elaby | Long fandom post o' doom

Life update! Well, more of a fandom update, really. Or a "what I've been up to" update.

What I've been up to has not been writing ¬_¬ The writing has just not been happening. I'm not going to worry too much about it, though, because drawing has been happening instead. Anime and manga have staged a brain-coup, and I've also started studying Japanese again. I bought volume 2 of "Japanese in Mangaland," a textbook and workbook that teaches the Japanese language through lessons with examples from real manga (the dialogue is from real manga, but the pictures have been re-drawn due to copyright reasons, which makes it kind of fun to try to figure out what might've been going on in the original). Volume 2 covers what I covered in my end-of-second and beginning-of-third years of Japanese, so it's a refresher for the more complicated grammar points with some added stuff that I didn't learn in class. There's a volume 3 as well that I want to get when I finish this one.

Last week, I got the third volume of The Last Uniform in the mail from Japan! *armwaving*

It's a used copy, but it doesn't look like it was ever even opened. It's pristine. I read through it once and I THINK that out of the two main couples, one (my favorite) gets together and one (the more central characters) doesn't - because one girl has to leave school because her mother is sick or something. They continue to write to each other, so I don't think it's utterly hopeless. And one minor couple got together, which I never expected and was really kind of adorable. I've started translating it, which is mostly what I've been doing in my spare time the past couple of days XD I've got something like 19 pages translated so far. It's very slow going at times. When the characters are just talking to each other, I can get through it pretty quickly, but when they start internal monologuing, there's just kanji EVERYwhere and I've come across at least three or four that have taken me about twenty minutes each to find in my dictionary. And then there are the really long complicated sentences that I first have to look up ten kanji for, then figure out the grammar, then piece together in a way that makes some sort of logical sense in English beyond the "well, I know what this means, but not how to say it" stage. Can you tell I revel in this? :3

A couple of weeks ago, I borrowed the first volume of Kashimashi ~Girl Meets Girl~ from the library. It was interesting; I had been avoiding it because I figured it was one of those standard cop-out "boy gets turned into girl and makes out with girls" yuri storylines, and I was highly skeptical about its sensitivity to transgender issues. After reading it, I'm actually more impressed with the way the story handles the main character's transition than the way it portrays same-sex attraction.

Okay, quick run-down of the plot (just a warning: it's one of those anime plots that you have to move past the initial "WTF?!" before you can appreciate the story): Hazumu, Japanese schoolboy and botany enthusiast, is out picking flowers on a mountaintop when he's crushed by an alien space ship. The aliens are able to restore him to life, but in the process, his sex was changed from male to female. The other two main characters are Yasuna, the girl Hazumu previously confessed feelings of love to, and Tomari, Hazumu's childhood friend.

Unexpectedly, Hazumu is the character whose portrayal bothers me the least (although as a mostly cisgendered person, I don't feel I can say that her portrayal isn't offensive; it's just better than I thought it would be). Before the spaceship crash, Hazumu exhibited characteristics that are societally categorized as female. Growing up, she (I'm just going to go with she) liked wearing dresses, had traditional "female" interests, and seemed to be soft-spoken and very emotionally open. It's interesting to note that Hazumu's face is never shown in the parts of the story that take place before the spaceship crash. Hazumu takes to her female body very quickly, and the "feminine" mannerisms that her friends urge her to remember seem to come naturally. She's only conflicted about who she has romantic feelings for (i.e. females), not about having different anatomy. There's a little bit of "omg I have boobies!" embarrassment, but she seems pretty happy about it. My secret theory after reading this first volume is that Hazumu's gender has always been female and her romantic attraction is toward females; it's just when her sex becomes female that she starts to think being attracted to females is wrong.

This brings me to the other two main characters, who I find - er - problematic. First is Tomari, Hazumu's best friend, who clearly had a crush on her when Hazumu's body was male. She's loud and protective and ranty and generally gets up in everyone's business when they treat Hazumu like a girl, which frankly ticks me off. In spite of that, I think that she's just freaked out that she's in love with another girl and that there must be something wrong with her, and so she pushes back against Hazumu's easy acceptance of her new sex. She's very protective of Hazumu and understands that "Hazumu is Hazumu," that is, the same person who was her best friend all her life. Hopefully she'll develop more, because right now she's kind of caustic and mean, and I don't like her very much.

Yasuna is the other main character. I have much conflictedness about her. When Hazumu confessed love to her before the crash, Yasuna only tearfully replied "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry," ((*has Tenth Doctor moment*)) and later lamented "If only you were a girl." After the crash, Yasuna declared herself in love with Hazumu and kissed her. Tomari is rather mean to her, trying to protect Hazumu's feelings and thinking that since Yasuna turned Hazumu down she had no right to ask for her affection now. This may be why I'm predisposed against Tomari - I saw Yasuna as a girl who was attracted to girls, not boys, and who was anguished because the person she was in love with had a body she wasn't attracted to (and so she thought they couldn't be together). Tomari has no idea how Yasuna feels, and thinks she's just playing around with Hazumu's feelings.

Here's where the conflictedness comes in. When Yasuna was happy that Hazumu became physically female, I assumed this was because she was romantically oriented toward women. I was wrong. Yasuna has some sort of condition where she can't see males - they're fuzzy, indistinct, indistinguishable from each other - but she can see females perfectly clearly. She was afraid, therefore, that she would "never fall in love." However, Hazumu was the only male that she could see - not perfectly, but better than all other males (this is one of the things that led me to believe that Hazumu's gender has always been female). She turned Hazumu down because she was afraid that her condition would worsen and if they got together, she would someday become unable to see Hazumu, and she couldn't bear that. So when Hazumu became physically female, Yasuna could see her clearly and could act on her feelings.

The message that people can fall in love regardless of gender is a good one, but I'm disappointed that Yasuna was given this condition in order to make it "okay" that she's in love with a girl. Maybe it's meant to be a form of prosopagnosia (although it's a whole-body thing with Yasuna, not just facial), in which case I'd be a lot less irritated. To me, though, it seems like a plot device that allows Yasuna to like girls without risking being viewed by readers as a lesbian.

The plot of Kashimashi is pretty much cemented in reality - a high-school romance - except for the whole spaceship incident and the fact that an alien - and the spaceship, in the form of a cute floating pink-haired girl - have moved in with Hazumu. The alien (he looks like an average square-glasses-wearing Japanese guy wearing footie pajamas with a hood that has antennae on it) tells Hazumu that his race got so advanced that it discovered the power to obliterate the universe, so it gave up all emotions to prevent war - and is now dying out because nobody loves each other. He's on earth trying to research how to start loving again. The alien is kind of interesting, in a "holding a mirror up to life" sort of way. For example, he asks Hazumu what she's going to do about the two girls she's obviously in love with, and she's like "Well, I don't know how I feel about them anymore. I'm a girl now." The alien looks confused and asks "Is there some kind of restriction on your planet toward same-sex relationships?" Hazumu looks like she's about to reply but stops, and it appears that she's questioning her immediate assumption that she couldn't love a girl when she's a girl.

So, anyway, I want to read more of it. I have hopes that it'll become something more than the usual sex-swap-for-titillation-value story, and it does seem to be headed in that direction.

I've also been watching (over the past month or two) the first half of the anime Romeo x Juliet. It's pretty freaking awesome, actually - and this is me: not a big fan of the play. The opening sequence was clearly designed for me personally, or at least for anyone who the Utena opening sequence sends into raptures. As

caitirin pointed out, it's like they made a list of all the cool things from the Utena opening. Flower imagery? Check. Kickass girls in boys' clothes? Check. Swordfighting? Check. Reaching hands? Check. Gravity-defying exploding architecture? Double freaking check XD The characters are pretty cool, too.

I rather like Juliet. She's very strong sometimes, but she's also a fifteen-year-old girl (er, or is it sixteen?), and she balances the "masked crusader of justice" thing with the "teenager who just wants to be with her boyfriend" thing very well, I think. She has her occasional weak moments, but usually I only just start to go "Gah, would you stop moping and get back to being awesome?" when she does just that. The animation is SO pretty, holy cow, so we get Juliet-with-short-hair dressed like a boy, and Juliet-with-long-hair dressed like a girl, and Juliet-with-long-hair-in-ponytail dressed kind of in between and looking gorgeous every time. She's able to revel in being boy-like and girl-like in turn, and I think that's pretty cool.

Romeo is such an adorable little naive idiot XD He's very cute, and very earnest, but he's still an idiot. He didn't know what potatoes were when they found them in the ground. His father is incredibly, extremely, overtly, Emperor Palpatine-evil, and Romeo is OMG so stunned! when he realizes this. But they're really cute together, and god I hope they don't die >_<

The story is very loosely based on Shakespeare's play, in that Romeo and Juliet live in Neo-Verona and they're children of rival families who fall in love. There have been two balcony scenes so far, but other than that, I haven't noticed much similarity. Juliet is the daughter of the previous Prince of Neo-Verona, who was killed by Romeo's father, and she protects the non-noble denizens of the city as Akai Kaze, the Red Whirlwind (dressed much like a red mage from Final Fantasy XD). There's also a giant psychic tree and a little white-skinned, white-haired girl who takes care of it, and I'm sure they will have something to do with something at some point O_o It has all kinds of characters named after ones from Shakespeare, and there's even a playwright named Willy who occasionally shows up and makes significant comments. Willy is, uh... I don't know how to describe him. He reminds me of Dispel from Tenshi ni Narumon, and the closest thing I can think of in Western media that I could compare his characterization with is a drag queen stereotype. That they would portray Shakespeare like this is interesting to say the least.

I have the last half of the series to go! I need to buy it first, of course.