like, this exchange isn't going to make the cut because I had to can this whole sub plot, but I get to write it for myself. for me. as a present. a little treat.

He/him Furina in a "I am absolutely going to continue making my eyelashes look like crowns whenever I feel like it. Do you know how long that technique took to perfect?" kind of way.

They/them Furina in a "There is actually absolutely nothing neutral about my gender or my person. I feel everything all at once, so the plurality is quite fitting... Yes, I'm fine, why do you ask?" kind of way.

She/her Furina in a "Oh, that's just what you're most used to? Very well. You realize gay men have used these pronouns in certain situations, yes?" kind of way.

New coworkers means im once again confronted with the really funny reality of: cishet people hear my voice and assume im a man. Gay people look at me and have to run an entire 4d chess simulation to figure out my gender situation and then go ‘WE’RE SETTLING ON THEY/THEM’ . The only incorrect option

i hate being untethered from the constraints of gender presentation in my mind because it means i often desire multiple contradictory things or at least things that can't be rapidly fluctuated between. it would be nice to be clean shaven and do some makeup now and again for a prettier look but then i have to contend with the mortifying ordeal of seeing my bare face for the 4-5 days it takes to get a decent amount of scruff back

ive been inhabiting the male social box for so long now, mostly because it's much less effort and feels like my neutral base point, that i often worry if i were to play in the space of femininity to a degree in which my plausible deniability as just a Quirky Guy came into question that it would be too much of a departure from the persona ive become known for. i also just perceive feminine presentation as inherently fancier (and in fairness it does require more work) and as a certified tired bitch i always talk myself out of it because its "not a big enough occasion". fellow gender outlaws please lend me your strength and encouragement to stop playing 4D chess with myself about this 😂

You wanted personal opinion, I feel this will be very unpopular but “queering your craft” or whatever is bullshit. I myself am apart of the LGBT+ community so let me just explain

Witchcraft has no gender and this just tries to jam witchcraft into another box that it doesn’t deserve, if you can’t seperate gender (that doesn’t even exist beyond our comprehension) from magic then maybe you should try

I am also queer, and I see your points and actually fully agree with you, but I also need to point out a few things that I'm sure you already know but a casual reader of magical stuff might not.

While many people claim that witchcraft is a woman-only thing (which is a stupid but unfortunately commonly-held view), a lot of people lean into gendering things through the lens of Wicca, or rather a pop culture understanding of Wicca, which is where you get the "fire and air are masculine and water and earth are feminine" stuff that can be seen echoed around. I'm sure it goes further back than Wicca's founding in the 1950s (I believe European manuscripts started gendering plants and stuff around the time alchemy had its big boom, but I'm not a historian, so please don't take these parentheses as fact without doing your own research). Unfortunately, Wicca's founder and several of its big-name splinter sects were BIG on the "heterosexual only two genders fertility religion" thing, which melded into witchcraft more broadly when Wicca made its way into the public conscious.

If someone sees all of this gendering going on, it's no wonder that they'd want to pull it out of their craft (like I have done in my jump to wizardry) OR use it in specific instances (like a lesbian trying to cast a love spell that will draw a mystery feminine lover or a transmasc guy using magic to help combat his dysphoria).

Overall, I agree that witchcraft, like magic as a whole, is inherently genderless, and people stuff things into neat little boxes too much. Then again, I'm a wizard, so maybe I'm just playing 4D chess with this whole process.

~Jasper

Two Please Please Please I Need to See My Wife Again 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈

What a good start to my 4D chess gender headcanons

What's the instant hit ship that prompted your post and do you hate it?

im spoilering all the ship names so I don't show up in any of their tags but heed my warning for some (polite) criticism

hrmm ok I don't really hate it but I just cannot get into cyn*nari. ships that are created before we even meet a character tend to not land for me cause I dont really care about the character yet and I'm the type who likes to observe and psychoanalyze before I mash my metaphorical barbie doll's faces together.

I do kinda hate y*eyato tho cause when it cropped up it seemed people were using it to intentionally piss off eim*ko fans. which like I dont even have a problem with m/f yae it just seemed weirdly targeted the way some people were talking abt it. also again- we hadn't met ayato at that point. now it just leaves a bad taste in my mouth cuz of the drama.

ch*lumi is another one I really dislike but that's more into why I dislike a lot of m/f ships. I feel like there's an assumption that you can just put a man and woman next to each other and itll imply romance and it makes for very very lazy development. (that's like a big problem in shounen action I've noticed cause like obviously the romance isn't the focus but damn dude if you can develop an emotionally intimate relationship between 2 of the main guys at least give us something between who we're supposed to believe is in love.) also the fanworks I've seen for it seem.. overwhelmingly cishet.

even with my ships that are already gay I'm usually playing 4d interdimensional chess with their gender and whatnot, mostly cause I find my own gender to be something complex that I'm constantly exploring. so my assorted headcanons give me a playground to explore gender expression in a way that mirrors and contrasts to mine.

I think it can be very present when a m/f ship is queer. I've written my own m/f relationships that are palpably queer. Even if both parties are cis. Most ch*lumi content I've seen though? It's not that. which is really a shame cause even though I'm not really a traveler ship person and I really like childe and lumine as a platonic duo and I think I might like them as a ship if people made them gay as fuck. I'm more attached to other ships tho so I don't really care to get any sort of investment in that.

I can also tell when queer content is written by straight people sometimes which is just as bad lmfao. not saying straight people cant write gay romance, in fact I know many people find learn about their sexuality through writing so I fully endorse it, but you can usually tell when it's written by someone who is straight in a "I am conceptually okay with gay people but I have done nothing to unpack my beliefs that have occurred as a result of being raised in a cisheteronormative society" way. gay people are also fully capable of writing and thinking like this though so more literally I mean straight in like, a cultural/ideological way. if that makes any sense. Straight™

also definitely have seen the same thing in gender fics but I try not to be too judgemental cause like. I know half of the time their egg isn't cracked yet and they'll figure it out in a year or two. I've read several gender fics that start with the author saying "I'm not trans I just relate to their experiences" and lo and behold pronoun change in bio so like. yeah. let the chick hatch on it's own and all that.

I also dislike je*nluc for the same "people write them too cishet to have any appeal to me" reasons but also I personally headcanon diluc as gay so there's that.

also dont like b*nnett/f*schl/r*zor or any variations cuz I have my silly little siblings razor and fischl hc and then just. idk either of them with bennett doesn't really spark anything in me and it's one of those "I like them as friends so struggling to find platonic content of them has made me mildly annoyed" type deals.

no judgement to anyone who likes any of these ships of course! I think they're all perfectly fine even if they don't resonate with me on a personal level :^] except people who're into y*eyato for spite that's weird <3

I kinda got off track with that but <3 yeah

I ended up scrubbing my old Tomodachi Life file and playing it current day with all the personal developments is so insane. I have to play 4D gender chess just to have gay marriage. I'm demiaro/ace and romance makes me deeply uncomfortable for a variety of reasons but that is The Point like one of the funniest most major events to happen in the game. I have so much hatred for marriage as an institution esp as someone who's disabled but again. That is THE MAIN DRAW. To marry your favorite guy (in Mii form). I would never want children the idea is horrifyingly distressing to me I would be the worst father in the world but having Mii babies, again, is one of the funniest fucking things you can do in the game. Yes you can have universal birth control as an option but the Mii babies are SOOOO much funnier. I feel like there's a joke here about how playing as a mass murderer in a video game doesn't reflect who you are in real life but I just can't grasp it LMFAO

thoughts on bungou stray dogs season 5

woo, that was a fun binge-watch! ok, my (not spoiler free) thoughts:

this was a good season, really really good. i'm really impressed by asagiri's ability to keep us guessing and to play off old story patterns while also developing new ones—characterization's very consistent but also keeps developing in fresh and interesting directions. pacing's less wack than s3 (where fyodor appeared in like 3 episodes), the plot develops at a solid pace, the themes are really interesting

this was the gayest season i have seen so far and i've been letting this stupid show queerbait me for 6 years now, so that's saying something. fukichi and fukuzawa simultaneously have the energy of messily divorced exes, pining repressed best friends, and happily married couple all at once. if i was mori i'd be jealous (but it's mori so he's not, though i do appreciate mori/fukuzawa as a foil to fukichi/fukuzawa).

i'm not really the biggest fan of raising the stakes continuously overall, like i really don't think media needs to go like season 1. save my friend season 2. save my home season 3. save the world or some shit, it's fine to have similar magnitude of stakes throughout. but it's cool that asagiri's got the ambition to tackle some lofty questions—in particular i think nikolai's own struggle to determine his free will compared to fukichi's desire to strip free will from humanity in exchange for world peace is interesting.

i have never been particularly taken by fyodor, or fyodor's relationship with dazai, or fyodor's relationship with nikolai. but this season has finally caused me to cave and admit he's great. he's hilarious, he's a great foil to dazai (their weird 4D chess frenemyship is excellent, i understand why people ship them now), his dialogue is top tier and i fucking lost it when he faked having a split personality to the character with split hair because he (rightly) figured sigma would fall for it. like yes DRAG HIM

speaking of split haired characters, i miss Q, who had a lot of potential to add some more chaos to the mix and who i generally want to see more of (his fucked up gender energy and his being a lovehatechild of dazai and chuuya is so entertaining)

i'm...actually a bit disappointed that dazai did not actually let chuuya die, although i do like the direction asagiri took—in "double black," we saw chuuya place his trust in dazai, and it paid off. this time around, dazai placed his trust in chuuya—literally let him put a loaded gun to his head!!—and it paid off (and also chuuya got his revenge for dazai taking too long to nullify corruption last time, you know he had fun with those extra bullets).

i really enjoy that asagiri shows time and time again just how much these two trust each other, but at the same time, i think their relationship could actually be stress tested more—like, i genuinely wanted to see dazai placed into a real "pick chuuya or the ADA" situation! i want to see dazai and chuuya actually on opposite sides, not in truces or working together or whatnot, and i suspect that this will happen in the show's last arc—it's eventually going to circle back to ADA vs. PM, just like the beginning. TL:DR; i'm an insane dazai/chuuya shipper and the chokehold they have on me is so humiliating that i just don't talk about it 99% of the time. if i loved you less i would be able to talk about it more.

although i did 100% call him being OK with killing chuuya as BS, because there is no goddamn way dazai's last words to chuuya would ever be as mild and cliche as "we didn't really get along, but sometimes we understood each other." that man has been practicing dramatic monologues in his head daily for the last seven years. when he does deliver that monologue it's going to fucking SERVE

speaking of being taken in by fyodor: fine fine I GET THE DAZAI/CHUUYA X FYODOR/NIKOLAI PARALLELS NOW OKAY. not that i denied them before but we were really getting bashed over the head with it in the prison break episodes. being queerbaited by this show is better than a lot of actual media gay couples but it still hurts like a bitch.

i continue to want to wring atsushi's neck lol. akutagawa has never really been my fave or anything, but his character development is clearly progressing much faster (and i really really respect it) and our narrator still can't fucking form an opinion without one of his friends to guide him!! kyouka and lucy please ditch him and date each other instead. the lack of kyouka in this season was CRIMINAL.

i kind of ship kenji and tetchou now...i know the show is pushing tetchou and jouno but jouno is just so fucking MEAN and tetchou deserves someone who doesn't judge him for his quirks okay :(

tachihara biggest glow up of any character since the beginning of this show. the character development i didnt know i wanted

this season did a lot more work to humanize the hunting dogs (esp. the non-tachihara ones) and i enjoyed that a lot. teruko's role in the finale, killing the man she loved most because fukuzawa couldn't, absolutely murdered me. i think it's such a good step in her character arc as she has to figure out who she wants to be without him. also i appreciate that she's a badass female character who isn't a weirdly sexualized girlboss and is also a weirdo

aya and bram is truly one of the most bizarre pairs in this show and there are a lot of bizarre pairs, so that's saying something. i legitimately feel like asagiri picked some names out of a hat or spun a wheel for this or something. but i am excited for bram to figure out what he wants after spending forever being enslaved to others, and hope that this involves listening to the radio all day with a 10-year-old girl. the way children are portrayed in BSD as these incredibly vulnerable and impressionable people worthy of love and protection sincerely fucks me up so bad

loose ends: where is the help me note from? i assumed dazai wrote it, but i doubt it, and i also doubt he just left sigma to die. we still don't know what fyodor's ability is, which makes me nervous, since he is ALLEGEDLY dead. i wonder if it's nikolai's (frankly he does legitimately seem like the type to have split personality issues). i'm worried the antidote isn't an actual antidote, and we obviously haven't seen the end of nikolai. there's an actually comical amount of power in bram's hands now. mori's been fairly quiet this season, and there's no way he didn't plan a way for himself to benefit from the carnage. that man is a vulture, he exploits starving orphans off the street! and he sent in chuuya to save the ADA's ass twice and let akutagawa disappear for 2+ weeks! this man was just negotiating to have yosano join the mafia, you can't tell me he didn't get something for himself out of this.

honestly i kind of just want this shit with the hunting dogs and the decay of angels to end and to stop worrying about world domination so we can go back to the ADA battling yokohama's villain of the week, like man the tension has just been building nonstop. give the ADA a coffee break. 😭😭

ranpo fans are truly getting their time lately huh. we are winninggggg

GOOD morning tumblr.

Went to a party last night, a house warming party for one of my improv friends, very fun. Very scary trying to navigate socializing again.

We played truth or drink and I opened a response to a question about kink with "first of all I'm playing 4d chess with my gender" to room of cis ppl.

But now I'm reading psu reviews because psu's frighten me.

you know i actually like they/them pronouns and using gender neutral terms for myself but only when I’M using them for ME like.

18 and 20 for the meta asks? also I already commented on clip 3 but fr this clip was so good that was such a good execution of that scene and s5 has been so good and literally brightens my day thank u 💛 i hope you’re doing well

hi, thank you so much!!!!!!!! i hope you’re doing well too <3 <3

i am putting a read more because i am a rambley person, but underneath you will find talks of unused plot points, the parallels between the girl squad and the lad squad, and what taylor swift album(s) i believe each season has the vibe of.

tw for discussion of abuse, mental health problems, addiction and eating disorders

18. Do any of your stories have alternative versions? (plotlines that you abandoned, AUs of your own work, different characterisations?) Tell us about them.

skam brighton has. so many aus. because it itself is an au of an original work. me and two of my great writing friends have written a great numbers of aus including but not limited to riordian-verse, glee, doctor who, rwrb, trc, a murder mystery au, and many aus based on comfort media of mine that i started on never finished (house of anubis, barbie movies, etc.). and many of them are unironically so good???? @fingersmithbysarahwaters and @nightwing642 are incredibly talented screenwriters. but also i did write a screenplay adaptations of the first two books in the raven cycle series and 2/3s of rwrb for no reason other than fun and autism.

as for skam brighton. oh boy. not many plot points have been changed, but some certain scenes/character moments were changed. for example, the scene in season 2 episode 8 where liz has a meltdown at the shopping centre and she has a heart to heart with mary was originally liz having a meltdown and running into al in the sensory room. but i wanted to hold back on revealing al as a main character until season 3. 

also in the og season 3, jake and al didn’t break up. as i was finishing the season, i was getting ideas for how i wanted the series to develop (james’s crush on al namely) so i thought it would be good for both of their developments for them not to end up together. also in season 3 i hadn’t planned for jake to move house originally, so there was a scene in the finale episode of the lad squad hanging out, but it got cut because it just didn’t make sense. 

in season 4, al and bree were a lot meaner to each other originally, because i love it when it gets busy at the brighton and the gay people get mean, but then i thought about it and decided it was out of character for both of them to be downright cruel. al and bree also had a scene in season 4 that was cut due to just not making sense. 

also, in season 5, the “inner white girl” scene originally wasn’t in the show at all, but one day i was listening to the song, and about a week before the episode came out, i wrote it. also, bree wasn’t written to be a she/they until literally the day of putting the clip out because i thought it would be cool. that’s it :)

also the way i write is that i write the full clip out in a google doc and then edit it in ao3 about an hour before i put it out, so a lot of changes happen there. just small things, like making dialogue flow better, changing certain songs because i just want to, and sometimes adding in new sequences that i just thought of.

20. Tell us the meta about your writing that you really want to ramble to people about (symbolism you’ve included, character or relationship development that you love, hidden references, callbacks or clues for future scenes?)

oh!!!! there!!!!! is!!!!! 

personally, my favourite thing to write is little symbolic moments that make me happy because i play 4d chess in my head with myself every time i write.

before i go off, i must say, so many hints and clues have been dropped for season six so far. season six has been my favourite season to write and i’m already planning a spin-off project based on it to write, and it’s gonna be starting sooner than you think.

so a piece of writing i’ve been thinking about lately is the parallels between the girl squad and the lad squad. before i begin to go off, these are the characters i think parallel each other the most.

jake - sandy james - bree nick - rori theo - esther al - liz

jake and sandy is quite an obvious parallel to draw - both are football players, both begin the series closeted and having a close relationship with bryan - but their personalities are quite similar. both of them are closer with their mother than their father, both use their relationships as a method of protection, and both are afraid of of societal rejection at the beginning of the series. they also both discovered their sexualities and mental health issues over the course of their seasons, and both of their love interests are more outgoing theatre kids. jake and sandy’s relationship is also so interesting to me - because they start as very awkward friends, and jake tries to help sandy by making bryan break up with her, but outs her in the process, and sandy doesn’t want to forgive him. she takes her time and comes to terms with it on her own and decides to forgive him because sandy’s just a sweetheart - and this also parallels the way jake takes his time to forgive his mother. also, in their friend groups, they’re both the newcomer to them, and we get the introductions to the group dynamics in their seasons, and in the later seasons, they’re both a lot more relaxed as they’re in recovery <3

james and bree are also very similar characters. both have problems with substance abuse, both have promiscuous reputations, both have both mommy and daddy issues. they are both dean girls, to put it in spn terms. they’re both very funny, and use humour to cover up their struggles. both are dealing with a lot of mental illness and, throughout the series, it becomes more and more clear. they’re also both seen as “the hot ones” of their groups, with a lot of the characters canonically having small crushes on them (liz, rori and nick with james; rori, esther and annabell with bree). they’ve also both canonically hooked up with sophie. which i just think is fun. they also played mimi and roger together, which i think shows their parallels as addicts and people (with roger struggling with recovery and depression until the end, when he begins to get help, and mimi living the high life until it all crumbles down around her). they also share a want for independence and both are very sana-esque characters (james being middle eastern and religious, bree being the cool rebel girl in season 1).

nick and rori are both the “fun friend”. they’re both comedic relief in the early seasons, but we do get in depth with them as the show goes on. in grease, they play james and bree’s love interests (which is ironic, as rori and bree get together and nick is in love with james), and in rent, they play angel and maureen, the two main comedic relief characters. both of them struggle to connect their asian identity with their british identity, and both struggle with how the world perceives them (nick with their gender presentation and rori with her eating disorder). they both struggle with toxic masculinity and toxic femininity and use humour to cover up their struggles.

theo and esther are similar in the fact that they’re the squad members we know the least about. they’re both jewish, they’re both the mum friend of their respective groups, they’re both autistic and they’re both quite nerdy. they’re the most grounded member of their respective groups and tend to take charge and help make decisions. they’re also both quite sarcastic and very firm in their opinions. 

al and liz are parallels simply because they are both nooras and vildes. they’r eboth autistic, they’re both the odd one out in their friend groups - liz being a lot more serious than the girl squad, al being a lot more in his own little world than the lad squad. they’re both very blunt and straight forward and say whatever they’re thinking.

also just some of my favourite bits of foreshadowing: nick being bitchy to liz throughout season 2 because they’re in love with james….. al talking about his sister to jake in season 3 and whenever al talks to the girl squad, bree insults him or walks away…… in season 4 episode 1, audrey mentions bree’s cousin is pregnant and then when bree finds out the results of her pregnancy test, oh no by marina plays (i’m now becoming my own self fulfilling prophecy)....... nick and all of his gender stuff throughout the series……. just all of the character stuff with grease and rent….. also just bree and rori’s whole relationship arc because it has everything. queerbaiting. subverting expectations. musical homoeroticism. a little cheating for fun. and they were best friends. honestly bree and rori season 3 is very august by taylor swift…… you weren’t mine to lose…….. 

speaking of, no one asked by here’s each season of skambr and the taylor swift albums they’re most like.

season 1 - debut/fearless

bro sandy is just such a debut/fearless era person. she’s looking for her place in this world!!!!!! she has the teardrops on my guitar energy (quite literally sandy pre-canon voice i bet he’s beautiful that boy she talks about and he has everything that i have to live without about bryan and sophie)..... the fun giggly crush songs that are deeply homoerotic….. esther season 1 voice the entirety of you belong with me. like esther really made a deeper connection with sandy in one month that bryan did in years of knowing her. sandy also is the type of person to stan love story, she just thinks it’s such a fun song and she does yell the key change every time it comes on. 

season 2 - speak now/lover

elizabeth!!!!! liz is the type of person who only liked old taylor and then got internalised misogyny and then got over it and loves taylor again. the story of us is canonically a liz/rori song…. yes i am still a liz/rori subtext warrior….. liz is very never grow up and dear john is a very her and james song in the fact that they both relate to it……. when they bonded over their trauma “don’t you think i was too young”...... also lover is a liz season 2 album because it’s about liz learning that love is the most important thing in the world….. liz voice i want to be defined by the things that i love. also the archer is just a skam brighton song because it is an isaac song. also i’m just gonna say it. i like me! it’s a good song when brendon urie isn’t in it, you all are just afraid of having fun. also though liz in season 5 is very better than revenge because, while her season is about unlearning your internalised prejudices, i believe she deserves to be misogynistic for 3 minutes 37 seconds.

season 3 - red

now this is controversial. this season is about depression, grief and anger, and these feelings are red. literally jake voice so you were never a saint and i loved in shades of wrong we learn to live with the pain mosaic broken hearts….. like treacherous….. holy ground….. the whole country pop vibe….. the bitchy songs mocking people’s perceptions of the singer…..  22 is a lad squad song…. also jake voice i remember it all too well but it’s about his father’s abuse and his mother’s neglect…… like the whole season is just jake getting to the point where he is at “begin again”. also i feel like jake would like red because he spent a lot of time watching taylor swift music videos as a youth both because he liked the music and had crushes on the guys in them, and he feels red is the perfect middle between the country and the pop and the indie and he just really likes being sad.

season 4 - reputation

bree big reputation holland!!!!!!!!! she has it all - the romantic drama, the hatred of men, the fucking homoeroticism. bree stans the reputation tour and they have made the entire holland-fletcher family watch it on their netflix (al fucking loved it because he’s a canon swiftie, audrey had a fun time, patrick was a little confused, but has the spirit). listen bree “i did something bad”. bree “look what you made me do”. bree and rori “new year’s day”. bree voice i swear i don’t love the drama, it loves me!!!!!!!!! like the reason the season has a lot of reputation songs and ends with daylight from lover is a metaphor for bree leaving their reputation era…. also reputation has she/they vibes

season 5 - 1989

1989 my best friend 1989!!!!!!! i am coming out here as a 1989 (deluxe) stan. it’s just a serotonin album for me and it is just so nick. the mocking songs about their reputation…… the genuinely deeply depressing homoerotic songs that have fun upbeat music…… the cars….. also clean is just such a nick song. he is in recovery, he is just so personal to me. also nick voice one night he wakes strange look on his face pauses then says you’re my best friend and you knew what it was he is in love!!!!!!! nick canonically in love with all of their best friends braxton!!!!! also nick feels like a 1989 stan because they just have those fun energies. nick WILL scream the spoken part of shake it off at the top of his lungs. also new romantic is just a skamverse song in general. also just. out of the woods. no reason for me to say it other than it’s one of my favourite songs of all time.

season 6 - folklore/evermore

no evermore is not out yet. yes i am claiming it for season 6. see taylor has said that these albums are all about telling stories/fairy tales and that’s what season 6 is about. i cannot wait until next friday when the main and my plans for the hiatus are revealed…….. genuinely i do not know how anyone perceives skam brighton so i don’t know who people think the next main is, but…… i can only describe the state of me writing this season as the various ambiguous disorder gifs.

The All-Gender Gaze (also Chapter 22 of Spotted Flower)

I’m sure somebody has made this point before, but I thought of it on my own so whatever. Genshiken the original focuses more heavily on the male gaze and how the largely male cast observes female anime characters as objects of lust. It doesn’t take long for Ohno to be introduced, but she’s kind of the outlier as a general nod to “Not all Otaku are male guys!!” Then we get Ogiue, who really expands the perspective of Fujoshi and clarifies that it’s not just how this one creepy girl really likes butch men but still lets herself be objectified to fit in with the dudes. By the end of Genshiken the original there’s a pretty even split between showcasing the straight(?) male and female gaze while still existing under the construct of a male-dominated Genshiken where by default, the girls are being objectified most (see: cosplaying).

Genshiken Nidaime initially sets itself out as “just a reversal” of this by having the female-dominated Genshiken where by default, the male are being objectified most (see: literally the entire fucking manga they’re shipping the past male members of Genshiken). We’re given our token male character, Kuchiki, who, while happy to view himself as the member of a harem (ironic, isn’t it, that he’s the only “male“ character of the Genshiken who doesn’t in Nidaime?), is only viewed a component of the fujoshi’s shipping. (As you totally-not-alt-right youngins would say, get cucked!) But besides this and a fu”danshi”, it’s just doing the opposite of before, right?

Heh. Heh. Time to pull out my large, round spectacles and kale smoothies, my friends. It’s queer time. I’ve probably said it before, think about it for two seconds and you can understand, but Hato exists largely as a fujoshi, not as a fudanshi. It’s fucking spelled out for you by like, the fourth chapter or something, I’m sure you know the explanation by now. If not just ask me and I‘ll make a separate post on it. Anyway, Hato kind of is this catch-all of gender and sexual exploration. Don’t say they aren’t... come on. They literally prefer to live as male and female part time in Nidaime and !Hato presents as female in Spotted Flower and has gotten a boob-job to boot. There’s your gender exploration. Now how’s about the big question that becomes the central plot of like, a few volumes of Nidaime about how the fuck is it possible for somebody who reads that much yaoi to not find themselves a little bit attracted to men. Tada!! Queer representation, guys! Y’all straight people can do it too, you know? Just don’t make it a super negative representation and have a good grasp on how pronouns work... maybe have done some research about discrimination queer people face... yea, okay, fair enough, I see why you don’t, but Kio did and it makes me happy (disregard the pronouns bit; I’m not sure how common gender-neutral pronouns are in Japanese so he gets a pass). Anyway though, Hato’s purpose is largely to demonstrate how fucking interesting a queer perspective of traditionally binary objectification in manga can be. I know it takes some research, but it makes your story so much more interesting. Spotted Flower, I don’t even know what the fuck it does. It’s 4D chess or something. (It doesn’t help that my translation of what Chapter 22 says is provided by Google Translate.) Muda-kun has probably covered this better than I can already, but lemme do my best. I’m only like, four months late to the hype train. We were talking about the objectifying gaze, but let’s just address the elephant in the room.

So basically !Madarame is making !Hato an option, he’s letting himself be seduced by them, because he’s been weighed down by all the responsibilities of marriage and having a life and garbage like that. He says (according to Google Translate anyway), that he doesn’t want to make his wife embarrassed by his childish interests and behaviors, but also how this in itself is childish behavior, letting himself be changed by his desire to please the woman who pleasures him. And Hato, ever the beautiful succubus, asks if he wants to become a dirty adult. Not only this, but they’ve prepared. They’ve always been waiting for this moment to happen (and they fucking say it too). They’ve researched all about how two penis-havers actually do it (not like all that yaoi shit). Madarame (shit, sorry, I meant !Madarame) realizes partway through that he really is a sou uke at heart (It was always meant to be HatoMada. You know it. MadaHato was just the excuse so he could maintain face of still being straight. Now that Hato’s got boobs though, he can handle getting fucked in the butt.) and Hato’s TRUE POWER LEVEL IS FINALLY SHOWN. YEAAA!!! They become God, literally, and satisfy the dream they’ve had for like, the past 10 years or however long it’s been since Genshiken (shit, they’re separate timelines guys, okay?!) about being THE REALEST BOI!! Google Translate may not be much, but I understood the part where they say “I will love you with all my body and mind... relax and let me do it... (p 25).” I don’t think there’s much lost in translation there. (Also in the next chapter they literally say they did more giving than taking. I’m pretty sure it was Hato’s dick in Madarame, okay?)

Um, was I going to analyze something here? Oh, right. So Spotted Flower said fuck you to the traditional notion of male / male yaoi (Imean, they are both biologically male, but that’s about it). Instead it embraces the more gender-neutral satisfaction of shipping two characters, not to appeal to fujoshi, but to appeal to fans of HatoMada. Actually, let’s be real, it’s probably just to piss everybody else off. I’m sure some HatoMada fans are pissed too since their love is only satisfied in a kind of disgusting affair (dude, your wife just gave birth and you’re cheating on her. That’s pretty fucked), but you know what? I was depressed on a likely clinical level after it dropped that Madarame wasn’t going to pick Hato and once again when Madarame picked that fucking bitchass twat Sue. So to see HatoMada come to fruition in any extent pleases me greatly. Not to mention, this is undeniably Madarame’s fault here. Like, say what you will about Hato being guilty for preying on him, but Madarame called them over, Madarame asked them for sex. It is his fault 100%. And you know what, I’m not a fan of HatoMada because I sympathize so deeply and truely with Madarame. It’s because of Hato. Even beyond this too, Hato makes the extra good boi move of telling Madarame he shouldn’t and that it’s betrayal et cetera. So, you know what? I’m pretty happy with this.

Also, you know what, fuck you Angela! FUCK YOU! You said that Madarame sou uke was fiction and this was reality, but you know what the real reality is? IT‘S MADARAME GETTING THE D BOIIIII!!!! AHA!!! I WIN! HATO WINS! IT’S THE BEST!!!!!!! Madarme fucking asked for it. HE ASKED FOR IT. All you faithless, weak-hearted sorts didn’t believe, but I did. I never stopped believe in HatoMada. Ask my friends, even, I’ve had debates over death of the author being used to the extent of not accepting the last volume of Genshiken as canon. I ALWAYS KNEW AT HEART THAT HATOMADA HAD TO BE TRUTH.

And if this is all that happens— if the two never fuck again, I’m still satisfied. I don’t need a relationship even. I just needed to see HatoMada be true once. And oh boy it was, in gratuitous detail. The irreverent, non-hyper-sexualized, non-pornographic even, tone that it takes only makes it better. After all, I’m too much of a queer boi to be turned on by such normal interests as penis-in-butthole sex pumping back and forth.

So basically woohoo! We’ve got our queer representation of sex in !Genshiken. Something about the queer gaze ... I guess it goes that Hato is queer and they lust after Madarame, male (though as the traditionally feminine role in yaoi, which in itself is interesting, since the original intent of yaoi was for the uke to be relatable to the female reader and further satisfy the male-dominant, female-submissive cultural notion where the man takes what he wants and the female is helpless, but here Hato is, undeniably serving the  role still as a fujoshi and yet lusting and relating to the dominant position... is it somehow because they were assigned male at birth?), but also after women (as evidenced by the fact that their partner is Yajima), but they kind of exclusively read fujoshi-oriented manga i.e. male-male yaoi. It’s almost as if Kio knew about how the uke is supposed to be what “straight” women “project” themselves onto and also about how fujoshi really don’t project themselves onto either character per se but rather just take the truly position of power by being just an observer, a powerful observer, who derives sexual and non-sexual pleasure just by seeing how it all goes down. And also about how by fujoshi sharing their fantasies they occupy this virtual lesbian state (see: Akiko Mizoguchi’s “Reading and Living Yaoi”). And also about... you know. Point is he gives a good representation of fujoshi and shit. It’s pretty cool.

*looks at you w my big gay eyes* loser bfdi for the hcs listen i need

(From this post)

Yeah I'm sure you would Gayboy Sexuality Headcanon: Gay Beast. Loser has kissed a girl like once in her teens during spin the bottle and then has never seen a single woman again Gender Headcanon: Short answer: Nonbinary transfem (he/she) but I need you all to understand Loser's 4D chess gender. Absolute Late Bloomer who's def had "I wish I could be like a girl but I like being a guy too:/" moments when younger but didn't put much thought to it. Has always been around trans ppl but nothing rly Fit Him or she didn't have much time to think about it until being with Cake and actually sitting down and talking about Gender. She's like, happy with her gender expression and being Lame Masc but also likes to be a Pretty Lady. She's a dilf, he's a milf, he's your housewife and also she's a man. But not in a male way. Man only in a gay way. Lady in a gay gender non conforming way. You simply have to Get It. She's Loser A ship I have with said character: LOSERCAKEE DUHH They were like.. my first ship when I got into it cuz of you AND HOW COULD IT NOT BE ITS PERFECTLY SWEET & GAY Loser obviously cares abt cake like. Its not just cake bein a Huge Fan like YEAH HE IS and he needs Loser a little bit ( a lot ) but Loser is also very fond of him LIKE COME ON. THEYRE SWEET LITTLE THINGSSS WHAT ELSE CAN I SAY. How could u not see Cake blushin up a Storm around Loser and Loser nudging him and not think those two are IN LOVEEE Also Loser x Winner but I talked abt it here already. Loser is a very shippable beast like... the options are endless. Spongy, Donut, Fries, Snowball, Leafy, Ruby, mabye Clock and Tree even YOU GET MY POINT . Also don't get me started on Loserfour I was a bit fixated on that pairing for a bit #swag A BROTP I have with said character: GELATIN & LOSER they also kiss just a little bit but like AS BROS YKNOW. Same Pose Buddies. Loser would go to Gelatin's steakhouse a Lot he's a regular costumer A NOTP I have with said character: [Gestures] IDK A random headcanon: German. General Opinion over said character: I WONDER HOW I WOULDVE FELT ABT HER IF IT WASNT FOR YOU... But even then I brought a lotta original ideas to the table and according to you Im a good source for Loser content so yay. But I feel like ppl misunderstand him a lot. He neeeever came off as pretentious abt his fame to me, moreso just Accepting and Enjoying it WHICH ISNT BAD he was never rude about it or anything. I do think It's funny how she doesn't do much except just stand around and be strong sometimes and everyone loses their minds ITS SO SILLY . DESERVED