You should check out Total Fantasy Knockout. The author has stated multiple times that the exact nature of the unavoidable queerness of the story is left for the audience to decide and that they just want to cause people to realize things about themselves, lol.

I do get kind of frustrated when transfems claim for their “team” characters whose experiences and stated feelings map really well onto transmasc experiences, but I understand the impulse and at some point we all just need to take what we can get. (For the record, Ranma does not fall into that camp for me because he very much does not seem to have dysphoria, lol)

Hardly anyone reads Ranma as a transmasc character though, mostly because he was born and raised male and his female form is rather new. Instead, he’s typically seen as the transfem egg fantasy of “oh no someone made me become a girl! Oh well, there’s nothing I can do.” In the actual text of the anime/manga, he is pretty adamant that he’s a guy, but mostly seems to want to get rid of his female form because it’s inconvenient (he gets comfortable being seen as a woman pretty quickly). IMO it’s got some genderqueer/gnc flavor, but doesn’t map very well onto more binary trans experiences.

I’m really not a fan of .ml, but I’m not sure I see what’s objectionable in either of these posts.

If it makes you feel any better, I am very confident in my guess that there are cis men your dad and grandpa would call “not real men” either.

Ultimately, if being a boy makes you feel more like “yourself”, that’s enough. Sorry you’re dealing with unaccepting family.

I’ve heard that part of it is a spoiler and part of it is a pun that’s impossible to translate

Best time of year. I love my little octopus skeleton 🐙 💀 💕

Imo,

It makes sense for a hospital birth record (not a government document) to note “observed sex at birth”, alongside other measurements like length and weight, since it’s a medical record and gives then a moderately good first guess about internal organs.

It makes sense for drivers license and passport to have “gender expression” alongside hair and eye color, height, weight and if you wear glasses. Everything in that section is self-reported and helps make sure you’re the person on the document, but they’re all things that can be situationally different or go out of date. With how dimorphic our fashion is culturally, gender expression can be pretty identifying, similar to the other qualities.

Every other government document has no business recording sex or gender in any capacity. Neither of them is the government’s business.

Ya, I’ve bounced off a couple non-fromsoft soulslikes and they always seem to forget that the games are tying to build you up by challenging you rather than tear you down by defeating you. I can definitely see how those kinds of harsh dev vs player type games could feed into a mindset of “it’s everyone for themselves and i will come out on top”

It’s weird because (having only played elden ring) I’ve always felt like I’ve got support from others even though I play solo. There are so many helpful and encouraging messages, from “beware of right” to “don’t give up!” to “well done o well done”, that it always feels like I’ve got a bunch of people at my back, even though I still need to do all the work myself. Even the ghosts give the impression that we’re all going through this together.

Maybe it’s just a thing where you get out the same type of energy you put into it.

It might be a countable/uncountable noun thing, lol. Like, I wouldn’t consider Dan Da Dan s2 to be “a new show” but i would consider it to be “some new animation”, if that makes sense. “Anime” can be used in either sense and since it doesn’t change when pluralized it can be hard to tell which someone means. At the same time, I stand by what I said that “[x show] is returning and it’s still very good” and “[y show] is new and it’s very good” are statements with fairly different target audiences.

Hype!!

IMO it’s a little weird to fill a “best new anime” list almost half with returning anime. Like, they’re not wrong picks, but people are either already planning to watch them or they’re not caught up.

It’s very good, but for anyone planning on watching it: take the content warnings EXTREMELY seriously. The show does not mess around.

I’ve also heard there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, so it’s not 100% suffering. But golly gee wiz is there still a lot of suffering.

I’m pretty sure the people complaining about child sexualization in anime are not the same people supporting child beauty pageants and child marriage…

If it were a series of strategies to attempt to reduce the number of pedo/incest anime (not just outlawing them, but influencing the market with regulation of advertising and/or broadcast content), I might be tentatively on board, but something tells me it’s going to be more about censoring blood and gore, queerness, and maybe even themes of fighting against authority, depending on how ambitious they get.

I get really salty when people point at patterns in anime that are sort of objectively bad and claim that they’re fine because that’s “just Japanese culture”. Like, I’m really tired of being told I’m overreacting when I say maybe anime shouldn’t glamorize pedo shit or make characters that are racist or homophobic stereotypes. Save “it’s just Japanese culture” for when I’m complaining about the cute mascot character’s annoying verbal tic, lol.

Also, this isn’t specifically an anime thing, nor is it specifically a western thing, but I get a little frustrated with “it’s just fiction”. Fiction is constructed out of the worldview of the creator(s) and will always contain at least some of their ways of thinking. All art contains some meaning to it, and teasing apart exactly what a piece of art is trying to say is typically both useful and fulfilling.

There’s an episode of Eminence in Shadow where one of the girls has a little plushie of Shadow-sama and I was APPALLED to learn that I could not buy such a thing. Every bit of merch for that show seems to be of the girls and all i want is my own little Shadow-sama!

I’m with Clevatess on this one. Humanity probably should be destroyed.

This doesn’t appear to be doing anything new (at least so far) but Cloverworks’ gorgeous animation and direction really sell it regardless. Everyone’s very cute and I’m eager to see them grow. I give the premiere a 4/5.

P.S. netflix please let this out of jail, what is wrong with you