#txt:mzkref

[jacketkos]

the funniest thing I’ve ever been vagued about but deleted because admittedly I didn’t clarify my case as much as I should have is someone who was a proponent of femboy theory on twitter insisting あいつ in mizuki’s flashbacks wasn’t transphobia or misgendering because it’s technically gender neutral. and like. yeah. it is. but the level of fundamental disrespect it denotes when referring to a stranger + its neutrality in itself makes the closest approximation of that line, essentially, her classmates calling her “it.”

like I cannot stress enough that the neutrality + coarseness of it is, in itself, the misgendering given the context. you don’t really have to be a genius to understand the underlying implication of throwing a derogatory, dehumanizing term at a trans woman you don’t know. there’s a blatant social context you have to be ignoring in order to tell yourself that it’s just banter or whatever.

tbh I really disagree with ensekai neutering the depiction of the bullying she gets to the point the translation of my footsteps makes yet another transphobic comment border on sounding supportive; if people are that disquieted by it perhaps they should probably not be engaging in the story about a group of deeply suicidal girls.

[jacketkos]

I think the funniest part of someone on twitter insisting the translator just made an oopsie on my footsteps is like. it’s been a hot second since last reading it so for a brief moment I considered “well, I forgot when mizuki said she directly told some of her classmates about her agab. maybe the translator didn’t know about it and that’s why they chose a weird interpretation of the implied subject.”

it’s the same event. she literally says she came out to some of her classmates and that they know in the exact same event.

[jacketkos]

twitter users straight up on god telling me that professional jp -> en translators working on a gacha game might just not know the meaning of キャラ and they could have simply made a small oopsie in translating the lines in my footsteps as they did

[jacketkos]

can’t wait for two million years for them to drop the full version of the deichuu ni saku cover in order to see who sings その姿が嫌いなだけで because the meaning of that line changes so severely depending on whether or not kanade or mizuki gets it

[jacketkos]

wish I could meet the supposed majority of cis people who love trans woman mizuki people on twitter insist exist. I think it would be funny if people counted us among that cohort solely because I’m the one singular cis person in our entire system of like. fifty guys.

[jacketkos]

these are certainly some translation decisions they decided to make! this certainly definitely makes sense in context! this definitely isn't pathetically neutered from the original wording so as to not convey the harshness of the transphobia she faces!

[jacketkos]

people will literally respect a cis girl character as a trans girl before they respect mizuki as a trans girl and I highkey feel like I'm going insane. "trans airi" next to "they/them mizuki" is literally fucking absurd as hell and yet I see it so often.

do you like your trans characters without the whole "actual experience of being trans" or something. because I can tell you airi's shit is like, normal for cis girls who still have to deal with learning to conform to societal expectations of femininity lol. it's almost like misogyny fucks with your self-perception like that.

meanwhile you're given an actual overt trans character and despite her hyperfemininity, the few "boyish" traits she has (that would be perceived as character quirks if she were cis) somehow negate every other aspect of her presentation and the fact she's been shown to actively enjoy being regarded as a woman.

I literally cannot figure it out. is it because we see her pre-transition that the fandom subconsciously can't see her as a woman? that it made her identity "impure" by, you know, actually depicting transitioning?

[jacketkos]

I’m not even wholly against nb mizuki headcanons as a whole but the idea that she is “canonically” nonbinary is literally just some shit people on tiktok pulled out of their ass. literally everything else people cite as affirming that “nonbinary-ness” outside of this comes from what appears to be a fundamental misunderstanding of what it’s like for binary trans people.

because binary trans people can still be gnc. binary trans people have still been perceived by various cultures as being a “mix” of male and female since fucking ancient times. and yes, binary trans people still just want to be perceived as “just themselves.” none of these things are Inherently Nonbinary, you just have an extremely sheltered worldview when it comes to the range of trans experience.

(it’s also weird how, whenever people call her “nonbinary,” it rarely reflects the fact that this label encompasses a range of different experiences—it’s instead treated as this monolithic secret third unlockable gender inherently more progressive than any other. it’s almost like this feels motivated by needing to degender a trans femme character to make her more palatably Relatable to the predominantly AFAB userbase)

[jacketkos]

honestly it’s kind of disappointing tie a ribbon seems to lean more ambiguous in its handling of mizuki’s gender than previously because, once again, I do not trust craft egg of all people to not cave in to pressure from fans and I have to wonder if they diverted course from their original intent to appease the ensekai fandom as they did with her pronouns in general.

people like to use those discord messages from staff as further proof of nonbinariness but. it just fundamentally does not match the initial narrative they set up. honestly as it stands I’m taking the “canonization” of they/them by ensekai staff as them pretty much admitting they won’t ever properly say the quiet part out loud—or that she hasn’t worked out how she herself wants to identify.

[jacketkos]

like don’t get me wrong I get that sometimes people claim characters are canonically x y z when the evidence may be tenuous at best but there is a distinction between blatant cope reinterpretations of the text designed to comfort the person doing the reinterpreting and “this character’s entire arc is about the process of transition and the vulnerability of disclosing your status as someone who is now stealth online and not so stealth + persistently bullied at school” 

claiming that unambiguously canon trans characters don’t exist because internet squabbling has blurred the boundaries of “canon” in the first place is remarkably short-sighted to say the absolute least and I think it is actually worth dissecting why a bunch of other TME people read an arc where a trans woman is assigned they/them in a context where it isn’t safe for her to openly affirm her identity as a woman and equated that to her being an empowered nonbinary queen

[jacketkos]

prsk wikia admins after weeks of forcing everyone to degender mizuki and saying she’s clearly canonically nonbinary in their posts defending the decision only to now reverse course and admit that there’s literally no actual canonical basis to state that she's nonbinary rather than a trans woman, well after spreading the misconception throughout the fandom that calling her a trans woman is somehow innately disrespectful and bigoted despite this having more textual basis

[jacketkos]

even funnier is like. the wikia using the conversation with rui calling her 瑞稀くん as evidence while completely ignoring the fact mizuki calls him 類ちゃん to fuck with him sometimes too (and beyond that, the whole point of that conversation in particular is that they're conforming to social norms they would normally flout—hence her hitting him with 類さん in the same conversation.)

it’s almost like they were fucking around with each other and it’s not a serious reflection of her identity—and for that matter, the EN fandom vastly overstates how strictly gendered her usage of ボク is in the first place.

literally that gets me the most. if a cis girl used “boku” in a gacha game we wouldn’t even be talking about it because it’d be little more than an eccentric, offbeat character quirk. but when mizuki—who has probably used boku her entire life before transitioning anyway—uses boku, it’s irreconcilable proof that she’s actually nonbinary/a boy in spite of literally all other evidence we have to the contrary.

[jacketkos]

whats your onions on transmasc mafuyu? its kinda weird to me personally that ppl would do that hc while they grab their pitchforks and torches for trans girl mizuki. i 100% agree w/ your mizuki posts btw

I like transmasc mafuyu but I’m also somewhat personally biased about that lol. I can’t see mafuyu as a binary trans man though and I perceive it as being on like … a continuum? as a consequence of there being something blatantly dissociative going on there. OWN being on the more masc side of the spectrum, the host being less so, and then good girl mafuyu being the most fem out of all of them because she’s meant to conform to societal expectations.

it’s also struck me as odd primarily on the basis of like … I’ve already mentioned that a lot of the shittiness about mizuki comes from a majority of the trans portion of the fandom being tme and simultaneously wanting to project their experience of transness onto her because it’s such a crucial part of her narrative, but mafuyu also has enough Gender to go around in a way where people could absolutely stay in their lane and not be weird.

my only explanation is that it’s because mizuki has such a Cutesy aesthetic (“femme nb representation”) and/or it’s a weird envy of the bigotry she bears the brunt of so heavily and the fake smile she puts on in spite of it. I think there’s a common misconception due to her façade that she’s more “proud” of being trans when we’re repeatedly shown she struggles heavily with internalized transphobia—“they wouldn’t like me if they knew I wasn’t a girl like they are,” is the underpinning of her current conflict, after all + it’s implied that she detransitioned in middle school during tie a ribbon specifically to avoid harassment.

[jacketkos]

I still don’t get why the translator of my footsteps on sekaipedia went with “Maybe this is a big misunderstanding.” unless they were intentionally being egregiously conservative in not wanting to add any subtext that isn’t currently in ensekai even though it’s obviously the case that that line exists to provide new, additional subtext contextualizing what’s going on with mizuki

you have to contort yourself to translate the text as that, versus, like. “You could just be mistaken about this.” which is like. the reason we know she’s trans rather than gnc. I’m actually giving them the benefit of the doubt that they didn’t want the responsibility of translating that line more than anything but. man. I hope the official translation does it justice at least