#spring 22 trends

[merakisphere]

Five years ago I thought it would be a neat idea to try and make my favourite trinket of all time (3D wire mandala). So I found myself some copper wire, beads, a set of pliers and began tinkering. 5 years later, I make these wonderful multi-purpose pieces for lovely people all over the world full-time, and I couldn't be happier.

The ingredients for making a 3D wire mandala:

122.5 inches of electroplated copper wire (gold, silver, black)

14 funky beads (8mm size)

7 pieces of banding wire (22 gauge)

A one step looper and bent-nose pliers

and a lot of patience.. XD The next step in my small shop journey is to transition from selling on Etsy to my own website. Don't get me wrong, Etsy has been amazing for me as someone who wanted to open their own handmade shop but didn't know where to start, however, it is now time for me to spread my wings and (hopefully) fly. fingers crossed

Use code TUMBLR at checkout for a special discount just for discovering my work on here! PLUS checkout using PayPal and receive a FREE Spring Bloom Orbi-Loop with your purchase. (yes, I ship worldwide too!) Finally, don't forget to follow me as I am preparing a full-fledge tutorial (for free) to teach others how to make this on their own! It'lI be such a fun at-home craft project that I hope others will enjoy as much as I do!

PS: Sorry if this isn't blaze worthy. Just had a few extra credits available from Tumblr.

PPS: Style in video is Purple Nova (silver wire/standard size)

[thelibraryghost]

A Young Person's Introduction to Early 20th-Century Western Fashion

am i hip with the kids yet

General information Dotschkal, Janna. "1920's." FOUND. October 21, 2016. English Heritage. "Fashion Through History: Episode 3 – 1930s." YouTube. April 16, 2023. Rudolph, Nicole. "The History of Standardized Sizes in Womens Fashion and Why They FAILED." YouTube. May 16, 2021. Vintagebursche. "100 Years of Classic Menswear - and what we can learn from each decade." YouTube. February 29, 2020. Zebrowska, Karolina. "1920s Fashion Is Not What You Think It Is." YouTube. May 20, 2018.

Accessories Cox, Abby. "Flappers, Y2K, & Capitalism are Why Women "Don't" Have Pockets." YouTube. January 12, 2023. Cox, Abby. "The Disappointing Truth On Why We Don't Wear Hats Anymore..." YouTube. December 18, 2022. Rudolph, Nicole. "The History of the Iconic Cloche Hat: Making 1920s Fashion." YouTube. September 18, 2022. Rudolph, Nicole. "When Hats were Illegal: Sewing a Goth Edwardian Hat." YouTube. February 21, 2021. Sheehan, Sarah. "Neo-Egyptomania." PatternVault. December 31, 2022. Zebrowska, Karolina. "Why Did We Stop Wearing Hats?" YouTube. April 28, 2020.

Cosmetics Banner, Bernadette. "Making and Testing a Victorian Skincare Routine." YouTube. April 8, 2023. English Heritage. "1930s Makeup Tutorial | History Inspired | Feat. Amber Butchart and Rebecca Butterworth." YouTube. December 18, 2018. Holland, Evangeline. "On How to Be Lovely." Edwardian Promenade. April 15, 2010. Rudolph, Nicole. "The Controversial History of Color Season Analysis." YouTube. November 4, 2023.

Fabrics Rudolph, Nicole. "The History of Elastic." YouTube. July 4, 2021. Rudolph, Nicole. "Wearing Overalls to Boycott Fashion Greedflation? Weird History of 1920." YouTube. March 16, 2024.

Gowns and formal wear Banner, Bernadette. "I Redesigned Mary Poppins' Jolly Holiday Dress Based on REAL Edwardian Lingerie Gowns." YouTube. February 20, 2021. Banner, Bernadette. "I Remade Mary Poppins’ Dress to be Actually Edwardian." YouTube. July 9, 2022. Cox, Abby. "Alexander McQueen & the Patriarchy Problem in Modern Fashion." YouTube. October 20, 2023. Cox, Abby. "What Makes a Gown Haute Couture (like House of Worth) in Victorian and Edwardian Eras?" YouTube. September 19, 2021. Lady Rebecca Fashions. "An Edwardian Woman's Fashion Evolution." YouTube. June 4, 2022. Oakes, Leimomi. "Terminology: what is a lingerie dress or lingerie frock? (and blouse, and skirt)." The Dreamstress. July 21, 2018. Rudolph, Nicole. "Stop Idolizing Coco Chanel: a shocking history of theft." YouTube. January 13, 2024. Rudolph, Nicole. "The Truth about the Fringed Flapper: Making 1920s Evening Dresses." YouTube. November 6, 2022. Vintagebursche. "1920s Theme Party - How to dress." YouTube. December 9, 2023. Zebrowska, Karolina. "1920s Fashion Encyclopedia, Pt 1: Daywear." YouTube. November 27, 2019.

Hair care and styling Banner, Bernadette. "I Tried Following a Real Edwardian Hair Care Routine." YouTube. May 12, 2020. Lady Rebecca Fashions. "Getting Dressed in the Edwardian Era / Gibson Girl Hairstyle Tutorial." YouTube. June 12, 2020. Lady Rebecca Fashions. "Titanic-era Hair Tutorial // Getting Dressed in the 1910's." YouTube.September 4, 2020. SnappyDragon. "Historical hair myths debunked : How often should you wash your hair—daily shampoo or no shampoo?" YouTube. August 12, 2022. Zebrowska, Karolina. "Weird Edwardian Beauty Tips." YouTube. February 11, 2017.

Laundry and starching Banner, Bernadette. "Ok but how did the Edwardians WASH these dresses?" YouTube. August 3, 2022.

Outerwear Cox, Abby. "Athleisure: Destroying Fashion & the Environment." YouTube. January 18, 2024. Rudolph, Nicole. "150 years of Masc Women causing a Moral Panic." YouTube. June 17, 2023. Rudolph, Nicole. "The History of Jeans, T-shirts, and Hoodies: Time Travel 101." YouTube. March 20, 2022. Zebrowska, Karolina. "SPRING/SUMMER FASHION TRENDS REVIEW but it's 1936 (ft. original fabric samples!)." YouTube. April 22, 2022.

Shoes Rudolph, Nicole. "I Made Witchy Edwardian Shoes by Hand!" YouTube. March 14, 2021. Rudolph, Nicole. "Making 100 year old Comfy Slippers: Free Pattern!" YouTube. December 30, 2023. Rudolph, Nicole. "The Myth of Tiny Feet "Back Then"." YouTube. September 26, 2021. Rudolph, Nicole. "The True History of Stiletto Heels : the battle between Ferragamo and Dior." YouTube. August 26, 2023. Zebrowska, Karolina. "Why Is No One Talking About 1930s Shoes?" YouTube. September 15, 2020.

Undergarments Banner, Bernadette. "1903 Patented Bustle Pad Reconstruction." YouTube. June 8, 2019. Banner, Bernadette. "Achieving That Classic Edwardian Shape: Reconstructing a 1902 Bust Bodice." YouTube. April 16, 2020. Lady Rebecca Fashions. "So What are Guimpes Anyway? // Examining Antique Edwardian Guimpes." YouTube. August 21, 2020. Lady Rebecca Fashions. "They Wore Corsets in the 1920's?!" YouTube. January 29, 2022. Rudolph, Nicole. "Did Brassieres End the Corset?" YouTube. February 28, 2021. Rudolph, Nicole. "Dressing in Edwardian Clothing: Undergarments and Layers of 1907." YouTube. November 1, 2020. Rudolph, Nicole. "How Flappers got their Figure: the 1920s Silhouette." YouTube. July 10, 2022. SnappyDragon. "How pin-up photos fooled dress history : the making and marketing of lingerie pictures." YouTube. April 1, 2023.

[sflow-er]

I saw the YR confessions poll, and while I wouldn’t say I ship Walty, I enjoy reading them sometimes. And I particularly like your version of them! Please don’t despair. Your stories are wonderful and your versions of these characters are so compelling 🧡

Thank you anon for your incredibly kind words, and for reading and enjoying my stories about Henry and Walter! Your message made me smile 🧡

I'm sure there are people out there who, like you, enjoy the occasional Walty fic even if they don't ship them! But conversely, I think there are also a lot of people who will vote to ship on these polls (the more ships, the better!) but aren't actually interested in fics or posts about them.

[Putting a cut here because as usual, this turned into a rambling thought piece]

The fact is that most viewers simply don't get attached to minor side characters, and that's particularly understandable when it comes to the Hillerska students in YR. I've noticed that many fans are not only indifferent to these characters, but they actively dislike them. A lot of people never forgave them for shunning Simon in S1, and the glimpses we saw of their elitism in S3 didn't do them any favours either. They represent a world that Simon doesn't fit into and Wille is meant to break loose from.

I regularly see posts questioning how anyone could like these characters, and even the occasional bad faith take on why they are popular. I assume those people are in the minority; the majority just scroll past posts or fics about Walty, Stedrika & co because they simply have no interest in exploring them further. (I keep thinking of how someone once told me directly that they couldn't stand any of the privileged brats, which was why they hadn't read my fics.)

In the immediate aftermath of S3, there was in fact a small surge in enthusiasm for Walty, as the meadow scene moved their relationship from "strictly platonic" to "open to interpretation" in many people's eyes. In my poll on their canon status, the result of 42.9% shippers/fans was probably skewed by my followers being more likely to ship than the average YR fan, but there was also very real excitement on their tumblr and ao3 tags. Many new posts and fics (by non-Wilmon standards), good responses to those, and new kudos/hits on older fics too.

However, that surge was virtually over by May, and since then, interest seems to have plummeted. Walty still appear in some fics as a side ship or as part of an ensemble, and there's one post-S3 WIP focused on them that has 130 kudos, but there have been very few new tumblr posts or fics focused on them since the spring. When people do make posts or publish fics, they don't get much of a response.

Of course, the immediate reasons are many fans moving on from YR as a whole since canon ended, and summer happening in between. But if we disregard those and just look at the fandom at any given time, there is a definite "Wilmon only" trend that I feel has grown stronger as the fandom has grown smaller. (Here's a link to my thoughts on said trend after S2.)

Take, for example, the fic numbers for other ships on ao3 (for the sake of clarity, I'm only including fics tagged with /): 121 Salice, 110 Walty, 86 Stedrika, 28 Vingust, 23 Madirosh, 22 Nilcent, 21 Sigust, 5 Vindie, 2 Madisander, 2 Nilgust. Plus 106 Sircus and 92 Sargust, but few of them are shipfics.

Even if these were all separate fics focused on each ship, they would only make 420 (+198) to Wilmon's 4,799 fics as of this morning. In reality, most of them are either fics primarily focused on Wilmon with other ships on the side or in the background, or multi-ship fics.

To bring this back to Walty, those 110 fics make six pages on ao3. If you sort them by kudos, only five fics on the first page are primarily focused on them, with 1,227 (OPS in which Wilmon are prominent side characters), 561, 517, 469 and 423 kudos. There are way more Walty-focused fics on the second page, but the decline in kudos is pretty steep. The bottom of page two is already down to less than 200, and only the very top of page four is over 100.

As a non-Wilmon author, I do find it sad how often I see people say that they aren't interested in anything else. I don't blame anyone for feeling that way - it was Wilmon's story that hooked us all in the first place! Everyone should get to enjoy fandom in their own way, and there's a strong sense of community in people being obsessed with the same ship and keeping it alive with all their love and creativity.

But for those of us who are also interested in the other aspects, the heavy focus on Wilmon can become a demoralising cycle. New fans coming into the fandom don't see much enthusiasm for other ships or characters, which means they don't get invested in them, which means there's even less incentive to create more fanworks or posts about them. There are no subcommunities for us; just the outer perimeter of the already small YR community.

For me, personally... Let's just say it has been an adjustment to go from OPS, which had 700 to 1,200 hits per update, to TRD where 200 hits per update are a windfall. That's partly my own fault for taking too long between updates (creative burnout is a bitch) and insisting on such a niche angle (ace/allo fics simply aren't as popular as allo/allo). But interest in Walty has also been on a steady downward trend I would say since the long wait for S3, and the brief upturn after S3 was very likely the last one. It's good to set my expectations accordingly the next time I post something.

Which I fully intend to do! I still have one or two new stories to tell and one WIP to rework and finish, and the "write for myself" approach is working for now. The "share for others" part will be harder than ever, but I'm keeping faith in my small group of loyal readers. Some of them may have been swept away by other things, but some have already reassured me they'll be there.

So you don't have to worry about me throwing in the towel just yet, dear anon, but thank you again for your supportive message! It really means a lot in light of everything I wrote above 💜

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Tamara Pietzke

Published: Feb 5, 2024

For six years I worked at a hospital that said all teenagers with gender dysphoria must be affirmed. I quit my job to blow the whistle.

I know from firsthand experience what hard times are. Though I had a happy childhood, raised as the middle child by working-class parents in Washington State, my mom died of ovarian cancer when I was 22. 

After that, my family fell apart. I felt lost and alone. 

I decided to become a therapist because I didn’t want anyone to go through what I had, feeling like no one on this planet cares about them. At least they can say their therapist does. 

I earned my master’s in social work from the University of Washington in 2012, and I have worked as a therapist for over a decade in the Puget Sound area. Most recently, I was employed by MultiCare, one of the largest hospital systems in the state. 

For the six years I was there, I worked with hundreds of clients. But in mid-January, I left my job because of what I will go on to describe.

The therapeutic relationship is a special one. We are the original “safe space,” where people are able to explore their darker feelings and painful experiences. The job of the therapist is to guide a patient to self-understanding and sound mental health. This is a process that requires careful assessment and time, not snap judgments and confirmation of a patient’s worldview.

But in the past year I noticed a concerning new trend in my field. I was getting the message from my supervisors that when a young person I was seeing expressed discomfort with their gender—the diagnostic term is gender dysphoria—I should throw out all my training. No matter the patient’s history or other mental health conditions that could be complicating the situation, I was simply to affirm that the patient was transgender, and even approve the start of a medical transition.

I believe this rise of “affirmative care” for young people with gender dysphoria challenges the very fundamentals of what therapy is supposed to provide. 

I am a 36-year-old single mother of three young kids all under the age of six. I am terrified of speaking out, but that fear pales in comparison to my strong belief that we can no longer medicalize youth and cause them potentially irreversible harm. The three patients I describe below explain why I am taking the risk of coming forward.

* * *

Last spring, I started seeing a new client, who at 13 years old had one of the most extreme and heartbreaking life stories I’ve ever heard. (For the sake of clarity, I am referring to all patients by their biological sex.)

My patient’s mother has bipolar disorder and was so abusive to my patient that the mother was given a restraining order. My patient was sexually assaulted by an older cousin, by one of her mother’s boyfriends, and also once at school by a classmate. Her diagnoses include depression, PTSD, anxiety, intermittent explosive disorder, and autism. She is being raised by her mother’s ex-boyfriend (not the one who assaulted her).

The year before I started seeing her, when she was 11, she was hospitalized for talking about committing suicide. Later that year, a pediatrician diagnosed her with gender dysphoria after she started to question her gender. The pediatrician referred her to Mary Bridge Children’s Gender Health Clinic, whose clinicians recommended she take medicine to suppress her periods and that she think about starting testosterone.

Mary Bridge, MultiCare’s pediatric hospital, runs the gender clinic for minors and employs nurses, social workers, dietitians, and endocrinologists, who provide gender-affirming care, which includes prescribing hormones to young patients who question their gender. In order to get that prescription, patients first need a recommendation letter from a therapist. Because Mary Bridge is a part of MultiCare, their patients were often referred to therapists like me who were in their system.

In an April 2022 blog post, a Mary Bridge social worker wrote that the gender clinic’s referrals increased from less than five a month in 2019 to more than 35 a month in 2022. In May 2022, the clinic received a $100,000 donation from Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute “to study health care disparities” in transgender youth.

The clinic operates in Washington, one of the states with some of the most lenient legislation on gender transition for youth. In May 2023, the state legislature passed a law guaranteeing that youth seeking a medical gender transition can stay at Washington shelters—and the shelters are not required to notify their parents.

Because of my patient’s autism, it was difficult for us to engage in introspective conversations. During our first visit, she came over to my desk to show me extremely sadistic and graphic pornographic videos on her phone. She stood next to me, hunched over, hyper-fixated on the videos as she rocked back and forth. She told me during one session that she watched horror and porn movies growing up because they were the only ones available in her house.

She showed up to our therapy sessions in disheveled, loose-fitting clothes, her hair greasy, her eyes staring down at the ground, her face covered by a Covid mask almost like a protective layer. She went by a boy’s name, but she never raised gender dysphoria with me directly—though one time she told me she would get mad at the sound of her own voice because “it sounds too girly.” When I asked her how she felt about an upcoming appointment at the gender clinic, she told me she didn’t know she had one.

In between scrolling through videos on her phone, she told me how she cried every night in bed and felt “insane.” She described a time when she was eight years old and her mother nearly killed her sister. She remembered her mother being taken away. At times, she would “age-regress,” she told me, by watching Teletubbies and sucking on pacifiers.

When she started seeing me, she had recently threatened to “blow up the school,” which resulted in her expulsion.

I knew I couldn’t solve all of her problems, or make her feel better in just a few therapy sessions. My initial goal was to make her feel comfortable opening up to me, to make the therapy room a place where she was heard and felt safe. I also wanted to try to protect her from falling prey to outside influences from social media, her peers, or even the adults in her life.

With a patient like this, with so many intersecting and overwhelming problems, and with such a tragic history of abuse, it took our first three sessions to get her feeling more comfortable to even talk to me, and to understand the dimensions of her problems. But when I called her guardian last fall to schedule a fourth appointment, he asked me to write her a letter of recommendation for cross-sex hormone treatment. That is, at age 13, she was to start taking testosterone. Such a letter from me begins the process of medical transition for a patient.

In Washington State, that’s all it takes—a few visits with a therapist and a letter, often written using a template provided by one’s superiors—for minors to undergo the irreversible treatments that patients must take for a lifetime.

I was scared for this patient. She had so many overlapping problems that needed addressing it seemed like malpractice to abruptly begin her on a medical gender transition that could quickly produce permanent changes.

The MultiCare recommendation letter Tamara was given for approving the medical treatment of minors with gender dysphoria. I emailed a program manager in my department at MultiCare and outlined my concerns. She wrote back that my client’s trauma history has no bearing on whether or not she should receive hormone treatment.

“There is not valid, evidenced-based, peer-reviewed research that would indicate that gender dysphoria arises from anything other than gender (including trauma, autism, other mental health conditions, etc.),” she wrote.

She also warned that “there is the potential in causing harm to a client’s mental health when restricting access to gender-affirming care” and suggested I “examine [my] personal beliefs and biases about trans kids.”

When Tamara outlined her concerns about giving a patient testosterone to her manager at MultiCare, she was told to “examine your personal beliefs and biases about trans kids.” She then reported me to MultiCare’s risk management team, who removed my client from my care and placed her with a new therapist.

A risk manager’s job is to minimize the hospital’s liability, but in my case, they deemed that my concerns posed a greater risk to my client than giving her a life-altering procedure with no proven long-term benefit.

I shouldn’t have been surprised by this. Just a few months earlier, in September of last year, I was one of over 100 therapists and behavioral specialists at the MultiCare hospital system required to attend mandatory training on “gender-affirming care.”

As hard as it is to believe given my work, I hadn’t heard about gender-affirming care before that moment. I needed to know more. So each night in the week leading up to the training, I searched online for information about gender-affirming care. After putting my kids to bed, I sat glued to my computer screen, losing sleep, horrified at what I found.

I discovered that neither puberty blockers nor cross-sex hormones (testosterone or estrogen) were approved by the Food and Drug Administration as a treatment for gender dysphoria. In fact, prescribing these treatments to kids can have drastic side effects, including infertility, loss of sexual function, increased risk of heart attack, stroke, cardiovascular disease, cancer, bone density problems, blood clots, liver toxicity, cataracts, brain swelling, and even death.

While gender clinicians claim hormonal treatment improved their patients’ psychological health, the studies on this are few and highly disputed.

I found that those experiencing gender dysphoria are up to six times more likely to also be autistic, and they are also more likely to suffer from schizophrenia, trauma, and abuse.

The research also implies that the dramatic rise in these diagnoses across the West likely have a strong element of social contagion. In children ages 6 to 17, there was a 70 percent increase in diagnoses of gender dysphoria in the U.S. from 2020 to 2021. In Sweden there was a 1,500 percent increase in these diagnoses among girls 13–17 from 2008 to 2018.

Yet, countries that were once the pioneers of gender transition medicine are now starting to backtrack. In 2022, England announced it will close its only gender clinic after an investigation uncovered subpar medical care, including findings that some patients were rushed toward gender transitions. Sweden and Finland undertook comprehensive analyses of the state of gender medicine and recommended restrictions on transition of minors.

I decided—though it was potentially dangerous to my career and to me—to ask questions about the findings I discovered.

The training I attended laid out an affirming model of gender care—from pronouns and “social transition” to hormone treatments and surgical intervention. In order for children to be diagnosed with gender dysphoria, the training stated, patients must meet six of eight characteristics, ranging from “a strong desire/insistence of being another gender” to “strong preference for cross-gender toys and games.”

Tamara and her MultiCare colleagues were trained to diagnose gender dysphoria among their young patients when they met six of the eight above characteristics. It was made abundantly clear to all in attendance that these recommendations were “best practice” at MultiCare, and that the hospital would not tolerate anything less.

When the leader of the training brought up hormone treatments, I shakily tapped the unmute button on Zoom and asked why 70 to 80 percent of female adolescents diagnosed with gender dysphoria have prior mental health diagnoses.

She flashed a look of disgust as she warned me against spreading “misinformation on trans kids.” Soon the chat box started blowing up with comments directed at me. One colleague stated it was not “appropriate to bring politics into this” and another wrote that I was “demonstrating a hostility toward trans folks which is [a] direct violation of the Hippocratic Oath,” and recommended I “seek additional support and information so as not to harm trans clients.”

In the training, gender-affirming treatment is presented as “suicide prevention.” As soon as I closed my laptop, I burst into tears. I care so deeply about my clients that even thinking about this now makes me cry. I couldn’t understand how my colleagues, who are supposed to be my teammates, could be so quick to villainize me. I also wondered if maybe my colleagues were right, and if I had gone insane.

Later, my boss reached out to me and told me it was “inappropriate” of me to raise these questions, telling me that a training session was not the proper forum. When I tried to present the evidence that caused me concern—the lack of long-term studies, the devastating side effects—she told me she didn’t have time to read it.

“I am speaking out because nothing will change unless people like me blow the whistle,” Tamara writes. “I am desperate to help my patients.” In retrospect, this ideology had been growing in power for a long time.

I remember in 2019 seeing signs of how gender dysphoria arose among many of my most vulnerable female clients, all of whom struggled with previous psychological problems.

In 2019, I started seeing a 16-year-old client after her pediatrician referred her to me for anxiety, depression, and ADHD. When I first met her, she had long blonde hair covering her eyes, to the point you could barely see her face. It was like she was going through the world trying to be invisible.

In 2020, during the pandemic, she told me she had started reading online a lot about gender, and said she started feeling like she wasn’t a girl anymore.

Around this time, her anxiety became so debilitating she couldn’t leave her house—not even to go to school. After taking a year off school during the pandemic, she enrolled in an alternative school for kids struggling with mental health. I was relieved that she was making friends for the first time, and seemed to be feeling a lot better.

Then she started using they/he pronouns, identified as pansexual, and replaced the skirts and fishnet stockings she often wore with disheveled and baggy clothes. Her long hair became shorter and shorter. She started wearing a binder to flatten her breasts. She tried out a few different names before settling on one that’s gender neutral.

The official diagnosis I gave her was “adjustment disorder”—an umbrella term often applied to young people who are having a hard time coping with difficult and stressful circumstances. It’s the type of diagnosis that doesn’t follow a child forever—it implies that mental distress among kids is often transient.

She came out as transgender to her family in 2021. Her mother was supportive, but her dad wasn’t. Regardless, she went to her pediatrician seeking a referral to a gender clinic.

In 2022, she went to Mary Bridge Children’s Gender Health Clinic for the first time, where the clinicians informed her and her parents that if she didn’t receive hormone replacement therapy, she could be “at increased risk for anxiety, depression, and worsening of mental health/psychological trauma,” according to her patient records. Her dad refused to start his daughter on testosterone, and so all the clinic could do was prescribe birth control to stop her period due to her “menstrual dysphoria,” or distress over getting her period. Which is something I thought all teenage girls experienced.

Five months later, she swallowed a bottle of pills and her mother had to rush her to the emergency room.

By early 2023, my client logged on to our weekly session, which we started doing by Zoom, and she told me she identified as a “wounded male dog.” She explained to me that this was her “xenogender,” a concept she had discovered online, which references gender identities that go “beyond the human understanding of gender.” She said she felt she didn’t have all of the right appendages, and that she wanted to start wearing ears and a tail to truly feel like herself.

I was stunned. All I could do was silently nod along.

After the session, I emailed my colleagues looking for advice. “I want to be accepting and inclusive and all of that,” I wrote, but “I guess I just don’t understand at what point, if ever, a person’s gender identity is indicative of a bigger issue.”

I asked them: “Is there ever a time where acceptance of a person’s identity isn’t freely given?”

The consensus from my colleagues was that it wasn’t a big deal.

“It sounds like this isn’t something that’s ‘broken,’ ” one colleague wrote me back, “so let’s not try to ‘fix’ it.”

“If someone told me they use a litterbox instead of a toilet and they were happy with it and it’s part of their life that brings them fulfillment, then great!” she continued. “I might think it’s weird, but then again, not my life.”

After learning that one of Tamara’s patients identified as “a wounded male dog,” a colleague replied: “If someone told me they use a litterbox instead of a toilet and they were happy with it and it’s part of their life that brings them fulfillment, then great!” I was baffled and alarmed by her unquestioning affirmation. At what point does a change in identity represent a mental health concern, and not something to be celebrated and affirmed? Fortunately, my client never brought up her “xenogender” again. She also isn’t on testosterone due to her father’s disapproval. So I kept these thoughts to myself, and ultimately, in order to keep my job, I let it go.

Another female patient, who transitioned as a teen, serves as a warning of what happens when we passively accept the idea that gender transition will entirely resolve a patient’s mental health issues.

This client, who I started seeing in 2022, is now 23 and rarely leaves the house, spends most of the day in bed playing video games, and envisions no path to working or functioning in the outside world due to a variety of mental health problems. In 2016, this patient was diagnosed with autism, anxiety, and gender dysphoria. Later the diagnoses grew to include depression, Tourette syndrome, and a conversion disorder. In 2018, at age 17, the Mary Bridge Gender Health Clinic prescribed testosterone, despite the fact that this patient is diabetic and one of the hormone’s side effects is that it might increase insulin resistance. The patient’s mother, who has another transgender child, strongly encouraged it.

This patient now has a wispy mustache and a deepened voice, but does not pass as male. It turns out that testosterone, which will be prescribed for life, did not relieve the patient’s other mental illnesses.

My biggest fear about the gender-affirming practices my industry has blindly adopted is that they are causing irreversible damage to our clients. Especially as they are vulnerable people who come to us at their lowest moments in life, and who entrust us with their health and safety. And yet, instead of treating them as we would patients with any other mental health condition, we have been instructed—and even bullied—to abandon our professional judgment and training in favor of unquestioning affirmation.

I am speaking out because nothing will change unless people like me—who know the risks of medicalizing troubled young people—blow the whistle. I am desperate to help my patients.

And I believe, if I don’t speak out, I will have betrayed them.

--

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/26895269.2022.2100644

--

Amidst the scandal, Mary Bridge Children's has deleted the above blog post by self-professed "they/them," Aytch Denaro. However, the internet doesn't forget.

[mariacallous]

As far as mass shootings, go, it was over quickly. Just before midnight on Saturday, a man carrying multiple magazines of ammunition entered the Club Q, a gay bar in Colorado Springs, Colorado, spraying gunfire. As bullets flew, two patrons at the club subdued the attacker by grabbing the gun from him, and hitting him with it. They held him down until police arrived. The first 911 call was made at 11.56pm; the killer was taken into custody at 12.02am. But in those six minutes, five people were killed, including Daniel Aston and Derrick Rump, two men who were tending bar, and Kerry Loving, a partygoer. Eighteen were wounded. As the clock struck midnight, it became a holiday for the bar’s community: Transgender Day of Remembrance, which honors trans people killed in hate attacks, was observed on Sunday.

There’s a grim routine, these days, to the mass shootings in America. Some elements remain constant from shooting to shooting. Usually, the gunman is a young white man, and usually, he has a history of violence against women. There will have been mental health episodes, or previous run-ins with police. But none of this history will have stopped him from getting a gun. American mass shooters tend to use automatic or semi-automatic long guns, the kind that aren’t available to civilians in other countries. Almost always, they purchased them legally.

In the aftermath, the public makes a grim calculus. How many dead? How many wounded? The initial numbers that trickle out through the media tend to tick upward in the following hours and days, as more of the injured arrive in local hospitals and some of the wounded pass away. Americans compare the latest massacre to the others, rationalizing to keep the panic and despair at bay. “That one wasn’t so bad,” we tell ourselves. “Only three were killed.” This has become the price of being in public in America, a psychic tax that we all pay when we leave the house: that the next time, when the next gunman opens fire in a school, or a church, or a grocery store, that one of the anonymous numbers printed in the newspaper will be someone we love.

In the hours after a gunman stormed into Club Q, a morbid kind of box checking began. Yes, it was a young white man who committed the rampage – this time a 22-year-old. Yes, the shooter had a history of violence against women: the attacker was arrested last year after an hours-long standoff with police after making a bomb threat against his mother. He was charged with multiple felonies, but, yes, he still had access to guns. Yes, the killer used an AR-style long gun to murder his victims. And yes, the killer appears to have rightwing ties: he’s the grandson of a far-right California state assemblyman who supported the January 6 insurrection. On Monday, the shooter was charged with five counts of murder and several hate crimes.

There’s a morbid randomness to American gun violence – that fatal combination of scarce mental health treatment and superabundant firearms that makes America, and only America, a place where mass public massacres are common even when the nation is ostensibly at peace. But if the Colorado attack was enabled by America’s pervasive gun violence problem, it seems to have been prompted by the tenor of rightwing media, both broadcast and online, which over the past years has turned a virulent, conspiratorial and obsessively hateful eye towards the LGBT community.

In the coming days, the massacre at Club Q will be cast as an isolated tragedy, and those who point out the right’s complicity in the violence will be accused, with predictable cynicism, of politicizing the tragedy. But what happened in Colorado Springs this past weekend was the foreseeable continuation of a trend of escalating violence targeting gay spaces, and drag shows in particular.

Egged on by conservative politicians, like Lauren Boebert, social media figures, like Libs of TikTok, and traditional media scions, like Tucker Carlson, conservatives have spent the past months consuming the lie that gay and trans people are “groomers” – that is, perverts and pedophiles who want to molest children, or sterilize them, or confuse them into leading different, wrong and lesser lives. In the face of this supposed harm to the innocent, any vengeance can be justified.

The lie that gay people are “grooming” children has provided cover for violent and bigoted displays at LGBT community spaces across the country. Over the past year, drag performances and other LGBT events have been targeted with protests and violent threats in California, Idaho, Georgia, Texas, Florida, Indiana, Oregon, North Carolina and New York. Violent rightwing militia groups, like the Proud Boys and a group calling itself Patriot Front – who wear masks, because they are ashamed to show their faces – have appeared at these events, menacing gay people with threats. Just last month, in Eugene, Oregon, violence erupted outside a drag show when rightwing goons appeared and began throwing rocks and smoke bombs. At that hate rally, as at others, the anti-gay protesters carried semi-automatic rifles. It was only a matter of time before they started using them.

Like most bigots, homophobes know little about the groups they target, and their hatred doesn’t hew to logic. But when pressed, they will say that gay and trans people lack the virtues that they associate with traditional masculinity – virtues like honesty and integrity; courage, discipline and willingness to protect the innocent. But it was two patrons, almost certainly gay themselves, who subdued the attacker at Club Q, risking their lives to spare more bloodshed.

Meanwhile, in Uvalde, police officers armed to the teeth – the paragons of hegemonic masculinity that the right is always insisting we worship – stood by, cowardly and immobile, while a gunman slaughtered little children. If the right sees “manliness” as a virtue, a willingness to risk yourself to help the vulnerable, then you’d think it would be clear to them who the real “men” were.

[the-conversation-pod]

Summer 2023 Lagniappe

We made it to the end of the season, folks! Time for all of the extra discussions that just didn't fit into the structure of the season. Nini and Ben are both from the Caribbean and share the word "lagniappe" which means "a little extra" (kinda like a baker's dozen).

This time we've got quite a few things to discuss, and we also have our first guest! Ben's best friend David joins us for the Season Wrap-Up conversation.

We're going to answer some questions from @ctl-yuejie and @mynameisnotthepoint.

Nini caught up on My Only 12 Percent, Roommates of Poongduck 304, and She Loves to Cook, and She Loves to Eat.

We unpack the eldritch horror that was The Shipper. We will not be discussing it ever again.

We discuss the execution of polyamory in Me, My Husband, and My Husband's Boyfriend.

We then hang out with David and discuss genre history, favorite actors, flops-and-trends, and award our Girl, You Tried award for this season.

Finally, we look ahead to the fall!

Listen on Apple Podcasts!

Listen on Google Podcasts!

Timestamps

The timestamps will now correspond with chapters on Spotify for easier navigation.

0:00 - Welcome 1:15 - Intro 3:14 - Talk Nice to Us 3:36 - How Did We Get into QL, and How Has the Podcast Changed Us? 9:10 - How Does Criticism and Commentary Change Your Viewing Experience? 13:11 - Catch Up Corner 13:59 - My Only 12 Percent 22:52 - Roommates of Poongduck 304 26:14 - She Loves to Cook, and She Loves to Eat 30:09 - The Shipper 59:46 - Next Watches 1:02:33 - Me, My Husband, and My Husband’s Boyfriend 1:15:53 - Spring Roundup 1:16:40 - David Introduction and BL Background 1:18:50 - David’s History with Queer Cinema 1:20:59 - David’s Favorite BL Actors 1:23:24 - David’s Thoughts on the Spring Shows 1:26:15 - Somewhat Forgettable Shows 1:29:25 - Favorite Actor Pairs 1:36:49 - The Changing Nature of BLs 1:39:34 - Girl, You Tried 1:46:56 - Looking Ahead 1:57:44 - Outro

The Conversation: Now With Transcripts!

We received an accessibility request to include transcripts for the podcast. We are working with @ginnymoonbeam on providing the transcripts and @lurkingshan as an editor and proofreader.

We will endeavor to make the transcripts available when the episodes launch, and it is our goal to make them available for past episodes. When transcripts are available, we will attach them to the episode post (like this one) and put the transcript behind a Read More cut to cut down on scrolling.

Please send our volunteers your thanks!

0:00 - Welcome

Nini

Hello, hello! Your QL fandom aunty and uncle are here with giant sunglasses, brown liquor in a flask, a folded five-dollar bill to slip into your hand when no one is looking, lukewarm takes, occasional rides on the discourse, deep dives into artistry and the industry.

Ben

Lots of simping! I’m Ben.

Nini

I’m Nini.

Ben

And this is The Conversation. About once a season, we plan to swan in and shoot the shit on faves, flops, and trends that we’ve been noticing in the BL, GL, or QL Industry. Between seasons, you can find us typing way too many words on Tumblr.

1:15 - Intro

David

Hey, guys. My name is Dave. I'm your new favorite BL B-Asterisk-T-C-H and I'm here to introduce Nini and Ben—who don't really need any introduction, but I'm an extra bitch. So that's why I'm here. They're giving out awards. There's shadin’ shows. They're uplifting some shows, but mostly shade. So, welcome, tune in, have fun, and I'll see you guys in the episode. It's gonna be a lot of me, so be prepared, like, it's a lot. 

Bye, guys!

Nini

We have our first guest on the show—not for the last time, because we had so much fun with David. David's going to be back. 

Ben, what are we talking about? This is the lagniappe.

Ben

So, the lagniappe, as always, is going to be the bits that just didn't fit into the format of the other episodes thematically or in a way that we thought was necessarily interesting. So, we also figured out that Spotify has a question and answer tool and a commenting section, so please use it. We're having a lot of fun with it. 

We're going to answer some questions from some friends of ours—one old, one new. We're going to talk about Nini catching up when She Loves to Cook, and She Loves to Eat, Roommates of Poongduck 304, as well as My Only 12 Percent. Nini and I are going to stare into the abyss and scream about the eldritch horror that was The Shipper. We're gonna promise you all some things for the future. We're gonna talk about a very complicated show in Me, My Husband, and My Husband's Boyfriend. And then finally, with David’s very specific presence here, we're going to unpack the entire spring season and generally qiqi for a bit.

Nini

It's delightful. Y'all are going to have a lot of fun see see you in the episode.

3:14 - Talk Nice to Us

Ben

On to the Talk Nice to Us section! Some of you lovely listeners—we still have not figured out what we wanna call you; please chime in and let us know—has sent us a couple of questions, one from an old friend of mine on Tumblr, and one from a new friend of the show. 

Nini, please take us into the questions.

3:36 - How Did We Get into QL, and How Has the Podcast Changed Us?

Nini

Ok, so the first question is from @ctl-yuejie, and they write, “I am curious how and why you two started watching QL, what your first impressions were, and how they might have changed over time and after starting a podcast about it?” 

So, Ben, how would you answer that question?

Ben

As a known homosexual and amateur cinenophile, [Nini laughs] I was bored and stressed with the Western Queer Cinema when I discovered BL. SOTUS comes out in…2016. I was desperate for a fresh infusion of queer cinema. There was a huge dearth of content happening in the 2010s. 

I really like queer stories, and I really like queer people getting to have fun and have a good time, and one of the things that stood out about SOTUS that felt fresh at the time was how forthright Kongpob was. I also liked that it was giving a commentary on its own society at the time, and I was basically hooked on QL from that point on. 

One, there was just a whole lot more of it—even with the small amount of content we had in 2016, 2017, 2018—there was more time spent with those shows than like all of the queer movies I watched in that year from the West. 

That's why I'm here, and then I met Nini, and she was like, “I want to talk about the shows and I want to do a podcast.” And I was like, “Well let's not think about it. Let's just do it.” 

Now we're here. What about you?

Nini

We talked about some of this stuff in our very first intro episode. I have been around fandom for a really long time. I have been familiar with the concept of BL. Sometime around the end of 2020 or beginning of 2021, some edit of I Told Sunset About You showed up on my YouTube, and I was desperate to find it. Back then it wasn't easily findable. And so, in trying to find it, I cycled through Life: Senjou no Bokura, Gaya Sa Pelikula, and Where Your Eyes Linger before I found I Told Sunset About You finally. 

So I got here at the beginning of 2021, and I just started devouring what I could find. And then, yeah, met Ben on the Tumblrs, and I said to Ben, “Hey, Ben, you write nice about things. I want to do a podcast because I want to do deep dives into some of this stuff.” And Ben said “Bet” and here we are. 

In terms of how my impressions of QL have changed over time and after starting this podcast, I am…familiar with the rhythms of some of this media now, and so things that probably would have irked me at the beginning don't irk me anymore or I enjoy them. I think I watch the shows differently now. When I'm watching I'm always thinking about, “Oh, I wonder what Ben's gonna say about this?” Which is fun! ‘Cause usually I am spot on.

How about you, Ben? How have your thoughts about BL, QL, GL, and fandom changed since starting the podcast?

Ben

One of the useful bits about the podcast versus say…blogging and essay writing is…the conversation itself forces me to think differently about the shows. Like I don't come into the podcast recordings with a bunch of, like, scripts written out for what I want to talk about. I sometimes give us questions to focus on that I think will get us into the meat of what that particular project was trying to dig into. But it's talking with each other and then it's the discussions with other people that really elevate the entire experience for me. 

I think what I've enjoyed the most about the podcast is…I feel like the shows are not one and done anymore. I feel like I'm exiting the very sort of masculine style of fandom engagement—which is mostly watching, memorizing, cataloging—and I'm very much enjoying the transformative part…of fandom where we talk about the shows, unpack them. I find myself being significantly more engaged than I was previously, and it makes me a little more picky about what I watch. 

Like, if I know I'm not going to talk about the show with you I'm far more likely to just dismiss the show.

Nini

It's true. There are some times where just like, “Ugh, God. I mean, if Ben's gonna watch this I guess I'm gonna have to watch it, too.” Doing the show has been really great from that regard in that I have watched things that I would have originally dismissed because of Ben— sometimes I don't love them. But most of the time when Ben says “you should watch this” I find it really worthy. 

9:10 - How Does Criticism and Commentary Change Your Viewing Experience?

@mynameisnotthepoint writes, ”How is your balance with consuming a piece of media and consuming the meta around it? Have you had it happen that the meta around it—reading up on things—completely changed your mind on a series?” 

Ben, has reading meta ever changed your mind about something that you watched?

Ben

The simple answer is yes; the complex answer is no. 

None of us are immune to receiving new inputs from other people, and people read things differently from me. I do find value in other people's perspectives. I like understanding where people are writing from. But it's very rare that somebody saw something in a show that was so groundbreaking that I also didn't see it in the first place. The big beats of the story are rarely something that I missed while participating along the way. We're all pretty smart, and the shows are rarely trying to trick us. So, it's very rare that, like, somebody's like, “Aha! It was the butler in the kitchen with the candlestick!” and I'm like, “How did you predict that?”

Nini

How I prefer to engage with the meta doesn't lead a lot of the time to me changing my mind about a show, but it has happened that I have been…persuaded not out of my particular read but more into seeing another read as valid. In my head I can hold two ideas, so I can be like, “Well this thing, I read it this way. This person read it that way.” I think both of those things can be happening at the same time. I don't feel like my read is exclusive to every other read. 

It's fun to talk to people about these things. I'm with Ben. A lot of the enjoyment in these shows other than watching some of the shows themselves—not all—is in talking to people about the shows and finding out what where their perspectives are coming from and seeing where our perspectives intersect, and where they might run parallel, and where they might conflict, but then how that conflict may not be a conflict at all. It's the twisty intellectual side of things that I really enjoy, and then also just the emotional side—having those conversations, getting to know people through their experience of media and my experience of media. I find that incredibly fun and rewarding. It's one of the reasons that I do the podcast with Ben. 

For me, the answer is yes sometimes my mind is changed by meta, but more often than not my thinking is expanded—not changed—by taking in meta.

Ben

Expand is a good way to describe it. I do think most shows that are good benefit from really invested people with the ability to communicate their thoughts sharing them determinedly week in week out. I'm a big fan of meta, basically. 

Keep writing! If you listen to us, keep writing!

We don't get to make friends with people if you guys are just lurking! Please write! Write on tumblr. Write on your blogs. Write to us. Whatever you do, just keep writing! We want to hear what you're thinking about the shows.

13:11 - Catch Up Corner

Nini

This is the Spring Catch Up Corner. We've got a doozy of one for you guys to round out the end of this but we're going to start with a few things that I caught up on in the spring mostly because Ben would not shut up about them.

Ben

[laughs] It's true though!

Nini

So in the spring I watched She Loves to Cook, and She Loves to Eat (in Japanese: Tsukuritai Onna to Tabetai Onna), then Roommates of Poongduck 304, and My Only 12 Percent. Since Ben is breaking up with New this season I'm going to start with My Only 12 Percent.

13:59 - My Only 12 Percent

Ben

Okay I thought we were going to have fun first with, like, She Loves to Cook, and She Loves to Eat. It's like directly into My Only 12 Percent! “And another thing! Smack!”

Nini

We always go from worst to first, but we're ending this particular catchup with the worst because of what it is. 

Ben

Man…[sighs]

Nini

I'm just gonna go with My Only 12 Percent. We don't I think need to do like the reminder to everybody about what My Only 12 Percent is because we've talked about it in the VIIB Awards. You all should go back and listen to that episode—I'm not exactly sure which episode it is but I will probably put it in the show description. 

So. I looked at it I watched it…[Nini sighs, Ben laughs]…and—okay, I'm gonna be real real with you, okay?

Ben

Okay.

Nini

I cannot say that I liked My Only 12 Percent. But I also cannot say that I disliked My Only 12 Percent.

There were moments, there were moments to My Only 12 Percent that I did like, but, like, the first two-thirds of the show I just found incredibly frustrating. I am not really a Cooheart fan as an actor. Actually, let me take that back.

Ben

Yeah, that's right, you better correct yourself.

Nini

I think Cooheart is talented. I would like to see him work with somebody else, because he has only worked with New, and I think he and New bring out the worst in each other in the director-actor relationship. I think that occasionally they reach certain heights but I think that working together, they lean into some old techniques, they lean on things that they're accustomed to doing with each other and it doesn't work for me. 

One of the things I would like to see Cooheart do is play older and New always has him play younger, and in this particularly he plays really young. And it's the effect of it is unsettling for me even when they age him up a little bit. I can’t slide away from the acting he was doing earlier in the show when he was playing like 15-16 and it's just it's hard for me to recalibrate once they age him up. 

The things I do like about the show. I like how Cake and Eiw were just—they were just like that the whole time from like the day they were born, I guess. Like, the first day that they were ever put in a crib together they were just like that. I mean everybody else more or less knew what it was and how they felt about each other, but nobody forced them to figure it out or forced them to explain it or anything like that. They just let them figure it out for themselves. I liked the realization part of things. I did like that scene where Eiw is watching Love of Siam—which is something else that I have to put on my catch up list—and you see the moment when he understands something about himself. I, too, I'm a person who has light bulb moments watching media. 

So, I am a fan of characters who work things out by having, like, a media moment. I like that the two of them were just always connected and they figured out for themselves how they felt. I liked the fight that they had in episode 12 when everything sort of comes to a head because Eiw knows how he feels. Cake knows how he feels, but neither of them is really talking to each other about it. They're just trying to fall back into their old patterns without laying on the table what the feelings are. And, of course, it becomes an issue and they have a fight about it because Cake is jealous. This is the kind of jealousy I like, where things are unsettled and one character is like I cannot hold in anymore how I feel. I am upset about this thing that you're doing, or this person that you're talking to, and the reason for that is because I feel this way about you. And the other character is like, “Well, fucking finally!” 

So I did like their fight. I thought that Cooheart was very good in their fight. I liked Santa and his connection with him in the fight. I always like to see a good fight between the two main characters when something has been building up for a while. It was really good. 

One of the other scenes that was really good was their first time scene. The way that it happened was very gentle. It was very matter of fact, almost. It wasn't like a big planned romantic thing. It just kind of happened because they were just there and vibing. I like that. But this show felt like New [Ben laughs] and not in the good way. 

Ben

There It is.

Nini

It felt like classic New Siwaj! It felt like New Siwaj doing Make It Right. It felt like New Siwaj in the parts of Until We Meet Again that piss me off. 

There's, like, a lot of minutiae. Stuff that's happening around the characters that's not really important to the narrative or the character building. It's just a bunch of stuff that's happening and he just insists on showing it in detail. There's way too many side characters. They drag out the main story, like it takes 12 episodes—12 of 14 episodes—for Cake and Eiw to get to the point where they can even have the conversation. And then there's, like, some weird blushing maiden shit which I never like. 

And then the thing that New always does which is that the last minute brings out some left field bullshit out of nowhere, that has absolutely no relation to anything else, and just kind of stops sorry dead in his tracks. In this instance, it's Eiw’s mom is dying randomly all of a sudden because their dad used to smoke when he lived with them. Their dad hasn't lived with them for like—what over a decade? So their mom has third hand smoke cancer. It's just out of nowhere. I can't understand why it's there. 

So basically I didn't dislike it but I didn't like the show either. If I had to give it a score I would probably give it…a 6. It's okay. 

Ben

Harsh. [laughs]

Nini

It's New Siwaj on his New Siwaj bullshit. That's gonna be a 6 for me.

Ben

Well, I'm glad you at least humored me and watched it. I feel differently now that New has irritated me twice in the last couple of months, first with Double Savage and then with A Boss and a Babe. That being said, I hope that someday he earns the moments he really wants to hit, because what he's trying to do is actually really interesting. Two best friends who've been in love with each other in one way shape or form their entire lives, and it takes them over 20 years to find an alignment that works for them. I'm into that.

Nini

Listen, New gon’ New, and I don't have to put up with it anymore. 

Ben

That's honestly one of the most unexpected takeaways of this whole season for us was realizing that I don't think I like New Siwaj anymore.

I'm not mad at him. I just feel a little bit sad, because he reminds me of a lot of guys who I knew when I was in college who mean really well. They just don't really know people or how to interact with them. That's how a lot of New’s stuff feels, particularly his whole thing with revealing context after someone has really fucked up something. Because that's how he gets things. Like he fucks up something, and likely somebody yelled at him and explained it to him, and he was like “oh damn,” and then he wrote it down in this journal, and then he turned it into one of his scenes in his shows.

Nini

I think we've talked enough about New Siwaj. We talked about New Siwaj literally the entire season. I am over him. Let's move on.

Ben

Very well.

22:52 - Roommates of Poongduck 304

Nini

The second thing that I watched—and this one I actually quite liked—I watched Roommates of Poongduck 304. 

This was actually pretty good. It was a solid little workplace drama out of Korea. I quite liked the way that they balanced out the boss and employee relationship by having them flip it at home and be landlord and renter. I always like when these boss-subordinate relationships have some kind of other power dynamic going on next to it. 

I really liked the characters. I thought they were fun. Watching Holland play like…[laughs]… a scamming-ass, down-dirty—like, he's supposed to be his friend but he's just stealing from him—let's just be real. It was delightful in certain ways but it was also heartbreaking because watching Jae Yoon get scammed and taken advantage of by not just Holland—who I can't remember the character's name even though I liked the show—but watching him get scammed by all his friends. It was just really hard. I kind of was like, “Aw, baby…You need to be more careful about who you let into your life.” 

But, yeah, I enjoyed this. I really enjoyed this. I thought that the work stuff was really integrated well into the romantic story and vice versa. For essentially a rom-com setup, it was quite realistic and quite fun. Yeah! I had a good time with this.

Ben

I really liked this show a lot, and I feel like…this show is underrated. I agree with you. I think this is one of the rare K-BLs that understands how much time they have exactly and what they want to do with that time. I think they balance the relationships in a way that makes it fun, and it's not just one person getting picked on by the other the whole time. 

And, like, the only thing that really I don't like in this show—is the same thing I usually don't like with the Korean stuff—is the way they handle alcohol in the shows that usually makes me uncomfortable. Seo Jae Yoon, I don't like the way he drinks. But, given the friends he has, I guess I'll let him have it.

Nini

Hoo! Listen, his friends are trash, throw the friends away, throw all the friends away. My God! The other friend who is basically like in an MLM and keeps making him buy shit...

Ben

Now that was gross.

Nini

What was the name that he had for him on his phone?

Ben

I don't know, but I remember being, like, really embarrassed about it. Like, it was basically like “fool” or…

Nini

Yeah, it was something like that. It was really mean. It was basically something that implied like he was just somebody that this guy was taking advantage of.

Ben

Like it basically felt like he called him “chump” and put him in his phone as that.

Nini

Yeah…and it was ugly but it was part of a character arc for Jae Yoon as well to understand that he deserved better than these friends who would use him like this, and I did like that. It's a solid little show, very enjoyable. I would recommend it to people. I liked it.

26:14 - She Loves to Cook, and She Loves to Eat

So, today of all the days, the day we're recording, we got the news that there is going to be a second season of this: She Loves to Cook, and She Loves to Eat.

Ben

I'm so fucking relieved. [Nini laughs] I really am! I will let you talk first but my goodness am I relieved that we're getting a season 2. [Ben laughs]

Nini

So, back in the VIIB Awards when we're talking about the GLs of the year, Ben laid this one out as one of the ones that he really enjoyed. He called it the lesbian What Did You Eat Yesterday? and being a great fan of What Did You Eat Yesterday? I was like, “Okay, bet. I will definitely watch this at some point.” 

So I found myself with some time, and I cracked open the old computer machine, and I decided I'm gonna watch She Loves to Cook, and She Loves to Eat, and—oh my god—how lovely. It's so lovely. I love the show! I love it so much! Watching this gentle…kind of slow gravitation between Nomoto and Kasuga. I smile the entire time. It was so lovely. ‘Lovely’ is the word that just comes to mind when I think about it. 

And then Kasuga talking about how she has never felt accepted, or never felt understood…Nomoto starting to understand in herself how she's always felt separate from everybody. And then Nomoto watching Kasuga eat at every day basically, and those sessions them having dinner becoming more and more sexual…The look on Nomoto's face when she watches Kasuga eat becoming more and more mouth open kind of “this is hot” kind of thing. 

And her not even realizing that that's what's happening to her: that she is becoming sexually attracted to Kasuga, and particularly to watching Kasuga eat. 

Oh, God, love it. Love it. Love it. Love it. And then, as the show goes on, she starts to acknowledge and accept the fact that she's attracted to Kasuga—that she's sexually attracted to Kasuga. At the point in time that the story ends in season 1—now I can say that: in season 1—I remember thinking, “Oh my god! It's not finished! I need so much more of this—” 

Ben

And that's why I'm so fucking relieved.

Nini

It ends when they're really starting to adjust their relationship from friends to a romantic relationship. 

So, we are getting a second season of this of 20 episodes next year in 2024, and I personally cannot wait. I love that all the Japanese shit that I really glommed onto in the last few months are all getting sequels. 

So, there was the Utsukushii Kare sequel first, then we found out earlier that we're getting a second season of What Did You Eat Yesterday? and now She Loves to Cook, and She Loves to Eat. 

I am very glad that I took your recommendation on two-thirds of this list. [laughs]

Ben

Shade. [laughs]

Nini

On all of it. There was stuff to hold on to in My Only 12 Percent. The totality of it just wasn't for me. So I'm glad that I watched all three of these, but of the three, my absolute favorite thing that you recommended that I watch is She Loves to Cook, and She Loves to Eat.

30:09 - The Shipper

Nini

We've talked about the lovely fun things and now it's time to descend into hell. 

Ben

Last time we left you all, Nini and I decided that we would watch The Shipper from 2020 and report back to you all, because we liked a lot of the folks involved and thought it would be really interesting to give a show that we knew had had some complicated responses when it first aired a genuine watch. Well, we've had the opportunity to watch it, and we just finished it, and we have a lot to say. 

So, before we get into our immediate reactions, the simple breakdown of The Shipper is that it is a high school setting show in which two girls who’re writing sexy fic about two older boys at their school that they love and ship. This eventually leads to some kerfuffles in their school. Our protagonist, Pan, ends up riding with one of the boys home one night. They get into a car crash, killing both of them. In the afterlife, they meet the god of death—who is played by Jennie Panhan. They sass Jennie a bit, she mushes their faces, and sends them back to Earth, but accidentally switches their bodies, and then Pan has to live as Kim—the boy that she's been viewing as part of her ship for a long time clearly—for some time, where she realized she doesn't exactly know him that well, and then starts to reevaluate how she's always perceived him. 

A lot of other things happen. There are some ideas that are half-baked in this, and it's very clear that the show was fighting a thematic war within the writers room itself. And quite frankly, it left me and Nini both dissatisfied and deeply disturbed to put it mildly. 

Before I hand it over to Nini, I just want to say real quick, this is the first time in MDL history that I think I'll be giving a show a 1. 

So, Nini, we just finished The Shipper. How are you feeling?

Nini

I'm going to let MDL user jarabaa speak for me, and I quote: “I found the series so intensely disagreeable that my feelings of shock and unease will probably stay with me a long time whenever I think of The Shipper.” End quote. I think that says it all.

Ben

‘Disagreeable’ is really such an accurate term.

Nini

This just reiterates to me that sometimes when we both have a gut feeling about something, we should trust that, because we both had a gut feeling that we would not like this show, which is why we never watched it. And now, having watched it, I think we were both correct.

Ben

I feel so validated in my decision in 2020. I took one look at that show and I said ‘hell to the no’ and I wish we hadn't been curious in going back.

Nini

They say, “Curiosity killed the cat?” Well, I feel like a dead kitty right now because…What? Was? That? [sighs] 

Okay, I'm going to try—I'm going to try to actually formulate some sentences that are descriptive and helpful in order to lay out why I never want to think about this show again after we finish recording this.

Ben

Getting into some specifics about what may have happened along the way here: There were some interesting ideas presented early in the show that the people who ship people don't really know the people involved; that they have a false notion of them based upon surface details and the fictional things they've created about them. There's an interesting idea in this, particularly as it pertains to shipping real people who exist with each other as opposed to say fictional characters.

Early on the show really says something special with Pan realizing she didn't actually know who Kim was when she was forced to live as him, because she thought she knew who he was, and I made the joke when we were watching, like, the first episode, like, that, “You know, he's just a hole to her,” [Nini chuckles]...I didn't realize that that's what the theme of the show was going to be…

Like, spoilers for the end of The Shipper, only one of them survives Jennie mushing them in the face. First is apparently too weak. Prigkhing is so much stronger. And so Prigkhing gets to live as First’s character for a while. Eventually one of their bodies has to go and they make the decision for Pan to keep her body and for Kim (First’s character) to die. 

How we get there is a huge mess and by the time it finished the show read extremely homophobic and lesbophobic to Nini and myself.

Nini

Oh, throw in transphobic.

Ben

And transphobic. I'll let you take on that portion. 

For me, one of the things that was kind of interesting introduced along the way was that they were shipping two boys together because maybe they picked up on the homosocial tension between them, and what we learn along the way is that these boys actually did have a homoromantic relationship brewing between them. But it was nothing like anything that these girls had really imagined. I don't think I'd give much thought to the depths of the feelings between these two boys. And what we end up learning about the actual relationship between Kim and Way, the two boys that they’re shipping, played by First Kanaphan and Fluke Pusit respectively, ends up being fairly compelling, and I was deeply invested in what they might have done with those boys’ dynamic, particularly if we'd have gotten a see who Kim actually was.

But what ends up happening along the way that ends up frustrating me is critical moments that should have belonged to two gay boys…never get to happen for them…and what happens because the the narrative chooses to have the Kim character be dead the whole time, it makes all of Way’s expressed feelings for Kim, particularly after the accident, all feel super unrequited. 

I'm not opposed to exploring queer grief, but I don't like the way it's done here. It feels cheap. 

I'm gonna let Nini get into the specifics of this, because she said it multiple times when we were watching this: “this show wants to have its cake and eat it too.” It wants to give a stern lesson about how deeply out of touch shipping is, but also feeding shipping the whole time? And ends up…kind of damning itself along the way because we never actually really meet Kim…and he's dead at the end…and so all he is is what everyone else has projected onto him.

Nini

This show, for like maybe 6 or 7 episodes, tiptoes up to several points. It almost makes a series of points as Ben mentioned about shipping, about the experience of fandom, about who we think fans are and who they might actually be. It almost makes a point about how many queer women are in fandom and women discovering their queerness through fandom. It almost makes a point about about transgender people and the idea that the way that we present to the world maybe not being who we are inside. It tiptoes up to all of these points, and in the end touches none of them. The front half of this is intensely frustrating, and then the back half is just actively offensive. It just— I can't even— [laughs] Actively offensive!

The shift happens when we realize that there is this weird, ugly fake relationship—that is fake on one side but very real on the other—happening between Kim and one of the teachers. That's when this show really started going off the rails for me—the whole thing with Kim and the teacher is when I started feeling deeply uncomfortable. I started feeling gross. I didn't understand why this is the way that the show was going, what they were trying to say with this storyline. I still don't know at the end of the show what they're trying to say with that storyline other than I guess they're trying to tell you that the actual Kim was not a good person. But then why have him be essentially the victim of a predator?

Ben

It's really hard for us to give you guys the necessary context for some of these things. The simple overview is when Pan accidentally finds herself in Kim's body, she learns along the way that instead of being like the star academic student, he's actually an academic cheater, that he's involved in a secret relationship with one of the stern teachers, and he uses that relationship to get answers to the tests. This upsets Pan because her image of Kim as a star student and badass is ruined. 

Eventually, she learns that the reason why Kim was manipulating this teacher and involved in this relationship with her to get these tests was because he was helping Way study so that Way could get out of an abusive situation in his house with his dad by succeeding at school properly, because Way gets into fights too much. We don't really return to the whole thing there because all we get is…a teacher with very…juvenile-centric kinks projecting them on to a star student. It just left both of us, when we watched it, feeling super weird about it.

And it doesn't really go anywhere. They're just like—at the end she's like moved on to an age-appropriate man now, I guess? Like, good for her? I guess Kim's death was the necessary catalyst for her to stop trying to hook up with one of her students.

Nini

It's so gross and it's the pivot after which most of what happens feels gross to me, and there are a hundred different things that they're trying to do—none of them lands. It feels like the show wants to have its cake and eat it, too, in a lot of ways. 

I haven't even started to get into what they did with the character of Soda. Soda is Pan's best friend who she writes the fic with, who is her ride-or-die. The implication of the show is that Soda and Pan are kind of in love with each other, particularly that Soda is in love with Pan. But that again goes nowhere—in the end, they randomly put both Pan and Soda with boys?

Ben

A lot of things just don't make any damn sense in this show. It's frustrating because the show comes close constantly to a good point like it almost makes the point that shippers know nothing about the people that they're shipping…but then it never really gives us like an interior understanding of who Kim actually was. We only know him through what everybody else is getting out of knowing him. That's almost an interesting point but the big problem I feel with the show is that I feel like this show is the most intellectually disturbing and manipulative show that we've ever experienced. I don't think the show ever really lands on a real feeling it wants to go for and so you're kind of left floundering. 

I really…don't…like this particular project, and it's really frustrating because there's a lot of people I really liked in it. Individual pieces of the show on their own could be some really cool moments. Like I think Fluke plays a kind of himbo-badass-type-jock character really well. Like he plays Way super well as a guy who is not the greatest at school, doesn't really have like a refined understanding of human connection; but knows who's important to him, and knows who he wants to be with, and knows not to mislead other people along the way. 

And it's really frustrating to see a gay character like Way be constantly emotionally abused by this narrative. The frustration that arises from me as I watch this, particularly whereas it pertains to Way, is he already knows that he has feelings for Kim, and over the course of interacting with Pan, because Pan in some ways softens Kim because she's less standoffish than he is, Way decides to confess his feelings to Kim. And this pissed me off in episode 9 because I've been a gay boy confessing from the closet to someone before. It is the most terrifying thing that has ever happened to me in my life, and I was so disgusted with this show because they gave one of the most intense things that you can do as a gay man with another boy to a fucking shipper who never really respected who they were as people. 

I hate that with all of the fires that burn in my soul, and it never really gets better from there.

Nini

Let me give you an example of a direction that the show was going in that it then undercut. 

So, one of the actual good story arcs in the show. At the beginning of the show, Way is in a relationship with View’s character Pingping. Pingping is the school's queen bee and she is out here like putting out this…general idea that she and Way are in this hot and heavy thing. Meanwhile, Way has never really touched her. They spend all their time together staring at their phones and occasionally talking to each other. You can see where there is some affection there between them but Way quickly—I guess for the narrative—realizes how he feels about Kim, and he's very open immediately about talking to Pingping about it and being like, “Look, I am in love with somebody else.” And the way that Pingping handles that is also very real. She doesn't want to hear it. She avoids it. There's a lot of interesting stuff there. All that's great. 

And then, they undercut it by having Pingping, like, put a hit out on Kim. It's insane.

Ben

That is actually what happens. Like, the most frustrating thing to talk about with this show is that everything we're describing happened as we're describing it. The problem with The Shipper is while it's very easy to talk about the actions that transpired over the show and the expressed-by-the-character reason for why they're doing what they're doing, the thematic implications of everything they're doing is actually incredibly disturbing. 

Like, one of the big things we talk about in fandom sometimes is that projecting homosexuality onto boys is the way a lot of girls figure out their own queerness with themselves, and the show walks right up to this line by highlighting the romantic potential between Pan and her friend Soda, who spend way too much of their free time and their class time writing sexy fic about two boys like a year or two older than them, and then throws that idea away as if it were preposterous. 

That is…so offensive, and it's weird in a show that features young gay love in it about girls who are obsessed with young gay love to do something that felt Incredibly homophobic—in this case, specifically lesbophobic.

Nini

The show in general feels homophobic and lesbophobic because in the end, the only romantic relationship that actually gets to happen is the one between Pan and Khet, who is Kim's brother. So of everything else, basically Way falls in love with Kim and Kim dies, they tease Pan and Soda but it doesn't happen and they both end up with boys. It feels like it wanted to be clever and out-clevered itself, so to speak, to the point that it just got real stupid.

Ben

You look at The Shipper and you can see the points that it's hinting at but it's almost like it's afraid to make the point because they're worried that the audience that they're hoping funds this project doesn't turn on them by realizing that they're being maybe chided for how they behave, and it ends up becoming a show fundamentally about nothing, that ends on an insane level of queer trauma that it somehow writes off as useful because it helped a straight girl figure out that she should maybe fuck her best friend who's hung around her writing sexy fic about his brother, but she didn't know it was his brother for the last year or two? But also she's now projecting her intense shipping desires onto Gun and Off who randomly show up in the final six minutes? 

…I deserved better than this.

Nini

Let's just talk about the absolute—I mean, it sounds so weird to say that this is the absolute wildest moment of the show. I mean, if we went through all the wild moments of the show it's probably not the absolute wildest, but it's the one that felt probably the wildest and most offensive in the end and that was The Kiss. 

Ben

Fuck. Here we go.

Nini

At the end, Pan is now trying to get back into her body after a series of UNO reverses in the last two episodes that just were exhausting and upsetting. Now Pan is trying to get back into her body before it dies, and the way that she gets back into her body is supposed to be a true love kiss. Pan is still in First’s body at this point in time, and then they decide that the true love must be Kim's brother Khet. 

It's two boys kissing but it's somehow still homophobic! [laughs] It's so—oh my God. 

So, Pan's got to have a true love's kiss. So, Pan calls Soda while she's running to tell Khet that if he likes her he should come and kiss her in the form of his brother's body—which he does! I'm telling you, guys…what I'm saying is exactly what happened.

Ben

I just hate the show for having Ohm and First kiss, having it be one of the weakest kisses either of these boys has ever given, and then immediately cutting to a funeral afterwards. Because First’s character died.

Nini

Technically, First’s character died at the beginning of the show, and we only get to dealing with that at the end of the show. And in between, we just get a bunch of stuff…

I mean we haven't even got into the family drama, because aside from everything else that's happening, Kim and Khet live alone while their parents are in another country, and it seems like Kim and Khet kind of hate each other. And so there's a whole family drama happening with Pan in Kim's body where Khet is coming to peace of some kind with his relationship with his brother and then has to also deal with the fact that actually his brother is dead, and then has to shepherd his parents through that. So there's that. 

And then we randomly find out somewhere in the middle of the show that Pan is actually growing up being raised by her stepfather because her mom died? And her stepfather is constantly being encouraged by the people around him to ditch her because he doesn't have any responsibility to her, but she thinks of him as her dad.

Again all, on paper, compelling stuff. But the way that it's dealt with in the show, it just, it all feels like a bridge too far. 

Ben

The show wants you to think about a lot of really interesting ideas and such, but it doesn't want to come forward and say them itself. Like it's always tiptoeing up to something and then peeking in the room, and then walking away from it. It's one of the most frustrating experiences I've had as a viewer in a really long time. The show feels intellectually dishonest.

Nini

That's probably the best way to describe it. This show has roughly 800 convictions and the courage of none of them. It feels so dishonest intellectually. It feels…offensive. It feels…rude.

Ben

I was so angry at the end of episode 9 in a way I have not felt since the final episodes of HIStory3: Make Our Days Count. I don't like moments that should be joyous for queer people being snatched from them to make some sort of cute point in a narrative to seem somehow better than the audience? And it really really pissed me off. 

In this particular instance, it's when Way confesses his feelings to Kim and Pan goes into what she knows is going to be a confession believing this is somehow for her—which is deluded. And then she gets upset during the confession that the confession to the boy whose body she's in is being given to the boy whose body she's in and not to her, the shipper, after earlier chiding the girl she should be developing a lesbian romance with for deciding to project that onto the boy whose body she's in because she misunderstands their dynamic as Kim actually flirting with her. And I was enraged by this show taking a gay moment from a gay boy, and then also running away from a lesbian moment and having the character just be completely out of touch about it—which I guess is maybe the point about shippers, but not the point the show really wants to land on. 

And its final messaging in the last like ten-odd minutes is so deeply disturbing that I have not recovered. So, as we've described here today, Kim and Way are the boys that these girls were projecting all the shipping nonsense onto. We learned that these boys are actually involved in a fairly interesting and complicated gay love story that I actually think would have made for a really compelling story on its own—but I digress—and then…Kim is dead. And so we have to process that particular fact, and these girls believe that the best way they can honor the two boys who they never understood is to keep writing deluded fic about them! And I have not been this disgusted in a really long time.

Nini

And it's presented as valedictory somehow.

Ben

Right? Like they have Way cry, like, weird tears of thanks—I don't know what the hell happened here, and maybe because we can reflect on this now three—three to four years later—maybe this is why they put Aof in charge of all the queer shit after this because this…was a bridge way too fucking far.

Nini

At one point toward the end of our watch I remember just saying out loud “I fucking hate this” to Ben, and I think I kept that mantra up—varying versions of “I fucking hate this” and “I'm so pissed” for probably the last entire episode and a half of this show. 

Before that we were making jokes about psychic damage and eldritch horror. More and more jokes as the show went on, because we were absolutely taking psychic damage watching the show. The show was an eldritch horror. I just did not realize how much of an eldritch fucking horror that it was. 

Gah, listen. It's over. We've learned our lesson. We're never doing something like this again.

Ben

We have no promises to you all about other things we want to catch up on right now, because goddamn do we need a break. If we skipped it, we were correct! And we will not be second guessing ourselves ever again!

Nini

I think that's going to be the rule: if there is something that we both skipped it was for a reason and we should never watch it. Like it's one thing for us to, like, individually like something and recommend it to each other, but I think if there's something that we both skipped, I think that's the new catch up rule. If we both skipped it, it's staying skipped.

Ben

So it is written, so it shall be.

I don't really have a lot of positive things to say. Like, I think the set design was cool, I think the production design was fine. I think overall the performances are strong. The GMMTV talent is consistently solid at the level we expect of them. I don't think anyone else at GMMTV—at the time at least—could have done what First was asked to do in this character, or characters, he's playing, technically, two.

Nini

This is purely a writing fail. There's nothing else that I can point to that is wrong here. This is a hundred percent writing fail.

Ben

So, The Shipper was bad and wrong and offensive and evil. We will not be taking further questions about this show. We have said all that I want to say about this show, and I will not be referring to it going forward. We all deserved better than this.

Nini

I know there are those of you out there who love it. I'm sorry. I'm not one of you, and I am not willing to discuss it at all. 

Ben

I've said my piece and counted to three.

Nini

Amen, and hallelu. Moving on.

59:46 - Next Watches

Nini

So what are we going to catch up on in the summer and talk about in the fall? 

Well…for me, I will finally be getting past my weird reaction to the uncanny valley effect that I get from watching the face smoothing filters on the show and I am going to watch Light On Me.

Ben

Good.

Nini

Ben has been recommending this to me. He recently rewatched it and says that it holds up. Everybody loves this show. I've always intended to watch it but I could not get past the skin smoothing filter. It makes everybody look like a weird robot. It's just unsettling. I am going to fight through my horror of it to actually watch the show. 

[both laugh]

Ben

Jesus Christ.

Nini

And I'm gonna talk about it when we [laughs] when we come down to the fall, so look out for that discussion in October. Ben, what are you gonna watch over the summer?

Ben

[sighs] So, one of our recent pickups—who's been a delight—has watched so many things that I've recommended that I gave her a coupon, which she cashed in on Coffee Prince, which I am currently watching. And Nini has also convinced me to watch Mama Gogo. 

I originally skipped Mama Gogo because I had watched Friendzone, and I had watched Friendzone 2: Dangerous Area, and I just wasn't in the mood for Jojo doing big cast, obnoxious, soap-opera-level drama, and so I just skipped Mama Gogo at the time. We're about to watch Only Friends in probably the next one to three months maybe. I will watch Mama Gogo in preparation for more of Jojo's oeuvre, and then I guess we'll talk about both of those.

Nini

I think you're gonna enjoy Mama Gogo. It's not gay, but it feels gay?

Ben

I have watched Jojo's work. I know what you're talking about.

[both laugh]

Nini

I think you're gonna have a good time with it. 

So, that's what we're gonna be catching up on over the summer and talking about in our Catch Up Corner in October. So, look out for that.

1:02:33 - Me, My Husband, and My Husband’s Boyfriend

Nini

So in keeping with our mission to watch things that are queer-adjacent, queer-ish, as well as queer things, Ben and I both watched over this spring Watashi to Otto to Otto no Kareshi—Me, My Husband, and My Husband’s Boyfriend.

Ben, what is this about?

Ben

A mess! Me, My Husband, and My Husband’s Boyfriend is about a Japanese high school teacher who is sexually unfulfilled in her five-year marriage despite having an otherwise devoted and caring partner, who then discovers that her husband—on their anniversary— is making out with some guy right outside their door. In the process of trying to cope with this and deal with this, they end up attempting to form a poly triad with this guy, who her husband is seeing, who turns out to be her high school student who is an adult now. He also had feelings for her, and so they end up in this complicated situation where everyone's trying to take care of everyone. It's a little bit of a hot mess, and the show ends up asking for people to interrogate what their own relationships mean for them, though it ends on a somewhat ambiguous note for our trio. 

There's a lot to unpack along the way there, but the broad strokes is a teacher finds out that her husband is cheating on her with a man, and she decides that they're going to try and make this trio work. Complications ensue.

Nini

‘Complications ensue’ is putting it mildly. I feel muddled about the show, but the show is also pretty muddled, I think. It feels like they were trying to do something. I'm not sure it got all the way there— 

Ben

It did for me!

[both laugh]

Nini

Maybe it did for the audience that they were aiming it towards, which is obviously their local audience in Japan—

Ben

And sad, gay artsy boys like me!

Nini

I'm really curious as to how this was received inside of Japan. Japan's been doing these shows where they try to marry the individual instincts that are related to identity and specifically queer and queer-adjacent, I guess, identities. They're trying to marry that to the collectivist culture. So they're trying to put these shows in front of people like “This is maybe seem a little bit strange to you, but look at how happy everybody is. Isn't it most important that people are happy?” 

And, this one, I think from what I got from it, It seems like it didn't know exactly what it wanted to say about polyamory. There's a polyamorous character, who is Shuhei, who is the…husband's boyfriend, who is also in love with the wife. But the other characters aren't poly but they're still trying to make a poly relationship work.

It's so much! They're trying to stuff so much into this show, and I'm not sure that it entirely works for me. Ben has other ideas.

Ben

They're not poly to start, but no one is really except for characters like Shuhei, and I think that's why I like it. The big thing about being queer is you have to decide what relationships are going to be for yourself. You have to figure out what friendship, romance, and intimacy are going to be for you one person at a time. The etiquette rules of cis-heteronormativity do not apply to you, and so what works for me in this is most of the people who walked into this story were not poly but they did care about the people involved. 

Was being a poly triad the right solution for them? Absolutely not, but at the core you have two people trying to juggle a complicated sense of duty to each other, while also wanting different things from each other and maybe other people, and having to reconcile what all of those things are going to be for each other because they also wanted to honor the vows and choices they made to commit to each other under the previous structures before they got into this. 

So, no, Yuki and Misaki are not poly really in going into this, but opening themselves up to the idea that the way they understand love might not be concrete enables them to find something that puts them maybe on the path to actually being comfortable and cared for, and properly caring to the people that they value.

Nini

I would rock with that except for one very important thing. Yes, they're still working it out at the end. The show does end ambiguously, but the overwhelming feeling I get at the end is not a feeling of hope, it's not a feeling that they are going to work it out—that they're working through it and they're going to get to the place, because I still don't feel like they are being honest with themselves entirely about what they want. 

For example, Misaki, she wants sex and what she ends up with in the poly relationship, and even in sort of a wider polycule that she’s decided that she's putting together, none of it nets her the sex that she wants. But she has talked herself into it as being right for her, while it still doesn't give her what she wants. 

And I think it's very similar to Yuki. Yuki wants to be in a gay relationship. He wants to be in a gay monogamous relationship, and the polycule doesn't give him that either. So it feels like they're not even working towards the things that they want. That they've decided on this as a solution, but it doesn't actually solve anything for them.

Ben

So the reason why it doesn't bother me at the end is I don't need the confirmation. They want you to think about it. It's not about whether or not this polycule works. It's a question of, “Have your thoughts about polyamory changed from spending five hours with these characters?” And so the ambiguity at the end is totally fine for me because you're allowed to project what you hope for onto them, and the question is whether or not you can reconcile what version of their lives looks like. It's the thinking about it that's important for them. 

I totally see…your kind of hopeless read on the situation, but it doesn't bother me because they lean into ambiguity at the end. And so you're allowed to project onto it what you maybe want for yourself, or for those characters. Like, I do agree with you that Misaki wants sex, and they don't confirm her getting sex onscreen, but they confirm her taking charge of her life which to me is at the core of her lack of sex.

Nini

It's not even for me that they don't show her getting sex on screen. It's not like that. It's more about her mindset about it. Instead of that remaining part of her mindset: the fact that she wants sex. By the end she's completely put that thought aside it feels like.

Ben

I think it's implied that her desire for sex is also tied up in her notions of the kind of family they're supposed to have.

Nini

I'm not sure I agree with you there because it's one thing to feel like you should be having sex, and another thing to want sex, and I feel like Misaki wants sex. There is an argument to be made there about doing the things that you're expected to do and not doing the things that you're expected to do. Like, I fully see where the show is going with that with the character of the other teacher—I think it's Misumi—the fact that Misaki is not doing what Misumi thinks that she should do. So Misumi inserts herself into the situation and causes a problem. 

She's trying to fix it because she thinks that Misaki is too weak or too something to do the things that she should be doing, when it's really that Misaki doesn't agree that that's necessarily what she should be doing. I get that part. I'm down with what they're trying to do there, but I didn't get the sense that she wanted to have sex because she thought it's something that she should do. It felt like it was something that she herself wanted and she wasn't getting. 

Maybe I'm getting too involved in the sex of it. Maybe that wasn't the intention.

Ben

They leave who she inevitably chooses…to bang it out with ambiguous and up to the audience, Because for them to confirm in any sort of way I think would lead to too narrow a read on polyamory itself.

Nini

So the idea that they're trying to get across is that this is not about sex. Polyamory is not a sex thing.

Ben

Correct.

Nini

I can accept that take, in terms of what they're trying to put in front of their audience.

Ben

Both of them want sex. Like Yuki wants sex, too, when it comes to Shuhei, but like he's unsatisfied because he can't enjoy it openly the way he realizes he wants to and needs to. And so much of this is about them all having to let go of their preconceptions about what their lives should look like. And so, like, the final scene of the three of them, like, seeking each other out at night, and then just being happy to see each other, works for me because it feels like they see each other, and that's enough for me. Like, I don't have to understand it to get that, whatever they found, it works for them. 

That's how I feel about every polycule I've ever met. I don't always get it, but everybody involved seems all right. Their relationship is not about me. If they say they're happy, I just accept that and move along.

Nini

I'll take that away and think about that, but my overall feel of the show is that it definitely had ideas that it wanted to get across. It had an audience that it was talking to. I think that maybe I wasn't the audience, and that is part of my ambivalent feelings about the show. So, for me, it lands on ‘good,’ obviously has a point of view, obviously has a story it wants to tell. But it's not for me, and that's fine.

Ben

I gave this a 9 because I really engaged with all the ideas the whole way through, and I  was really gripped by the whole of it. I liked how so much of it ends up being about Misaki having to defend her family from herself, from her co-worker, and I like that she's consistently fighting for the boys specifically, and that she cares about them. 

Nini

Ben gives it a 9. I, on quality, give it a 9 and a half.

Ben

Oooh, look at you.

Nini

Like I said, it is a good, objectively good, show. I'm just not the audience for it.

1:15:53 - Spring Roundup

Ben

And we're back! 

Now that we’ve finished catching up on all of the shows—good and bad—it's finally finally time for the Spring Roundup. This week we have our first guest on The Conversation. We have brought my best friend, David onto The Conversation. David, say hello to the people. 

David

Hey, y'all! 

Ben

Okay. [David laughs]

Nini

Hi, David! I'm so excited to have you with us! 

David

I am, too!

Nini

I remember saying to Ben, like, probably around the time the first voice note hit the chat, like, ‘David has to come on the show.’ So, I am very glad that we were able to make it work.

David

I love that. He was telling me that people wanted to hear me, and I'm like, “Look, there are too many people who tell me to shut up. I love this!” [David and Nini laugh]

Nini

That will never be a problem over on this side. 

David

“David talking again.”

Nini

Never shut up, I beg you. [chuckles]

1:16:40 - David Introduction and BL Background

Alright, alright. So, David, tell us about you. Tell us about how you even got into BL. Tell us a little bit about the David story.

David

Um, hoo! I'll say, so I'll start from the BL angle. I got into BL because of Ben. I don't know if he's ever told anyone this story, but me and Ben have two very different takes on Love of Siam. He is not to bring it up in my presence. I feel tricked and deceived. But because of Love of Siam, I didn't even realize that BL was a category, and Ben tried to initially get me into it, but I got really sick for a while. And I wasn't watching with him, and then I started getting over it and the first BL that like fell into my lap because I found it on YouTube was Until We Meet Again. 

And then it was a rabbit hole. I like finished that BL in like I think one sitting. 

Ben

Which is insane. 

David

And I think in that sitting I was texting Ben like, “Oh hell no!” [laughs] And then immediately went and watched another whole show back to back and that was Love by Chance.

Nini

Interesting!

David

Finished that the next night. [Nini laughs] Yeah, girl, I know. I know. 

Ben

It was super annoying having David texting me about old shows because like we're neck deep in like 2021 content. [David laughs] Like that was a busy year. There was a week at one point we had 16 shows to watch and David’s like, “So this show in 2018: I really want to talk about it.” 

David

I was also watching all the current stuff. 

Ben

Yeah, that was a lot. 

David

I was, I think at least six, seven hours a day. For a while it was all BL. 

Ben

According to David's MDL, he's basically current on all of the BL 

David

Yeah. There's maybe like four or five recent ones that I haven't watched, and two of those I was directly told by someone ‘you are not missing anything.’ 

1:18:50 - David’s History with Queer Cinema

Ben

Here's an interesting question because you and I have been in the guts of queer cinema a long time. Prior to BL, what are some of your favorite gay movies that you remember? 

David

Now, of course he knows this is loaded because I'm always gonna say Big Eden.

Ben

It’s so good.

David

One, it like touches my heart. When I'm depressed I watch Big Eden. It's one of the few times where I've been upset at the main queer character almost the entire movie. Henry has issues. But Big Eden is a beautiful movie, and then maybe after that Beautiful Thing, To Wong Foo, Priscilla Queen of the Desert, Bound, Like Water for Chocolate—another lesbian classic. 

Ben

To elaborate on The Love of Siam conversation, we watched Love Siam, and David and I were both deeply repulsed by what happened there. But we contextualized it in different ways. David was furious and was like, “I never want to discuss this film ever again,” and so David was not exactly primed for BL because he was so ambivalent about Thailand.

The big Thai gay things we watched between 2012 and 2017ish…

David

Oh, Jesus Christ.

Ben

…were Love of Siam, Bangkok Love Story—a horrible film.

David

Horrible fucking film.

Ben

The Blue Hour—a good film but really unsettling—and How to Win at Checkers (Every Time). 

David

Lord Jesus.

Ben

So. 

David

Like Thailand routinely came for my throat and I had done nothing to it. Thailand routinely showed up at my front door with these movies like, “Come outside. We ain't gonna jump you,” and inevitably I would open the door and get jumped, and I never learned my lessons. So—

Ben

[laughs] It would always be me leading them. I’m like hey I got this film!

David

Yeah!  It’s Ben. It's Ben. Yeah, no, it wasn't Thai. It was Ben sitting outside with the movies. “Come outside. You won't get jumped.” You said that last time. “Girl, come on, stop talking about old shit.”

[Nini laughs]

Ben

I like the queer angst films. David does not.

1:20:59 - David’s Favorite BL Actors

Ben

So back to BL! For funsies: How about you tell the people of the podcast who some of your favorite boys are. 

David

Ohm and Fluke. 

Ben

She is a My Blue girlie. 

David

Uh, I really am. [whispers] Earth Pirapat. I love him. 

Nini

Why did you whisper it like that?

David

If you hear this, Earth, my one true love. [Nini laughs] My current husband, I love him. He is a placeholder for you. I just want you to know [Nini laughs harder] he can be gone tomorrow, bae. Like it ain’t nothing. Earth, what do you need? Like, I got you. What do you need, Daddy? You need a boat?

Nini

I heard the F at the end of Earth right there and I was like I feel you. I completely understand where you're coming from this moment—not my particular ministry but I feel you.

David

Yeah, thank you, thank you. I had to constantly deal with Ben's malcontent, so thank you for acknowledging…

Ben

I will back up David's Earth girlie bona fides. David has not seen Water Boyy because I refused to let David suffer that loss, but David saw Earth for all of two minutes in Love By Chance and he's calling me “Who is this man! I need to know who this man is immediately!” 

David

I—he came on the screen. I was like “and that's it, yep, right there!” 

Nini

You were officially sprung.

David

Right there! [gross David mouth noises] Yes.

Nini

Oh my God. [laughs]

David

Yeah, Earth. Earth. That's all I gotta say, Earth. That man—whew—Lord.

Ben

David has an appreciation for what he calls ‘the Big Talls’ and—

David

Yeah, I love the Big Talls.

Nini

Fair. You know how I feel about a Big Tall.

Ben

You and Nini can hang out together talking about Man Trisanu—

David

Man! Oof, girl! Not Man! Oh my…girl!

Nini

‘Man.’ Is. Correct.

David

Never has a name so encapsulated a being.

Nini

‘Man’ and ‘tree’ in the same place.

David

Girl. Man. Tree. Mountain. Stud. I mean, look, look, look, Man. Man did the job that he was sent here to do. God Bless him. May Buddha protect him. Like yass. [Nini laughs]

1:23:24 - David’s Thoughts on the Spring Shows

Nini

Okay, so we've got the shows we've got the boys. Let's dive into the season. Talk to me about how you felt about this spring—all the shows we've been watching over the last few months

David 

So, I think I've said this to Ben before. I felt that this season was probably the one of the most extremes. Like there were a few things that were...hmm...misses, kind of, but for the most part we had…duds and bangers. And the bangers made the duds and the misses that much worse. 

We had [The] Eighth Sense, Bed Friend, Our Dining Table, Jack o’ Frost, and everything else was okay, but those are all 10s and they were bangers, and it just made everything—

Ben

How dare you forget La Pluie? I will beat you. 

David

Oh I'm, I'm so sorry, please forgive me sir. [Ben laughs] You're right. I—I'm so sorry, sir. La Pluie. He's right. That was wrong. I do deserve the slapdown that I just received.

Ben

Sat in my house—for 11 of 12 episodes. 

David

In his house—played in his face y'all. Played in this man’s face. In his face like he didn’t know who it was. I’m sorry. La Pluie.

[Nini laughs]

There were a lot of good ones and I think that's why there were so many, many more bad ones. In particular, the most glaring combination is the shows that were basically the same show but one was clearly better.

Step by Step, [A] Boss and a Babe. Look, A Boss and a Babe, I get what they were trying to do but the whole show was a massive misstep, and it was so much more obvious because right after A Boss and a Babe we got Step by Step—which fumbled maybe a couple of times—it fumbled a little—but it stuck the fucking landing. 

Ben

Hmm...

David

I think—oh here—

Nini

Ben is gonna fight you, but David I am on your side!

David

I heard the 'mmm'. She has talked to me about this before. I actually completely agree with what I know she's gonna say, but I still think they stuck the landing in a way that everyone else fumbled and fell on their fucking face.

Ben

Hmm...

Nini

David, you me. You can't see me now but we are shaking hands! We are shaking hands.

David

We are I—I concur. Thank you.

Ben

I’m gonna have a little sip while y’all—

[David and Nini laugh]

1:26:15 - Somewhat Forgettable Shows

Ben

So you mentioned a bunch of shows that really stood out for you. Like, looking over your list, like you already mentioned like Our Dating Sim, Our Dining Table, Step by Step, La Pluie, Bed Friend…looking at the rest of the stuff: What did you genuinely enjoy, but you feel like you have to look at your list to remember that show.

David

Oh, that's a good one. I really enjoy but I have to look at the list to remember it…Our Dating Sim. I liked it but it would never be in the forefront of my mind. But if you bought it up and I saw it in front of it like “I like that.” I felt during this show—I was like ‘oh this is cute.’ 

That's a really good question. Like you liked it but you need to like, be reminded of it. And that would be, yeah…Our Dating Sim, Jack o’ Frost. God bless it, I want to say Naked Dining but Lord Jesus Christ… 

[Ben laughs]

They tr–girl, they’re my top nominee for “Y'all tried it” 

[Ben and Nini laugh]

Ben

David has declared a new entrant into Girl, You Tried. 

Nini

I'm putting it in the notes. What about you, Ben? What's the one or two that you liked but to actually remember you gotta look at the list?

Ben

It's probably…Unintentional Love Story and…Love Mate. These are both shows that I think I gave 9s to, and I would earnestly recommend, but I don't think I would independently bring them up in conversation as like BL Essentials that I really want someone else to watch. 

David

I agree with those, particularly Love Mate. Like, I would put Love Tractor on that list.

Nini

I watched Love Mate and Love Tractor after the fact. Which, by the way, the Koreans have got to get better at naming these shows. 

Ben

Love Tractor is a good one, too! Like, Love Tractor was actually good— 

David

Love Tractor was good. 

Ben

It feels like they missed it. 

David

There was a point where they could have done some stuff faster, and had these boys sucking face quicker—I'm gonna let it be what it was…It was cute, but like I said, it's on that list for me. I liked it but it never comes to the forefront of my mind. 

Nini

I feel like that's fair for both Love Mate and Love Tractor. 

What else did we watch that I have to remind myself that we watched? 

Ben

There were quite a few flops we did not even acknowledge the season. [laughs]

Nini

We're not even talking about the flops—

Ben

David's going on on a face journey right now.

David

Like, my whole, [sighs] There were so many… 've seen fish dumped on the bottom of a boat that flopped less than some—

Nini

Oh my God—

David

Fish gasping for air trying to get back into the sea! “Release me, old man, and I shall grant you three wishes!” Some of this stuff was flippity floppity floopin’ all over the place.

Ben

As I remind David about the trenches that I fought through for eight years of BL. 

David

Here he goes…

Nini

“Oh, all my life I had to fight.”

David

Had to fight David. I had to fight Viki. I had to fight iQIYI—

David

I love BL. 

Nini

Had to fight WeTV!

David

Lord knows I do! 

Ben

I did have to fight WeTV, though, shit.

[everyone laughs]

1:29:25 - Favorite Actor Pairs

Ben

Before we get into some of the cerebral questions about this season, I have one more sort of half-fun question to sort of ease us there. Of the programs that you enjoyed, which actor pairs did you enjoy working together the most—just in the work—not with all of the fan shit around it?

David

Bed Friend. 

Ben

What about Net and James really stuck out for you?

David

The material they were handling, because we can talk about all the high heat stuff—whatever— they were great. Rarely has two people had that kind of sexual chemistry, but the—trigger warning—the sexual assault thing, and how at some point you realize even though he has not told him what happened to him, he knows. And how he is respecting his boundaries and that's coming into the story and they're talking about—without talking about how someone deals with that trauma for the rest of their life. And how it can't help but inform every decision you make, and how you respond to things. 

And I do not think that any other pair could have pulled that off in the same way that Net and James did. As a matter of fact, if you had asked me if I thought they could do it, I probably would have said no.

Ben

Judging on their previous work I would not expect— 

David

—on their previous work, but they were both…fantastic. 

Ben

What about you, Nini?

Nini

My couple of the season? It's gotta be Man and Ben.

David

I'm not even mad.

Nini

I think Man and Ben did a really good job with Step by Step. 

David

I’m not even mad…even though that boy has the ugliest crying face—God bless him—Ben, I love Ben to death, but like his crying face makes me so angry. 

[Ben laughs]

I'm like please teach this child how to cry without scrunching up his mouth like that. I love him, though.

And how tall is Man? 6’9” or something?

Ben

I don't know. It's a lot though.

Nini

Man was on point. Everything he put on screen was on point, and Ben just followed along I think. I think they did really well.

David

I would like to say, too: I don't think we've ever seen…a pursuer really be…emotional. Like if you think about it, how many times have we seen “the guy” going after the person really have a breakdown and cry. There might be some tears. They're upset. They're throwing stuff, but he broke down. 

Nini

He was crying in his baby brother's lap.

David

His brother. He was like ‘what the fuck am I supposed to do?’ And he delivered that! It was completely believable. Like I watched that scene five times. He just loses it. It was completely believable. He was amazing, and I was just like ‘How dare you hurt my redwood?’ 

Nini

The thing that struck me about that scene was that Man couldn't actually produce tears but somehow—that scene—is, like, he is bawling. There are no tears and I'm still feeling everything that he's feeling because just the sound of his voice—everything.

David

It was working and this motherfucker couldn't cry! I was like how dare you! 

Ben

My couple of this season is Title and Pee from La Pluie.

Nini

I knew you were going there.

Ben

Girl, you knew what this was. We did not simp hard enough for Title during the La Pluie discussion.

[David laughs]

That boy is beautiful! He has an incredible smile. Like, they're like ‘I think Tai likes this boy too’ and I'm like ‘that's just Title. He just gives everybody the eye every time he looks at them. He breaks people. It's The Eyes of Kid Midas shit going on here.’

David

You know you can't be looking at everybody like that because even I was like he's a whore. 

[Ben laughs]

You don't look at everybody like that.

Nini

Did I not say that Tai is an alley cat like from jump.

David

And you were right. You were a prophet. You led the march because he's a whore. 

Ben

And he bit that man.

David

And then he bit him.

Nini

No, okay, sorry. We just did not ventilate this enough because I just, like, uploaded the Adult Swim episode today, which means I just listened to it again and I'm sorry we didn't talk enough about how Tai bit that man. We just didn't.

David

He bit a grown man…and then had the nerve to get mad because the man got mad ‘cause you bit him. Do we remember what he said after that? ‘You made me.’ Sir! That is inappropriate in every way shape and form that matters! You can't just be biting people.

Do I want to sometimes walk around and bite people? Yes, because, listeners, some people just deserve to get bit. We all know it, we all secretly think it. Like, don't play. Don't play. Lie to God, don't lie to me. Read your scripture. It's above me. 

All I'm saying…What was I saying? He's a whore. That's what I'm saying.

[Ben laughs]

I lost the thread at some point. 

Ben

They don't have easy characters to portray. Title has to be a likable enough protagonist for people to project onto him before they recognize that he's been in the wrong the entire time. And then he has to be wrong in a way that also makes you want to root for him to get better. And that's super difficult— 

David

Oh…I didn’t think about it like that. 

Ben

And Pee has a difficult character because he has to be all of these things without people asking any questions about his biography. Like, he has to be a perfect romantic interest but not in a way that's distracting. Pee has to portray Patts in such a way that we identify him as the ideal partner that Saengtai has been looking for this whole time, but we need to not ask any questions about him, like where does his money come from, what's the deal with his people, what does he care about outside of Saengtai and taking care of these animals and his friends 

And he encompasses Patts in such a way that he feels like a complete person. Who has turned his interest towards Saengtai in a way that doesn't demand the audience ask any goddamn questions about him. Like, for all the debating about Patts this whole season, nobody stopped to ask a damn question about how does this man's life even function, which I think is also great. Because it means everybody was caught up in Saengtai's bullshit the whole time.

They give such legible performances over the course of the show. There's never a moment where you're confused about what Saengtai or Patts is feeling and why they're feeling it. 

Ben

So we talked about the actors. We loved Net and James this season. We loved Man and Ben. We loved Title and Pee. Who else stood out this season?

Nini

Iijima and Inukai.

Ben

Also Suzuki Kosuke and Honda Kyoya. The Japanese BLs we gave 10s to? Stellar performances. Nobody has looked like such a sap more than Iijima in a long time and that was so lovely to watch. 

1:36:49 - The Changing Nature of BLs

Ben

Let's get into the cerebral. We talked a little bit in the… Adult Swim episode about how intellectually demanding this season felt. 

David, since you've been in a rapid catch up with BL for the last two years…We talked about how emotional the winter felt with Moonlight Chicken, Utsukushii Kare 2, The Warp Effect, My School President, Never Let Me Go— 

David

Back to back to back to back bangers. I don't even know if we've had a season where there were that many back to back to back bangers. 

Ben

Airing concurrently? No, that was a first. However, this particular season as you said, there were really good shows and not so great shows. How do you feel about how much the shows of this particular season required us to lean in, and pay attention to them, and talk about them, and acknowledge what was being said?

David

I think the medium is evolving. I think we're having to lean in more because some shows want us to. They're clearly writing this. They're clearly directing this. They're clearly leading us somewhere where we want you to think about this. It's not all cutesy. And I think that is a maturing of the genre itself.

Ben

Nini, you have any thoughts about the…cerebral nature of this season you want to get out for the lagniappe?

Nini

I talked a little bit about this in the Adult Swim episode, but my brain? She be tired. My brain be so tired like to the point where, over the summer, I'm just watching trash, lighthearted fluff, and one or two things that are making me think a little bit more, but mostly just—yeah—I don't want to think for the next little bit. 

David

Trash is where it's at, yup.

Nini

I'm a Thailand girlie. I go up for the Thai shows most of the time, and every big name in Thailand gave me something to look at, more or less, this season and it was all like…if not the best, it was instructive. It was interesting. It made me think. So, I generally had a good time, but she tired.

Ben

I almost want to say this is where the genre peaks for me. Like I've been wondering what the peak of BL was going to look like for a while. There was a lot of really heavy stuff this season about what queer people are living with and experiencing, and I am curious where BL goes after this. 

1:39:34 - Girl, You Tried

So before we talk about where BL is going next…We've been building towards this all season. It's time to hand out Girl, You Tried. 

[David laughs]

Dave this is your first time on the podcast with us. During the VIIB Awards we handed out an award for a show that. Boy, there were some ideas, there were some performances—they were not in the same meeting. 

David

[laughs] At all. The focus group saw something different. Um, people watched a different show. Some notes got jumbled up. Uh, clearly the director was asleep or just not paying attention. Things happened. 

Ben

Nini, please introduce our contestants.

Nini

For those of you who might be new to us, Girl, You Tried is an award that we give out every season for a good concept that struggled with its execution. So, our four nominees. Four, people! Four nominees for Girl, You Tried this season are: late entry—Naked Dining, original entry—A Shoulder to Cry On, and along the way entries—A Boss and a Babe and Step by Step. 

You've heard us talk about all of these shows across the season, so we're not going to dive too deep. Y'all will have heard the problems that we had with the shows. David, aside from Naked Dining which is the one you put on the list, maybe tell the people why you think Ben and I put specific shows on the list.

David

To be fair, I did not watch A Shoulder to Cry On because Ben dogged that show out so bad I wasn't even gonna give it the time of day. So, um, I can't vote on A Shoulder to Cry On. 

Naked Dining takes it home for me because they were both annoying. They both were getting on my nerves, and this weird thing that they love doing in Japan, where people take off for prolonged periods of time and don't talk to one another…is obnoxious. There were all these weird near misses, and the food was supposed to be more central but it really wasn't. Some things just didn't make sense and no one would explain it. Normally that's okay, but there are things that are central to the story that just didn't make sense. 

Ben

How did they try? 

David

What they tried for was cute little cooking show with a side of romance. What they got was day-old, discounted bread. They wasted my time and my soul. It was a waste. If we're taking it down to brass tacks, they tried…something…I don't know what it may have been.

Maybe they were trying to do a cooking show. Maybe they were trying to do a show about kitchen safety, and why you shouldn't be in your kitchen naked. I really don't know what they were trying to do. 

Ben

Nini, we've talked about a lot of these shows a lot. Who is your winner for Girl, You tried for this season?

Nini

Well for me, it's always gonna be who, with like some nips, some tucks, some tweaks, would have been a 10 for me? That's my criterion, and for me that show is Step by Step, ‘cause Step by Step was like, I think I ended up giving it like a 9.

Ben

Yeah, you gave it a 9…

Nini

Yes, I did! I truly think that with a couple of nips and tucks and tweaks like Step by Step could have been a 10 show for me. I just enjoyed whatever Tee was doing. I…was into the ideas that he was playing with. You know I'm a vibesy bitch and I was feeling the vibe of Step by Step. 

But! It needed some—some tidying—it needed some cleaning up. Like I said, some nips, some tucks, and it would have been essential for me. So yeah, Step by Step. That's my winner. How about you, Ben?

Ben

I went back and listened to some of our stuff in preparation for the Girl, You Tried award, and I think the fact that we had a gaming company and a team of gamers and they never did anything with that as a potential crossover feels like a huge miss from the writing standpoint, which means that they were barely paying attention. That's a huge knock in the ‘you're not really’ trying section of the board for me. And I think just listening back, the intensity with which I was criticizing Step by Step is basically the built-in answer for me. 

I love Tee a lot, as a creator, as a queer person, and…I'm always rooting for him, but goddamn does he make it hard sometimes.

[David and Ben laugh]

Nini

Ben said Tee’s that friend you have who's right, but damn, shut the fuck up. [laughs]

Ben

Drink your juice, Shelby! 

David

Tee really is. Girl, you shoulda just sat there and ate your dinner. Tee really is that friend. See! Just sit there, just eat. 

Ben

Like, the reason why it's Step by Step is, as an entertainer, Tee—I think—broke trust with his audience. And he really misfired there, because, like, there are so many good ideas in Step by Step, and he's got a really good eye as a director. He's a really legible storyteller but he's got to figure out how to put these things together. He's got to figure how to structure his episodes more effectively. And so for me, it ends up being Step by Step because I can feel the show that Step by Step wants to be more than the other shows on this list. 

Like, Naked Dining doesn't know what it wants to be. A Shoulder to Cry On got edited to all hell because of the idols involved. And what the fuck was New even doing with the bunch of fucking gamers in a workplace BL? Anyway. So, it’s Step by Step.

Nini

All right. The dubious honor of Girl, You Tried for Spring 2023 with two- thirds of the votes [laughs] goes to Step by Step.

David

I amend my vote. You have talked me out of my vote. I will now amend my vote: Step by Step clears the board! 

Ben

The whole panel! [laughs]

David

It'll be the only award show it ever sweeps. 

[Nini laughs]

Nini

Sorry! So it's now unanimous.

David

Minus ones across the board.

Ben

Alright, panel, 10s or chops? Nini?

Nini

One chop.

Ben

Two chops.

David

Three fucking chops. [Nini laughs] 

I don't see it!

1:46:56 - Looking Ahead

Ben

Our final section: Looking Ahead. What do we have up next? Nini, you've got the list.

Nini

Well, what are we watching right now? So let's start with that. So, one of the things that we're watching now [sighs]...I'm just gonna say it. We're watching Be My Favorite. I am on record on this podcast as saying that I had zero interest in watching Be My Favorite. Ben said he was going in hostile—which, he did. 

We had to literally amend the name of our chat for the show, like as the show went on. What did it start as?

Ben

Not Our Favorite.

Nini

I was not watching at that point. It went from Not Our Favorite to Maybe? It's Good?? to We’re Mad This Might Be Good. And then now our chat is just called UGH! FINE!!

[David laughs]

David

So I slugged my way through the very first episode, and when he had said it was like the first time in a long time that me and him have both been like ‘absolutely not’ and then…two weeks later this bitch goes “so Be My Favorite” and I turn—aghast, of course—because I thought not only had that ship sailed but we waited until they got at the harbor and we sank it. 

And I discover that homegirl down here is taking a sub to go look at its remains. Then of course, because I'm like no this has got to be a complete disaster, because there's no way this Miss Thing went back to his show and now I'm sitting here like “Ugh…okay.” 

Ben

What else is on the “Wow are we actually watching this?” list. 

David

I know it's not Hidden Agenda. 

Nini

It is Hidden Agenda.

David

I haven’t watched it yet because I was gonna let Ben watch it. I'll be like if Ben hates it I won't bother watching it. But I don't want to start watching this shit, and like it, and have this bitch hate it, and not have anybody to watch this show with. 

Ben

I don't hate it! I don't think I'm sold on it yet. But I don't hate it. 

David

Someone told me that they have definitely gotten better…as acting, now, one show under.

Ben and Nini

Hmmmmmmmmmm...

David

No! Not the both of you! Not the both of you!

[Ben and Nini laugh]

Not the both of you going 'hmmmm' like a starting up race car. I am so mad that you both at the, nearly a second apart 'hmmmm'

[Everyone laughs]

Nini

Here's the thing, right? [David continues laughing] I wasn't going to watch it, then I found out it was Tee and then I was like “well shit, now I have to watch it” because I am contractually obligated to watch everything that he makes after Lovely Writer.

David

Understood.

Nini

This is giving me such Lovely Writer teas in some very specific ways, but it's too early to tell as yet— 

David

What are we? Three in, or two in?

Nini

Three in. Yeah, it's too early to tell—like, with Tee you got to give it half the show. Because, like, when I think about Lovely Writer like around four is when it started turn, and by six I was like ‘yeah, okay, in.’ 

With Tee, he's a slow burn motherfucker. You just got to give him time to get into it. So I am holding my thoughts on it…so far, but I am contractually obligated to watch it all the way through.

Ben

David and I caught up on Laws of Attraction this weekend. It's a lot of fun. We're having a great time. 

David

I love him. 

Ben

He’s talking about the insane lawyer. 

David

His level of outright ridiculous sissiness. I live for. It is walking gay chaos…and I…live… for every moment he is on the screen. And somehow each shirt got gayer.

Like, I don't know if he's having conversations with people in costuming, or if he is like pointing at a random poor little assistant and going “You I want you to go to a woman's blouse store and get the ugliest, most asymmetrical shirt you can.”

Ben

[laughs ]And it better be champagne-colored!

David

“And you are to bring it back here, and I swear to God, if it's not earth-toned or champagne…I will beat you to within an inch of your life. Go do your job and get out of my face.” 

He is giving me everything because, look, girls, gays, and theys with guns—I'm here for. And when he goes to that office trying to beat that boy up, and he pulls out that gay-ass little gun… and goes, “Look, Boo-Boo, I'mma put one in you one way or another.” 

[Nini laughs]

I live. I live! I was resurrected. I had bronchitis and he cleared it up. It resurrected me. That whole scene healed me in body and spirit. I'm not gonna even lie.

Nini

So I am not watching this. I am waiting for somebody to tell me I must watch this. 

David

Oh girl, you're not missing anything. Do not get us wrong! You are not missing cinéma vérité by any stretch of any one's fucking imagination. But what I will tell you is that it is delightful.

Ben

Also from Thailand, we are watching Be Mine Superstar.

Nini

When I was talking earlier about a trash watch. This is what I was talking about. [laughs] 

David

I have not been watching it because it was another one that I was kind of waiting to see what Ben was gonna say.

Ben

Be Mine Superstar is fine. It is…very watchable. It isn’t asking a lot of me right now. I'm having a good time with the performances. Overall, it is a low stakes watch for me, and I'm with Nini. Like I'm having a great time with the big pieces but I don't mind having just a very watchable show where it's very clear that Ja and First are having a good time playing against their type. 

David

Okay!

Ben

Okay, we're gonna talk about the shit I care about!

Nini

Now Ben wants to talk about Japan.

Ben

Let's talk about Japan! 

David

Oh, here she go. Buckle up, folks. It's gonna be a bumpy night. 

Ben

Japan is currently airing two shows. I am living my best life! 

Currently, we have Tokyo in April is… which is the first new outing from MBS, who have continued their Drama Shower rotation. A lot of you may not be familiar with who MBS is but they are a Japanese broadcasting network. It is very, very cool that MBS is invested in BL because they have produced some of the most important shit that's worked its way out of Japan into the masses, like some of the most famous anime comes from MBS. Very, very cool that MBS is committing an entire second year to BL and they are continuing to get more gritty with the kinds of stories they're willing to tell along the way, and I am really, really impressed with Tokyo in April is… and I don't want to say anything else right now because we have a lot to unpack when we finally discussed it in fall! 

Also, Minato’s Laundromat 2 is airing right now, and while Nini may never watch Minato's Laundromat 2 so we'll probably not discuss it on this show except for me saying like it deserves a VIIB Award later, it is really cool that the showrunners opted to abandon the source material for the second season. 

From Korea we have Jun & Jun right now. If you are kind of bougie about Korean production, I don't think you're going to enjoy this one. 

Finally, Taiwan is back! Oh my god, Taiwan is back and it's as cracked out as ever! Holy shit Stay by My Side is so stupid! I love it! 

[David laughs]

We have needed a stupid BL for a while, and like it's not stupid in a sense like the plotting is bad, the storytelling is bad, but it's just so silly. It's like what if we take all these goofy BL tropes and just ramp that up to 9! Not 10, just 9! 

We don't know when Man Suang is going to come out. We're anticipating it but we have no idea when it's going to release because they are doing the international festivals circuit thing.

David

A friend of mine got into a viewing of it. Apparently it's good. Sincerely good. 

Nini

There is something else coming out of Drama Shower that I don't have on the list because it only came up recently. My Personal Weatherman. That is what it’s called.

And the last one, which I am obligated to mention because my baby Na Naphat. Na and ISBANKY is in it and Saiparn from Midnight Museum. It's Club Saipan Fine: Moments and Memories. 

Ben

That looks like a goddamn mess.

Nini

It looks exactly like the kind of trash that I need to watch, and it’s only four episodes.

Ben

I'm glad it's only four episodes, so you can report back quickly because goddamn I am not doing that one. 

David

Ben look harrangued—and traumatized—right now. [Ben laughs] He's huddling on the floor in the corner shaking his head. 

Nini

It's mess and lesbians.

David

Oh wait! There are lesbians in it?

Nini

Yes.

David

And here we are! We're there. That's it, that’s it. I'm watching it. 

1:57:44 - Outro

Ben

As we wrap this up, David, thank you for joining us as our very first guest on The Conversation. 

David

Oh god this was awesome.

Nini

I just want to let the people know that we've been here for two hours. I don't know how long the edit's going to be but we've been having a goodass time.

Ben

I think we just take, like, the necessary stuff for the episode and then just release a bonus episode and just call it the David Cut. [David laughs]

David

It's the David Cut where I talk in a gravelly voice. 

Ben

David, since we are together we have to do the thing for Nini because she's been waiting for it for a long time. 

Let's remind our listeners something very important: Dick is abundant.

David

And low in value. 

Ben

Dick futures are not a safe investment. 

David

The NASDICK is trending down.

Nini

[crying] The NASDICK…

Ben

I'm making sure it's the NASDICK—I said NASDICK and I almost killed Ben. The first time I said the NASDICK is trending down and almost killed one of my best friends.

Nini

[laughs] On that note, I think it's time to wrap, and we will bid you all adieu until the fall. David, Ben, say bye to the people. We out.

David

Bye! Thank you guys for having me! It was great! 

Ben

Peace!

[itsawritblr]

"I Was Told to Approve All Teen Gender Transitions. I Refused."

Via The Free Press:

Perhaps you read the long investigation about detransitioners published in this weekend’s New York Times. It is comprehensive and sober and we highly recommend it.

It’s also a piece we are confident would never have made it into the paper were it not for independent publications like ours taking the journalistic and reputational risk over the past few years to pursue the subject of “gender-affirming” care and the subsequent harms inflicted on vulnerable young people. In this, we are proud to stand alongside Hannah Barnes, Lisa Selin Davis, Hadley Freeman, Helen Joyce, Leor Sapir, Abigail Shrier, Jesse Singal, Kathleen Stock, Quillette and others, who took the arrows so that the mainstream press could finally start reporting on what’s really happening. 

What is immensely clear is that individual testimonies—whistleblower accounts like those we’ve published by Jamie Reed and Dr. Riittakerttu Kaltiala—have made the change we are now beginning to see. 

And that change is now impossible to deny: witness the arrival of lawsuits from young people who say they have suffered the consequences of these life-altering treatments. 

Today, therapist Tamara Pietzke adds her voice to those of our other whistleblowers, and tells how she could no longer go along with the pressure to transition her patients.

By Tamara Pietzke

February 5, 2024

For six years I worked at a hospital that said all teenagers with gender dysphoria must be affirmed. I quit my job to blow the whistle.

I know from firsthand experience what hard times are. Though I had a happy childhood, raised as the middle child by working-class parents in Washington State, my mom died of ovarian cancer when I was 22.

After that, my family fell apart. I felt lost and alone.

I  decided to become a therapist because I didn’t want anyone to go through what I had, feeling like no one on this planet cares about them. At least they can say their therapist does.

I earned my master’s in social work from the University of Washington in 2012, and I have worked as a therapist for over a decade in the Puget Sound area. Most recently, I was employed by MultiCare, one of the largest hospital systems in the state.

For the six years I was there, I worked with hundreds of clients. But in mid-January, I left my job because of what I will go on to describe.

The therapeutic relationship is a special one. We are the original “safe space,” where people are able to explore their darker feelings and painful experiences. The job of the therapist is to guide a patient to self-understanding and sound mental health. This is a process that requires careful assessment and time, not snap judgments and confirmation of a patient’s worldview.

But in the past year I noticed a concerning new trend in my field. I was getting the message from my supervisors that when a young person I was seeing expressed discomfort with their gender—the diagnostic term is gender dysphoria—I should throw out all my training. No matter the patient’s history or other mental health conditions that could be complicating the situation, I was simply to affirm that the patient was transgender, and even approve the start of a medical transition.

I believe this rise of “affirmative care” for young people with gender dysphoria challenges the very fundamentals of what therapy is supposed to provide.

I am a 36-year-old single mother of three young kids all under the age of six. I am terrified of speaking out, but that fear pales in comparison to my strong belief that we can no longer medicalize youth and cause them potentially irreversible harm. The three patients I describe below explain why I am taking the risk of coming forward.

Last spring, I started seeing a new client, who at 13 years old had one of the most extreme and heartbreaking life stories I’ve ever heard. (For the sake of clarity, I am referring to all patients by their biological sex.)

My patient’s mother has bipolar disorder and was so abusive to my patient that the mother was given a restraining order. My patient was sexually assaulted by an older cousin, by one of her mother’s boyfriends, and also once at school by a classmate. Her diagnoses include depression, PTSD, anxiety, intermittent explosive disorder, and autism. She is being raised by her mother’s ex-boyfriend (not the one who assaulted her).

The year before I started seeing her, when she was 11, she was hospitalized for talking about committing suicide. Later that year, a pediatrician diagnosed her with gender dysphoria after she started to question her gender. The pediatrician referred her to Mary Bridge Children’s Gender Health Clinic, whose clinicians recommended she take medicine to suppress her periods and that she think about starting testosterone.

Mary Bridge, MultiCare’s pediatric hospital, runs the gender clinic for minors and employs nurses, social workers, dietitians, and endocrinologists, who provide gender-affirming care, which includes prescribing hormones to young patients who question their gender. In order to get that prescription, patients first need a recommendation letter from a therapist. Because Mary Bridge is a part of MultiCare, their patients were often referred to therapists like me who were in their system.

In an April 2022 blog post, a Mary Bridge social worker wrote that the gender clinic’s referrals increased from less than five a month in 2019 to more than 35 a month in 2022. In May 2022, the clinic received a $100,000 donation from Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute “to study health care disparities” in transgender youth.

The clinic operates in Washington, one of the states with some of the most lenient legislation on gender transition for youth. In May 2023, the state legislature passed a law guaranteeing that youth seeking a medical gender transition can stay at Washington shelters—and the shelters are not required to notify their parents.

Because of my patient’s autism, it was difficult for us to engage in introspective conversations. During our first visit, she came over to my desk to show me extremely sadistic and graphic pornographic videos on her phone. She stood next to me, hunched over, hyper-fixated on the videos as she rocked back and forth. She told me during one session that she watched horror and porn movies growing up because they were the only ones available in her house.

She showed up to our therapy sessions in disheveled, loose-fitting clothes, her hair greasy, her eyes staring down at the ground, her face covered by a Covid mask almost like a protective layer. She went by a boy’s name, but she never raised gender dysphoria with me directly—though one time she told me she would get mad at the sound of her own voice because “it sounds too girly.” When I asked her how she felt about an upcoming appointment at the gender clinic, she told me she didn’t know she had one.

In between scrolling through videos on her phone, she told me how she cried every night in bed and felt “insane.” She described a time when she was eight years old and her mother nearly killed her sister. She remembered her mother being taken away. At times, she would “age-regress,” she told me, by watching Teletubbies and sucking on pacifiers.

When she started seeing me, she had recently threatened to “blow up the school,” which resulted in her expulsion.

I knew I couldn’t solve all of her problems, or make her feel better in just a few therapy sessions. My initial goal was to make her feel comfortable opening up to me, to make the therapy room a place where she was heard and felt safe. I also wanted to try to protect her from falling prey to outside influences from social media, her peers, or even the adults in her life.

With a patient like this, with so many intersecting and overwhelming problems, and with such a tragic history of abuse, it took our first three sessions to get her feeling more comfortable to even talk to me, and to understand the dimensions of her problems. But when I called her guardian last fall to schedule a fourth appointment, he asked me to write her a letter of recommendation for cross-sex hormone treatment. That is, at age 13, she was to start taking testosterone. Such a letter from me begins the process of medical transition for a patient.

In Washington State, that’s all it takes—a few visits with a therapist and a letter, often written using a template provided by one’s superiors—for minors to undergo the irreversible treatments that patients must take for a lifetime.

I was scared for this patient. She had so many overlapping problems that needed addressing it seemed like malpractice to abruptly begin her on a medical gender transition that could quickly produce permanent changes.

The MultiCare recommendation letter Tamara was given for approving the medical treatment of minors with gender dysphoria. I emailed a program manager in my department at MultiCare and outlined my concerns. She wrote back that my client’s trauma history has no bearing on whether or not she should receive hormone treatment.

“There is not valid, evidenced-based, peer-reviewed research that would indicate that gender dysphoria arises from anything other than gender (including trauma, autism, other mental health conditions, etc.),” she wrote.

She also warned that “there is the potential in causing harm to a client’s mental health when restricting access to gender-affirming care” and suggested I “examine [my] personal beliefs and biases about trans kids.”

When Tamara outlined her concerns about giving a patient testosterone to her manager at MultiCare, she was told to “examine your personal beliefs and biases about trans kids.” She then reported me to MultiCare’s risk management team, who removed my client from my care and placed her with a new therapist.

I shouldn’t have been surprised by this. Just a few months earlier, in September of last year, I was one of over 100 therapists and behavioral specialists at the MultiCare hospital system required to attend mandatory training on “gender-affirming care.”

As hard as it is to believe given my work, I hadn’t heard about gender-affirming care before that moment. I needed to know more. So each night in the week leading up to the training, I searched online for information about gender-affirming care. After putting my kids to bed, I sat glued to my computer screen, losing sleep, horrified at what I found.

I discovered that neither puberty blockers nor cross-sex hormones (testosterone or estrogen) were approved by the Food and Drug Administration as a treatment for gender dysphoria. In fact, prescribing these treatments to kids can have drastic side effects, including infertility, loss of sexual function, increased risk of heart attack, stroke, cardiovascular disease, cancer, bone density problems, blood clots, liver toxicity, cataracts, brain swelling, and even death.

While gender clinicians claim hormonal treatment improved their patients’ psychological health, the studies on this are few and highly disputed.

I found that those experiencing gender dysphoria are up to six times more likely to also be autistic, and they are also more likely to suffer from schizophrenia, trauma, and abuse.

A risk manager’s job is to minimize the hospital’s liability, but in my case, they deemed that my concerns posed a greater risk to my client than giving her a life-altering procedure with no proven long-term benefit.

I shouldn’t have been surprised by this. Just a few months earlier, in September of last year, I was one of over 100 therapists and behavioral specialists at the MultiCare hospital system required to attend mandatory training on “gender-affirming care.”

As hard as it is to believe given my work, I hadn’t heard about gender-affirming care before that moment. I needed to know more. So each night in the week leading up to the training, I searched online for information about gender-affirming care. After putting my kids to bed, I sat glued to my computer screen, losing sleep, horrified at what I found.

I discovered that neither puberty blockers nor cross-sex hormones (testosterone or estrogen) were approved by the Food and Drug Administration as a treatment for gender dysphoria. In fact, prescribing these treatments to kids can have drastic side effects, including infertility, loss of sexual function, increased risk of heart attack, stroke, cardiovascular disease, cancer, bone density problems, blood clots, liver toxicity, cataracts, brain swelling, and even death.

While gender clinicians claim hormonal treatment improved their patients’ psychological health, the studies on this are few and highly disputed.

I found that those experiencing gender dysphoria are up to six times more likely to also be autistic, and they are also more likely to suffer from schizophrenia, trauma, and abuse.

The research also implies that the dramatic rise in these diagnoses across the West likely have a strong element of social contagion. In children ages 6 to 17, there was a 70 percent increase in diagnoses of gender dysphoria in the U.S. from 2020 to 2021. In Sweden there was a 1,500 percent increase in these diagnoses among girls 13–17 from 2008 to 2018.

Yet, countries that were once the pioneers of gender transition medicine are now starting to backtrack. In 2022, England announced it will close its only gender clinic after an investigation uncovered subpar medical care, including findings that some patients were rushed toward gender transitions. Sweden and Finland undertook comprehensive analyses of the state of gender medicine and recommended restrictions on transition of minors.

I decided—though it was potentially dangerous to my career and to me—to ask questions about the findings I discovered.

The training I attended laid out an affirming model of gender care—from pronouns and “social transition” to hormone treatments and surgical intervention. In order for children to be diagnosed with gender dysphoria, the training stated, patients must meet six of eight characteristics, ranging from “a strong desire/insistence of being another gender” to “strong preference for cross-gender toys and games.”

Tamara and her MultiCare colleagues were trained to diagnose gender dysphoria among their young patients when they met six of the eight above characteristics. It was made abundantly clear to all in attendance that these recommendations were “best practice” at MultiCare, and that the hospital would not tolerate anything less.

When the leader of the training brought up hormone treatments, I shakily tapped the unmute button on Zoom and asked why 70 to 80 percent of female adolescents diagnosed with gender dysphoria have prior mental health diagnoses.

She flashed a look of disgust as she warned me against spreading “misinformation on trans kids.” Soon the chat box started blowing up with comments directed at me. One colleague stated it was not “appropriate to bring politics into this” and another wrote that I was “demonstrating a hostility toward trans folks which is [a] direct violation of the Hippocratic Oath,” and recommended I “seek additional support and information so as not to harm trans clients.”

In the training, gender-affirming treatment is presented as “suicide prevention.” As soon as I closed my laptop, I burst into tears. I care so deeply about my clients that even thinking about this now makes me cry. I couldn’t understand how my colleagues, who are supposed to be my teammates, could be so quick to villainize me. I also wondered if maybe my colleagues were right, and if I had gone insane.

Later, my boss reached out to me and told me it was “inappropriate” of me to raise these questions, telling me that a training session was not the proper forum. When I tried to present the evidence that caused me concern—the lack of long-term studies, the devastating side effects—she told me she didn’t have time to read it.

“I am speaking out because nothing will change unless people like me blow the whistle,” Tamara writes. “I am desperate to help my patients.” In retrospect, this ideology had been growing in power for a long time.

I remember in 2019 seeing signs of how gender dysphoria arose among many of my most vulnerable female clients, all of whom struggled with previous psychological problems.

In 2019, I started seeing a 16-year-old client after her pediatrician referred her to me for anxiety, depression, and ADHD. When I first met her, she had long blonde hair covering her eyes, to the point you could barely see her face. It was like she was going through the world trying to be invisible.

In 2020, during the pandemic, she told me she had started reading online a lot about gender, and said she started feeling like she wasn’t a girl anymore.

Around this time, her anxiety became so debilitating she couldn’t leave her house—not even to go to school. After taking a year off school during the pandemic, she enrolled in an alternative school for kids struggling with mental health. I was relieved that she was making friends for the first time, and seemed to be feeling a lot better.

Then she started using they/he pronouns, identified as pansexual, and replaced the skirts and fishnet stockings she often wore with disheveled and baggy clothes. Her long hair became shorter and shorter. She started wearing a binder to flatten her breasts. She tried out a few different names before settling on one that’s gender neutral.

The official diagnosis I gave her was “adjustment disorder”—an umbrella term often applied to young people who are having a hard time coping with difficult and stressful circumstances. It’s the type of diagnosis that doesn’t follow a child forever—it implies that mental distress among kids is often transient.

She came out as transgender to her family in 2021. Her mother was supportive, but her dad wasn’t. Regardless, she went to her pediatrician seeking a referral to a gender clinic.

In 2022, she went to Mary Bridge Children’s Gender Health Clinic for the first time, where the clinicians informed her and her parents that if she didn’t receive hormone replacement therapy, she could be “at increased risk for anxiety, depression, and worsening of mental health/psychological trauma,” according to her patient records. Her dad refused to start his daughter on testosterone, and so all the clinic could do was prescribe birth control to stop her period due to her “menstrual dysphoria,” or distress over getting her period. Which is something I thought all teenage girls experienced.

Five months later, she swallowed a bottle of pills and her mother had to rush her to the emergency room.

By early 2023, my client logged on to our weekly session, which we started doing by Zoom, and she told me she identified as a “wounded male dog.” She explained to me that this was her “xenogender,” a concept she had discovered online, which references gender identities that go “beyond the human understanding of gender.” She said she felt she didn’t have all of the right appendages, and that she wanted to start wearing ears and a tail to truly feel like herself.

I was stunned. All I could do was silently nod along.

After the session, I emailed my colleagues looking for advice. “I want to be accepting and inclusive and all of that,” I wrote, but “I guess I just don’t understand at what point, if ever, a person’s gender identity is indicative of a bigger issue.”

I asked them: “Is there ever a time where acceptance of a person’s identity isn’t freely given?”

The consensus from my colleagues was that it wasn’t a big deal.

“It sounds like this isn’t something that’s ‘broken,’ ” one colleague wrote me back, “so let’s not try to ‘fix’ it.”

“If someone told me they use a litterbox instead of a toilet and they were happy with it and it’s part of their life that brings them fulfillment, then great!” she continued. “I might think it’s weird, but then again, not my life.”

After learning that one of Tamara’s patients identified as “a wounded male dog,” a colleague replied: “If someone told me they use a litterbox instead of a toilet and they were happy with it and it’s part of their life that brings them fulfillment, then great!” I was baffled and alarmed by her unquestioning affirmation. At what point does a change in identity represent a mental health concern, and not something to be celebrated and affirmed? Fortunately, my client never brought up her “xenogender” again. She also isn’t on testosterone due to her father’s disapproval. So I kept these thoughts to myself, and ultimately, in order to keep my job, I let it go.

Another female patient, who transitioned as a teen, serves as a warning of what happens when we passively accept the idea that gender transition will entirely resolve a patient’s mental health issues.

This client, who I started seeing in 2022, is now 23 and rarely leaves the house, spends most of the day in bed playing video games, and envisions no path to working or functioning in the outside world due to a variety of mental health problems. In 2016, this patient was diagnosed with autism, anxiety, and gender dysphoria. Later the diagnoses grew to include depression, Tourette syndrome, and a conversion disorder. In 2018, at age 17, the Mary Bridge Gender Health Clinic prescribed testosterone, despite the fact that this patient is diabetic and one of the hormone’s side effects is that it might increase insulin resistance. The patient’s mother, who has another transgender child, strongly encouraged it.

This patient now has a wispy mustache and a deepened voice, but does not pass as male. It turns out that testosterone, which will be prescribed for life, did not relieve the patient’s other mental illnesses.

My biggest fear about the gender-affirming practices my industry has blindly adopted is that they are causing irreversible damage to our clients. Especially as they are vulnerable people who come to us at their lowest moments in life, and who entrust us with their health and safety. And yet, instead of treating them as we would patients with any other mental health condition, we have been instructed—and even bullied—to abandon our professional judgment and training in favor of unquestioning affirmation.

I am speaking out because nothing will change unless people like me—who know the risks of medicalizing troubled young people—blow the whistle. I am desperate to help my patients.

And I believe, if I don’t speak out, I will have betrayed them.

(note: previously posted this with a lot of repetition because of copy/pasting. This is the fixed version. But if you see any repetition or mistakes please let me know!)

[analytik2]

List of Urusei Yatsura Remake Season 1 episodes with their corresponding Original Anime Episode and Manga Chapter counterparts

(source)

Basically, this is a list of Urusei Yatsura Remake episodes with their original anime counterparts and their corresponding manga chapters. I even added some notes about things that I personally found interesting or noteworthy about the episodes or the manga chapters.

I wanted to make this list for a while now so hopefully some people will find this useful or interesting.

Here is the list. It's quite long.

Chapters adapted by Urusei Yatsura 2022:

Episode 1A Young Love on the Run Manga - Chapter 1 Young Love on the Run Original anime counterpart – Episode 1A I'm Lum-chan the Notorious! Note: The Remake version is longer and adapts the full chapter of the manga more faithfully whereas the OG anime takes more liberties. However, the Remake version had its own changes as well. Such as making it more clear how Lum fell for Ataru.

Episode 1B Between a Rock and a Hard Place Manga - Chapter 5 Between a Rock and a Hard Place Original anime counterpart – Episode 6A Love Triangle Black Hole Note: The Remake skipped Chapters 2-4 and went straight to chapter 5. This is a trend in the Remake and it's because it's not a full adaptation of the manga.

Episode 2A Present for You Manga – Chapter 4 Present for You Original anime counterpart – Episode 5A The Mysterious Seductive Beauty Sakura

Episode 2B The Yellow Ribbon of Happiness Manga – Chapter 15 The Yellow Ribbon of Happiness Original anime counterpart – Episode 7A Electric Shocks Scare Me!

Episode 3A Trouble Rains Down!! Manga – Chapter 22 Trouble Rains Down, Chapter 25 Love and Suffering Original anime counterpart – Episode 14A Mendo Arrives With Trouble! Note: Only the first scene of Chapter 25 was adapted in the Remake's Episode 3A before the B segment of the episode started.

Episode 3B Amazed in a Maze Manga – Chapter 30 Amazed in a Maze Original anime counterpart – Episode 23 The Spring Blossom Picnic Note: In the Remake, the ending of this episode was changed with a spaceship leaving the cave which showed Kurama to be in it, thus connecting this episode with the next.

Episode 4 Sealed with a Kiss!! Manga – Chapter 136 Kurama Again!, Chapter 137 Sealed with a Kiss!, Chapter 138 Goodbye, Covenant! Original anime counterpart – Episode 48 Princess Kurama - A New Challenge! Note: Episode 4 in the Remake was the first full-length episode of the Remake. Kurama’s debut chapter and all the chapters featuring her prior to chapter 136 were skipped as Kurama debuted in Episode 4 in the Remake. Originally, Kurama debuted in Chapter 16 Become a Woman and Start Over! in the manga and Episode 9A Sleeping Beauty Princess Kurama in the OG anime. So far, none of her later chapters have been adapted either.

Episode 5A The Glove of Love and Conflict Manga – Chapter 216 The Glove of Love and Conflict Original anime counterpart – Episode 116 Love and War! Battle of Glove VS Pants!! Note: In the Remake, Sakura got her job as the Tomobiki High School nurse in this episode. Originally, she became a school nurse in Chapter 37 Sakura Sensei, Enchanted Blossom in the manga, and Episode 5B Virus in Distress in the OG anime.

Episode 5B How I've Waited for You… Manga – Chapter 26 How I've Waited for You Original anime counterpart – Episode 10 Pitter-Patter Christmas Eve Note: Episode 10 in the OG anime was the first full-length episode and also a Christmas special. It also had to change a lot of the story since Mendo wasn’t introduced yet. The OG Episode 10 ranked in 4th place twice in 2 separate polls. But if you ignored the 2nd and 3rd rank which were anime-original episodes, it ranked 2nd place. In a poll for the Remake's Season 1, it ranked in 2nd place. Both versions of the episode were very good and adapted one of the most iconic chapters of Urusei Yatsura in a great way.

Episode 6A Good Day for a Departure Manga - Chapter 8 Good Day for a Departure Original anime counterpart – Episode 15A The Great Spring War

Episode 6B Oyuki Manga – Chapter 10 Oyuki Original anime counterpart – Episode 8A Neptune is Beyond the Closet Note: Mendo wasn't introduced yet in the manga or the OG anime at this point so his inclusion in the Remake was an anime original idea.

Episode 6C Ataru Retires Manga – Chapter 61 Ataru Retires Original anime counterpart – Episode 64 Goodbye Season Note: The OG anime pretty loosely adapted this chapter as it almost completely alters the plot and the jokes.

Episode 7A Home Is Where You Find It Manga – Chapter 42 Surfin’ SOS, Chapter 86 Home Is Where You Find it Original anime counterpart – Episode 34 Goblin in Distress - Yearning for People Note: Only the first few pages of Chapter 42 were adapted at the beginning of Episode 7A of the Remake.

Episode 7B Marine Garbage Disposal Manga – Chapter 91 Marine Garbage Disposal Original anime counterpart – Episode 34 Goblin in Distress - Yearning for People Note: The first “canon” multi-chapter arc of the manga took place between the 1-month time-skip mentioned at the beginning of Episode 7B of the Remake, Chapter 87-90 Deranged Marriage Part 1-4. This was adapted in Episode 22 The Great Space Matchmaking Operation in the OG anime. Originally, Sakura’s boyfriend Tsubame Ozuno debuts in Chapter 19 Disco Inferno in the manga and Episode 12A Love Battle Royale in the OG anime. Also, Episode 7 of the Remake is the first episode where the episode structure is the exact same as its original anime counterpart.

Episode 8A Transfer Student Close Call… Manga – Chapter 55 Sports Festival Close Call, Chapter 56 Cultural Festival Close Call Original anime counterpart – Episode 18A Girl's Day! Introducing Ran-chan Note: The OG anime adaptation of Ran’s debut chapter was changed since Lum had not enrolled in Tomobiki High School yet. A few panels of a flashback scene from Chapter 56 made it into the Remake’s Episode 8A right before the start of Episode 8B. Chapter 57 was completely unadapted in both anime.

Episode 8B Farewell Party Close Call… Manga – Chapter 68 Farewell Party Close Call Original anime counterpart – Episode 18B Ran-chan's Invitation Note: Episode 8 of the Remake is the second episode where the episode structure is the exact same as its original anime counterpart.

Episode 9A To Kill With Love Manga – Chapter 6 To Kill With Love, Chapter 7 A Contemptible Good-For-Nothing Original anime counterpart – Episode 3A The Coming of Rei, the Handsome Shapechanger!, Episode 3B Die, Ladykiller! Note: In the Remake’s Episode 9A, the first half of the episode was based on the first half of Chapter 6 while the second half of the episode was based on the second half of Chapter 7. Each chapter was adapted fully in Episode 3 of the OG anime.

Episode 9B Studying Mayhem Manga – Chapter 110 Studying Mayhem Original anime counterpart – Episode 36 Rei's Return! Crisis in the Classroom!

Episode 10A Parents' Day Horrors Manga – Chapter 51 Parents' Day Horrors Original anime counterpart – Episode 16B Terrible Visiting Day Note: In the OG anime adaptation Ataru was awake the whole time and Lum’s mom actually battled Mendo’s mom. In the Remake, Lum’s mom is actually voiced by Lum’s original voice actress Fumi Hirano.

Episode 10B Since Your Parting Manga – Chapter 34 Since Your Parting Original anime counterpart – Episode 44 After You’ve Gone Note: The OG Episode 44 was voted to be the best episode of Urusei Yatsura first in 1986 as an end-of-the-series poll and was rebroadcast as episode 194. The second time it was voted to be the best episode of Urusei Yatsura was in 2019 in NHK’s Rumiko Takahashi Megapoll. The OG Episode 44 is highly regarded probably because of the changes made by the director Mamoru Oshii and his unique directing style. The Remake seemed to take some cues from the OG Episode 44. This episode was also released on the 1st anniversary of the Urusei Yatsura anime on October 14, 1983. The Remake version of Since Your Parting also won 1st place in an official poll of Season 1 episodes in 2023.

Episode 11A Mendō Siblings!! Manga – Chapter 121 Mendo Siblings! Part 1 Original anime counterpart – Episode 50 The Mendō Siblings!

Episode 11B A Strange New Year at the Mendō Estate Manga – Chapter 114 A Strange New Year at the Mendō Estate, Chapter 163 The Wild Christmas Tree Party! Original anime counterpart – Episode 185 New Year’s Panic! The Mendō Family’s Human Sugoroku Tournament Note: Only the last 2 pages of Chapter 163 made it into the ending of the Remake’s episode 11B as a very loose adaptation. The Remake seemingly took some cues from the OG anime again by including Ryoko in the mix. Originally, Ryoko wasn’t in the manga chapter since she debuted later in Chapter 121. The Remake also added other characters like Oyuki, Benten, Rei, etc. as a replacement for Ten.

Episode 12A Ten is Here Manga – Chapter 63 Ten is Here Original anime counterpart – Episode 2 Mail from Space - Ten-chan Arrives! Note: The OG anime introduced Ten super early. Thus he was also in a lot of episodes where he wasn’t supposed to be in. The OG anime also had to change Ten’s debut episode a bit since a lot of the characters who are in Chapter 63 weren’t introduced yet.

Episode 12B A Date for Just the Two of Us Manga – Chapter 65 A Date for Just the Two of Us Original anime counterpart – Episode 26 Ten-chan's Love Note: The OG anime episode changed up the story of the manga quite a bit. Strangely, it even cut some scenes from the manga which might be considered a bit erotic. Even more strangely, the Remake counterpart did adapt those scenes albeit with its own twist.

Episode 13A The Great Off-Campus Snack Battle Manga – Chapter 106 The Great Off-Campus Snack Battle Original anime counterpart – Episode 46 Lunch is a Battlefield!

Episode 13B A Gift from Ten!! Manga – Chapter 124 A Gift from Ten!! Original anime counterpart – Episode 60 Love Love Catchball! Note: The OG anime episode included some original content like having a separate Love Love Catchball for the men which made the episode funnier.

Episode 14A That Mizunokōji Boy Manga – Chapter 40 Youth Devoted to the White Ball, Chapter 141 Baseball Shenanigans Original anime counterpart – Episode 70 Dramatic Appearance! Mizunokoji Ton-chan!! Note: Both the OG anime and the Remake combined Chapter 40 and 141 to make Ton’s debut episode. However, the OG anime episode 70 adapted more of Chapter 141 than the Remake’s Episode 14. The Remake’s Episode 14 was the second to have a name that was different from the title of the manga chapter it was adapting.

Episode 14B Love Letter Trouble Manga – Chapter 202 Love Letter Trouble, Part 1, Chapter 203 Love Letter Trouble, Part 2 Original anime counterpart – Episode 140 The Mysterious Giant Cake! Love Escape Panic!! Note: The OG anime’s Episode 140 adapted Chapter 202 and 203 with Chapter 213 Secret Spot! Palatial Cake of Horrors by combining them into one story which made the whole episode way more unhinged and hilarious.

Episode 15A Anko Pathos, the Taste of Love!? Manga – Chapter 171 Anko Pathos, the Taste of Love!? Original anime counterpart – Episode 109 Ran-chan, Tasting the Tearful Love of a First Kiss

Episode 15B Memories and a Close Call... Manga – Chapter 59 Memories and a Close Call Original anime counterpart – Episode 35 Darling's Had it This Time! Note: The OG anime stitched Chapter 59 together with Chapter 60 Genuine Close Call and basically created one story. Ran also enrolled in Tomobiki High School in this episode of the OG anime. In the manga and the Remake, she already enrolled in her debut chapter/episode.

Episode 15C Adverse Effects Manga – Chapter 103 Adverse Effects Original anime counterpart – Episode 188 Darling Said He Loved Me Note: In the OG anime Episode 188 Shinobu successfully managed to give Mendo the “love potion”. The animation of this episode was quite poor as most of the staff were probably busy working on Movie 4 Lum the Forever which came out a few weeks before this episode aired.

Episode 16A Family Feud!! Manga – Chapter 147 Family Feud Original anime counterpart – Episode 63 Ryūnosuke Arrives! I Love the Sea!

Episode 16B Hello, Sailor Suit!! Manga – Chapter 148 Hello, Sailor Suit! , Chapter 150 Ran, Scent of a Woman, Part 1, Chapter 151 Ran, Scent of a Woman, Part 2 Original anime counterpart – Episode 63 Ryūnosuke Arrives! I Love the Sea!, Episode 65 Ran-chan's Great Date Plan! Note: Although Episode 16B in the Remake is titled Hello, Sailor Suit! most of the episode actually adapted Chapter 150 and 151. But because of strict time constraints, many great scenes or details were cut from the episode. Most scenes from the original Chapter 148 were removed and the character of Ryunosuke’s father was nerfed probably to avoid controversy. Episode 63 and 65 of the OG anime adapt the manga chapters more faithfully.

Episode 17A A Chest Full of Longing!! Manga – Chapter 184 A Chest Full of Longing, Part 1, Chapter 185 A Chest Full of Longing, Part 2 Original anime counterpart – Episode 96 Shine! The Blessed Bra!! Note: In the Remake’s Episode 17A A lot of scenes from the manga were cut or changed, especially near the ending, making the episode much shorter than it should be. This was probably done to avoid making controversies. This makes the OG anime’s Episode 96 one of the rare cases where it was more faithful to the source material than the Remake.

Episode 17B Wish Upon a Star Manga – Chapter 290 Wish Upon a Star Original anime counterpart – Episode 177 Wish Upon a Star! The Winning Family in Desire Panic Note: The OG anime’s Episode 177 added a lot of original content which made the episode feel more like it was focused on Ataru’s father. Similar to how the anime original Episode 78 Pitiful! Mother of Love and Banishment!? was focused on Ataru's mother. In the Remake, Ataru’s dad is actually voiced by Ataru’s original voice actor Toshio Furukawa.

Episode 18A Indelible Lipstick Magic!! Manga – Chapter 172 Indelible Lipstick Magic Original anime counterpart – Episode 110 Un-re-mov-ab-le Rouge Magic Note: The beginning of the episode had a bunch of cameos from manga and OG anime-only characters who didn't make proper appearances in the Remake. You can find the list of them and their first appearances in manga and OG anime here. Like many other manga chapter names, the name of this chapter was actually a reference to a popular Japanese song of the time, Ikenai Rouge Magic by Kiyoshiro Imawano from 1982. This song was actually used as an insert song at the start of Episode 18A of the Remake. The OG anime’s Episode 110 was very unhinged as the classroom erupted into complete chaos with the boys kissing each other and Ryunosuke kissing Shinobu like Ataru kissed Mendo and Ataru kissing Cherry right after he kissed Mendo.

Episode 18B Lethal Attacks! Yaminabe Manga – Chapter 240 Lethal Attack: Yaminabe Original anime counterpart – None Note: So far, this is the only story of the manga that was not adapted in the OG anime in any way until the Remake adapted it into anime for the first time.

Episode 19A Magic Realm! Jungle of Terror Manga – Chapter 212 Magic Realm! Jungle of Terror Original anime counterpart – Episode 115 Haunted Special: Raiders of the Lost Mendo Note: The OG anime’s Episode 115 actually stitched Chapter 212 together with Chapter 164 Slumbering Family Heirloom to basically create one story. It strangely replaced Ryunosuke with Ten in the first half probably to make sense out of the rest of the story. The joke with the octopus tearing off Ryunosuke’s clothes was then replaced with Shinobu and Lum instead and it had more fanservice with actual nudity that wasn’t in the manga or the Remake.

Episode 19B Pickled Manga – Chapter 112 Pickled Original anime counterpart – Episode 42 Drunken Boogie Note: The OG anime’s Episode 42 had an insert song Margarita by Helen Sasano which made the episode more memorable. The Remake’s Episode 19B had Lum’s hair color change to red and Ten’s hair color to orange after they get drunk from eating umeboshis. This wasn’t in the manga or the OG anime and was an original take by David Production.

Episode 20 Recovering That Which Was Lost Manga – Chapter 199 Recovering That Which Was Lost, Chapter 200 Recovering That Which Was Lost – Fierce 3-On-3 Battle, Chapter 201 Recovering That Which Was Lost – Conclusion, Chapter 335 Time Bomb Memories Original anime counterpart – Episode 97 Duel! Benten VS the Three Daughters!! Note: The OG anime’s Episode 97 included Ataru in the episode when he was absent in this story in the manga (besides a flashback scene). This created a plothole for a later episode in the series. This episode also featured a cameo of the crab teacher who appears in Chapter 335 of the manga. This chapter was never adapted in the OG anime. Episode 20 in the Remake was the second full-length episode of the Remake.

Episode 21A Cosmo Teacher CAO-2 Manga – Chapter 180 Cosmo Teacher CAO-2 Original anime counterpart – Episode 85 Revenge of the Planetary Instructor CAO-2

Episode 21B Ooh, Scary! Voodoo Doll Manga – Chapter 232 Ooh, Scary! Voodoo Doll Original anime counterpart – Episode 131 Don't Die! Ryōko's Special Straw Doll!!

Episode 22A Big Bottle, Little Bottle Manga – Chapter 272 Big Bottle, Little Bottle Original anime counterpart – Episode 161 Small Magic Bottle! What's to Become of Me!? Note: The OG anime’s Episode 161 began with an original scene where Ataru went on a date with Lum. Lum wore a gorgeous outfit with a hat on this date and she had this get-up throughout the majority of this episode.

Episode 22B When Love Strikes Manga – Chapter 209 When Love Strikes Original anime counterpart – Episode 122 The Fox's Hard Feelings of Painful Love... Note: The OG anime’s Episode 122 felt more artistic as it had a larger emphasis on Shinobu and even included her monologuing.

Episode 22 Post-credits scene Manga – Chapter 186 Miss Tomobiki Contest: Preliminary Round Original anime counterpart – Episode 91 Document - Who Will Be Miss Tomobiki!? Note: In the Remake, some scenes from the beginning of the manga chapter were cut possibly due to time constraints or to make the episode less controversial.

Episode 23 The Tomo-1 Queen Contest Manga – Chapter 187 Miss Tomobiki Contest: Main Contest, Chapter 188 Miss Tomobiki Contest: Swimsuit Competition, Chapter 189 Miss Tomobiki Contest: Battle of the Women, Chapter 190 Miss Tomobiki Contest: Results Original anime counterpart – Episode 91 Document - Who Will Be Miss Tomobiki!? Note: The OG anime’s Episode 91 was one of the most controversial episodes of Urusei Yatsura. It was an incomplete adaptation of the Miss Tomobiki arc of the manga which disappointed many fans. It only adapted Chapter 186 and a few pages of the beginning of Chapter 187. It ended with Ataru fleeing away to Osaka with the sponsorship funds and the Principal delaying the Miss Tomobiki competition indefinitely. Thus, the actual competition didn’t take place in an animated form until 2023 with the first Season Finale of Urusei Yatsura Remake. Not only that, this episode also had an original satirical joke which Rumiko Takahashi, the author of Urusei Yatsura, found very offensive. Chapter 188-190 were completely unadapted until the Remake adapted it as Episode 23. Albeit majority of the scenes from Chapter 188 were cut probably to avoid creating controversies or because of time constraints. Episode 23 in the Remake was also the third full-length episode of the Remake.

If you count every chapter, the Remake adapted 65 out of 366 chapters of the manga in Season 1.

This post was very easy to make thanks to the Urusei Yatsura Fandom and furinkan(.)com web page where I got the majority of my information.

(source again)

[bizarrequazar]

GJ and ZZH Updates — January 22-28

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This is part of a weekly series collecting updates from and relating to Gong Jun and Zhang Zhehan.

This post is not wholly comprehensive and is intended as an overview, links provided lead to further details. Dates are in accordance with China Standard Time, the organization is chronological. My own biases on some things are reflected here. Anything I include that is not concretely known is indicated as such, and you’re welcome to do your own research and draw your own conclusions as you see fit. Please let me know if you have any questions, comments, concerns, or additions. :)

[Glossary of names and terms] [Masterlist of my posts about the situation with Zhang Zhehan]

01-22 → Zhang Su posted a douyin a few minutes before midnight, leaving the comment on it, “New Year's Eve~ Those who spit at me are really meaningless, I have never hurt him, so you can spit whatever you want~ If you still support him, go support his new songs and trendy brand~ As his friend of 18 years, it’s not that you make friends just for show, there are some things you can’t help if you don’t believe it, time will prove it” [screenshot] (I’m not linking the douyin itself because I don’t want to give him traffic, DM me if you want the link) This was well timed, as Flora finished the wiki page for him the following day, which outlines exactly what a good “friend of 18 years” he’s been. 

→ #GongJun and #HappyJunZhe2023 trended on Twitter.

→ Gong Jun’s studio posted three photos of him from 12-31 holding Lunar New Year’s items. Caption: “At the beginning of the new year, window stenciles are posted, the red envelopes are full of blessings, and spring comes. Chinese New Year's Day is destined to be the beginning of good luck, remember to turn on the TV today and watch the boss @ Gong Jun Simon!” 

→ The Weibo account for Fox Spirit Matchmaker posted a new poster for the show featuring Gong Jun and the female lead Yang Mi.

→ Gong Jun posted a promotional image for the Youth Exhibition program he would appear in on 01-24. Caption: “In the new year, I hope to jump out of my comfort zone and see more scenery that I’ve never seen before.  In the brand-new Year of the Rabbit, I also wish you a bright future and to not to shrink back. On January 24th at 20:00 on the third day of the Chinese New Year, I will take you into a special ‘Youth Exhibition’, remember to come and see it!”

→ 361° posted two photo ads [here] and [here] featuring Gong Jun.

→ The Instagram posted a video of “Zhang Zhehan”, “Zhang Mama”, and “Zhang Zhehan’s nephew” sending New Year’s greetings.

→ Gong Jun’s studio reposted a video by People’s Daily of Gong Jun’s Dragon TV appearance that would air later (full videos linked below) with the added caption: “Fighting with swords in the jianghu, living a bold life, watch boss @ Gong Jun Simon's chivalrous transformation tonight! In the coming year, I wish everyone good luck and a happy New Year!”

→ Gong Jun’s studio posted sixteen photos from his Dragon TV appearance. Caption: “The whirling chivalrous man, willful and dashing, boss @ Gong Jun Simon is free and unrestrained, happily singing a song of the jianghu.”

→ Gong Jun posted a douyin of himself in his outfit from his later Beijing TV performance. Caption: “There are a lot of ‘skins’ in the New Year!🤓” BGM is Rollin by Calvin Harris.

→ Gong Jun appeared on Dragon TV’s Spring Festival Gala, where he performed 刀剑如梦 originally by Wakin Chau and did some magic tricks. [performance] [translated lyrics] [subbed magic tricks] (cw a bunny falls, no obvious signs that it was hurt) Fan Observations:   -  The hanfu worn by some of the backup dancers (below) is the same one that Zhang Zhehan wore on 2021-07-14. At that time, fans of another artist whom I will refrain from naming slandered Zhang Zhehan online, claiming that the outfit had been made exclusively for that artist who had worn it previously. The use of the hanfu here—and for multiple backup dancers nonetheless—is pretty much spitting in the faces of those people.  -  During the first part of the performance, there’s an illustrated cherry tree with a single white blossom.

→ Gong Jun’s studio posted nine photos of Gong Jun in the outfit from his later Beijing TV performance. Caption: “The green shirt welcomes the spring, smelling the snow on the branches. Boss @ Gong Jun Simon is going to the Chinese New Year appointment at the #Beijing TV Spring Festival Gala# tonight!”

→ Gong Jun’s studio posted a douyin of him from the above photoshoot. Caption: “Snow is falling, green shirts are fluttering, and boss @ Gong Jun Simon starts the first work diary of the lunar calendar 🐰 year!” BGM is 探窗 (钢琴版) by 汐音社.

→ Gong Jun appeared on Beijing TV’s Spring Festival Gala, performing the song Blood Actor originally by HITA. [performance] [lyric video with contextual info] Fan Observations:   -  Some drew parallels between the lyrics of this song and those of the song Zhang Zhehan recited part of on 2021-07-26.  -  As mentioned in last week’s post, HITA is openly and actively a CPF. [Here] is a song she wrote specifically for them. 😊

→ Gong Jun’s studio posted nine photos from his Beijing TV performance. Caption: “The rhyme of the opera is melodious, and the music and shadow overlap. Boss @ Gong Jun Simon's green shirt appeared, tasting the meaning of rhythm and leading the elegance of the country.”

→ #Gong Jun sings beautifully# trended at #9 on Weibo hotsearch, and #GongJun, #龚俊Simon, and Junjun trended on Twitter.

01-23 → Hsu Fu Chi posted a photo ad featuring Gong Jun.

→ Fresh posted four gifs of Gong Jun.

01-24 → Hsu Fu Chi posted a photo ad featuring Gong Jun. Fan Observation: Someone mentioned that they’ve been using these same photos for ages, so I checked and they've been using this specific one since literally the first day of their endorsement on 2021-10-29. 🤡 Judging by hairstyles, I would guess he hasn’t done more than MAYBE three photoshoots for them, if I’m being generous.

→ Fresh posted four more gifs of Gong Jun.

→ Gong Jun’s studio posted two photos of him from the 2023 Online Audio-Visual Ceremony he would appear in that evening. Caption: “Firm and proud, hard-blooded. Tonight at 20:00 boss @ Gong Jun Simon stars in ‘Youth History’, recalling the heroic years of the past and expressing the spirit of the times.”

→ Gong Jun appeared in the 2023 Online Audio-Visual Ceremony, performing in a group song and acting in a skit. [full performance] (no subs yet)

01-25 → The Instagram posted a video of a clip from a fourth stolen song that would be released the following day. This was 洪荒剧场, the same song mentioned above that the real Zhang Zhehan had recited some of during his livestream on 2021-07-26, which was intended to debut it at the cancelled concert. (Quite coincidental timing, if you ask me.) Fan Observation: The photos used were leaked by August 2022, and the song demo was leaked in October 2021.

Also, the Instagram’s pfp was changed again, now to one of the most recent white haired photos. This might have happened a day or two earlier before I noticed.

→ Gong Jun made a post promoting the new drama Turn on the Right Way of Life. Caption: “Support Bo-ge's new drama! ... Catch up tonight!”​​

01-26 → The fourth stolen song was released. In the credits, it lists only Zhang Zhehan as the lyricist despite the real Zhang Zhehan having mentioned that it was written by Tang Tian.

→ Hsu Fu Chi posted a photo ad featuring Gong Jun.

→ Gong Jun posted nine illustrations of the God of Wealth. Caption: “God of Wealth, God of Wealth, look at me! ! !” Fan Observation: The eighth picture was used by Zhang Zhehan as a pfp when he first made the Super3 Instagram account.

→ #ZhangZhehan trended on Twitter.

01-27 → #ZhangZhehan continued to trend on Twitter, #TheRealZhangZhehan also trended.

→ Wang Yixu, the CEO of STELLAR Pictures responded to a question on Weibo, saying that both Rising with the Wind and Fox Spirit Matchmaker will include songs performed by Gong Jun.

→ The Instagram posted a video of “Zhang Zhehan” playing basketball. 

01-28 → #TheRealZhangZhehan continued to trend on Twitter.

→ MARRSGREEN posted a photo ad featuring Gong Jun.

→ Kangshifu posted three photo ads featuring Gong Jun.

→ Addition 01-29: The Instagram posted a video of “Zhang Zhehan” playing with fireworks; this video had been posted to Weibo the previous day. [Here] is a video highlighting a glitch in the deepfake.

Additional Reading: → Flora’s daily fan news  → Flora also finished the wiki page for Xie Yihua this week.

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This post was last edited 2023-01-29.

[septembermonologues]

maybe the little "life doesnt end at [x age]" trend is a little corny or played out but this summer i drove my own car out to see my best friend at her own house to take her bridesmaids dress shopping for our friend from high school's wedding and we decided to go to a children's museum even though we're 22 and 23 and then right after we went to an art museum with only 3 hours until it closed thinking it would just be a silly chaser to the day but ended up sitting watching just one exhibit for almost an hour and found ourselves in awe of being surrounded by art and giddy with the joy of the whole day even though we were tired and our legs hurt and we've been steeping in the stress of graduating college in the spring and not seeing each other as often as we would like. i struggled a lot in my tweens and teens and could never picture a life for myself after high school but that singular day showed me what my life can be. its big and scary and i don't know what to do about a lot of it but i do know that i can choose to make it filled with some art i help make and an abundance that others have made and time with my friends and, while we aren't high school best friend anymore, we are still girls together in all the ways that matter and have so much laughter and quite, heavy conversations about what it all means on seemingly insignificant days ahead of us. and that's enough for me.

[lucyfashion2]

2: Office wear

This one is my favourite trend i have selected, I feel it brings a casual and stylish look to the every-day office wear. Consisting of blazers with matching skirts / trousers, crisp white shirts, pencil skirts and a range of dull colours such as black, white, grey and brown.

Mark Gong

bernice. (2023). Mark Gong Spring Summer 2024 Fashion Show Outfits. [Online]. YouTube. Last Updated: Oct 27, 2023. Available at: https://youtu.be/GmBcX5t3zJQ?si=jZsHTcnoe4XfQbGs [Accessed 7 December 2023].

Mochino

FF Chanel. (2023). Moschino | Spring Summer 2024 | Full Show. [Online]. YouTube. Last Updated: Sep 21, 2023. Available at: https://youtu.be/crdXJNI_XRY?si=nPhkbFTPqEMiz2XG [Accessed 7 December 2023].

Gucci

FF Chanel. (2023). Gucci | Spring Summer 2024 | Full Show. [Online]. YouTube. Last Updated: Sep 22, 2023. Available at: https://youtu.be/yCHcRbhONzM?si=TaqNBR0Ss3y4QY9_ [Accessed 7 December 2023].

[bnhaobservation]

Fanfic: Love is a fire - Characters’ ages

So, in order to write my fic and make it as canon compliant as reasonably possible, I researched over the character ages as BNHA gives them but in a way that keeps into consideration the character's birthday (example: Natsuo in the manga is shown as having 3 and 4 age of difference compared to Fuyumi, that's because the first time he already had his birthday but the same couldn't be said for the second time, although Hatsume is also in the 1st year of high school, same as Midoriya and Co, her age is given as 16 as she already had her birthday).

As, in addition to the age they've in the fic, I listed all the calculation process as well as the age they would have in the manga, even who's not reading my fic might find this of some interest.

Characters’ ages at the start of this fic (30 December, which also means 2 years and 4 months before Midoriya and All Might meet in the manga):

Todoroki Enji (轟 炎司) aka Flame Hero: Endeavor (フレイムヒーロー エンデヴァー): 42 as he’s born on the 8th of August (Near Shizuoka). In the manga in May his age is given as 45.This makes him a little more than twice as old as Tōya. Other relevant facts about him are before high school his father died, at 20 he was already Number Two and that Tōya should have been conceived in spring when he was still 21, meaning by that age he had already married Rei. By how Rei is wearing a scarf on their first date, we can assume it was in winter. Quirk: Hellflame (ヘルフレイム), Height: 195 cm, Weight: 118 kg, Blood: AB, Favorite food: Kuzo Mochi.

Todoroki Rei (轟 冷) aka Himura Rei (氷叢 冷): 38. Canonically we don’t know how old she is. I assume she’s younger than Enji. Since Horikoshi usually makes wives much younger than husbands, I’ll assume it’s Horikoshi’s trend and that she is younger than Enji. I might be wrong. Quirk type: Ice (氷結 Hyōketsu).

Todoroki Tōya (轟 燈矢) aka Dabi (荼毘 Cremation): 19 but about to turn 20 as he’s born on the 18th of January. In the manga in mid-December his age is given as 23. Other relevant facts about him are that, in order for Tōya and Natsuo’s age difference to work Enji started training him at 3 and he started burning around the summer of that year with Natsuo being conceived on November of that year, that when he was 8 he attacked Shōto, that when he was 13, in December (or in January prior to his birthday) his flames turned blue, Rei snapped and was hospitalized and Tōya burned himself and ended up in All for One’s hands and comatose. He woke up three years after, likely when he was 17 or about to turn as such. Quirk: Blueflame (蒼炎 Sōen), Height: 176 cm, Hated food: Fish.

Todoroki Fuyumi (轟 冬美): 19 as she’s born on the 6th of December and, canonically, Fuyumi is supposed to be 1 year younger than Tōya which, considering the months in which they had birth, would mean if they’re born in different years, would make her almost 2 years younger than her brother (to be exact 1 year 10 months and 20 days). However the manga shows an image of her being an infant while Tōya is still learning how to walk. As kids learn to walk at around 1 year of age, I assumed they were born in the same year and are in fact only 10 months and 20 days apart. It fits with how in chap 187, in November, her age is given as 22. Quirk type: Ice (氷結 Hyōketsu), Height: 160 cm, Favorite things: Soap opera.

Todoroki Natsuo (轟 夏雄): 15 (last year of middle school - Corusan Middle school (凝山中学校 Corusan chūgakkō*) as he’s born on the 1st of July. Canonically… we aren’t sure of Natsuo’s age. In chap 187 he’s 19 and 3 years younger than Fuyumi, in chap 302 he’s 4 years younger than Fuyumi and 5 years younger than Tōya. However the difference might be explained by assuming that chap 302 took place before July, so neither Natsuo nor Fuyumi had turned 9 and 13 respectively, while we know chap 187 takes place around November so Natsuo has turned 19 but Fuyumi isn’t yet 23. Quirk type: Ice (氷結 Hyōketsu), Height: 181 cm, Favorite things: Sashimi, the sea,

Todoroki Shōto (轟 焦凍) aka Shōto (ショート): 11 (last year of elementary school - Corusan Elementary school (凝山小学校 Corusan Shōgakkō*) but about to turn 12 as he’s born on the 11th of January (Near Shizuoka). Canonically Shōto is 8 years younger than Tōya and, since he’s 11 this would place him at his sixth year of elementary school, which would mean he has more than 3 years before he would attempt the exam for U.A. High school. Quirk: Half-cold Half-hot (半冷半燃 Hanrei Han'nen), Height: 176 cm, Blood: 0, Favorite food: Zaru Soba.

Kurumada Untenmaru (車田 運天丸): 43 as he’s born on the 4th of March. He is 47 when he’s introduced in January, meaning he’s about to turn 48. Height: 180cm, Favorite things: Flowers.

Kamiji Moe (上路 萌) aka Burnin (バーニン): 21 but about to turn 22 as she’s born on the 18th of January. Canon states her as 25 in January, when Shōto and his classmates begin to work in Endeavor Agency, meaning she should be about to turn 26. This makes her 10 years older than Shōto therefore this would also mean she was 15 about to turn 16 when Tōya supposedly died, which places her at the first year of high school which, considering her line of work, was likely a Hero high school. Quirk: Blazing hair (燃髪 Nenpatsu), Height 169 cm.

Kidō (キドウ): Canonically we don’t know how old he is. Quirk: Traject (軌道 Kidō).

Onimā (オニマー): Canonically we don’t know how old he is.

Yagi Toshinori (八木 俊典) aka All Might (オール マイト): 52. Canonically we don’t know how old he is but he’s born on the 10th of June (Tokyo) and in chap 397 he says he’s more than 55 and in chap 304 that he had All for One for 40 years. According to the script for Episode 49 Yagi is 14 when he meets Shimura Nana and she likely passed him One for All before he went to Hero high school, which, considering he’s born in June, he started at 15 years and 10 months. Due to this I’ll say 56 is a good approximation and this makes him 10 years older than Enji. Other relevant facts about him are he was 18 when Nana died and, once he finished U.A. he moved in the states and came back in Japan when he was 23. 5 years before meeting Midoriya he got seriously wounded by All for One. In the canon of this fic, if it happened in April, it would means he was 49 about to turn 50. 5 years before being hurt, he accepted Sasaki Mirai as his own sidekick. Quirk: One For All (ワン・フォー・オール), Epithet: "Symbol of Peace" (平和の象徴 Heiwa no Shōchō), Height: 220cm (muscle form), Weight: 274kg (Before injury)/255kg (Muscle form), Blood: A.

Sasaki Mirai (佐々木  未来) aka Sir Nighteye (サー・ナイトアイ): 34 but about to turn 35 as he’s born on the 2nd of January (Tokyo). In the manga he’s introduced after October started and his age is given as 38. Other relevant facts about him are he was All Might sidekick for 5 years but their partnership dissolved when All Might got hurt by All for One. Quirk: Foresight (予知 Yochi), Height: 200 cm, Blood: AB, Favorite things: heroes, especially All Might.

Torino Sorahiko (酉野 空彦) aka Gran Torino (グラン トリノ): Canonically we don’t know how old he is but he’s born on the 28th of January (Yamanashi Prefecture). Quirk: Jet (ジェット), Height: 120cm (Currently)-200cm+ (Formerly), Blood: B.

Hakamada Tsunagu (袴田 維) aka Fiber Hero: Best Jeanist (ファイバー ヒーロー ベスト ジー二スト): 32 as he’s born on the 5th of October (Okayama Prefecture). In the manga he’s introduced in between May and summer and his age is given as 35. Quirk: Fiber Master (ファイバーマスター), Height: 190cm, Blood: AB.

Toyomitsu Taishirō (豊満 太志郎) aka BMI Hero: Fat Gum (BMI ヒーロー ファット ガム): 25 as he’s born on the 8th of August (Osaka). In the manga he’s introduced in October and his age is given as 29. Quirk: Fat Absorption (脂肪吸着 Shibō Kyūchaku), Height: 250cm (Fat form), Blood: O.

Nezu (根津): Canonically we don’t know how old he is but he’s born on the 1st of January 1 (Tokyo). Quirk: High Spec (ハイ スペック), Height: 85 cm, Blood: A.

Shūzenji Chiyo (修善寺 治与) aka Youthful Heroine: Recovery Girl (妙齢 ヒローイン  リカバリー ガール Myōrei Heroine Recovery Girl): Around 62/66. Canonically we don’t know how old she is but she’s born on the 4th of April (Tokyo). Age of retirement in Japan is currently 70 but I’m not sure if it applies to Heroes in BNHA, however, considering she was working as a nurse when Enji was in high school I’ll assume the youngest she could be back then as a teacher is 20 and which makes her age in canon range from 65 to 69 in the final arc. Quirk: Heal (癒し Iyashi), Height: 115cm, Blood: B.

Cook Hero: Lunch Rush (クック ヒーロー ランチ ラッシュ): Canonically we don’t know how old he is but he’s born on the 17th of June (Niigata Prefecture). Height: 160cm, Blood: AB.

Aizawa Shōta (相澤 消太) aka Erasure Hero: Eraser Head (抹消 ヒーロー イレイザー ヘッド Masshō Hero Eraser Head): 27 as he’s born on the 8th of November (Tokyo). In the manga he’s introduced in April and his age is given as 30. Other relevant facts about him are he started his work studies when he was 16, during summer, under His Purple Highness at Purple Revolution Agency, along with Kayama and Shirakumo. Quirk: Erasure (抹消 Masshō), Height: 183cm, Blood: B.

Yamada Hizashi (山田 ひざし) aka Voice Hero: Present Mic (ボイス ヒーロー プレゼント マイクVoice Hero: Present Mic): 27 as he’s born on the 7th of July (Tokyo). In the manga he’s introduced in April and his age is given as 30. Height: 185 cm, Blood: B.

Kayama Nemuri (香山 睡) aka R-Rated Hero: Midnight (18禁 ヒーロー ミッドナイト Jū-hachi-kin Hero: Midnight): 27 as he’s born on the 9th of March (Saitama Prefecture). In the manga we’re told in April her age is 31. Quirk: Somnambulist (眠り香 Nemuriga), Height: 175cm, Blood: A.

Kurose Anan (黒瀬 亜南) aka Space Hero: Thirteen (スペース ヒーロー 13号 Space Hero Jū-san Gō): 24 as she’s born on the 3rd of February (Kagoshima Prefecture (Tanegashima). In the manga she’s introduced in April and her age is given as 28.Quirk: Black Hole (ブラックホール), Height: 180cm.

Inui Ryō (犬井 猟) aka Hunting Dog Hero: Hound Dog (猟犬 ヒーロー ハウンド ドッグ Ryōken Hero Hound Dog): 29 as he’s born on the 15th  of November (Tokyo). In the manga he’s introduced in mid-August and his age is given as 32. Quirk: Dog (犬 Inu), Height: 196cm, Blood: A.

Shirakumo Oboro (白雲 朧) aka Loud Cloud (ラウド クラウド): Canonically he died at 17 during his second year of high school while he was at his work study and he was born on the 5th of May. This means his death happened by already more than 10 years ago, around October since it was short after the start of the new semester.Quirk: Cloud (雲 Cloud), Height: 187 cm.

Shimura Nana (志村 菜奈): Canonically we don’t know how old she was but she met Yagi at 31 and died at 35, killed by All for One. Quirk: Float (浮遊 Fuyū), One For All (ワン・フォー・オール). Family: Shimura Kotarō (志村弧太朗) (Son).

Tsukauchi Naomasa (塚内 直正): 32 as he’s born on the 4th of April (Iwate Prefecture). In the manga he’s introduced in April (likely after the 4th) and his age is given as 36.Code name: True Man (トゥルー マン), Height: 180 cm, Family: Tsukauchi Makoto (塚内 真) (Younger Sister).

Shigaraki (死柄木) aka All For One (オール・フォー・ワン): Canonically we don’t know how old she is but it’s said to be over 100. Main Quirk: All For One (オール・フォー・ワン), Alias: Master (先生 Sensei), Epithet: "Symbol of Evil" (悪の象徴 Aku no Shōchō), Ruler of evil (悪の支配者 Aku no shihai-sha), Emperor of darkness (闇の帝王 Yami no teiō), Demon Lord (魔王 Maō), Height: 225cm, Blood: B Family: Shigaraki Yoichi (死柄 木与一) (Younger brother).

Shimura Tenko (志村 転弧) aka Shigaraki Tomura (死柄木 弔): 16 as he’s born on the 4th of April. In the manga in mid-December his age is given as 20. Other relevant dates about him are he gained his Quirk at 5, probably in summer, and, on that same day, he ended up murdering his whole family by mistake. Quirk: Decay (崩壊 Hōkai), Epithet: "Symbol of Fear" (恐怖の象徴 Kyōfu no Shōchō), Height: 175.26cm, Weight: 59.8kg, Family: Shimura Kotarō (志村 弧太朗) (Father), Shimura Nao (志村 直) (Mother), Shimura Hana (志村 華) (Older sister), Shimura Nana (志村 菜奈) (Paternal grandmother), Chizuo (千津夫) (Maternal grandfather), Mako (真子) (Maternal grandmother).

Kurogiri (黒霧 Black Fog): 10, assuming that Shirakumo was turned into Kurogiri immediately. Quirk: Warp Gate (ワープゲート).

Garaki Kyūdai (殻木 球大) aka Ujiko Daruma (氏子 達磨) aka Tsubasa (翼): Canonically we don’t know how old he is but he’s supposed to be over 120 years. Quirk: Life Force (摂生 Sessei).

Sun-Sun Haruaki (スンスン 晴明): Canonically we don’t know how old he is.

Akaguro Chizome (赤黒 血染) aka Hero Killer: Stain (ヒーロー 殺し ステイン Hero Goroshi Stain) aka Stendhal (スタンダール): 28 as he’s born on the 14th of June. In the manga he’s introduced in May and his age is given as 31. Other relevant dates about him are he attended to a private high school for Heroes but despaired over “the fundamentally corrupt view of Heroes within the educational system” and dropped out the summer after his first year. Until the end of his teen years he made speeches on the streets calling for the return of the old idea of heroes until he decided words have no powers and, for the next ten years began learning killing techniques on his own. During those ten years his parents died and he took the identity of Stendhal, becoming a Vigilante who kills Villains. After his meeting with Knuckleduster, which happens after All Might was injured by All for One, he decides to become Hero Killer: Stain and target Heroes as well. Before he’s stopped he murdered 17 Heroes and put 23 Heroes permanently out of commission. Quirk: Bloodcurdle (凝血 Gyōketsu), Height: 182cm, Blood Type: B.

Kizuki Chitose (気月 置歳) aka Curious (キュリオス): Canonically we don’t know how old she is. Quirk: Landmine (地雷 Jirai).

EXTRA (as they didn’t appear but I still checked on their ages)

Takami Keigo (鷹見 啓悟) aka Wing Hero: Hawks (ウィングヒーロー ホークス): 19 as he’s born on the 28th of December (Fukuoka). In the manga he’s introduced in November and his age is given as 22. Other relevant facts about him are it seems in an Interview of Honyasan MA with Kohei Horikoshi’s current editor they said he was taken in by the commission and trained hard under them when he was six years old*, he started his own agency at just 18 and made it into the top ten of that year’s second ranking which takes place in November (meaning he might have opened his agency in January). Then in the ranking before All Might retirement, he became Number 3 and in the one post his retirement Number 2. Quirk: Fierce Wings (剛翼 Gōyoku), Height: 172 cm, Blood: B.

Toga Himiko (渡我 被身子) aka Toga Himiko (トガ ヒミコ) aka Yakuza Toga (ゴクドー者のトガ Gokudō-sha no Toga): 13 as she’s born on the 7th of August. In the manga in mid-December her age is given as 17. Other relevant dates about her are she runs away after middle school graduation, therefore when she was 15. Quirk: Transform (変身 Henshin), Height: 157cm.

Bubaigawara Jin (分倍河原 仁) aka Twice (トゥワイス): 27 as he’s born on the 10th of May. In the manga in mid-December his age is given as 31. At 16 he ran down with his motorcycle a young man and got fired from his job. His parents were killed while he was in middle school by a Villain. Quirk: Double (二倍 Nibai), Height: 178cm.

Iguchi Shūichi (伊口 秀一) aka Spinner (スピナー): 17 as he’s born on the 8th of August. In the manga in mid-December his age is given as 21. Quirk: Gecko (ヤモリ Yamori), Height: 174cm.

Sako Atsuhiro (迫 圧紘) aka Mr. Compress (Mr.コンプレス): 28 as he’s born on the 8th of October. In the manga in March his age is given as 32. Quirk: Compress (圧縮 Asshuku), Height: 181cm.

Notes:

- In canon we only know that, according to "Ultra Archive", Todoroki Shōto went to Corusan Middle school (凝山中学校 Corusan chūgakkō). I assume it's actually an institute that has Elementary and Middle school and sent all the Todoroki kids there

- I didn’t get to read the interview, so take this with a grain of salt.

[golbrocklovely]

haven't posted one of these in a while so…

here’s more of colby’s tweets from 2020.

i don’t have proof that these are his tweets, but believe me, they are his.

if it’s bold and italicized, it’s someone’s tweet to him.

if it’s in (), that’s just me commenting lol

added bonus: if they have a * next to them, that means it’s been deleted

~~~~~~~~~~~

July 3 - me and my homies have pillow fights in hotel rooms

fan: TELL ME TO GO TO BED

GO TO BED!

decided to take a walk alone in palm springs CA tonight, almost got mugged by two dudes. i’m okay and back at my hotel! PSA don’t wander off alone in a foreign area without friends.

fan: @/ColbyBrock why is your foot scarred up

had to run, i’ll explain later i promise

other fan: damn what shoes were you in or were you in no shoes

barefoot like an idiot 🤦🏻‍♂️

Cactus: 1 Colby Brock: 0

July 8 - fallin in love is so beautiful but can bring so much pain

maybe that’s why i’m so closed off

emotionally unavailable cause i’m scared to fall so deep again

fan: But the pain brings a drive unlike any other

facts

fan: Who hurt our baby🥺😠

no one .. just circumstances out of my control

July 9 - i miss japan everyone is so nice there

July 11 - new hair hi

@/mannymua733: colby in purple hair : “r u lost baby girl” me : 👁👄👁

hahahah

July 12 - life is a movie and YOU are the main character

July 13 - @/allylovesit: Miss you lol @/ColbyBrock

i miss you!

July 14 - leaving a ghost town and ended up with two flat tires. seems something didn’t want us to go so soon

July 16 - don’t settle for any less than you deserve !

manifest the person you want to be, and become them

July 17 - i love my LGBTQ fans !

(a whole month after pride? tsk tsk colby lol jk)

fan: @/AmberScholl can you and @/ColbyBrock plz do this tik-tok trend😂

@/amberscholl: @/ColbyBrock u down ??

you just wanna see me in a dress huh ;)

@/amberscholl: in my dress, specifically

July 18 - if you’re at war with yourself in your own mind, time really makes things get better.. promise.

July 21 - keep having this same dream over the course of the past 2 years. not sure what to think

July 22 - i’m in a really deep Michael Jackson phase right now and i don’t know why

stop pulling my heart strings 1D

July 23 - someone said i looked like a 19 year old uncle yesterday 💀

(what does this even mean sksksk)

i haven’t seen this much happiness on social media in a LONG time. thank you one direction.

fan: Serious question: what’s ur favorite song by them?

rock me ! or up all night

getting a big tattoo tonight

July 24 - for me and my best friend. (pics of his tattoo that's about him and sam)

July 27 - fan: i lose sleep every night knowing @/ColbyBrock hasn’t said what his favorite song from harry styles is 😪

sign of the times 🖤

July 28 - let’s forget who we are

July 30 - i miss the deep talks at 3am with someone special where you get the feeling of being high on life just from being so deep in conversation 🛸

Aug. 1 - what’s up guys it’s sam and colby

Aug. 3 - fan: I wonder if @/ColbyBrock thinks he’s hot, cute, or both👀 I’m expecting an answer sir

none of the above

we lost one of our little kitties today :/ RIP scar, you deserved a better life. hope you’re eatin all the tuna you can imagine you in heaven #trapcats

Aug. 6 - if i can, then you can too

Protect Your 🖤

Aug. 7 - i hate when people talk behind my back

Aug. 10 - tired

Aug. 13 - kingdom hearts

@/mannymua733: that's the tweet

love u

(miss colby and manny having interactions, ngl)

ever since our feral cat Scar passed away the other cats hardly show up anymore 💔

Aug. 16 - i feel like most alive when i’m the most uncomfortable

Aug. 17 - our neighbors are so scary, saw this old woman in a nightgown running around at 10pm last night not making a sound .. please SOS

*Aug. 21 - #teamcolby is back? let us know if you want a mini prank war to happen …

@/jakewebber9: i thought we left pranks behind, now u got it coming for ya buddy

guys he called me his “buddy” 🖤😱😚

Aug. 25 - just got my photo shoot pics back 👀

Aug. 27 - in the end the answer will always be and has always been love

Aug. 30 - i will never ever understand why someone would take the time to hate on another person for absolutely no reason

don't just say it, prove it. stand behind it

Sept. 1 - (posted some shirtless photoshoot pics)

@/mannymua733: seeing this photo on my timeline… (video of him closing his mouth)

lmaooo

@/DavidAlvareeezy shut up and kiss me

😗

Sept. 3 - why do i kinda like the tattoo pain

Sept. 7 - there’s some memories that no matter how hard i try, they will never leave me alone

(oh damn even i forgot this one… poor baby)

Sept. 9 - everything can feel so heavy

Sept. 13 - the old XPLR vibes are back and it feels so good 😈

Sept. 14 - always in my head

Sept. 15 - man i missed traveling so much

Sept. 16 - sometimes i don’t mind wearing a mask in public cause it hides my face

Sept. 17 - don’t forget to question everything

fan: @/ColbyBrock can you do me a favor and call me a bitch again

you’re a lil bitch

Sept. 20 - @/mannymua733: i think i need to glam @/ColbyBrock and @/SamGolbach

👀👀👀

Sept. 21 - such a beautiful day in Los Angeles i hope everyone is feeling okay !

Sept. 22 - you can’t help it if your mind changes

Sept. 24 - “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that” -Martin Luther King Jr.

Sept. 28 - i just have no idea where i’d be without you

[friendofthecrows]

If there was something that could reach inside my memories, or back in time, seeing everything, even things I can't remember anymore, I know the first thing I'd do is look at statistics about my emotions.

Was it really that bad? How did I feel compared to a normal person? Was I weak and lying to myself?

I'd stare at my average feelings laid out on a bell curve, without the bias of what I remembered or remembered to write down in the moment. I'd try to make sense of it. I'd look at an arc of my emotions over time, I'd see myself spiraling downwards - or healing, whichever turns out to be true. I'd look at my low point, and maybe it wouldn't be the spring I lost my best friend. Maybe I made an altar to that suffering in my mind. Or maybe I would look and go, "I see, so I was right. At least I don't have to worry about finding a secret, worse rock bottom." And for joy, maybe the stereotype would be right, and my happiest memories would be in childhood, even though I remembered it sucking in retrospect. Maybe there would be the same baseline, for the most part, but with big spikes for my favorite moments. An especially chaotically fun sleepover with my ex-best friends, the first time I watched my old favorite show that I don't like any more, the concerts, probably the concerts.

Once I'd made sense of the numbers, graphs, and general trends, or had stared at them long enough to know that I had gotten my share of attempted understanding, I would want to see the memories.

There's too much to watch, 22 years of it, so I would ask, "What was my best day from each year? The day that I was happiest?" I would ask it for a summary of each and a short explanation of why it's the best, each totaling a couple of pages. Then I'd watch the best hour of each of the best days.

I would have to split the watching over the course of a few days, and I know that in-between, I would be thinking about it, wanting to immerse myself in happy memories again.

I would write a little story for each of the 22 days. Happy little stories that don't mean anything.

I would do the same for the worst memories, locked in reliving like a trauma flashback.

Then, I'd want to know which moments were most impactful. Which ones changed me the most and altered the course of my life. What if I was shaped by my worst moments, or what if they were all completely mundane? Why am I this person? (These people?)

When I had all 44 to 66 stories, I'd put them in order and read them through. Would it make a coherent story? I would look for themes and compare them to my favorite novels. I would treat the thing like an English class until I understood. I would be scared to find it devoid of merit. Maybe I would share it anyway in the hopes someone would understand me through it.

How much would it say about me, really?

It should say a lot, what my happiest and saddest and most important memories are. How much characterization happens if the moments of joy don't center on graduations or meeting my best friend, but instead on concerts or frenzied mornings of internet chaos? It would be important if the day my mom's boyfriend died, when I was four and didn't understand death yet, so I thought he'd abandoned us and I couldn't understand why, didn't make it into the worst moments, and they were instead occupied by mundane moments of misery, those days where nothing important has happened but your chest rips itself open regardless.

Earlier today, I'd had an idea for a short story. It was about the ghost of a dog trying to keep his still living owner from killing himself.

I wonder if I was really thinking of Nikki, the half wolf half akita that did most of the work of raising me when I was a small child. Many times, my mom has remarked that she thought she heard a dog, only to find the dogs accounted for in another room. Sometimes, people catch glimpses of silver fur out of the corner of their eye, but Nikki isn't there. When I was a child, I was convinced she was with me. I couldn't see or hear her, but I knew she was watching, and I would talk to her. I'd hold my hand out to my side and imagine her running her back under it like she used to, and I couldn't feel her, but I knew she was there. When I was little, I got myself through so many things by thinking that I wouldn't want to make Nikki sad. The dead wolf who raised me. I couldn't break her heart.

At some point, I stopped doing that. I can't remember when.

Would memories of her make it into the book of moments? Would I want to live or die if I relived my most defining moments? Would Nikki be there, trying to comfort me? I wish I could remember how it felt to bury my face in her fur and cry.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Ryan Burge

Published: Jul 24, 2023

A few months ago, my wife and I were driving into St. Louis and were about ten miles away from downtown in a suburb on the Illinois side of the river. We drove by this large commercial building next to the interstate that had a fairly nondescript sign with a single word on it, “Ascend.”

She looked at me and said, “Is that a church?” I honestly had no idea. So, she Googled it. Guess what Ascend is? It’s a marijuana dispensary. Illinois just legalized marijuana for recreational sale a few years ago and there are lots of new stores opening up all over the state. That’s the world we live in right now, not entirely sure if that new big warehouse by the highway is selling recreational drugs or preaching Jesus.

That little anecdote is indicative of a much bigger trend happening in American Christianity. The First United Methodist Church is out, Elevation is in. There are very few new Southern Baptist Church buildings springing up across the United States, but there are at a ton of Journey/Lift/Resolution churches being planted every week across the country.

Obviously, the rise of the Nones is the biggest story in American religion right now, but the second most important shift in the landscape is the unmistakable rise of the Nons. The only religious family that has grown over the last decade is non-denominational Protestant Christianity. There’s little reason to believe that their ascendance will slow at any point in the near future.

If the future of American society is a shift away from institutions, there’s no bigger beneficiary of this trend in the religion space than non-denominational evangelicalism.

In 1972, less than 3% of all American adults indicated that they were non-denominational. That share has only risen from there. In the 1970s and 1980s, the growth rate was undoubtedly small. It took until 1996 for the share of Americans who were non-denominational to surge past five percent. But from that point forward that line has only gotten steeper.

They got to 7.5% of the population in 2004. They reached ten percent of the sample by 2012. The most recent data says that nearly thirteen percent of all adults in the United States are non-denominational Protestant Christians. There are more non-denominationals in the U.S. today than mainline Protestants.

Here’s a key part of that story, though. This is not a situation where “a high tide raises all boats.” Instead, it’s non-denominational Protestants are gaining new members hand over fist, while other denominations are losing folks by the tens of thousands.

A lot more data about denominational decline can be found here:

You can see that even in the GSS data. In 1984, about 13% of Protestants were Southern Baptist, and another 12% were United Methodists. Those are easily the two largest Protestant denominations in the United States. Non-denominationals, were just about 5%.

In 2018, the picture is entirely different. Now, just 7.5% of Protestants are United Methodists and another 10% are Southern Baptists. While, the share who are non-denominationals has now risen to nearly 22%. Using this measure, it would appear that there are more non-denoms that United Methodists and Southern Baptists combined.

Other data sources aren’t so sure about that, though. The 2020 Religion Census took great pains to count the number of non-denominational folks in the United States. That’s no easy task given the diffused nature of this religious expression.

In total, the Religion Census managed to captured a total non-denominational population of just over 21 million. That makes them the second largest religious tradition in the United States, only trailing the Catholic Church at nearly 62 million. For comparison, the Census counted 8 million United Methodists and 17.6M Southern Baptists, which a lot more than show up on their member rolls.

But, it’s worth thinking about just how many non-denominationals there are in comparison to other groups that are not the Southern Baptists and United Methodists. There are more non-denoms than: LDS + Muslims + ELCA + AoG + Jehovah’s Witnesses + Natl. Miss. Bapt. + LCMS + TEC + Natl. Bapt. Convention. Those are all major traditions in their own right but are just dwarfed in size by non-denominationals. And, again, most of those denominations are declining in membership rapidly now.

Just how dominant non-denominational Christianity has become moves into sharper focus with looking at the data spatially. I calculated the largest religious tradition in all fifty states, based on total number of adherents.

Given the previous data about the overall size of the Catholic Church, it should come as no surprise that it is the largest tradition in 37 states that really span the country from coast to coast. The Southern Baptists are the largest in nine total states, and those states are in the Bible Belt - a region that runs from Oklahoma to the west and North Carolina to the East. The LDS is the largest in both Idaho and Utah. While, non-denominationals are the largest in three states: Washington, Alaska, and West Virginia.

But this gets much more interesting when looking at the second largest religious group in each state. Now, the Catholic church leads in six states. That means that they are #1 or #2 in 43 total states. But look at non-denominationals - they are the second most popular choice in 27 different states ranging from California to Maine. That means that they are top 2 in 30 total states. The SBC is first or second in only 12 states. No other denomination hits double digits.

The Catholic Church aside, there’s no other group that can come close to the spatial dispersion as the non-denominationals. Looking at these maps, there’s no regional trend for this group. They do well in the Pacific Northwest and in the Bible Belt. There are lots of them in New England and the Southwest. They are really everywhere.

Let’s get more granular now. The Religion Census also reports county level data on adherents and congregations. I decided to visualize the share of each county’s adherents who are specifically part of a non-denominational congregation. Before we get to the map, let me point out that there is a non-denominational church in 2,707 counties in the United States. The total number of counties is 3,142 - thus 86% of American counties have a non-denominational presence.

Where are they the most widespread? It’s a weird result, really. And not entirely what I would have guessed. There is a pretty solid pocket of non-denoms in the Pacific Northwest, especially around the Seattle and Portland metro areas. But then there are really high concentrations in the Rust Best, throughout Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Michigan.

Then, there is strip of dark purple that is pervasive in places like Virginia and the Carolinas. However, Florida is on a whole other level when it comes to non-denominationals. Of the 47 counties in Florida, non-denominationals make up at least 20% of all religious adherents in 26 of them. Texas also has 26 counties that make it into this top bin, but Texas also has 202 total counties. So, it’s not even close to a fair comparison.

I wanted to end this whole thing with a scatterplot as a first little attempt at trying to understand what factors drive more non-denominationals in a county. One likely culprit is age. The perception of these new upstart churches are young couples with lots of kids running around. But does the data back that up?

I grabbed some recently released Census data about the median age of each county in 2022 and merged it with the Religion Census and then shot a straight line through over 3,000 data points. What I found goes against the perception - non-denominationals are actually more prominent in older counties.

The difference is not a huge one. For instance, about 15% of all religious adherents are non-denominational in counties where the median age is 30 years old. In counties where the median age in 60, about 18% of the adherents are non-denominational.

There are mountains of more ink that can be spilled over the rise of non-denominational Christianity. I think it’s probably the most visible manifestation of how American society, and by extension American religion has changed so dramatically in the last two decades. We used to be a nation of institutions. The government, unions, and religious denominations were held in high regard by the average American.

Now, American society is largely bottom up. It’s not institutions that run the show, it’s individuals. Society has demolished the gatekeepers. Social media allows anyone with an internet connection to build a following in the tens of thousands in mere days.

Denominations used to absolutely dominate American religion. The leaders of the United Methodists, the Episcopalians, and the Evangelical Lutherans got to decide who could become a pastor and where they would be shepherding a flock. Now, a handful of non-denominational churches are started every weekend in the United States, completely from the grassroots.

There are tremendous benefits to this new approach to religion. There are also very real downsides. One thing is clear to me: non-denominational churches are only going to increase in the years to come. What I cannot fully predict is the long-term impact they will have on American society and American religion.

==

One hopes that if whatever amount of Xianity persists as people leave religion entirely, that it will be sufficiently nondescript enough that it will have minimal, if any, influence on public policy, and be generic enough that people will quickly figure out how that being anything anyone wants makes it human-created and human-driven.

[marvellouspinecone]

8, 13 and/or 22 for the goncharov ask, please? Hope you are having a great day!

Thank you for the ask! Any excuse to talk about blorbos

8) A quote from the movie I use on the daily

I have to admit I didn't know the film existed until yesterday when it started trending, idk how it managed to escape me, maybe bacause I'm not American? So I haven't had a chance to abuse any of the quotes. "Do you hear the clock ticking?" would've been an easy answer, but I think Mario's "God is looking away, anything can happen" has great meme potential, only in the way that the jokes based on tragic moments in media are the funniest (that dw post with Rose from Doomsday photoshopped into a picture of a vending machine? Still cracks me up as much as the actual scene makes me cry).

13) My favourite ship

Not to sound basic or anything, but it's Katya/Sofia, any day. Maybe I'm just gay, but no one does it like them. The codependency? The loneliness and isolation that they are in together? The childhood friends to strangers to enemies to maybe lovers thing they got going on? Impeccable. Honestly the fact that they found each other again, in Naples of all places, so far from the town they both grew up in, seems more like fate that anything that Katya and Goncharov have. I just wish we could see more of them than the seventies dudebro mafia thriller was willing to show us. We could've had it all if Scorsese and Mateo JWHJ0715 weren't cowards.

And here I absolutely have to address the religious themes. I don't even think that the creators understood the implication, it's not like 1970's Americans knew a lot about life in Soviet Russia, but we have to understand that both Katya and Sofia have most likely spent their formative years in a very anti-religious culture (hell, Goncharov himself makes a mistake of talking dismissively about faith in a deeply catholic country). And who Katya gives her dead father's Saint Nickolai locket to? Sofia. She is willing to part with the thing that protects her to keep Sofia safe. It might've been played in the film as not that big of a deal, but the implications! I'm going to combust!

22) My favourite Goncharov reference in unrelated media

This question is definitely the hardest because I am not much of a film connoisseur, I only watched Goncharov bc everyone was talking about it. I guess taking another JWHJ0715's work is cheating, since it's not entirely unrelated, but it's the best I got.

JWHJ0715's written the screenplay for a movie "Back At Last" that we studied at uni at some point as a part of a post-modernism course. The set up is different to Goncharov, but the themes are pretty similar, it's obvious that he has been drawing inspiration from his older work more than a decade later. So in this one in the big climactic scene in the end the main character says to her husband "Spring comes to Florence", with Florence being the hometown of both of them. I didn't realize it at the moment, but this most definitely was a "Goncharov" callback, but with an insight of the older Mateo, and the movie really reflects that change. I just think it's sweet that the implicit message here is that after winter there is always spring. "Goncharov" might have reflected Mateo's more pessimistic outlook on life, but in twelve years he is able to look back and say "it does get better, you can come back home again", which, knowing his life story, makes me cry a little bit. Idk, I may be looking too deeply into it, as I tend to do, but oh well, that's what makes engaging with media fun!