#bishy rambles

[bishicat]

AHH!!! Why does Solas saying "my heart" actually make my heart skip a beat 😭😭😭

[trainwreckgenerator]

hi i know you only asked for chilchuck edits so feel free to ignore this, but i made a little marcille amv if you'd be interested in that 👉👈 https://www.tumblr.com/lesbianweed/743906439021592576

THAT WAS SO CUTE thank u for ur service <3<3<3

[reineyday]

supremely enjoying how magical girl coded theyre making clark in my adventures with superman lol

[nugulover69]

Souta I swear to god

[daisyachain]

When consuming works in translation or even cross-cultural works in the same language, your standard midwestern white US reader (and more broadly your standard anglophone) is going to bring their own cultural structures and impose them externally on the work no matter what. This is the weeb blog so we all know what I’m talking about.

One specific example of this is the way that white/anglophone/US cultural consumers treat male ‘femininity’. In US culture, it’s a truth universally known (by girls) that girls like a girly guy or at least that the male figure most attractive to female consumers (who make up the majority of the audience for fiction in the US whether or not they’re considered as such by marketing teams) is a figure that they can relate to. The floppy boy band member, the middle aged man with cooking skills, whatever. US/Anglo standards of masculinity are also bizarrely tilted towards performance. SoCal-type standard US culture is as misogynist as any other culture (ie it’s misogynist), it’s just that this misogyny has its own flavour of expressing itself. Everywhere does.

In the broad anglo milieu, any hint of personal grooming, self-awareness, shyness, emotivity, or non-ripped physique is interpreted as feminine. The skinny boy band member, the jeans-wearing metrosexual, the vegetarian, the fat kid who hangs out with the girls in gym class because that’s the path that is least likely to end in physical assault. These are all sissies. The merest lack of sufficient beer-n-bacon posturing is taken for wearing a pride flag. By US standards, a non-muscled man who wears even slightly fashionable clothes is [twelve year old boy voice] gayyyyyy. The standard homophobic gay stereotype is a finger-fluttering peacock who can’t stand to chip a nail.

Go over to eg Japanese culture (most commonly consumed works in translation in the US), the stereotype is completely different. The archetypical male heterosexual romantic lead isn’t a sleeve-busting hunk, it’s a skinny, floppy, long-haired guy with delicate fingers and sparkling eyes. The homophobic stereotype is a muscle-bound thick-jawed mascara-wearer. This doesn’t mean that the bishounen/ikemen archetype is necessarily considered feminine. On the contrary, it’s another masculine ideal. No one in the US could possibly (in the public imagination) aspire to be a patterned-tie fashionista unless he’s gay or foreign. But, overseas, the reserved and cutting-edge fashion-conscious man is revered as an object of female desire.

Well it’s not quite as clean cut as all that but you get what I’m saying. You can see it in the translation of ‘ikemen’ to ‘pretty boy’. The original just means ‘a hot guy’ the other is a homophobic insult 90% of the time, but English really doesn’t have an equivalent term. Also why 00s weebs just referred to ‘bishies’, it’s because there’s no English term for it that isn’t in some way homophobic. I’ve seen ‘hottie’ used as a translation as well, but that’s got its own baggage as it’s exclusively a term associated with women’s speech, so it doesn’t make sense to have male characters refer to it without coming off as overtly gay.

So that brings us to: it’s a common misinterpretation for the bishounen/ikemen characters or presentations to be read as ‘gay’ by a US audience. Viz. BTS fandom and haters, shippers, etc. This is because there’s no real equivalent to this concept in the US without homophobic overtones. The closest you might possibly get is ‘boy band member’, but that also has oodles of homophobia as all of us who were there for the Bieber era remember. Rather than ice-cold idols of female worship, the US interpretation of a bishounen is of a girly guy.

Except, we’ve gotten to the point where US consumption and regurgitation of foreign cultural tropes has is on its third or fourth cycle. People are now instantly imitating their favourite art as it comes out with the help of the internet. LoTR shows up in JJK. RWBY gets a mediocre 2D anime. And League, famous for being the midpoint of US cultural context and East Asian cultural influence, puts up promotional material for the character Hwei. Who seems to be made to fit into the line of bishounen characters that have been coming out of the League design factory (Aphelios, Viego, Sett, some Ezreal skins) but who doesn’t belong there at all and instead comes out as a startlingly straightforward (hah) design for a femme gay character

[wolverinedoctorwho]

Rui is the prettiest woman in Project Sekai (not counting the vocaloids)

[ziekkfreak2-0]

Sarap talaga ng tulog no? Kaya lagi akong nagpupuyat <33

[q-gorgeous]

Hello dear VCE giftee 👀

I am your mysterious gifter, and I have been gathering ideas, but before I start working, I wanted to ask if you have any ideas or wishes of something specific you would like to receive!!!

I shall be thy fairy and create something ✨️

Bdbdbdb i dont have anything specific in mind besides enemies to lovers swagger bishie identity reveal kinda stuff but that was in the form you already looked at xD thats just my jam i have so much fun writing those types of fics

But other than that i am just excited to see what i get :D whether its like art or fic and all that dbbdbd

[speedyowl152]

Desperately holding myself back from replying to posts bashing certain ships in the main tags of shows.

Op isn't there to listen or have a good experience with fandom theyre just there to salt.

[derangedfujoshi]

Just a quick and easy guide to understand better the heights I go by when rating shotas

150cm is the MAX stretch I can allow and only if their facial features read EXTREMELY like a shota, the type you only see their face and go "oh ofc that's a shota" and then BAM they're too fucking tall. But again that is MY personal extra category, SLS aren't a real thing outside of my brain so if we wanted to be very strict anyone above the 140cm wouldn't count as a shota anymore no matter how shota-like their features.

At times tho, authors will give a certain height and then proceed to not respect it/draw the characters shorter/or it straight up doesn't look like they're that height, so what do we do in that case? I personally look for the body proportions, especially the limbs. Shota tends to have shorter ones usually either short arms & short legs or short arms & slightly longer legs. So if you're unsure about a character's height you can always check their proportions! Generally speaking if they have long arms and legs those are well proportioned limbs and paired with a kinda tallish character it could spell Bishie instead of Shota!

Anyway this is just me rambling, but I wanted to elaborate more on my reasonings behind my shota ratings (and talk about shota in general ehe)

[bishicat]

homies that ending in Tevinter Nights has me feeling too many feelings 😭

[jake-marshall]

[Fic] Blessed Are Those

New fic ahoy! TItle: Blessed Are Those Rating: M Ships: Carter/Trent, Claire/The Kappa, Carter & Harvest Goddess, Carter & May, other romantic relationships mentioned in notes Word Chapter Count: 24.5k, 4 chapters; complete. Summary:

Carter and Trent don't often have the opportunity to spend time together alone, but a rainy Spring day gives them that chance - before it's interrupted by Claire, and the unspeakable transgression that is weighing on her soul.

Surely the Harvest Goddess will forgive her. But as for Carter? He is but a man, after all, and therefore prone to the anger, jealousy and bitterness that comes with being human.

Struggling to accept that this mere farmer can wed a deity while he can not, he sequesters himself both emotionally and physically from the rest of Mineral Town, including Trent. Only through an epiphany brought about by divine intervention (and a handful of mushrooms) does Carter realize being a righteous man does not mean he must also be a lonely one.

Please mind the tags and the author's note at the beginning!!

>>Read "Blessed are Those" on ao3<<

(Notes and rambling under the cut)

(This is all a sort of rehash of my end author's notes but yeah) So my Writing Project for the month of August turned out to be what was originally planned to be a silly one-shot, that instead grew to a 24.5k monstrosity that let me sift through my religious trauma a bit and flex a bit of writing muscle re: relationship communication and non-graphic sex scenes.

This was also going to be way darker and fucky in re: Claire's role, lol, but I did not expect Carter and Trent to end up cute and almost, even, wholesome, thus steering the fic in a more mild and introspective direction (although lbr they're still pretty shady in this, its just not as focused on as I initially intended). I enjoyed considering Carter's possible background, too. He's so funny to me, I can't even say how much I like him versus how much he just cracks me up, but he makes an excellent conduit for me to pour my religious trauma into lol.

I'm not gonna sit here and pretend more than maybe 5 people are interested enough in Trent/Carter as a ship to read a fic this long about them but I am insanely proud of this fic both in the content and my technical writing, and hope if you do give this a chance that you enjoy the journey as much as I did.

Big thanks to @yorunoangel for being the one to inspire the path this took and being my rubber duck as I worked through it, and also thanks to @owls-den for letting me yell about the Boys as well as our bishie Fish Husband. Who knows, maybe there will be some Claire/Kappa in the future set in this universe. :p

[toskarin]

at some point I decided to put myself in immense pain by making the Divine Solis military aesthetic nomura-bishie to get around the preloaded implications of more readily-available imagery. at least it being mostly black means I can cheat the details in a lot of poses

rambles below the break

I wanted the Saints, more properly the Knights Apostello, to have something resembling clerical garb by way of BDSM fashion. as is the pattern with all the military uniforms I've drawn for VesalBlood's setting, it's incredibly over-the-top with a lot of removable pieces that make it less ridiculous as pilot's gear

the Knights Apostello are made notably different from the vessels of other factions for the sheer quantity of resources at their disposal. they're not all bad people, but they're all trust-fund kids with jurisdiction and means to carry out their petty grudges

so the tight pants make quite a lot of sense in that regard

[nugulover69]

You think Souta ever got tied to a chair naked and had his balls pulverized by a hot French terrorist-funding banker during his spy days

[residentbishie]

Blogs ahoy!

After much faffing about I have now finally decided to start using this website, and to make things a bit more organised I have sorted my content into a few separate blogs.

This main one will be my blog for general art and non-fandom related posts, and for those interested in things like screenshots, OC musings and more fandom related rambles I have now neatly sorted into two now blogs for your pleasure.

"Bishie-in-Azeroth" for all Warcraft themed posts.

and

"Bishie-in-Tamriel" for anything related to the Elder Scrolls series. I will start by uploading old content so I have it all neatly archived, but the goal is to eventually post more here since I feel less bad about being unhinged online when I can have it all tagged and sorted.

[roleshirked]

Do u have a long post somewhere about why you think bishonens are lesbian coded? Cause i would like to read it. I see it as the other way, bishies are het coded its why bifauxnen (females that resemble bishies) tend to be into men sch as with Kashima in GSNK and the protag in Ikemen Danso Reiya but nonthlsss lesbians like bishonen imagery bc gnc women are deemed unpopular and ugly thir ssa deemed bad & dirty irl while bishies are hearthrob princes with fangirls whose f-attraction is celebrated

i don't, mostly because it's a meme take, but i am so glad someone else sees a nugget there, lol!

the non-meme answer is super subjective: growing up as a kid plugged into the internet age and reading any josei/shoujou manga i could get my hands on, i wound up projecting way more onto the bishounen in those stories than i did the women protagonists. these are stories written primarily by straight women for other straight women, and as a result the men often (though not always) come off as way more sincere and compassionate and enigmatic and charismatic than men irl. also they're super pretty. so as a little closeted lesbian girl it was super easy for me to equate that with "i could be that!", especially since bifauxnen were so few and far between. i don't think i even discovered the term until my twenties.

you mentioning bifauxnen is huge though and i do agree they tend to be not nearly as lauded in fandom circles, which is weird imo. i disagree that they're het-coded; i think they're lesbian-coded also, but often shoehorned into het relationships as endgame in order to upkeep the genre and/or not sideline other plots. but i also latched onto them for the same reasons i do bishounen despite that: they're gnc, they embody masculinity in a way that is wholly not masculine, etc. etc. rose of versailles is to date my favourite piece of media of all time and oscar francois de jarjayes is my favourite character of all time. i have and had and will get into internet arguments with people who try to force a trans narrative on her, it tells me they didn't read the story or pick up on its tenets at all. ikeda-san has gone on record stating how oscar stepping into her womanhood and identifying it in her own way despite how her father raised her is directly a reflection of japan's expectations of women and wanting to subvert them in the 70s.

i think the reason we see less of characters like oscar or kashima or haruka or even utena is equal parts a genre problem and a reader problem. if we consider the market, most women who enjoy bishounen content do so because it's fulfilling a fantasy, and a woman character taking the place of that decidedly male character, even if aesthetically they are identical, ruins the fantasy. and if we consider the genre, bifauxnens more routinely pop up in stories where either the plot's focus is not romance or the character's focus is not romance. and if they're made to be romantic, they are paired with a man as endgame (see: oscar's side-stories with both marie and rosalie but ending up with andre), because it is likely the story this is taking place in is a shoujou/josei story, and so they have to preserve the straight woman's fantasy, etc. etc. i'm not saying you're wrong, just that the "access" to these two types of characters are different. i would kill for standard josei/shoujou stories that had bifauxnens instead of bishounens! i want nothing more than unassuming lesbian content that caters directly to my aesthetics. unfortunately my tastes and the genre i primarily consume tend to be at odds (and i fix this by developing my own lesbian bifauxnen content, but i am not linking that here, sorry.)

this is super rambly and has no point, i'm sorry! i'll leave you with a rec for a comic that is recent and features a semi-bifauxnen as one of the two women (!) protags, "The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn't A Guy At All!". it's a cute femslash comic about two classmates, one who is mistaken for a boy while she's working by the other, and shenanigans ensue.