Tag: LGBT

Posted on in Manga

The Manga Shelf: Unexpected Queer Romance in the B-Plot of I BELONG TO THE BADDEST GIRL AT SCHOOL

The Manga Shelf is a column where I go over whatever I’ve been reading recently in the world of manga. Ongoing or complete, good or bad. These articles contain spoilers.

I should not be writing this. I am, at the moment, ill, with something that is giving me an absolute monster of a headache, stuffing up my sinuses, and just generally making me feel like a wreck. I intended to fully take this week off, both to physically recover and to recuperate from a bout of burnout. Yet, here I am, because if there’s one thing that can bring me back to life, if only for the hour or so it’s taken me to pen this, it’s lesbians. Never accuse me of being an unbiased journalist.

I Belong to The Baddest Girl at School is a fairly straightforward romcom manga. It certainly has its edges, and we’ll come to them in a moment, but for the most part you—or at least I, as a non-connoisseur of the genre—could not distinguish this from any other manga of its type at a glance. The main character is Unoki, a meek, shy boy, who falls for Toromaru, a tiny, feisty powderkeg of a boss girl who embodies every possible distinction between that term and “girlboss.” They’re pretty great together, in a tropey but pleasant sort of way. If the manga were only about them, it’d probably still be just fine. There’s a nice core thesis about not changing yourself just because society tells you to, and about finding someone who loves you for who you truly are. The sorts of things that would ring a bit hollow if the manga were solely about a single straight couple.

But this article is not about a single straight couple, as you’ve probably guessed from its title.

Yuri is having a bit of a cultural moment again, as several titles are currently airing as anime or are about to be in the near future (to say nothing of the return of the likes of, say, Birdie Wing, or the largely self-contained fanbase that “Miyazawan Yuri” has accrued in recent years) but Baddest Girl isn’t yuri. Nothing here even really speaks the same language as yuri, which has rhythms and archetypes all its own. Instead, to my pleasant surprise, I feel like I’ve discovered an example of convergent evolution.

Baddest Girl‘s obligate backup characters, of the sort who tend to stand around and comment on the A-Couple’s relationship, are Yutaka and Matsuri, respectively a serious straight-man type (ironically enough) with a chilly disposition, and a lunkheaded ruffian with a fixation on Toromaru herself and a tendency to get the wrong idea about things. We learn pretty early on that, far from simply orbiting around Unoki and Toromaru’s relationship, they have one of their own. Matsuri thinks of herself and Yutaka as best friends while nursing her sorta-crush on her boss. Yutaka, meanwhile, is a very different story, and it’s clear that she holds romantic feelings for Matsuri. There isn’t any ambiguity here, and some of the manga’s fairly rare spots of true angst come from the fact that Yutaka simply assumes that she and Matsuri aren’t compatible; less because Matsuri is straight (she’s not) and more because of her whole deal with Toromaru.

Now again, Baddest Girl is mostly not about Yutaka and Matsuri, which means that A) their side of the story progresses fairly slowly until a certain specific point, and B) it’d be easy for the cynically minded to write off their presence (and any implied feelings between them) as, basically, bait for a male audience. Baddest Girl did, after all, serialize in Young Ace UP, a seinen web-magazine, during its 2017-2021 run, and it’s hard to argue that their designs aren’t at least slightly meant to get more eyes on the manga. But this would downplay the fact that despite not being omnipresent through the manga’s 77 chapters, Yutaka and Matsuri are some of its strongest characters.

When Baddest Girl cashes in that built-up emotional connection to make it clear that it’s taking Yutaka’s feelings very seriously, it completely works, because we’ve already been following these characters for a while at that point. We know that they’ve been close for years, we know that Yutaka changed her whole sense of style because Matsuri thinks she looks “cooler” if she dresses like an old-school delinquent. So, later in the manga, when Yutaka confesses in a sudden sputtering overflow of emotion after Matsuri brings up the possibility of leaving town after she graduates, it makes a perfect sort of emotional sense. She actually steals a kiss from Matsuri, the sort of thing that is not really ever OK in real life but has a long enough heritage in romantic fiction that I’m willing to let Baddest Girl off here.

At the end of it all, the only thing Matsuri is actually at all mad about is that Yutaka didn’t tell her sooner. Yutaka pledged to always stay by Matsuri’s side several years before trying to actually date her. One can understand Matsuri’s (ultimately fairly mild) frustration at not being trusted a little more.

Even then, she gets over it pretty quick, and the two transition from friends to girlfriends with admirably little further drama; Matsuri even returns the kiss that Yutaka stole from her. Hilariously, this also means that by the manga’s end, Yutaka and Matsuri have actually gone farther, in terms of physical intimacy, than our leads. Unoki and Toramaru are still at the handholding stage as of the manga’s final chapter.

As much as I’m hyping this up as different or daring, the truth is, of course, that Baddest Girl isn’t unique in this regard at all. Even Kaguya-sama: Love is War!, probably the genre’s current gold standard in terms of intersecting popularity and quality, tosses in a bone to this effect very late in its run despite otherwise being straight as an arrow. (It’s one of that manga’s few flaws, I’d argue.) But what is rare is for the queer subtext to have that “sub” cut out entirely, and moreover, in a way that is both structurally elegant and actually reinforces the manga’s core points. Sure, you can, again, be a cynic about it and write all this off as pandering, or as the product of the author’s own interests. But that fails to account for the emotional weight it’s given (and, in fact, that the author is a woman). Plus, the very fact that these characters exist in this story, one that is not actually, really, about them, and feel so normal within it, is its own kind of victory. It’s true that we, as queer people, do need our own stories, but there’s a lot to be said about showing up in the backgrounds of others’ stories, too. In real life, few people have exclusively friends of their own sexual orientation, and it’s nice to see a manga that’s otherwise pretty heavy on tropes and archetypes reflect that. It even folds Yutaka and Matsuri’s relationship back into their usual dynamic, which takes on a flirtatious edge for the final few chapters of the manga, given that they’re now officially a couple.

As far as I can surmise, Baddest Girl was never crazy popular or anything, but mangaka Ui Kashima has kept working (currently, she’s penning the VTuber-themed romcom Liver Diver Lover, which has a beautiful tongue twister of an English title) and I hope she takes what fandom Baddest Girl did manage to pick up as a mandate to keep being herself.

As for me, well, I am going back to bed. See you next week, and hopefully no sooner. (Seriously, I need to rest.)

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Posted on in anime, Misc. Anime

Apathy Is Not The Answer: The Anime Fan Community Needs To Defend Its Most Vulnerable Members

I don’t normally write things like this. I so don’t normally write things like this that I’m at something of a loss as to how to start this post. The specific catalyst for this post is a notice from Anilist moderators Mex and Electrochemist that they’re stepping down as staff members, but the issues here are reflective of a wider cultural problem in the English-speaking anime fan community, and one that it cannot afford to ignore in a world that is increasingly being forced to reckon with status quos that some of us (including myself) have long been privileged enough to take for granted.

This has been a recurring theme in English otakudom over the past several years. Recently, prominent fan space /r/Animemes finally banned use of the term “trap” to describe feminine AMAB characters. This specific issue has long been a point of contention in anime fan spaces, and it’s useful to discuss here as it both relates to my own specific experiences (I am a transwoman) and is a microcosm of the aforementioned broader problems. /r/Animemes did not take the “sudden” rules change kindly, and one can find a majority of its community mocking the staff even several days later.

Astolfo from Fate/Grand Order. A character who the term in question is often applied to. (It is worth noting that Astolfo’s gender identity is never explicitly disclosed by the text and is listed as “a secret” on their character card).

The arguments for the use of the term “trap” (and I do apologize to my fellow LGBTQ+ persons but I will be using the term in this post for demonstrative purposes) tend to come in one of several flavors. Given my preference for assuming good faith, I tend to believe that most people who defend the term genuinely believe these arguments. (There is certainly a contingent of those who do not but continue to use them in bad faith, but active malice is beyond the scope of this post.)

The first prominent argument is that “trap” is a “term of endearment”. Setting aside the curious logic that one’s intent in saying something absolves them of all blame regardless of what that something is, this is not true, and is a recent post-hoc justification for the term. The origins of “trap” to mean “a character treated as male by the text but who looks feminine or androgynous” are in fact rather murky.

The issue is that regardless of where it may come from, it has, in fact, been applied to actual AMAB people who present femininely (mostly transwomen, though hardly just us), evidence of which is unfortunately scattered to Twitch chats and the like. There is also a larger history of “trap” being used specifically against transwomen as a slur that dates back to at least the ’70s.

I don’t blame straight or cis persons for not knowing this (many queer people do not!), and I am not a linguist and am thus unqualified to say whether the two terms are etymologically related, but the conflation is certainly present. Thus, when transwomen see the term “trap” being applied to characters who share some of their characteristics, it can be hurtful. That is, ultimately, all anyone wants out of the issue, the acknowledgement that it can be hurtful and, ideally, willful abandonment of the term.

(As a side note and to deflect the obvious. I am aware of the minority of queer persons who call themselves “traps” and are attempting to reclaim the term. A distinction must be drawn here: that is the right of a queer person, not anyone else. Wiktionary in fact defines all of these senses of the term right in a row.)

The second is the frankly rather ridiculous claim that asking people to refrain from hurtful language constitutes a loss of “freedom of speech”. Freedom of speech arguments are tricky in general, because despite what one might assume, there is not actually a consensus on what the term means. (There is a lengthy section on Wikipedia’s page on the subject about how it is interpreted from place to place. It is a genuinely fascinating and difficult area of law, and I encourage the interested to look into it.)

Regardless, it is not commonly held to apply in opt-in/opt-out internet communities. Were Anilist, /r/Animemes, and so on, public forums of import, one might have an argument, but they are not. No one is advocating for a ban of discussing characters who this term may be taken to apply to, they are just being asked to use a less offensive label, something quite reasonable and simple to do.

But this, of course, is all quite specific. The broader issue is a lack of consideration. I do not wish to levy accusations here beyond the bare minimum, but I have spoken to many people, some close friends, who have been driven away from anime as an artform and from anime communities as a space because of sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and so on. This is not to say that “everyone needs to like anime”, because that is certainly not true. But if you don’t think that the simple fact of people being shitty to others causes this kind of harm is at the very least, regrettable, then you’re not an anime fan, you’re a bigot. Anime fan behavior can put people off of an artform they might have otherwise loved, and if you are a reasonable person you must recognize that that sucks. For the many differences we may have, what unites anime fans is our passion for the art that we love. Depriving someone else of that passion is despicable.

It’s hardly definitive but I feel this flash poll, in which over half of my followers (who are mostly queer, anime fans, or both) responded in the positive, is indicative of general sentiment.

And this brings us back to that opening paragraph. I liked Anilist (and still like Anilist!) in part because it seemed like a place where the staff actually kind of, you know, cared. To see two of the staff members most active in fighting harmful rhetoric step down is heartbreaking, and feels telling. I have no insider information about Anilist’s inner workings, but Mex’s comments do not inspire great faith in me that the site will be a haven for marginalized otaku going forward. The worst part, of course, is that is exactly what the tiny minority of those who are actively hateful instead of simply apathetic–the ones who this post is not aimed at, because there is no convincing them–want.

I would here call on the members of Anilist’s administration to really consider if they want Anilist to simply be “another anime listing site” or if they want to expend the (admittedly not trivial!) effort to make it a genuinely better community.

But of course, this is not specifically about Anilist. This problem permeates the entire English-speaking anime fan community, an unwelcome and ugly relic of the era where the biggest places to discuss anime online in English were 4chan and related communities. A problem whose biggest offenders actively want to continue this status quo.

I have seen some sign that things are changing, with the rise of several prominent queer video essayists who work in anime spaces (including Digi-nee, who came out only after achieving prominence and managed to keep most of her viewers) being a good sign that there is still an audience for this stuff that hasn’t been driven off by the worst of the worst, but these spaces must be actively protected. Apathy is not enough, and standing idly by accomplishes nothing. I am not excluding myself from this call to action, it is easy to pretend that all marginalized groups are fundamentally the same (something, upon editing this article, I myself am trying my damnedest not to do) but the fact of the matter is that everyone needs different accommodations and the ugly undercurrent present in anime fan spaces affects us all differently even as the root cause remains more or less the same.

If I can end this with a plea, it’s this. Consider your words, consider who they may affect. If someone asks you to change your ways, listen instead of arguing. We need to do better, because pretending there is nothing wrong will not solve anything.

Generally I end my articles with a pre-cut footer template. Here, instead, I will simply ask that if you found this article any sort of helpful, consider following me on Twitter.