#ryugasaki nox

[trans-ralsei]

the funniest thing about kiui/ryugasaki nox being canonically nb transmasc and koharu possibly being transfem

is that there's a chance koharu took a look at ryugasaki nox and mistakenly clocked them as a boymoder:

which meant that the first question on what's your cup size was meant to encourage rather than be invasive, but ends up being invasive either way

[sipping-ambrosia-wine]

okay so yorukura definitely didnt stick the landing... honestly episode nine mightve felt like more of a season finale if it had been leading into a season two. i dont think its bad necessarily, splitting kanoyoru toward the end of the story but i dont think they got enough one on one time together before it ended. kimura and kiui really got time to shine, which i do appreciate, but kanoyoru has been set up from episode one. theyre really the heart of the show, and giving them so little time together- even with a relationship left unconfirmed, like in lycoris recoil- kind of kills it. they were going FULL THROTTLE on kanoyoru endgame. they didnt include an aquarium date in episode three a cheek kiss in episode five the motorcycle beach date in episode seven, all of mahiru's teasing and her remarks about a special someone who inspired her and she's interested in for it to be unintentional. their breakup had me on the edge of my seat, but their make up just left me wanting.

kimura and kiui's endgame developments are generally pretty well liked and with good reason. mei got to confess her feelings and she made it clear that in contrast to her reasoning as a fan it was because of her real, less marketable traits that she loved kano. that its because theyre such different people and because she doesnt always understand her or want to emulate her that she loves kano now. and she expressed that through her own real, unmarketable trait, showing a little bit more of her own growth and self acceptance. that said its got a little less punch to it given the use of "nonotan" was nearly back to back with kano's flashbacks of her idol days and her confessing to her father that she can barely remember the last time she was called by her real name. kiui stood up to their explicitly transphobic old friends and regained a bit of that childhood confidence. maybe im a bit dumb bc the trans coding didnt quite fully click for me until then but that really blew me out of the water. like yeah oh loss of self confidence due to social isolation- and onset of puberty. when they clicked with the driving school friend who is also trans, even under the baggy dysphoria fits kano noticed that their chest was slightly bigger than the woman who had work done. kinda masc vtuber rig. pink hair and pronouns. its really cool that they confirmed it!

independent of the yuribait i do think kano and mahiru were decently done like... in all aspects aside from one another. mahiru previously worried about comments criticizing her technical art and it drove her to improve. the JELEE gang's support is why she had the courage to start drawing again in the first place but kano's mom gave constructive criticism, and then praise for the initiative and self improvement when she saw the arm edit. but that focus on technical skills and approval from others becomes a double edged blade and she doesnt deliver her best work until she draws authentically to herself and her tastes as an artist. i feel like they couldve delivered on the jellyfish metaphor, about how jellyfish can only filter and reflect the light around them, but that the light reflected is made more beautiful for it as well or... something. the point of splitting a dynamic duo in the third act is generally to let them breathe and develop apart from one another and prove they can stand on their own before bringing them together stronger for it, but though the theme is still there i feel like they kind of dropped the light and jellyfish dynamic after the fight. that said mahiru's show of devotion to kano being a timeslot at the show, the jellyfish art all over the city, and all of that being done via the show light projectors, mahiru's art made to literally shine for kano was a great touch.

now kano... this might be controversial but i dont see her ending as a "forgiving an abusive parent", or at least i dont think thats the point of it. last we see of her mom is at her graduation ceremony. kano leaves campus and sees her mom and her sister came to see her. she says she made her moms dream come true and she's clearly happy about it- but then she walks away. its not full severance but she's not living on her mom's agenda anymore. her sister was in the car- her mom mightve meant for a family meal after the graduation ceremony. from kano's words this might be the first time theyve seen one another since the concert. but kano has plans with her friends and doesnt even hesitate. her mom discarded her but it was kano who made her dream come true anyway. and now she's moving on to what she built for herself. before, she was singing to prove her mom wrong- but she was still singing because of her. when the set her 100k follower goal she was going off her mom's success model of numbered audience. she was with the sundolls as a nepobaby because her mom was their producer and wanted her in. but JELEE is hers and its what she's pursuing. all that said im dead curious about what's up with her family situation- her dad seems to be a shut in maybe? he's deliberately a gaping abscence in comparison to kano's hypercontrolling mom, and theyre definitely split. and through his viewpoint in kano's flashbacks as well as the fact that he was the reason she was in shibuya to see mahiru's mural, and also the fact that he's the last shot of the ed really makes me wonder.

overall disregarding the finale i'd say the show was still about a 8/10 but even with all that going for it they chickened out on kanoyoru and the whole series was cheapened by it. maybe the full finalized concert lyrics of shinkai yuei had a more uplifting love song vibe to it, maybe if they had made it clear that she was singing a love song for mahiru. maybe if mahiru had been the one to encourage her instead of melo. i dont dislike these decisions independently, pursuing passions for yourself and the connection it offers with other people rather than one person in particular, forgiving yourself and laying the past to rest, overcoming guilt to take positive action are good. but the last episode feels incredibly empty and it feels like overall they actively dodged every opportunity to fulfill the conclusion theyve been dangling since the start. it burns to say since i was rooting so hard for this show but theres really no other word for it but baiting. its yuribait.

[varianwonder]

Remember! Non Binary people do NOT OWE YOU androgyny

Anyway Nox's birthday was on the 1st of April. I guess the gender on their birth certificate is a prank.

[pain-du-coin]

Did Kiui/Nox ever wear a single outfit in "Jellyfish Can't Swim in the Night" that you couldn't colorpick the nonbinary flag from?

[ultrakart]

Idea: plural Kiui Watase/Nox Ryugasaki

[h0l03d1ts]

@mikneuteto ‘ S EVEBT DAY 1 !!

　⁓　　　♫　　　🍰ᵎ　　day 1

⑅ 　　◞　　　edit any of your favorite characters!

OR a character that matches your favorite song!

Kiui Watase is literally some of the best non-binary rep out there please watch jellyfish can't swim in the night

CREDITS UNDER CUT

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

PSD

[talenlee]

Story Pile: Jellyfish Can't Swim in the Night

Once there was a girl, who won an art contest, and made an artwork that was validation from the people around her; a beautiful drawing that was a testament to what she was doing and where she was. Then someone who she knew made fun of it, and her need to avoid conflict overwhelmed her, meaning she hid from her desire to illustrate in a totally normal, mentally healthy way to be, which is why she carries herself as a grizzled tragic veteran at the age of like, sixteen. Then, she sees someone fighting to protect that artwork, a musician, someone rebelling against people criticising the art or treating it like a cheap prop, even with its graffiti overtagging, and falls into a whirlwind story that every girl wants to, jumping to hand-holding, a kiss, and then:

Hey babe.

Wanna start a youtube channel with me?

I’m really not kidding.

Now, this is a year old anime but that doesn’t mean we don’t give you the spoiler warning up front. There are things in this anime I want to talk about and they happen after the setup of the story is taken and I want to be specific. This will also involve explaining and justifying the types of queerness present in this anime, which isn’t something I can do without revealing things that the story uses as secrets and development.

Also, hey, content warning, we’re going in on an idol anime, or, well, something idol-adjacent, idolesque, and that means as a natural given we’re going to talk about an industry that abuses its participants. There��s some transphobia, there’s some abusive parenting, and there’s a pretty reasonably represented depressive-anxiety loop combo, which you know, I feel like these are not just the price of admission but kind of the content of the idol genre, but if you’re just looking for a nice show where some nice people have a nice time, this isn’t it.

I wonder if that served to actually excite a little like oh ho ho, there’s transphobia, does that mean there’s actual trans here?

We’ll get there.

In a more structural way to describe it, Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night is an idol anime where instead of an all-singing all-dancing idol group that focuses on a bunch of manufactured identities, instead looks at the indie idol scene (I have to assume), where the protagonists are constructing an aggregate idol character, JELEE. They are Mahiru, the illustrator who draws the character, Kano, a singer with experience in the idol industry, who writes the songs and voices the character, Mei, a pianist and composer who makes the songs, and Kiui, their editor and mixer and all-round internet problem handler.

All four of these characters are operating on their second identity.

Specifically, Mahiru credits her art to a fake identity (to avoid attention at school), Kano is presenting as herself and not as her old idol identity (to avoid the control of her mother), Mei completely reinvented herself because of that old idol identity, even down to changing her name, and Kiui’s a Vtuber called Nox Ryugasaki, and also, he’s a trans dude and I will use that terminology to refer to him now we’re past the fold. We’ll talk more about him later.

What this means is that Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night is an anime that considers pretty thoroughly a question about constructed identity, aggregated identity, and also, a weirdly interesting question that I don’t see expressed this way, identity abuse. The group want to make music, they make music, they become reasonably successful making music, and yet, people around them, the sources of tension and pressure in their lives, are about people attacking them on axes of their identities.

It’s an anime about the ways that you can choose to be, but also the way that what you choose to be involves presenting elements of yourself to potential harm. Kano’s mother tries to impose an identity on her and attacks her for failing to meet that imposed identity. Nox chooses a way to be and contends with being distrusted and undermined, having to actually safeguard and patrol the boundaries of his social space to maintain that identity. Being willing to give up an element of her identity is a major critical moment for Mei, and Mahiru’s whole secret life as an illustrator for an idol group is only necessary to protect her from the crime of standing out.

This is a really cool thing for an idol anime to so deliberately focus on, and I like it a lot, especially since it sets the story up to be about the characters setting a violent boundary, choosing to be independent and their own people and rejecting those people who attack those identities.

Right?

Right?

You may have heard me use the phrase, possibly even glibly in some other contexts, of invisible bullets. It’s a term that’s useful if you know it and if you don’t know it, explaining it can quickly overtake the conversation. The term is derived from the title of an essay by Stephen Greenblatt, which is itself considered foundational to the concept used in literary criticism of ‘subversion and containment.’ As described by wikipedia, this is the way that a dominant system creates subversion to utilise it for its own ends. To put it in a less archaic way, people in power can make use of things that look like an attempt to challenge that power.

The metaphor I use, because it’s how I learned it and it sticks, is that Shakespeare’s plays about a King who had a troubled spot in history can be read as either pro or against that specific king, because on the one hand, it humanises the king and shows the difficulty of his struggles, and on the other hand, it shows that king failing and being replaced because of his limitations. The thing is, that particular consideration of two sides is one which makes it necessary to accept that a good king can exist at all, as opposed to the idea that, for example, kings suck and are all bad. To engage with a text that may seem to be undermining a king, it asks you to accept its idea that this bad king is an example of a bad king, but not that kings themselves are all bad and I swear yes I am still talking about Jellyfish Can’t Swim At Night, the anime about three queer messy girls and their ya boi making an online band.

It’s an idea that once I learned it helped me to illuminate things I found unsatisfying about genre media, especially when the genre was so well defined I could see the borders and boundaries. For example, within the high school drama genre of anime, you will see stories of people grappling with loneliness and isolation in school, or even bullying and oppression, but at no point will the solution to the problem be and you shouldn’t have to put up with this, because how we run this school system is bad. No matter how nakedly obvious the failure of the system around the students are, no high school drama is going to come to the conclusion that high schools shouldn’t exist and should be replaced with something better, because to do so would be to deny that they, themselves, should exist. And what does ‘something better’ even look like? It’s hard to describe what could be improved in a grand, sweeping scale across the schooling system in (say) Japan or Australia because it’s not like you’ve seen a lot of coherent examples that don’t just kind of look like the same thing with nicer teachers.

There’s more! There’s always more, I’m simplifying a summary and using this anime as a chance to teach you what Invisible Bullets is. But it’s also a really sweet show which shows an approach towards the creation of pop music and internet material that’s closer and more grounded than any of the other current rash-slash-plague of Internet Content Creator anime (and boy do I not think well of that genre). It shows how these things are the results of multiple people working together in a schedule, and how things can’t progress until people finish other parts.

It also has a few really cool older women characters, who are also working with that whole ‘identity’ element? One character is shown ditching an identity she didn’t like in the end and embracing a new one that’s much more fun and also just, a thing the stories try to ignore existing. Another character discusses openly things like having breast augmentation and framed as things she wanted to do for herself, and then she becomes a gamer, which is kind of how the pipeline works, I am led to understand.

Then thrown into all this is the added dimension that Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night is uh, quite gay. Like, there’s room to argue, I’m sure, but the argument that these girls are not crushing on one another requires you to take a leading position that means you can’t read or understand social cues, and also, that you kiss the homies goodnight, because this anime features at least two breathless stolen kisses followed by stunned blushing.

I like Jellyfish Can’t Swim At Night. I like its characters, a lot. I like the kind of story it’s trying to tell, and I really like the way it presents the work of making things online as being secretly extremely collaborative. I make what could almost be considered the most bare-bones kind of online media, where this is a blog that I write in every day, but I do need other people to make it work, specifically, a web administrator I can talk to when things go wrong on the site at a level I can’t personally understand. These are things that resonate with me and that I enjoy. All four of these characters have different kinds of problems, too, they’re not just The Same Kinda Girl especially because one of them isn’t a girl. That stuff is all very engaging. I also like the way that these characters are nakedly queer weirdoes (queerdos) in a way that’s obvious enough that to deny it requires active willing obtuseness.

The world that this story is set in however, is a world where a parent can’t be that bad, even if she’s been protractedly abusive for years. It’s where doxing people and violating their privacy isn’t worth apologising for. It puts a child and her parent on equal footing and equally wrong for one abusing the other. Any conclusion that doesn’t end with this mother being hit in the head with a brick is going to be unsatisfying, because the idea of breaking away from and rejecting an abusive parent is itself, alien to the story. And I think that that’s kind of necessary for being an Idol anime. Any idol anime is going to draw the conclusion that even if any given story of life inside the idol industry is bad, the idol industry is good and all you need to do is find the way to be in it that doesn’t completely suck shit all the time, because the reward is you get to be in the idol industry and make things.

I wish it ended better, I wish it loved wilder, I wish it hated harder.

It never promised that, though, and what it gives is still great.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[ladyloveandjustice]

Spring 2024 Anime Overview: Girls Band Cry and Jellyfish Can't Swim in the Night

Girls Band Cry

GBC was definitely my favorite new show of the season…and, for some reason, it wasn’t picked up for streaming. It’s one of the many Girl Band Stories that came out this season, but it was the best one. The characters were messy in a way I loved, especially the main character Nina, who’s a complete disaster, angry and loud and sometimes annoying, but so completely real to my experience as a teenage girl who was bullied.

Nina was bullied badly in school, and she’s a high school dropout as a result. Her favorite band helped her get through everything and stand her ground, “saved” her when she was on the verge of giving up on life completely. So when she sees that her fave singer Momoka ended up leaving her band Diamond Dust after the band went in a more commercial direction, the two of them decide to start their own band. Nina is ready to get back at all the people who looked down at them, but Momoka has more complicated feelings about her former bandmates.

Nina being powered by spite—and the series valuing that stubbornness and anger—is what made the series stand out for me, especially because the series just let her be extremely obnoxious sometimes without worrying about her “likeability”,--it made her feel ‘real’ and kind of refreshing. This is a series that starts out with girls going around flipping off people multiple times. The dynamic of the whole band, despite them constantly butting heads, is entertaining. All the characters have rough edges and broken pieces, but they end up fitting together.

The dialogue is fun, the music rocks, the CGI animation is actually super good and expressive. The fact the girls they chose are new to voice acting actually led to some offbeat performances I really liked—the fact it wasn’t as polished as other voice acting fit the characters and honestly made them feel a little more authentic.

The pacing does drag a tiny in the middle, but the climax is explosive and exhilarating. It’s also kind of gay, but in the form of a love confession that’s never really followed up on, (probably so they can have wiggle room to be like ‘how ambiguous was it platonic or romantic maybe she meant she loves ~her music~’) so I don’t count that. But at least it’s the confession isn't completely forgotten about in favor of putting the girls with "appropriate" male love interests (coughs in Sound Euphonium) because the only man on the show of any significance is Nina’s father.

Wholeheartedly recommend the show though, I love these charming disaster girls playing rock songs that slap, finding socially acceptable ways to flip people off, and kicking doors so hard they break them.

Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night

Speaking of gay girl band stuff where romantic tension is never followed up on! I binged Jellyfish while I was sick so I guess it counts for this review. It wasn’t nearly as strong as Girls Band Cry but it had stuff going for it!

The premise of this girl band show is that Kano, a former idol who left her career behind after a scandal where she punched another member of her group, runs into Mahiru, a former artist who stopped drawing after a disheartening experience with a jellyfish mural she created. But it turns out Kano loved that mural, and she wants Mahiru to be official artist for her anonymous internet musician persona, JELEE. JELEE picks up other members along the way, including hikikomori VTuber Kiui/Nox Ryugasaki and fangirl pianist Kimura.

Jellyfish had a lot going for it. It wanted to explore the competitive idol industry ruining girls’ lives, abusive parents pressuring their children into becoming extensions of themselves, the budding romance between Kano and Mahiru, the struggle of being trans in a society that forces one into a rigid role and objectifies those it perceives as women, and struggles of remaining creative when often faced with negative feedback.

And uh.... It pretty much fumbled everything but the last two. Granted, it's a soft fumble. A gentle fumble. I can't be too mad about it.

Let's start with the plotline I think it nailed though: Kiui/Ryugasaki (they seem to still use their original name even at the end but also use another name, so that’s what I’m going with) is great, and pretty much the main reason I’d recommend the show.

They’re as blatantly nonbinary as can be without actually saying the word (genderfluid or bigender is also a possibility. But very blatantly trans, either way). They’re also very fun with their over-the-top superhero fantasies. And the storyline where they use their VTuber persona to be comfortable with themself and present themself in the way they want is super compelling and interesting. There are a lot of really moving moments with them, including them shutting down some transphobic bullies (and I mean blantantly transphobic). And we get to see one of their friends enthusiastically support them.

On the other end of the spectrum, the idol and abusive parents subplots were pretty badly handled—we had the usual plot where said parent doing one act of kindness redeems them and things never have to get messy, and the idol plot seemed like it was going somewhere in critiquing how the industry fosters competitiveness and comes down way too hard on its idols for minor misdemeanors or things that shouldn’t be an issue at all, like dating. But then it just kind of ended with a “well internet harassment and destroying lives is bad, but like, we’re all troubled, aren’t we. don't we all vent sometimes." (???)

The plot between Kano and Mahiru…basically there was cheek kissing, blushing, very blatant flirting...and then a big nothingburger of a finale. But hey, Kano does have a gay pride and trans pride patches on her bag, so there’s that.

There's also one absolutely bizarre moment I have to warn about. In one of the episodes the girls run into an adult woman who's had a lot of plastic surgery done. Said adult woman invites the girls to touch her naked boobs (on the pretense of showing them was augmented boobs feel like? Or something?). And they do. As a group. As the woman thinks "they're high school girls, I hope this isn't illegal." IT IS, LADY. VERY ILLEGAL.

It's so out of nowhere that I originally forgot about it writing this, like my brain blacked it out. And then we (thankfully) never see this woman again outside a two second cameo in the finale. Unclear why any of this needed to happen.

So yes, this is basically the Jellyfish experience. The writing of the show was often uneven, it could be really good one second, and rushed and forced the next second. And there are a couple of absolutely baffling moments,

But I'd say on the whole the show is a positive, mostly thanks to Kiui/ Ryugasaki. When it hits, it REALLY hits and the characters are all very loveable. So I give it a reccomendation with a few warnings attached!

[dawn-lilacbloom]

age 16: life isn't worth living

age 23: ryugasaki nox :)

[ofdreamsanddoodles]

thank you to jellyfish can't swim in the dark for providing representation for weird transmascs who were social as a child only to quickly become paranoid and uncomfortable with how they were perceived as it became increasingly clear what made them comfortable was somehow socially unacceptable to girls, causing them to seek refuge online and losing interest in real life. and for having this character to be looked at with unwavering love and admiration from their childhood friend who thinks everything they do is the coolest thing ever. happy pride month nox ryugasaki, you're a hero to me, too

[anicastes]

Nox Ryugasaki here will always be on your side!

[trans-ralsei]

YOOO IS COMRADE RYUGASAKI-KUN BINDING #JELEEisthatdude #TransJELEEReal 💪💪💪💪💪🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈

yoooo is that che guevara #JELEEisthatGirl #JELEEiscommunist

[lea-knows-the-devil]

I'm collecting characters with nonbinary-coloured outfits from anime I've seen.

Bocchi from Bocchi the Rock! Source: Merch illustration (one of the artists is nonbinary)

Yui Shiromaru from Insomniacs After School. Source: Ep3

Kiui Watase/Ryugasaki Nox (canon nonbinary transmasc) from Jellyfish Can't Swim in the Night. Source: Ep12

[ribbons-in-autumn]

ugh. i just watched yorukura / jellyfish episode 11. im going to actually kill myself dude

spoilers below for episode 1x11 of Jellyfish Can't Swim in the Night

an overwhelming aspect of this anime is how the characters interact with the internet. this thoughtless, heartless, soulless medium which connects people from all walks of life. it simultaneously allows for true, anonymous self-expression and also untraceable public shaming. JELEE's entire thing is that she was a singer that lived and thrived online, far from the stage where tachibana nonoka once stood, completely removed from reality yet still inextricably connected to it through song. the internet allowed her to inspire and touch people purely through the screen, completely removed from her old identity. hey, doesn't this sound familiar? hello! if you're still reading this, that means you probably have watched the episode already. from hereon, i will still be referring to kiui with she/her pronouns. this isn't from conceding to any public opinion, but only because of my perception of kiui's character.

kiui's arc had plateaued by the midseason, as she had come face-to-face with her old friend mahiru about the truth, but she still hasn't *really* confronted what was really wrong *to herself*. kano's attempt at disconnecting her old idol persona with JELEE is paralled by kiui's own disconnection of her born identity as watase kiui and her built identity as ryugasaki nox: how she is perceived, and how she *wants* to be perceived. kiui and nox are both bombastic: they are over-the-top, obnoxious, and in-your-face about who they are and what they stand for. but watase kiui is tied to societal perceptions and expectations for what a watase kiui should be. struggling and pressured by those very expectations, she retreated to ryugasaki nox, a persona who isn't exactly what she is (there is some exaggeration), but crafted to be known by other people as someone she wants to be perceived as. it's not that she is ashamed of who she is, it's just that she doesn't want to confront what other people perceive her as (the 'weird girl').

in light of the Situation, she is exposed both as watase kiui (the 'weird girl' who doesn't go to school) to her vtuber audience and as ryugasaki nox (the livestreamer who hides under a fake name to perform as this 'fake' character) to her real life 'audience'. it has to be noted that she does not stop performing even after the exposé, she still streams under the name ryugasaki nox, with the same character. she does not hide who she wants to be like, primarily to save face in front of her audience (there is no apology video or anything), but she does avoid confronting her real life audience both by the very same act as not budging with her ryugasaki nox persona, and by not responding to them in real life, which is a classic kiui move.

this is where mahiru's role comes in. she, much like in their previous shared episode arc, is unrelenting with her love for her friend. she makes it known to her that she loves her and accepts her for who she is: her hero, the *strongest* hero. time and again she is nothing but supportive towards her friend, even with the reveal that she was not the student council president, even with the fights, even with the group falling out, she is always behind her no matter what happens. likewise, kiui is also very supportive towards her, the lying and hesitation aside. mahiru helps kiui, but it was kiui herself who stood her own ground in front of their old friends: being loud and proud of who she is, no matter what happens. which is, i have to say, a classic kiui move.

[mogai-headcanons]

Mauro Abelard is an aroace intersex forestgender forestcoric person who uses all pronouns!

Hiro Ryugasaki is a pansexual dragongender genderfluid person who uses all pronouns!

They're in a romantic relationship with Luca Yonazuki, a biromantic asexual transmasculine vampiregender person who uses he/him and nox/noxes pronouns!

Alice Kurobane is a shadend demigirl moon lesbian who uses she/her and they/them pronouns!

Mimori Amamiya is a pansexual gendercute fairygender person who uses she/her and cute/cutes pronouns!

Seiya Kibakura is a bellusromantic polysexual trans man who uses he/him pronouns!

Takuma Kibakura is an aromantic homoflexible boyflux person who uses he/him and they/them pronouns!

dni link

[airplaneniner]

RYUGASAKI NOX BEST HUMAN GRRAAAAHHHHHHH

WATASE KIUI BEST HUMAN GRRAAAAHHHHHHH