelings- hence his clusterfuck of an attempt to make Koujaku's flirting with women a bad thing. It's not coherent, it doesn't really make any internal sense, because Aoba has no idea he's even trying to lead himself away from something.

In the good ending, Koujaku briefly mentions that he thinks Aoba sleeps in so much because he wants to get his attention, and I can 100% see it as being true- Aoba doesn't know how to get Koujaku to treat him like he does women around him, so he chooses more covert ways to get that desired attention and care.

I also see Aoba's haircut to be symbolic/meaningful of his relation to his masculinity being percieved by others. Aoba's hair was the reason why he and Koujaku met as kids and established their friendship and later relationship. When they were cut, Aoba started to look more conventionally "masculine", and yet the haircut is also, in a way, representative of the beginning of his and Koujaku's relationship. It's because Koujaku doesn't care that Aoba is a man- hell, in the CD drama, he even admits that he's straight up attracted to Aoba's masculinity. If Koujaku liked Aoba BECAUSE he saw him as female-like, wouldn't he want to keep his hair long/feminine?

This is kinda explored in various extra material like the summer side story and valentine's day story- Aoba seems to believe that while Koujaku is with him out of love/attraction, he's being treated more as a novelty, a "girl-boy" that's going to be replaced by an "actual woman" one day. He's afraid that the chocolates he made for Koujaku for valentine's day will be seen as "gross", and he expects to see a mountain of chocolate given to Koujaku by women when he comes to his apartment. In the summer story, he expects Koujaku to deny their relationship when they're being harassed by drunk benishigure, and that he will be left behind when Koujaku is approached by female admirers. This never happens- Koujaku actually reassures Aoba that he's never going anywhere, and that Aoba has nothing to worry about. This is framed as Aoba being simply jealous, but I think that there is enough evidence to imply that his gender has a lot to do with it. We don’t know how would he react if Koujaku was approached by a man, but it's mentioned multiple times that it's seeing and thinking of Koujaku being surrounded by women gets Aoba down especially hard.

I feel like it's also important to look into the bad ending for Koujaku's route too, because if you look at it through that lense, you can see some interesting stuff. First and foremost, Shiroba is dressed in a sexualized version of the miko garb (miko are shinto shrine maidens, and they are exclusively women) that includes stockings, and his hair is just as long, if not longer, than Aoba's. He also has red tassels in his hair, right behind his ears, which sort of look like earrings. In short, it would almost appear like Shiroba is trying to look more "feminine" in order to appeal more to the way he percieved Koujaku's tastes- after all, Shiroba/Desire is all of Aoba's impulses, thoughts, and desires taken to the extreme. Aoba thought that Koujaku likes women and femininity, so Shiroba WILL make himself look as feminine as he can to make Koujaku like him more.

There's also the fact that, compared to their good end sex scene, Shiroba is much more... Placid. In the good end, Aoba speaks, he laughs, he laughs AT Koujaku, he tries to turn his head away but agrees to look at Koujaku in the end; He is an active participant who is willing to laugh at his partner (in a way) and make demands. In contrast, Shiroba mostly goes with what Koujaku wants to do; He participates to a degree, sure, but he allows Koujaku to bite him, lick his blood, and fuck him pretty violently without any sort of resistance. This might be a stretch, but it can be seen as Shiroba trying to play a more "feminine" role- which means being passive, allowing your (male) partner to do whatever he wants to do with you (even when it's painful or uncomfortable), and let him essentially use you as a receptacle of his emotions and bodily fluids.

This is a very narrow understand of conventional gender roles, but given that Shiroba is a being of extremes, it makes sense for him to see his own gender and dynamic with Koujaku as that simple and two-dimensional. This whole ending is all about misunderstood intentions/desires, so Shiroba is doing all he can to embody the most extreme conventional femininity in an attempt to appeal to Koujaku, while not having a clue that Koujaku was actually attracted to Aoba's masculinity.

The funniest part of it all is that Koujaku is actually a pretty feminine man himself; His very design blends masculine and feminine elements, which @asarigg points it out in her excellent essay on Koujaku, (among plenty other things), and the way he acts mixes masculinity and femininity too. However, Aoba either doesn't see it, or he treats Koujaku as a "special case"; It's probably the most clear in the scene in the CD drama where Aoba says that hairpins "usually" look bad on men (after Koujaku asked him if he'd like to wear one), but that Koujaku makes it work. The whole plotline/emotional core of this route centers on Aoba relying on his simplified image of Koujaku when it comes to how he thinks about him, only to be proven dead wrong and forced to confront how multi-layered of a person Koujaku is- to reject the image he made of him in his head as a child and make a new, more nuanced one as an adult.

When Aoba was a kid, he saw Koujaku as his hero, someone who protected him, watched over him; He was kind of his masculine ideal, someone he wanted to be when he'll be older. Now that they're adults, Aoba still sees Koujaku as someone hyper-masculine, whose feminine traits and behaviors are glossed over because Koujaku is "allowed to" be feminine a bit. The sad thing is that a lot of Koujaku's masculinity is kind of a ruse that was taken on as a defense mechanic, learned back when Koujaku was living in an abusive household, when he was a victim of abuse, saw abuse inflicted onto his mother, and was possibly forced to perform violence to some degree as means of "education" (things like learning to fight hand-to-hand or swordfighting).

Koujaku can fight because he tried to fight his abusive father and was trained to kill in the future, once he takes over the criminal empire. He flirts with women to fill the void he feels due to his rock bottom self-esteem and because he doesn't want to see women sad or mistreated after what he saw his mother go through. Koujaku's persona is carefully build and maintained, because all masculinity (or gender in general) is performed- this is what people around him expected him to be, that's what he was taught to be, and so he performs, even if it twists him up inside (we know he bottles up any negative emotions and doesn't share his struggles and trauma with anyone, which is also a part of toxic masculinity). It also seems like he's often out drinking with someone and he's a smoker- that's more of a theory, but people often find brief respite from their stress/unadressed emotions in substances, and while people of all genders do it, there seems to be a bigger social acceptance for men to indulge in order to "deal" with their problems and avoid showing "weakness" for just a bit longer.

The good thing is that Koujaku seems quite comfortable in his femininity. He loves his (stereotypically feminine) job, he remains kind and gentle to those who need it, he respects women around him and treats them well (even if that relationship is far from ideal of course), he's always considerate and caring towards Aoba, etc. It's interesting that despite liking and being attracted to Aoba's masculinity, he encourages him to branch out and seemingly embrace his own femininity more (he tells him he'd look nice in a hairpin, or that he'd love him no matter how he'd look like). I wonder if Koujaku found some kind of respite in his femininity back when he lived in his father's house and was potentially held to strict masculine gender roles enforced through violence.

It feels like one of these things that Aoba needs time to process and accept; In a couple years, he'll be doing deliveries with the most complex braid with flamboyant decorations and the most bitching eyeliner ever performed on Japanese soil.