#anyway hanai transgender. he transcends and perceives

[daisyachain]

Coach Momoe, Abe, Hamada, Tajima, Hanai, gender. Momoe is a charismatic and not particularly masc woman who wears the same uniform as the guys and has the boundless and stern self-confidence expected of men. Hanai initially is a bit sexist towards her, but after a show of brute strength he submits his will to her own entirely and treats her like an army general or a personal hero. He is in love with her on a level beyond girl = cute. In fact Hanai’s feelings for her are entirely concerned with her position as coach and motivator. His awareness of her being a woman is more to do with his respect for the stuff she’s gone through and the tightrope she walks than his feelings for her; Coach-Momokan who is a woman and Girl-Maria are mutually exclusive, one supplants the other. He’s not in love with someone who isn’t the Coach, he’s extremely aware that the Coach is a woman, but he also canonically abandons any expectations of her filling a feminine role. His attraction isn’t to her femininity and can’t be.

Tajima sees Hanai’s admiration for Momoe and jumps immediately to ‘crush.’ He himself has said he’s attracted to Momokan and would date her if she were his year. He doesn’t recognize that she views them all as kids rather than peers. To him, Momoe is a girl who is energetic like him, who loves baseball like him, who happens to be a few years older than him and knows more about stuff and can coach. Her being a girl, her desirability, her being his teacher don’t conflict because Tajima has no set concept of the roles. He has to get it pointed out to him that she stands apart in authority compared to Hanai’s hyper awareness of her authority, but he never forgets for a moment that she’s a girl you could crush on.

Hamada both jumps to thinking of Momoe as an attractive woman because of his mysterious sordid past and recognizes that she’s an adult and the rest of them are kids to her. He can see her as an object of affection because of her femininity, but absolutely can’t imagine her as a peer.

The rest of the team views her normally. She’s their coach who is also a woman, she has long hair, imagining her as a love interest is just weird uncomfortable and kind of odd.

Then Abe takes everything and turns it in the opposite direction. He has no concept of Momoe as a ~woman~ (desirable, attractive, charismatic) and because of that he also sees her as a woman. Let me rephrase. When the team discusses the ban on Shinooka confessions, the thought of Momokan as a love interest doesn’t cross anybody else’s mind but Tajima’s. Abe is the one who brings her up because—she’s a girl, technically, girls are in the acceptable dating demographic, ergo she’s also got to be off-limits. He’s so divorced from understanding the cisheteropatriarchal norm that he doesn’t understand womanhood being tied up in desire. All girls are equally just-normal-people, he can’t understand why the gang would crush on Shinooka (woman) and not Momokan (also a woman). Then later in his game with Shuu, he mentions that he didn’t really think of Momokan as a woman until then, and when he does, his first thought is—boy, that must have been hard. Gender is purely math to him. If you’re a girl, you have certain expectations and category tags. If you’re a guy, vice versa. There’s no intuitive understanding of how gender roles fit together. He’s just memorized them.

That comes around to the end of the circle. Abe resolves to win for Momokan just like Hanai resolves to win for Momokan. They both view her as their Coach and know she’s a woman. Hanai comes at it from the ambiguously romantic perspective. His admiration for her is dangerously intense, his motivation on her behalf is possessive and self-effacing, he devotes his will to her as a personal gift. Abe comes at it from a firmly student-mentor perspective. She’s sacrificed a lot to teach him, she’s skilled and she’s clever, he respects her deeply for accomplishing everything she has in spite of the challenges. He wants to win as a gesture of repayment and good clean friendship. There’s no push-and-pull or unspoken interest like he has with eg Haruna or Mihashi. They’re both motivated to win for Momokan and in completely different ways