#if you don't want to address period-typical homophobia you can just ignore it. most people will not care

[17yearcicada]

i will never understand why fandoms with a historical setting insist on making like 70% of the fanfiction modern aus... the history aspect is literally what makes it interesting hello...

[buzzkillgirls]

ohhhhkay because it seems everyone is weighing in on this discourse (btw. i'm not chronically online. feel free to disagree and reply in a normal way but please don't start actual aggressive discourse in the replies please i don't really care that much) the way i see mizu's gender identity is this:

mizu is, first and foremost, a racial minority. mizu is a mixed race person. this is the driving center of her story, as you can tell by both her name and the literal name of the show blue eye samurai. it's essential to who she is as a person.

it's not bad to headcanon mizu as a trans man/nonbinary/any other non-cis interpretation. i'd disagree saying that she's trans-coded, but the show deals with gender and she presents masc, and i can understand that people might want to relate to her.

what's bad is white queers refusing to engage with her actual character traits (being biracial) and addressing her being trans before they ever address her being half-white. there's nothing wrong with hcing folks as trans, but white queer folks in fandom should be able to like characters outside of those characters being headcanoned as queer. it's racist to ignore the character of color's canon struggles and to only engage with characters of color through the lens of white queer's projection of their white queer identity.

this might get touchier, but i also don't think it's transphobic to go "gender doesn't *work like that* in edo period japan- many folks are looking at this story from a lens it is fundamentally not designed to be viewed by. we can see this unintentionally eurocentric lens in stuff like fanfiction tagged with and including "period-typical homophobia" even though homosexuality was perfectly normal in edo japan because the shame associated with it is very much a post-christian thing. plus, it would more be a "engage with her struggles being afab" than "say she's 100% a woman" thing, because in edo japan, i'm lowkey sure mizu's story would be more focused on her gender being "born afab" than any of the 21st century luxury of thinking abt gender in a conceptual "i identify as" way.

most people are taking other people's headcanons in bad faith. i don't think yall r intentionally being racist and obtuse if you happen to love or relate to a trans interpretation of mizu. there's room to explore her gender, it's nice to relate to characters, it's been left somewhat up to interpretation in-show, etc. transmasc mizu isn't inherently wrong! i also don't think it's fair to say that people are being transphobic if they disagree with a trans interpretation of mizu- most folks saying this are just having a communication gap in which they're biting back at White Queers for doing the whole "only engaging in white queer projection for this female character of color" thing.