#i use yuri and yaoi as terms because its funny to me

[mcd-incorrect-quotes]

i'm starting to tire of incorrect quotes mainly because idk... the generator i've been using is kinda not funny nor are most of that shit rlly fitting soooooo. how would we feel if i started posting lil drabbles and shit on occasion? i have literally no time nor intention to post on the official site at ALL so these will jus stay on the blog :^] but yeah these lil guys live in my brain (it is literally jus mostly darkyuri and fleeting moments of skitrob yaoi) soooo how do we feel about that

[p2ii]

i think we should soft-retire the whole 'this too is yuri'/'yaoi', just like, a little bit 🤏. and maybe consider that characters of any gender can be multifaceted or preform gender non conformity in a way that doesn't inform their sexuality or relationship dynamics. aswell as stop pretending there is an inherent difference between the two as genre's from ppl who aren't actually emerced in that kind of fiction. any gendered relationship can and and probably HAS played out any trope. they're the equivalent of f/f and m/m catagorise on ao3, please.

this is mostly because if I have to read about another het/ m/f couple being 'both Yuri and yaoi' or 'half Yuri half yaoi' I'm going to go ballistic. it's giving 'half gay half straight' 😭

[crehador]

winter 2025 is upon us and i have very much not finalized my list of things to watch for the season. i might try a bunch of first eps at random and see what sticks, but the ones i'll definitely be following are:

slf s2, ao no hako, and chi - all continuing from fall 2024, so not technically winter shows, but really looking forward to another cour of all of these!

yohaji and touhai (and possibly ao no miburo? don't see an episode count for it listed yet) are also rolling into winter, reasonably entertaining but not as hype as those three up top

if haigakura is resurrected from the dead i will continue with that too and hope it gets ummmmm better. yeag

anyway. new stuff!

first and foremost...

TOXIC WIZARD YAOI SEASON LET'S GOOOOOOOOOOOOO disclaimer this is not even an image from the anime adaptation but i will always and forever take any excuse to post this owen, disclaimer 2 (electric boogaloo) despite my affectionately calling this toxic wizard yaoi all the time it's not actually bl just to be clear

anyway i've been avoiding all trailers for the anime since i want to go in and be surprised by everything. i do know we're going with f!akira here which seems fair enough since iirc we had m!akira in the stage plays

i don't know anything about if we'll be following the game story or if the anime will be doing something new. my hopes are for following the game, and if it does, i'll be curious to see how far we get (i'm not entirely caught up on the game main story myself... should really get on that lol)

but anyway besides the voice actors. i mean i'm mostly here for the voice actors. for asnm. but besides that and the beautiful card art and the adorable chibis. i just love mahoyaku for its complete and utter mastery of the toxic situationship. these wizards are so fucking weird about each other it's great. can't wait to see them more in motion

i will be very biasedly loving the shit out of this whether it is good or not lol

moving on! the sequels i'll be picking up this season are watakon, ishura, and uniteup (and hanako-kun but rip i can only put three images in a row)

looking forward to more peak romance from watakon, s1 really surprised me by how enjoyable it was. uniteup is really just a standard bog idol anime but it's pretty good as far as standard bog idol series go. it's no idolish7 but it's perfectly serviceable. hoping for some more bangers from this season, though in all honesty i didn't listen to much of the music from the first season besides anela's stuff... should probably check out the other groups

ishura... idk. i think it was fine/fun enough but my main little meow meow is already dead so we'll see how s2 goes i guess

and now for the brand new stuff!

sakamoto days looks like it's going to be a ton of fun, really excited for that one. bathhouse vampire one seems like it has the potential to be really funny too. momentary lily i'm picking up because honestly i like gohands. i'll just say it. i like gohands! they've made some real shit but i like their style! however. if this is named momentary LILY and turns out to not be yuri so help me god

zenshuu and hanashura are, interestingly, kind of complete opposites. i'm giving zenshuu a shot because visually it looks really good and i do love media about making media. the mc being an anime director is deeply compelling to me, but the actual premise is just... not

maybe it will surprise me in a good way, but i'll keep my expectations low

hanashura on the other hand just sounds lovely, i haven't taken a look at the visuals yet, but it seems like it'll be a quaint little school club series. and i love a good school club series

and then there's this isekai one... which i'm not enthusiastic at all if i'm being honest. like i recently binged tondemo skill and it was basically perfect so in terms of isekais where the guy has an online shopping power, i'm good. this one just seems superfluous to me. however... they got suwabe so. i will unfortunately be watching lol

there are a whole bunch of other series that i'll check out when the season begins in earnest, but i'm really hoping to keep my planning list to under twenty this season... so... well that's probably a lost cause. we'll see lmao

but. anyway. these uhhh seventeen? there are already seventeen?? jfc yeah alright these seventeen are on the list for sure

[schwarzeneggr]

junjou terrorist is crazy like nakamura really tried writing a story between a 17y old and a 40y old man and try to make it romantic i think in the SECOND fucking episod the old guy brings the young guy to his WIFES GRAVE AND INTRODUCES THEM yaoi used to be so fucking lawless we were all reading really shady stuff. even at 12 i knew it was fucked as hell. I never liked that, or the omega stuff, or the yaoi that broke a breach of trust like student/teacher or doctor/patient and stuff that grossed me out sooooososoososo much and it still does. The yaois iv owned and the ones I read were always super tame stuff and alot of it was about repression and i just skipped the sex scenes (and there were soooooooo much of it yaoi was more of a pornographic genre than anything back then) the contrast with yuri is so fucking funny because they barely even brushed lips youd read a 3 volume story and the culmination was them holding hands like pure maidens that couldnt be corrupted. in retrospect being introduced to homosexuality through this is fucked. but in a muslim family and facing extreme abuse this was my only gateway toward something I could deeply relate to even thou i did not know wat it was yet and i look back on it fondly now. i was and still am a fujoshi (idk the fujoshi term for men so ill stick to fujoshi) and thats why for all its flaws junjou romantica is a good memory to me. I used to dream abt being a mangaka like every other one piece reader but it quickly morphed to i wish i was a yaoi mangaka. and look at me now. Im litteraly this. except i do it for free online 👍

[psychewritesbs]

Don't you think it's funny cause actual canon gay characters in BL manga/manhwa will say "I love you" but only the shounen bromance can spew out some of the most romantic shit akin to a 19th century poet writing a letter expressing his surpressed love for his lover 😭.....

ok but when you put it like that...

This is an interesting conversation to have because I am not sure it's so much about the demographics (shonen is more of a demographic than a literary genre although it does have certain characteristics that define it because of its intended demographic), as it is about writing skill and being able to show vs. tell.

Because, as a fujo who went through a thirsty fujo phase, I consumed a lot of bl. Like... A LOT. And I came out of that phase accepting the cold realization that I did not like most bl/yaoi because it is highly clichéd and relies on tropes entirely way too much.

Like I literally used to say "I read yaoi for the plot" because...

GIVE ME THE CHEMISTRY, GIVE ME THE DYNAMIC, GIVE ME THE DRAMAAAAAAAAA!!!!

To your point under the cut 😂 ...

Man, I just can't get over how well you put it.

Anyways, given how you framed your ask, so do you think it's a male perspective thing? I ask because I do recognize that sometimes the way male friendships are portrayed in animanga feels very intimate and very unique to Japanese media, although I could be wrong.

Because, if we're talking about the big battle shonen bl manga out there, jjk, naruto, bnha, hq, etc. are the big "offenders" and these are all male authors (well, we're not sure about hq). So I can see why you feel like these characters are able to express their perspective for each other in a way that you don't see in other manga.

Personally, I am a big fan of how CLAMP (who are all women and very possibly all queer) executes LGBTQ+ dynamics. An example found in a shonen manga that I particularly love is kurofai from Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle.

And the thing about this pairing is that you never hear them say "I love you." Instead you are shown through their behavior towards one another and the subtext how much they have grown to care for each other.

In addition to the majority of CLAMP's m/m dynamics (across a variety of manga published for different demographics), another couple of examples of gays I love include Tomoko Yamashita's pairing in Sankaku Mado no Sotogawa wa Yoru (although I didn't care for the ending), Yoneda Kou's Saezuru Tori wa Habatakanai, and obvs Sayo Yamamoto and Mitsurou Kubo's Yuri on Ice. I haven't read/seen Banana Fish but I understand that's another bl fan fave classic that is good.

So there are some good dynamics out there outside of shonen lol, you just have to dig for them like a maniac... or so I've been told ehem.

But even as masterful as CLAMP is at executing soulmate dynamics, if you specifically take itafushi for example, Gege's ability to vest that bromance with so much beauty is just off the charts something else. As a woman I find the container of this dynamic to be deeply aspirational. There's this shared and unspoken understanding between the two characters, not to mention love that... idk.. it just has this... je ne sais quoi.

idk... I am curious about more #thoughts on this because there's a lot going on here in terms of self-insertion into male characters, equality in dynamics, just so much to unpack.

Please feel free to send all the #thoughts to whomever else reads this!

Thanks for reaching out anon!!!!

[yaoi-yaoieverywhere]

I love that the last few years occasionally I get the rare person judging the URL I've had since 2011. It's really- it's just fascinating, what people will latch on to and judge for the sake of 'fitting in'.

(Below is a Vent, but tl;dr Can y'all stop clutching your pearls over an old fandom term I've had as my URL since 2011 when it hurts no one? I explain below why this is not a slur, the actual usage and some history, and why I don't feel like changing my URL. It's not in depth but if you want to know more there's plenty of research to be had.)

Real talk tho, it is funny. Yaoi is a bad word for you? It's so cringe to have been in early 2000s English Anime fandom? You want me to change a URL I've had for over a decade that references an old meme (Blank, Blank Everywhere) bc it makes you feel a little initial startle when you like content I've bought or made? So silly. Why? Do you think it's- a bad word? A word that's just a genre?? Not a slur??? We don't call couples Yaoi, Yuri, Het That's just. Wh- Where did this come from, is all I'm asking. I remember hearing RUMORS that SOME ladies were doing it at cons (tho I never saw proof) around the time this started. I can understand the initial "what the fuck" but c'mon now. A lot of you making comments have CLEARLY never seen that.

And to be clear, I don't ship Real People. Apologies to the RPF shippers if that sounds rude, but it's just not something I do. So, y'know, don't like ~accuse me~ of calling irl gay people a term that's used for a genre of manga??

I think one of the protests has been like. "Oh, Yaoi means its gay content made for ladies". ...I am reading and writing. Queer fanfic content. On the internet. Primarily made by and for. Queer people. Which does include some ladies like me. Yaoi Manga is bought by a variety of people. Including, notably, actual gay men in Japan. It is extremely hard to get actual Queer Created, Queer Reputed content in Japan- it is literally kept under lock and key in most of the places that decide to stock it "for the children". So when they're curious it's a lot easier to look at what? Yaoi. Titilating, soft, romanticized depictions of young men in lust. Or love, occasionally.

I'm Queer gang. I've been Queer a long time. I know the delicacy of balancing decorum and comfort zones and even the turmoil going on between the older and younger generation over using Queer as a term. But, on a much more lighthearted, minor scale, I'm not going to stop using this url with Yaoi in it just because you don't research or understand the term and go with your knee jerk "I think I heard someone say some lady at a con call a gay couple that". Or even worse. "It's old, so it's bad."

You're not going to get some dudebro on the side of the street spit "Fucking Yaoi" at you. You're not going to have some dismissive teacher say "You have got to stop being so Yaoi." People in the school halls don't laugh and point and say "Look, it's the Yaoi." People on TWITTER, THE IRL HELL THAT IT IS, Are NOT going to tweet "lmao yaoi loser" if you're gay. They might if you post your otp, I suppose, if they're resulting to 8th grade bullying tactics which is surprisingly common on the internet. If people are calling you Yaoi in discord or something and it hurts your feelings, I'm a bit confused, but that sounds like a friend group problem that needs sorted imminently. Good luck with that.

You're okay. I'm not here to hurt you. This word is not here to hurt you. My URL is a joke that has become a lot less easily recognized over time, and that's okay. But it's not here to cause you harm. It's also not going to get you cool points if you diss it, but that's like, a you problem.

[dinosaurtsukki]

hiiiii i'm actually too shy to send u a message but u r so cute and friendly i wanted to be ur friend 🥺😳 hehe anyway u said u wanted to talk about anime other than haikyuu!! have you seen given????? it's literally the best thing to ever happen for me JENQJSBWHW IM JUST SO SOFT FOR ALL OF THE CHARACTERS 🥺😭 also do u read yaoi manhwas/mangas?or watch yaoi animes? do you have any recommendations? 👀 kkkk that's all i hope u have a great day, stay hydrated and safe! 😗💜

u,,, think im cute and friendly?? 🥺🥺🥺👉👈 ooooohh i've only heard abt given and it's just been newly released apparently?? what's it about? i used to read yaoi manga/manhwa and honestly i can't remember the titles HAHAHAHA. for yaoi manhwa though i remember reading something called 19 days ??? anyway it was really cute altho i stopped. in terms of anime i'll always love yuri on ice but i also like kiss him, not me because its so funny. tbh, not much of a yaoi fan (i kind of like seinen a bit more hahshahs) but i hope this helped!!

[thisdiscontentedwinter]

Disco, Disco. Its 2019 , so why am I still seeing m/m shippers being slammed as fetisher and mostly women? And whats more funny, I just saw the one abt anime that said yaoi is homophobic fetish but yuri is pure gold. Like... Both of them are genre for pornographic anime. ?? Why is it soo hard to believe that I watch them for their romance? Or that the plot is more relatable to me than het couple's? Cuz tbh, I related waaay more to BL's plots.. esp since theres a lot of dark themes in them

Oh, this is a fun one! Anti-culture will screech and screech and screech that “fujoshi” are gross awful horrible women for fetishising Japanese m/m. They think the word is in insult within itself, without realising that the word “fujoshi” only means “a female fan of BL.”* Which is what most of those screeching about it also are. 

*Fujoshi literally means “rotten girl”, and it’s a name the fans gave themselves because guess what? They were called rotten for liking mlm content. It’s a reclaimed term, and anyone using it as an insult doesn’t make them better than fujoshi. Because if they’re a female fan of Yuri on Ice, they’re literally a fujoshi too! 

Also, hot take, but you can objectify a fictional character as much as you damn like without fetishising actual living gay men. Who the fuck cares if you squee about Yuri and the other guy (I care so little I’ve forgotten his name, or even which one he is) as long as you’re not being an asshole to real people? 

Hot hot take: fictional characters are objects. Feel free to objectify them all you want. They don’t care because they’re not real. 

Hottest take of all: Treat actual people with respect, and treat fictional characters however the fuck you like. 

Can you believe that’s actually a controversial statement? 

[expshared]

a little bit o’ spring anime season retrospective, a little late 👇

I’ve only watched 2.5 series involved in the Isekai Quartet but I was thirsty for Re: Zero content so I tuned in to this. I’mma be honest: this was fun. Crossovers are fun. I really enjoyed seeing funny skeleton man and Goddess of Dumbass interact, and I think equal time and attention was given to all parties involved, and that made it fun, too. It was accessible for someone like me whose knowledge of these shows was only tertiary and even if it had its questionable moments (Darkness I hate you so much), the sum is an enjoyable package. I question if this show could work with any other quartet of isekai heroes because all other isekai protagonists are boring af.

Watching Fruits Basket again makes me realize that I absorbed too much of Tohru Honda into my personality when I was impressionable and wee and never figured out that it was bad. Anyway this was a nice new coat of paint on a beloved series. The updated designs are nice to look at and the care given to the new material is evident. But it is considerably less…fun than the first incarnation and can I be honest? As a manga reader, knowing what I know about how the little love triangle pans out and watching it from the beginning? I just don’t like Kyo like I did when I was 12. Which, uh, wasn’t that much to begin with. Tohru deserves the world and the anime has a lot of work to do to convince me that Kyo can give that to her.

Fairy Gone takes its place alongside The Lost Village for being the biggest waste of time. In its favor: I liked the main character’s design and that she wore pants. Its sins: horrible clunky CGI I could not make out, way too many proper nouns, infodumps every episode, butt rock, a general disinterest in its main cast and their secrets. It expected me to care about a bunch of stuffy old men and their machinations when there were friends-to-enemies girlfriends in the background they weren’t even considering. I don’t remember who the assistant attorney general prime minister of Not-England is and I don’t care. The fact that this gets another 12 episodes is baffling, how anyone could anyone listen to another 12 episodes of dull political cud-chewing is beyond me.

Carole and Tuesday makes La La Land look like a plastic bag tumbling underneath a highway. Carole and Tuesday should win the Oscar for best everything. Carole and Tuesday is the best contemporary musical by a mile. Watanabe has been waiting 25 years just to make this show, and it’s a delightful cross section of everything that’s made his shows successful in the past—the slice of life futurepunk of Cowboy Bebop, the zaniness of Space Dandy, the ensemble cast of Samurai Champloo. It’s a pleasure to watch. I love seeing these girls underestimated and then blow everyone out of the water, it’s a consistent delight. The soundtrack is amazing and everything on it sounds genuine and legitimate—probably because it is. Netflix shouldn’t be keeping this one all to itself.  

Hitoribocchi was a sweet little gem of goodwill. Strange, anxious Bocchi’s quest to make friends with her equally strange classmates was funny, empathetic, and endearing. I love this cast of weirdo misfits and who among us doesn’t secretly hope their friends don’t forget about them when they’re sick oh thank goodness it’s not just me.

Senryuu Shoujo was a little cute, a little funny, a little heartwarming. It’s forgettable but a nice kind of forgettable, where you fondly remember it for five minutes and then move on with your life. It’s a short form series so if you’re in the mood for a quick n’ light shoujo about pining and misunderstanding, this is an easy recommendation.

I think I set my expectations too high for Sarazanmai. I wanted it to be the takedown of yaoi tropes like Yurikuma so gleefully pitchforked yuri tropes, but that wasn’t its project at all. It was Ikuhara’s most visceral work, but also, I feel, his most grounded in reality, which is a weird fucking thing to say about a show wherein three boys turn into kappas to go up the concept of someone’s butt. This was, decidedly, my least favorite Ikuhara title, which isn’t to say it’s bad. It’s just not Penguindrum or Yurikuma. Its scope felt smaller, its commentary less biting, its reveals less….revealing. Stand By Me is a bangin’ ED, though, I will Stand By That.

Kono Oto Tomare suffers from not knowing who its main character is. Surely it’s Megane Senpai, who starts the show off? But it’s not, it’s most assuredly Delinquent Guy, who is the emotional heart of the show and who definitely has something going on with our third main character, Prodigy Girl, leaving Megane Senpai the third wheel. This show just doesn’t start with its feet underneath it—it hobbles along an ungainly fusion of shoujo and sports anime and doesn’t do either tremendously. It does, however, have a heart, and this cast did eventually grow on me and I want to see them succeed. Protip: if your show is about an activity, please feature the activity. There is very little actual koto playing in this show and this is one of its biggest missteps. It’s a serviceable show, but not a great one.

I don’t drop a lot of anime but I dropped Cinderella Nine at episode 5 because it was just too ugly. It was so bad that I began to doubt there was an “on model”. There was just nothing going for it—the character designs were awful, the animation would pass as a power point, and the sportball was nonexistant. Non Non.

Dororo really let me down. I didn’t care for its ending at all, and in fact, sort of felt as if it nullified all the hard work of the prior 23 episodes. Having Dororo and Hyakkimaru part is a terrible decision. Nothing was learned. The payoff was not rewarding. Would have to point to Aldnoah to find an ending in recent memory I disliked more than this one. >:(/10

The show I was most hyped for every week was Demon Slayer. It didn’t start out swinging—Tanjiro’s origin story is unfortunately pretty par for the course in terms of shonen heroes, and the years-long training arc and time skip right after it was not the most inviting beginning. In fact, that’s where I dropped the manga when I tried reading it a couple of years ago. But ufotable makes this serviceable and by the fourth episode or so, I was completely sold. Something I loved about the manga was its unique artstyle and use of patterns and gradients—any other studio would have sacrificed both. Watching a fight scene in Demon Slayer is a joy. Characters ping pong around each other and footwork is fancy and weapons feel dangerous and the techniques look cool and require Tanjiro to puzzle them out. Also, Tanjiro is such a good boy. He drinks so much respect women juice. Every time an episode ends I’m disappointed I don’t have more to watch.

[nellynee]

Couple of thoughts on Creek since the episode “Put it Down” and the new game came out. 

Can I just take a moment to say that I’m really glad that Craig and Tweek’s relationship hasn’t become a mean joke? Because I’ve been really scared for a while after “Craig x Tweek” that it would.

(rest under cut for length)

Like in the second to last scene of “Put it Down” when Tweek was going on and on about how he felt like he had no control over his life, I think his exact words were....

(Tweek) “I don’t know it’s- it’s like, maybe... maybe I have to find a way to feel a little in charge of me again.”

(Craig) “That sounds so insurmountable though, how would you even start?”

(Tweek) “I don’t know but, I-I gotta do something about this. There’s gotta be a way I can...”

You have no idea how terrified I was of that moment right there. I had to pause the show and come back because of genuine fear. Because there’s some key words in there. “Something to take control of me again.” that’s literally adult media shorthand for “I’m going to use sex with you that’s the thing that’s gonna give me some sense of self control” and that little pause, the gentle music, it was setting up the perfect punchline to cut to these poor ten year old boys violently making out at the BEST case scenario. That would have been the perfect South Park punchline.

Because South Park has absolutely gone there. “Miss Teacher Bangs a Boy” comes to mind (granted that was the definition of satire, and even taken to extreams it was treated real enough that lots of people get really uncomfortable thinking about that episode.) As does the prevalence of anal rape as humor, or jokes about Kenny having ALL the STDs. It’s just that, this could have gone horribly wrong.

But no, THANK GOD. I don’t know if Trey Parker and Matt Stone are bad at genuine emotion, or simply can’t help themselves in making the joke, or if they’ve tied their hands with the tone of the show, but you don’t get a lot of pure, simple, niceness in South Park, and that little “Thank you Craig” got to be that little bit we got, just, genuinely sweet and pure and untwisted to make a joke. 

South Park seems to finally be touching it’s old roots again with the children and their relationships to each other. South Park used to be good at that, back when the kids acted like kids. The joke was that these were kids, and the punchline was when the adult tone was suddenly ripped away to reveal a bunch of precocious children. 

And then these kids acting like adults stopped being a joke and started being the norm and things got uncomfortable. And I’m totally thanking the new games for this gradual shift back to the older tones. In the time since “Stick of Truth” came out South Park has been very preoccupied with time sensitive satire and it’s kinda overwhelmed the show, but incorporating the games in as canon has sort of forced the show to acknowledge that these are children. 

Children who are still of an age to get together with cardboard and cooking pans and play huge epics with their imagination, and now a lot of the more adult themes are being fostered on the actual adults of the show.

(I’d like to make a little sidenote here. There’s this huge gap in fandom I’m starting to see more between people who are like “OMG YES CREEK MY CHILD SELF IS VALIDATED”  and the one’s who are like “these are children stop shipping this ew” and on the second half... I see where you’re coming from, because I have a similar sort of fear, in that this show doesn’t exactly touch children’s sexuality (ew) with tweezers, and the fandom is no better. But I do want to note two things here. One, in that shipping doesn’t necessarily pertain to wanting a sexual relationship between characters. I wince a little in Craig x Tweek when Mr. Tweak leans in the doorway, sighs, and says “They’re so gay for each other” because... that’s me, I’ve done that. Not in real life, because shipping live people is just not ok in my opinion and I won’t get into that now, but.... Creek is the first positively shown potentially long term relationship we’ve had in South Park in potentially decades. Sometimes we want prepuberty softrock fluff. That really gross part of the fandom is not intrical to shipping, but I respect your preference to stay away. I ship Creek and I stay the fuck away too.

As for the show, why I’m making this side not in the first place, there was a joke in “Dude Mars Rules” that wouldn’t have been a joke if it wasn’t Cartman and I’m proud of the restraint. I’m talking of course of the first time Cartman saw a vagina. The joke is that it’s Cartman, in that he’s overreacting. But like, if it was anyone other than Cartman that exact scene could have been played completely straight as it was. 

I hate using the term children’s sexuality, because it’s fucking gross but I lack any other term, but it’s a thing that exists. There’s a certain age when everyone’s starting to dip the toes into puberty when everyone is just so fucking curious. I’m as close to Ace as Grey can get, but I have very distinct memories of experiencing the same thing, of other kids experiencing and talking about nothing but the same thing at that same age. Sitting across the room from each other with the lights off, “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours”, having nothing to do with attraction or sex or eroticism and everything to do with not understanding what’s gong on, wanting to know what’s different and what’s normal. Mine was in a bush in the back of a playground with another girl, which was probably a big sign back then, but the fact remains. 

We don’t like to think about it, and certainly don’t like to see it, but kids get curious and kids figure stuff out and this is Another of those things that could have gone horribly, horribly wrong in South Park and didn’t)

Back on track though, Creek is a joke yes, but the joke is not that they’re together. The joke isn’t even that they act like adults in their relationship. (Though they do, that’s never the joke. The joke in their more mature interactions isn’t that it’s mature as in “racy” but mature as in “emotionally mature”. The joke is that the two gay ten year olds faking it work harder and are better at being in a relationship than virtually every adult and other child in the show. Using these two as a juxtaposition with ever other bit of nasty relationship is refreshing.) 

The Joke is that the public perceives their relationship as being a lot more sexual and unstable than it is. The joke is the public’s perception, not the relationship it’self. 

I don’t really see anyone talking about the “eros ultimate combo” from FBW in this context either, in that the cut scene we get is the really obviously “yaoified” version of what’s actually happening. The reference to Yuri on Ice’s “ambiguous” kiss, the flying off clothes, how they go from almost kissing back to the hand holding. I think I’m the only person in the world who thinks that they didn’t kiss (Because what yaoi fangirl wouldn’t squeal and flail and immortalize such a kiss in every exquisite detail if it did happen?)

we are playing into that joke, flailing about it when what actually happens is these two boys go up to each other and hold hands because it grosses everyone out and that’s funny.

So yeah, please don’t let them become a mean joke Trey and Matt. Let these two boys be kids. 

Let them break up over something really stupid and be the end of the world and play out like a sitcom divorce and be super emotional because that’s what it feels like at that age, and then get back together right away and break up and get back together because that’s what kids do when they get a little bored.

Let them hold hands and yell about how they’re dating and gay to everyone who will listen because that’s a big deal to ten year olds and they’re figuring themselves out and as young boys in a fairly machismo saturated town its funny.

Let their first kiss be all puckered lips and chaste and smooshed noses and incredibly awkward and feel like fireworks and the chorus of Whitney Houston’s “I will away love you” because to kids it feels perfect and a huge deal at the time.

Let them do stupid kid things that seem like a big deal.

Feel free to use these boys to showcase the one healthy relationship we’ve seen in this series, for the love of god it’s funny, refreshing, and woefully needed in media, but let👏the👏boys👏be👏children👏! Precocious as hell to back and yes but PLEASE.

[pixelatedlenses]

“You Can’t Have Black Faeries”: Black Magic, Representation, And Fantastical Reads and Writing , or How I Started Writing Black Characters on Tumblr and Never Looked Back

So I’m going to preface this with the fact that this is a veritable essay that kind of winds: it’s not really organized and would never be published on a formal news site. It’s just my story, all of what I remember, and clocks in around 6ish pages. It was important for me to write this during Black History Month because over the last year, I’ve undergone a lot of changes, and my writing has changed with it. I hope that you’ll read this and ask questions, and continue to support me as I change even more. I love my blackness, I love my writing, and I love sharing it with you all. I suppose here’s the roots of how I got to be Spencer Avery, my pen name that I use for my core writing, outside of beng Tomi for art and light novels. 

It’s my story, and is more stream of consciousness than anything else. Basically: enjoy, is what I’m trying to say. Also, this is, of course, one of the supplimental pieces I mentioned in my post about writing about BHM in Japan. I hope you come to understand another part of me, and see why my black is beautiful. .

I can honestly say that at 24, I love writing black characters.

I stick representations of myself –my culture, fat black folxs, nerdy black folxs, magical black folxs– into whatever I can, whether it’s a mundane romance tale set in a perfectly normal world or a princess stuck in a tower. It became important to me about… eh, three years ago that I start to normalize those kinds of worlds, that Black folxs were just as magic as a Tolkien elf or a Harry Potter wizard. We belonged in those worlds alongside European styled magics too.

But it wasn’t always like that.

I started writing fanfiction at age 13. I was confused about a lot of things: I felt wrong in my black skin, about liking girls over boys and flowers, felt at odds with the black girls that teased me and bullied me into buying them snacks. (And also called my mother fat to my face, which yeah, we both are, but you don’t get to call her that, you know? Geez.) Most of all, I think feeling a sense of nothingness prevailed: I was a black girl playing at being good enough to be white, playing at stepping outside my ethnic roots to somehow feel capital-N Normal.

Video games, thus, became a home for me: I found myself in Naruto, felt at home in the vast worlds of Kingdom Hearts, was brave and empowered in Pokemon was somebodies hero in the countless rpgs stacked next to my bed. I don’t think its an exaggeration to say that I spent more time connected to a set of double a’s or a charger than I did reflecting on myself. I think now, a lot of Blerds –black nerds – often do: we’re pushed out with anti-blackness from our own black folx, and left to imagine ourselves as meaningful in somebody else’s world. It’s quite sad, and perhaps why now, I write so much fantasy and fiction featuring a black character overcoming: it’s a message that still needs to be heard and echoed.

Nevertheless, I was a lonely kid. It was the height of MySpace, I was a digital roleplayer under the all too ridiculous name Naruko Fai Uzamachi –I literally just let out the most pitiful Regret Groan – and I was still on the hunt for that last, little taste of acceptance.

Hence writing.

I put up my first fic on Fanfiction.net sometime in 2007, most likely May. It was a hot mess, but I’m saying that millions of words later in 2017. At the time, it was a release: I was deep into the 801 –that’s Yaoi for the uninitiated, taking from the alternative pronunciations for 8, 0, and 1 in Japanese – community, having found a weird, hypersexualized acceptance amongst likeminded women who felt pushed to Western society’s fringes. I was everywhere I could on MySpace, Aarinfantasy, and any board I could find to somehow make my 14-year-old heart ache less. Fanfiction was there as another balm: I have memories of sneaking onto the computer at midnight, trying to turn the brightness down just so to not wake my mother, and clacking out my feelings about depression, hurt, growing up, and wanting desperately to belong to something.

(As I’m currently at work, I won’t like it: it’s explicit, and I don’t’ look at things like that on my on hours. I can tell you it’s called “Land and Sky” and was a SasuNaru fic, a hot pairing even in 2017.  You can look it up on my Fanfiction.net account, and for fun, do a live reading with your friends. I’ve tried to rewrite it multiple times, and may try this year as it’s the anniversary and my writing is hopefully better. I think perhaps that’s my penance for teenage me’s horribly written yaoi: rewrite a SasuNaru fic every ten years for the rest of my life. Of course, it’s funny now: at the time, I was Ride or Die about that fic.)

This led to me often seeking solace in Asian characters: they were the closes analog to me. Brown and black faces didn’t match me in terms of how I felt; they reminded me of the same mocking laughter, harsh hands, and hurtful words that were hurled at me daily. I didn’t want to like them, but perhaps a part of me also realized I needed something. Asian person –specifically Japanese character – offered that something. They were ethnic enough in my young eyes, and were close enough. Sometimes, characters were a tanned brown, many shades away from my dark skin, but felt cousin to my desire for acceptance.

(Now, of course, I realize that wasn’t the answer and that Japanese-Americans are often ridiculed for their own desire to enjoy their culture, while Westerners  –predominantly Americans of European descent – often police fan culture within Anime and Manga or general Japanese pop, and that has often led to exclusion. That’s not to say there aren’t black folxs out there policing Japanese-American consumption of their own culture too: there certainly are, and they’re just as wrong.)

Writing, thus, developed into a series of long worded fanfiction pieces that I posted all across the web, primarily on FF.net, which was my stomping ground for a very long time. I can still google my many pen names –Syrus Gardenia Fuze, which apparently I asked to be called, dozens of Japanese names with African-esque sounds, and eventually, Nagone, which I took kanji –immaturely and without any knowledge of the language, as I was studying Spanish and not even Chinese yet to understand characters and radicals– to mix together to form “a strong sounding name” which I still use today, but hope to change this year actually– and find my pieces. I get hits daily from kids going through the same growth I did: kids who message me asking questions about the fictional worlds I built, kids who express the same sadness, heartache, and loneliness of being classed as different. PoC kids who tell me that they’re looking for themselves and found it in my writing.

Growing up certainly hasn’t changed in a decade, you know?

However, by the time that college rolled around, fed-up, still black, now queer me was tired, and fanfiction wasn’t always doing the same things it had. I was sick of school, wanted desperately out and to move to Missouri for college, but was stuck in a mundane year. After a blow up at my bullies which resulted in me getting kicked out the band hall and nearly breaking a bass clarinet from dropping it on the ground, I stopped writing: I just flat out gave it up. It felt like it was putting away childish things, tucking away the past, and would let me move on.

Of course, at this point, you’re realizing that I didn’t stop as I’m talking about writing. Let’s continue.

I came back to it in college after my father died because I need Home again. I was still focused on Japan and Japanese media because Japan was cool: I hadn’t had the realization that Japan was a country, and hadn’t really delved into my studies that would lead me to a degree in History and Asian Studies focused on Japan and on showing a 360 view of the nation rather than “it’s got pop culture!” I was still hiding from being black: high school had brow beat me with “Why do we need Black History Month?” gorilla masks when Obama got into office –with friends remarking that I should be proud on of my people made if at 17 and 18– and general Southern Fried Racism that I was more than willing to reject being black. My pool of genuine black friends had grown from two to six: I added a few men into the mix -almost all are college friends I still love- and was steadily working towards some awareness that I was black and not secretly a white girl beneath.

Home was in writing more fics: still primarily yaoi, though I had dabbled in yuri and girl’s love with the arrival of my first partner. I was a bit more brazen and brave about what I wrote, and started showing PoC women together instead of solely Japanese men. It was a radical change, and made me feel a little bit better between regretting being queer and loving college. But there was still a stark absence of anyone black: in fact, I honestly can’t remember ever writing a black character for most of my early writing life.

So, I bet you’re wondering when that black part will come in?

Well, it starts probably in 2013ish when I made my writing Tumblr.

I’d heard about Tumblr through my fourth partner, an asexual with a penchant for wanting a mixed child because they were “cute” and wanting a boy despite being agender and stating that no one should choose gender.

(I should add that they often remarked they wanted to spin the sperm of their donor to increase the rate of a boy, and would be sad to not have their child come out how they wanted. It made me feel very gross, and I was not at all sad to break up with them. It was for the best, and I hope that they realize now that it’s kind of gross to want a mixed child for their aesthetic and not because you wouldn’t mind having a child with multiple cultures. They were a nice person, but it’s alright to accept that nice people -even me- have microaggresions that we must constnatly work at.)

I started with a cosplay tumblr: it was dedicated to my costuming which I did often enough, and was made with the mindset of being a black cosplayer. This was a huge change, and it came solely because of an event the year before: namely, the murder-death killing of Trayvon Martin, a boy who was sent to rest by a man who is, simply put, a racist and hated him for his skin.

That changed my world: it was like I’d been literally seeing black and white, and suddenly, there was an entire spectrum of Brown that I fit into. I was a black person, ahd the potential to get killed for my skin, for not being submissive, for being a perceived threat, and that was scary. It was the kind of thing that, for months, kept me awake. I saw, for the first time, the ugly face of kind racism: I had white friends remark that President Obama wouldn’t know how it felt to lose a child like that because he was only half-black, and he was the President, one of the good ones. I saw that perhaps, I was perceived like that: that my intellect, my quiet nature, my bookish ways, and my gentleness were only Right because they were White, that a percentage of people around me where trading Me for being Good, and a Good Black.

(Insert another groan.)

So my writing changed with that: it became more active, more constant, and eventually in 2014, solidified into this blog with all the meager beginnings I could offer. I remember my first posts were from a roleplay senior year: they focused on the characters of our werewolf campaign. I think after that came some reposts from FictionPress  –I really want to start utilizing that again this year, alongside Wattpad and other sns for writing–  and then… well, then I started writing for myself. It started with fae –I’ve always like fae since I first read Holly Black’s Modern Fae series, specifically Valiant, sophomore year of high school– and so I started to transplant black features onto them. My fae ranged from sweet to scary, were villains, heroes, lovers, and friends. They were varied like I felt I was: black had stopped having a singular identity or word bubble of terms that were solely “ethnic” and was a mass of very difficult faces, all living very different lives. I mirrored that onto the supernatural, and it worked: I started to gain ground and felt that I was doing something right. It felt good, and that momentum carried into grad school, picking me up when I was down, giving me a place to escape, but also critically write about big feelings.

Simply put, writing was good.

(I also got into Legend of Korra heavy and started writing fic again. I’ve been on a two year fic break, but plan to pick it up soon, after I finish my current project which I still can’t talk about.)

You’d think that after nearly a decade of writing, I’d have written for myself, but I always think I was writing for others: it’s a habit I still struggle with because I’m a people pleaser and want to make folxs happy, but writing for myself was the most freeing thing I could ever reward myself with.

Now, I’d love to tell you I remember my first black girl, but the one I remember most –and the one that’s fairly well-known and recent– is Cobalt “Colby” Johnson, a college-aged, plump, chubby black girl from my novella Gelid. She’s from 2015, her story written in a month in a cast of all non-white characters. Colby is probably one of the dearest characters to my heart, and when I get a chance, I will rewrite her purposely quickly written story into something bigger, seal up her plot holes and give her more body.

Colby, as a character, was not originally meant to be an analog of me: I never set out thinking, “Yeah, this is me, but if I ended up in a crazy, month long adventure”. At the time, I was writing her as a challenge: finish one thing, and it would mean I could finish anything I set my mind to. Surprisingly, when I did finish, it gave me the strength to do just that: finish things, even if it took time.

Colby was the culmination of all the things I felt that big black girls needed: adventure, an acceptance of self. She was my swan song to the me that hated being fat, to the me that hated being fat and black, to the me that thought other black girls also wanted adventure. It was important to me that I give that adventure and have the black girl win: I gave her winnings in the form of a solid relationship with her mother that was genuinely healthy, a good friend, and the power of being a diety essentially. Certainly, thinking now about the story, there’s massive plot holes to how that all happened, but that wasn’t the point: it was getting that story out of me and out for people to engage with.

Regardless, Colby became me because writing is a part of me: every character takes from their owner, right? Colby was no different. But she was magical because she did something special to me, and made me crave writing again.

(Please search the Gelid tag on the blog. I really love this story because it changed me, and once I wrote it, I finally stopped looking back to my mistakes and started to change my writing to be more self-serving. And hey, if there’s enough interest, Gelid will receive a published rewrite and maybe even an ebook form like I had formerly planned.)

After that, a cork was popped, and I’ve been writing a lot more black girls since. Black folxs I should say as most range from AFAB persons to trans and genderqueer, genderfluid and fully other: dragons who take female form but are just them, otherworldly entities, fae who don’t need human gender roles. Honestly, I feel the momentum is still here even though I had to step back from writing to transition my life to Japan. I’m still writing black girls, though now, my life is influenced by half-Japanese and African-American folxs, writing for an often underserved part of Japanese society.

The fantastical is a powerful thing, you know, and when a pen is your sword, you can do a lot of great things. I wish that younger me had the ability to see that would be our reality one day: yet I’m glad I didn’t because realizing that was sweet, if not hard fought for, and makes writing even more valuable to me.

This year, of course, will bring more black girls, along with Japanese writing, largely because of my new environment. I have plans for many stories with all black fae communities, returns to old characters like Colby (Gelid) and Flavia and Sorrell (Polychromatic (18+), a piece from the wonderful SSBB, which was a dream come true!), a magical girl series called end game that contains black duotagonists, and lots of other stuff. I won’t reveal my entire hand: I want to keep some things close to my chest, but I can say that 2017 –and perhaps the rest of my life– will be the Year of Black Magic, of celebrating my skin through writing, of realizing worlds where real society is tossed out and equality, fairness, and mutuality reign.

I’m going to end this telling you that I’m still a work in progress: a decade of actualized self-hate is not cured by writing some pretty badass black folx overnight, or even in a few years. Loving my blackness, writing my blackness, and living both of those things are a daily effort, and sometimes, it gets beaten down and I feel worthless because ultimately I am a human. I’m not invincible. Yet I still find the ability, day by day, to rise up and be proud of me.

I’m but one of many black writers, but I’ll say that I’m proud: a decade of writing, a decade of The Struggle, and I’ve arrived. I love my life, and especially love my writing. I hope to share it for as long as I can on here, and everywhere for the rest of my life.

Say it loud: Spencer Avery’s Black and Proud!

tl;dr: I won’t ever have an all white story again, and honestly, probably never a story without 96% POC characters. It may be the case that I’m that one writer with the Token White Person in the future: I often wonder if that’ll be true. I don’t mean that in a negative way either: I love writing characters, but I also think it’s important that little black girls and black folxs can see themselves succeed not through strife, but through living in other worlds and engaging with life without having to always Overcome. Strife is not a Black Descriptor: it’s not all we are meant to do. Once I write black, I sure ain’t going back: ugh, that’s the wrong tense, but you get the point. I love writing representation for people who look like me, who are dark brown, darkly toasted, and proud. I don’t know if I ever could stop: the thought makes me rather sad. I hope that 14-year-old me who sought representation in tidbits, in girls like Tally Youngblood who I desperately hoped had an inkling of actual melanin, would be proud: that me would love to know that there are fae and witches, princesses in towers and deities that look like me: black, curled hair, big-brained, and adventurous in whatever they do.

[schwarzeneggr]

junjou terrorist is crazy like nakamura really tried writing a story between a 17y old and a 40y old man and try to make it romantic i think in the SECOND fucking episod the old guy brings the young guy to his WIFES GRAVE AND INTRODUCES THEM yaoi used to be so fucking lawless we were all reading really shady stuff. even at 12 i knew it was fucked as hell. I never liked that, or the omega stuff, or the yaoi that broke a breach of trust like student/teacher or doctor/patient and stuff that grossed me out sooooososoososo much and it still does. The yaois iv owned and the ones I read were always super tame stuff and alot of it was about repression and i just skipped the sex scenes (and there were soooooooo much of it yaoi was more of a pornographic genre than anything back then) the contrast with yuri is so fucking funny because they barely even brushed lips youd read a 3 volume story and the culmination was them holding hands like pure maidens that couldnt be corrupted. in retrospect being introduced to homosexuality through this is fucked. but in a muslim family and facing extreme abuse this was my only gateway toward something I could deeply relate to even thou i did not know wat it was yet and i look back on it fondly now. i was and still am a fujoshi (idk the fujoshi term for men so ill stick to fujoshi) and thats why for all its flaws junjou romantica is a good memory to me. I used to dream abt being a mangaka like every other one piece reader but it quickly morphed to i wish i was a yaoi mangaka. and look at me now. Im litteraly this. except i do it for free online 👍