#and it still has a very homoerotic romance subplot

[malachitezmeyka]

@katkastrofa

I need you to see the vibes I was talking about when it comes to a singing Emran

Yes, Reflection from Mulan is a very Aiza-coded song, I’m not going to deny that because that’d be stupid, it fits her down to a T

HOWEVER!! I have also been saying that she is very Shurochka Azarova (main character of The Hussar Ballad) coded, which is a rather conflicting statement to the previous one because Mulan and Shura are rather different characters, united only by very similar storylines.

And that’s when I got it: Aiza is Mulan-coded, but EMRAN is Shurochka-coded. And my proof is Shura’s rendition of Long Long Ago, which is exactly how I imagine a teenage Emran, who has finally grown into himself and is a bit high on being free from his previous life, would act

[Quick translation done by yours truly, with no rhyme because do I look like I have the spoons for that??:

They call me a boy without a moustache

For that I truly, that I truly do not care

For at least they don’t label me a coward

Long long ago, long long ago, long long ago

Another twirls his moustache angrily

Stares down at every bottle’s, every bottle’s end

But he himself is just a parody of a hussar

Long long ago, long long ago, long long ago

Another swears of his fiery passion

But if the wine, but if the wine has all been drunk

Then all his passion is at the bottom of the bottle

Long long ago, long long ago, long long ago

For lovers the sea is only knee-deep

And I agree, and I agree with them on that

But all are guarded by silent threat of infidelity

Long long ago, long long ago, long long ago]

DO NOT EVEN TRY TO TELL ME I’M WRONG BECAUSE I KNOW FULL WELL THAT I’M RIGHT!!!

[comparatist]

Something I wrote about Manga.

Manga plays an important role in promoting tolerance for gender minorities.

Manga is a cultural phenomena in Japan and the rest of the world. It’s not exactly a genre but an art of storytelling comprising the interests of all age groups. The style is considered to have its origin in ukiyo-e-prints of Hokusai in 19 century. The tradition lies in the creation of humorous art. There are tales of men who love to cook and woman who love to eat, Sommeliers having their extraordinary penchant for wine and the list goes on. Though the manga tradition has been categorised into four distinctive groups based on gender stereotypes, like ‘shonen’ being targeted for the young male audience and ‘shojo’ being set to arrest the attention of young female audience, while ‘sinen’ and ‘josel’ getting marketed for the older male and the female consumers respectively, significant crossover in the readership has been thoroughly noticed on the grounds of demanding good books over gendered stereotyped ones. Manga, as a mass medium of serialised characters has played a socially critical as well as an escapist role since the 1970s. However during the 20s and 30s, manga was explicitly a matter of juvenile interest, but then, after the economic boom in the post-World War 2 era, it expanded its market for all ages and social sections while exploring vast amount of subject matter. They however, primarily, focussed on sports, large eyed adolescents, the adventures of samurai and gangsters, and tales that indulge into the deep layers of sex and violence, often evoking pornographic fantasies.

Yaoi, also known as boys love or BL is a genre in manga and other such media platforms such as anime, drama CDs etc. exploring the features of homoerotic relationships between male characters. The general has been created by woman authors for female audience but the section attracts male readers too. It is basically defined by its characteristic feature of paring the male characters in the role of protagonists. The sexual top is known as ‘seme’ who becomes the active pursuer while the passive pursuant one is known as ‘uke’ or the sexual bottom. The term yaoi dates back to the doujinshi culture of the late 1970s to the early 1980s. It was then as self-deprecating way of referring to an amateur fan art parodying the mainstream manga and anime depicting their male characters in vague or explicitly sexual circumstances. Such writing or art resembles two Helens Cixous' idea of the “I’ecriture feminine” or the feminine fiction where writing is a way of pleasure for women to celebrate their desires by creating narratives around effeminate bodies thereby suggesting for a safe distance for the women’s desires and physical selves while defamiliarising the female body by making it somewhat male, reducing the vulnerability of woman, often implicated in an overtly sexual text and showing a way to expand her boundaries that she would not have done in real life, but through erotic discourse, anchored to the male body of the passive uke.

Shoujo manga stories also play an important part in the featuring of romances between young boys or young men from the mid 1970s.

In many Yaoi mangas, the performative male bodies, being the key to the unfolding of the narratives, especially during sexual acts, do succumb to heterosexual roles. In sexually violent manga of the yaoi genre, the male body of uke performs the role of the body to be violated which may even include male pregnancy(mpreg), pheromones going out of control etc. Therefore the romanticised, beautiful male body(bishounen) is made to play various roles ranging from pornography and wish fulfilment to a aesthetic beauty and different ideas of ‘tough love,’ as often the victim is portrayed to be falling in love with the assailant and forgiving his trespassing. These tales cater exclusively to the female psychosexuality, as they are produced by and for women and as there is no involvement of the female body in the stories, enter amount of pleasure that is derived from these texts is through mental correlation.

‘Boku Patalliro!’ is a Japanese manga series which explores the themes of yaoi, was written and illustrated by Mineo Maya. The plot focusses on comedy, primarily the weird adventures of Patalliro himself. Generally episodic in nature, the subplots often have little connection to the main one, other than involving the same identities.

Patalliro du Malyner VIII is the 10 year old diabetic child King of Malynera who grooms himself as a cat when he finds himself in frustrating circumstances and mimics the run of a cockroach when there is the need to speed up. In 1982-‘83, when homosexuality was still considered a taboo, Patalliro daringly flaunted it for laughs. Bancoran is an MI6 agent appointed by the British to be Patalliro’s personal bodyguard, is an efficient killer. The character identifies himself as an effeminate homosexual person. There are instances of Patalliro making fun of Bancoran's sexual nature which the latter is forced to accept owing to the royal advantage that the former enjoys. Bancoran is constantly frustrated because the enemy-agent assassins that he fights off to maintain Patalliro’s safety are the ones he fantasizes about. Patalliro himself seems to have interesting Bancoran and often tries to seduce him through various disguises or role-playing likes of which are that of a pretty boy or a beautiful woman.

Presence of beautiful, effeminate bishounens are abundant in the shounen-ai mangas, as well as socially accepted good looking Tamanegis (King’s group of elite guards) as bi-seinens in disguise. Patalliro’s narrative is parodic and pokes fun at itself through parodying the shounen-ai culture in many ways. Mild boy-on-boy actions, lighthearted atmosphere and good vibes are the salient features of the shounen-ai manga even if there are mentions of violence, it's not extreme. Another yaoi trope is the mannerisms and the gaits of the characters being very dignified to match with their physical beauty.

The semes are amazing lovers and are able to deal with their counterpart’s tantrums. Bancoran's relationship with Maraich, who once tried to assassinate him and almost regularly beats him up, is that of a regular heterosexual couple and he takes care of Maraich like a ‘husband should'. Maraich, a firm believer of monogamous relationship based on mutual loyalty gets pregnant despite being a man which, kind of makes their picture of domestic bliss complete.

However, when the subject of tolerance towards gender minority shown through manga is being discussed, the readers and critical thinkers should keep in mind that the concept of consent is often overlooked in a text emphasising on overtly sexual portions. The seme-uke relationships are often devoid of permission and the way they get portrayed through the mangas, is nothing but a normalisation of manipulation and glorification of the violation of bodily autonomy,. Body shaming and extremely unconventional body features creating serious insecurity and unrealistic expectations among Japanese gay men isn’t something that should be considered tolerant in any sense. Gay men often feel uncomfortable at their representation in such texts where bodies and sexuality are produced and consumed as tools of entertainment for women. However, the question of sexual exploration vs one sided homosexual ‘love’ being imposed upon the other is not raised as there has already been the normalisation of the disturbing trend in Japanese pornography, both gay and straight, of the sexual recipient not acting according to his/her will as words like ‘iya’ meaning ‘no’, ‘yamete' meaning ‘stop', ‘itai’ meaning ‘it hurts' get frequently used. Surely, manga covering the yaoi genre has great representation of the gay sexual love and relationships but the absence of consent in most cases doesn’t really make it tolerant for the gender minorities. Mere representations are not enough and the concept of free will in a healthy relationship should be a much discussed topic in the manga tales. It’s high time we realise that an act upon it.

[justanearth-boundmisfit]

I can't believe anyone treat metas seriously anymore. Apparently, Dean Cas exaggerated drama is for GA so they can see romantic subplot. What romantic subplot?! For god's sake, we have 2019, who still treats gay storyline like that? Like it's something to be ashamed of? If TPTB want Destiel to be canon, they would start treating it like any couple on tv, not tiptoeing around it, which they're not doing anyway cause there is nothing but bait there anymore. How blind can metas be to not see it?!

Well, there’s this group of people that wants to believe no matter what, and that have been fed this meta destiel endgame for more than three years now, I guess it’s hard to let go. Also admitting you were wrong, or that you were following a cult-like minded people can be a slap to the face, not many are going to do it. Some are really seeing these metas, for what they really are, bullies, that will attack anyone that doesn’t think like them, but many others are afraid to speak up.

Those of us who can speak or are willing to do it, have to keep going because it’s not right how this group is treating people. Besides, through the years, their metas have been proven wrong and wrong again and that’s why they are desperately lashing out. 

We can see how their “destiel endgame” is falling apart, and how they really do not care about the ship, or Dean or Cas, they just care about “being right” and when that doesn’t happen they are going to keep twisting their stories to fit their writings no matter what.

GA audiences are NOT going to see a romantic subplot when one of them is saying “you’re dead to me” to the other, they are going to see one man lashing at the other, and one VERY forced storyline that is pushing towards drama and angst just for the sake of it. More so when Dean and Cas have been barely interacting with each other through the last two seasons. There’s no romantic subplot, because it’s just NOT there. Yes, there’s, like I said, a forced, I hate to use the word, narrative, towards Dean manpain! through feeling guilty about lashing out, that we have seen before, nothing new, and nothing that screams ROMANTIC. Because if anything, 14.18, just put on the table how many times Dean has treated Cas like shit. If people want to see romance through abuse (and have no doubt that IS abuse, albeit not a conscious one), that’s their prerogative, but it’s going to be really hard in an era where tv shows and movies are changing so much, to see a story like that, and tag it as romantic plot. Times have changed. 

Metas see it or lie about it, because they can’t go back, after saying that destiel was going to go canon on season 13. Now that the show is ending, the possibilities for them to keep lying season through season, are limited, and that’s why they are grasping at straws. What these metas are doing is underestimating everyone, even GA, who don’t react to spn the same way they do. And like you said we are in 2019, the way spn writers present a story is barely used anymore. Yes, there are some shows that use the same formula of forced drama, but they are not good, as well as spn is not good and not that deep of a show.

I wonder how many other shows these metas watch? If any? Because if you compare the quality of the writing and the amazing subtext of shows like Sharp Objects, True Detective (especially seasons 1 and 3), Killing Eve, Big Little Lies, The Americans, Black Mirror, The Terror, The Leftovers, Hannibal, the new Twilight Zone (the last ep, destroyed me), Orphan Black, and going a little backwards shows that really were game changers like The L Word and Queer As Folk (I’m more fond of the UK version), it’s not hard to see why spn is subpar and stuck in time. And I’m not only talking about homoerotic subtext or lgbt+ stories, because some of the shows that I listed don’t have any, I’m talking about subtext in general, how a good writing can add to the story through music, art and even landscape,yes, but it has to be REALLY well done for it to work, a thing that spn lacks in spades, because they use the little subtext they have to queerbait, and that’s why, imo, they fail over and over again, and they have to recycle old story lines, to go back to a point where they know audiences came back because of Dean and Cas. 

That’s why we are seeing the same from them all.the.time. They have an overused formula they can’t get out of, because they have a dinosaur at the helm like Singer, that is still writing and directing like he was in a show in the 80′s. That old dudebro, aggressive male that lashes at everyone and everything, and it’s a douche in general when he doesn’t get his way, it’s what we had in shows from that era (and some from the 90′s too) and that’s what spn is giving us, and what some people are justifying. Maybe because they’re too young to remember? Maybe because, they don’t watch other shows to compare to? Idk, but they accept this aggressive, repetitive formula, saying that we don’t “get it” when some of us have seen it SO many times on television before. A way of telling stories that is being buried more and more, thank the gods…

And this is too long already, and as usual I apologize, there’s so much still to say about these metas… If they are showing anything is their absolute ignorance of tv shows, old and new, no matter how much they want to turn the tables and say that we are the ones that are not smart enough to understand spn. And I named just a few shows, because I’m sure you have yours, and people following me can also name lots of shows that are amazing at writing subtext and delivering a good story, without going for the manpain! at every end of a season. 

Take care!