Jacques is in their bridge troll era (純粋; derogatory)

My mom used to love the Pride collection at Target. I know we young gays can find all that stuff a little uncool, but my mother absolutely loved picking up her butch button up with little rainbow ice cream cones or whatever printed on them.

But obviously not acquiescing to bigots is asking a lot.

Fic is up on the archive~ ✨

archiveofourown.org/works/80577731

Morning reblag.

Kamille wants to hear war stories. Char wants to recruit a second Gundam protagonist. Amuro wants to give advice without fully committing to saying what he means.

16k-ish words?

More details in quoted thread.

char aznable goes to animal crossing

I am great at teams, so long as I the rest of the team is also freakishly motivated and competitive.

I like to pretend that I am chill and laid back and a super fun hang, I can just go with the flow, it's fine.

And then something happens and I abruptly remember that no I am a type A freak and I can only go with the flow if I can trust that the people around me doing a thing are also type A freaks.

Photo of a pink mannequin in a red and green tartan skirt, bleached tuxedo jacket, button up shirt with grommets, and black, red, and white decorated tie. The overall look is punky. Behind the mannequin is a work corner in a clothing store.

Perhaps I can design clothes sometimes.

Fanart parody of the cover of the manga "Go for it, Nakamura!" with Angelo Sauper (Go for it, Angelo!) and Full Frontal from Mobile Suit Gundam UC/ Unicorn. Angelo is front and center, clutching his chest in a panic. Star and heart outlines surround him with different expressions from Full Frontal in the. There are scattered hearts, stars, squiggles and roses.

i've been wanting to draw this for five years !! this could be tweaked and improved but the vision must finally be free
#fullan #gundam #gundamUC

Waking up to the news every day in 2026.

And that liminality also gets lost in a lot of these convos. People aren’t mad at teenage girls being teenage girls. They’re mad about women doing things they perceive as “for teenage girls” and attempt to punish them in a way society just doesn’t with men maintain adolescent hobbies and interests.

Cause ultimately all of shoujo culture has a tone of liminality to it. This is fine for girls and younger women, but you do have to grow up and become a proper member of society. Which does involve rejecting queerness under the traditional framework.

But 30+ year old fujoshi are aberrations. And certainly that’s fueling a lot of the pushback and censorship efforts with the mainstreaming of BL in Japan right now. Also probably a bit of why visual kei bands drop a lot of the aesthetics as they and their fans age and they get wider distribution.

Oh there’s also an added element to this where one is expected to grow out of the status of the shoujo and become a proper heteronormative good wife and wise mother. So you can maintain your fantasies via something like Takarazuka because it does historically lean conservative and heterosexual.

I also have some other impolitic thoughts on both the article and the response to it. But this is my like… articulated frustration with the article, discourse, and just telling people to “read BL scholarship”. I have. I also think that wouldn’t really help people “get it” in a big way.

And some folks will inevitably argue that the vkei links are problematic cause a lot of it is fanservice or gay-for-pay. But then the scene was pretty much defined by like, hide and Sakurai both of whom are pretty inarguably queer if you know how to read so like. Fight me, I guess.

Incidentally this does make me want to write on visual kei and shoujo manga more. And on early visual kei-adjacent artists modeling for Juné. Cause I think having flesh and blood men/male-bodies linked to these spaces would throw some folks for a loop.

So it perpetuates some of these debates of is it queer (yes!) is it for women (also, yes!) is it just women being horny (no but also yes and women are allowed to be horny). Cause they fundamentally lack a lot of the context and aren’t really pursuing it.

And not to knock BL scholarship (cause a lot of it is quite good and we have to start somewhere!) but a lot of anglophone BL scholars are coming at it without an appreciation for shoujo manga (which BL still fundamentally is and borrows from) let alone wider shoujo culture of the late-Showa period.

And that same gender kayfabe doesn’t exist as much in western media generally and certain hasn’t been mainstreamed to the point of simply being a trope (the princely woman or the cute cross dressing guy) within YA on up.

But I’d also argue it’s the same as Takarazuka otokoyaku being both men and not. Visual kei artists are men and not. Someone who wears ouji fashion is usually wearing “boystyle” but with patterns designs specifically for afab bodies. They’re masc and fundamentally not.

Ultimately the genders of the characters are kind of immaterial to the media itself, outside of the way in which they provide a permission structure for both safe desire and projection from the reader.

I’m like pathologically non-binary so maybe it’s easier for me to clock?

OR you get an effort to assert that BL is specifically queer or women interloping into queer men’s media and “fetishizing”.

And is there raunchy and problematic BL stuff out there? Sure. But despite depicting male characters, it’s not really about men in the way queer lit in a western context is.

Does really spot BL as a commercial art form (in the context of these other often commercial art forms) as For Women in a way we just don’t have for queer lit in the west.

So you get “BL is analogous to slash in that it’s rotten girls writing smut of ostensibly straight male-demographic works!”

Within the same social context, you also have Takarazuka, shoujo manga generally and its gender fuckery, visual kei (and the links between early visual kei, doujin culture/fanzines, and BL pubs like Juné are understudied), fashion… All of which, combined with Japanese gender segregation of media…

And that’s in part because of how BL got widely known on the anglophone internet (the legacy of Gundam Wing fandom of the early-00s is under examined here tbh).

But ultimately BL in Japan exists within the wider context of what I jokingly call the “gender kayfabe” in wider shoujo culture.

And BL (really literally yaoi) does have ties to doujin culture, obviously. The term yaoi comes from doujin spaces. Overseas BL fans (esp anglophone BL fans) have also always had more in common with slash fans generally than the average BL fan/fujoshi in Japan.

Re: the NY Magazine article and discourse thereof—

One of the things I’ve seen people correctly spot out is that it conflates the culture around slash fiction with the culture of BL and implies that BL came up in a parallel way via doujinshi circles.

The adhd is not at bay.

Lads I timed my shopping such that today I am out of nicotine patches, Red Bull, and my protein shakes.

I did have two cups of coffee with collagen peptides, and some leftover egg and veggie frittata so I’m doing ~okay. But I uh.

Might go have a smoke at around 3 cause I am feeling it.

Just add 5 to each, and that’s me.