#when a lot of the time they are just describing misogyny or straight up meanness which is not

[olderthannetfic]

https://www.tumblr.com/olderthannetfic/730572795212398592/what-is-up-with-all-the-trans-men-on-this-hellsite?source=share

As a trans man, I might have some insight into this one. I'm a lot older than the standard uwu sparkle anti, but I was in my mid twenties for the first wave of weirdness about trans boys on Tumblr about a decade ago, so I was just too old for it then, and I saw a lot of guys my age and a little younger get swept up in it.

OTNF rightly points out that young trans men are a particularily vulnerable demographic. This is part of it, but we're also a demographic that doesn't sit comfortably with our identites (gender identities or otherwise) and are told by everyone (on every side) that we are Doing It Wrong, that our existence harms others, and that we must be this specific way to be good people.

I'm sure you've seen the "trans men are better than real cis men" rhetoric. It's meant to be inclusive and to reassure us that we're not bad people just because of our gender, but it also denies us our entire gender identity.

So basically, you've got a bunch of young guys, most of whom were socialised like girls and learned to never be too assertive, many of whom are straight up suffering from dysphoria and stress, being told by people both within and outside of their communities that the are Wrong and Bad and Harmful just for existing. It makes sense that a lot of them would would find a movement based on moral posturing that will accept them if they perform correctly and will use their real name and pronouns. That's what Antis are; they say "use this vocabulary, send hate mail to that person, put these terms in your DNI, don't be caught reading that story", and, unlike other groups that police people's tastes and performance that hard, they're not overtly hostile to trans identities. So you can spout the right rhetoric, use the right tumblr icon, and they will actually accept you (on the surface, for a time, but we're talking about young and desperate people who aren't looking at the long game).

Helping them harass those badwrong horrible NOTP shippers or aces or middle aged women or some random artist who got caught drawing the wrong age gap or whoever is the fashionable target will prove that you aren't a horrible monster for being a man, you're moral and upright and correct.

And yes a lot of it is internalised misandry (that word has a lot of dumb baggage, but how else can I describe a boy who hates himself for being a boy?), or self-loathing born of dysphoria and just plain having to live in a world that's hostile to trans people.

Being an anti is a way out. It's a way to manufacture acceptence. And they're too young and too hurt to realise that that acceptance is as temporary and hostile as the people who accept them only if they pretend to be girls; the antis will turn on them the moment they start acting a little too manly or if they're caught liking the wrong ship.

(I've seen something similar happen to young cis queer guys and trans girls, too, but it isn't as pronounced since being raised as a boy means you probably already learned that standing up for yourself is ok sometimes)

--

I'm sure it also doesn't help that tumblr is absolutely full of BL/slash fandom. There's certainly plenty of gender diversity in these spaces, but it's inescapable that the majority of participants are women. So for a young, insecure guy trying to assert that he is a guy, it's easy to fall prey to "Waaaah, I need to reclaim my hobby for me!" gatekeepy nonsense.

Sure, it's going to be turned on nbs even harder than on cis women and will be used to misgender other trans men in the end and misogyny isn't cool anyway, but that's not what your average traumatized young fool is thinking when they first join up. They're thinking "I hurt."

TBH, though, probably the largest component is that all of us—all of us—have a mental image of a default human for a given context. It's rarely a trans man. And so anything a trans man does stands out and is A Thing Trans Men Do.

This is true even if you are trans. It is true even if you are not a transphobic dickhead. Unlearning the 'why girls are bad at math' xkcd strip is extraordinarily hard because recognizing patterns and having mental defaults is just how human brains work.

There are shittons of cis women who become antis, but they're just not notable in the same way.

Are trans men more vulnerable to becoming antis? It's possible, and the reasons you outlined above are likely why. I think it's an interesting question to discuss if we are specifically discussing why the trans men who do become antis do so.

But we don't actually have any hard facts to support that they are more prone to it than anybody else. My guess would be that vulnerable people are more likely to become antis, so any cis woman with a strong source of vulnerability like a shittastic home life is similarly vulnerable to a young trans man with no support network, but who knows.

Maybe only 5% of trans men on tumblr are antis and 50% of cis women. Maybe it's 90% of trans men and 20% of cis women. Maybe it's 1% and 1% and they're just all very loud.

We have no data. We just don't know.

And we will never be able to trust our own brains on this until trans vs. cis is such a nonissue that we don't even notice it.

[squaloropera]

alright, I was originally gonna make this as a comic but I’m really busy so I can’t manage that. I swear, this is my last anti-fujoshi post and then we’ll be back to our regularly scheduled inane nonsense.

firstly, I’ve seen a lot of people saying that they dislike the term ‘fujoshi’ to describe these people because of its misogynistic origins. I find this to be reasonable, so I will be referring to them as maiali pervertiti instead. It’s Italian! Hope y’all like it xx That out of the way, let’s begin.

I have put real, genuine, actual research into this. I scoured maiali pervertiti blogs to find their arguments, their mindsets, their justifications. As far as I could find, there are four main arguments. These being the following: ‘It’s just fiction, not reality’, ‘Hating us is misogynistic’ ‘hating us is transphobic/homophobic’ and ‘hating us is racist’. I will be unpacking each of these, looking at them from both perspectives, and explaining why exactly they’re flawed perspectives. Hopefully, a properly researched and informed take on this will help to clear the waters.

Let’s start with the first take. The ever-quoted ‘it’s just fiction, not reality’. This is an argument you’ll find in a lot of places, mostly in any place which is in support of questionable things being treated as erotic. Pro ships and pro-shippers also love to tote this. Now, on its surface this argument seems logical. However it starts to fall apart when you think about it critically. When we consider how the brain works, you’ll see what I mean. To be concise, the human mind slowly accepts things the more it’s exposed to justifications for them, regardless of how reasonable those justifications are. It associates a bad thing with ‘but nevermind, it’s fine’ and you stop feeling shame or regret over time. This is why you’ll often see lolicons say downright atrocious things about child characters- they’ve justified it for so long that they don’t see a problem with it.

Now, on the ‘it doesn’t affect reality’ claim, let’s look at other groups for this. Think about how many studies have been done saying that men who watch rape porn are more likely to become rapists. Think of all the people raised on the ‘I can fix him’ mentality on tv growing up to get in bad relationships or romanticise abuse under the idea that they can make an abuser better by loving him. It’s no secret of society that, actually, fiction does affect reality. The most concise, albeit silly way I’ve heard it put was ‘But you’re still jacking off to it. It’s affecting your dick and balls’. And I think that sums it up.

Next, let’s look at the ‘If you hate us you’re misogynistic’ claim. The mentality behind this claim is that women in Japan were referred to as ‘rotten girl’ for liking yaoi and bl, and to continue that rhetoric of not liking them is the continuation of misogyny. Again, this is a take that seems logical right up until you pick it apart. First we have to understand that the reason these men were calling these women rotten was because they disapproved of them exploring their sexuality and reading erotic content at all. They don’t hate women for reading gay porn, they hate women for reading porn period. The gay people criticising maiali pervertiti on tumblr aren’t hating them for the same reason. We don’t hate you for reading porn, read all the porn you’d like, we just want you to stop fetishising us. The difference is in the context; the men who were shaming Japanese women were shaming them for exploring their sexualities, were shaming you for treating an entire minority of people like they’re a porn category and for spreading gross, abusive content of mlm because you think it’s hot. It’s also important to note that Japanese women mostly started reading yaoi and bl because of the culture toward female sexuality in Japan. They couldn’t read erotica of straight couples, or they’d be seen as perverts. They couldn’t read wlw erotica, or they’d be seen as lesbians and shamed. Their only option for exploring their sexuality became mlm erotica. You, Lindsey from California, do not share this same issue.

Next we have the ever-irritating ‘If you hate us, you’re a transphobe’ argument.

*deep, deep sigh*

stay with me, fellow trans achillians. We can get through this. This argument is based in the idea that transmascs, specifically mlm transmascs, might read yaoi to explore their genders through sexual content. Unfortunately, exploring your gender through erotica and having a fetish are two different things. I personally did explore my gender through gay sexual content. Mostly fanfiction and mental fantasy, but with the odd fanart or comic sprinkled in there for flavour. The difference is that I never had a fetish for it. Most maiali pervertiti seem to argue with a very subtle straw man by implying that reading mlm content is the same as reading the gross rape porn yaoi that ‘fujoshi’ spaces are steeped in. This is not the case- there is a clear divide. I personally consumed actual, healthy content of gay sex. To go further with this argument, I actually think it’s actively harmful to perpetuate the idea that young trans people struggling with their gender should be exploring it through the things that are spread in fujoshi spaces. I’ve read some pf this stuff mostly by accident or against my will and that shit should not be associated in a young trans person’s mind with their gender. It isn’t safe.

Next we have ‘it’s homophobic to hate us’ which is definitely. A take. The rhetoric here is that by hating on the fetishisation consumption of yaoi, you’re really just hating gay men.

this is just… can I drop the nuance voice here? It’s bullshit. It’s gross bullshit. Gross, steaming, cowpat bullshit. Okay, nuance voice back up, let’s explore. maiali pervertiti, please understand that it’s mostly gay people who don’t like you. This is, again, a straw man argument. They’re trying to yell homophobia so they can ignore the real criticisms. The problem isn’t the homosexuality, my dear sweet perverted little fucking weirdos, it’s the rape porn and incest and abuse. Just read normal fucking mlm content I’m begging you.

Finally, we have the ‘it’s racist to hate us’ argument. This is an example of what I like to call ‘the firemen diversion’. This name comes from an example where a person might take the statistic of their being higher fatality risk the more firemen walk into a burning building, and then using it as an argument to suggest that it’s dangerous to call the fire brigade if there’s a fire. There’s a tiny nugget of reasonable argument in there, but it’s backing up a complete and utter bullshit lie.

This is basically what this argument is. The idea here is that the term ‘fujoshi’ was originally a reclaimed slur, and that westerners are changing it to degrade women again and are therefore misunderstanding the actual language behind it.

Now, this is based in a little bit of truth. Westerners do, in all fairness, misunderstand the term. I can’t speak for the reclamation of the slur, considering how I don’t know if that’s true, but I do know that the way it’s used has been quite incorrect a lot of the time. That’s the true bit. The rest of the argument, however, is nonsensical. While yes, some people misunderstand the word ‘fujoshi’, it doesn’t mean that the criticism of the culture (especially the culture in the western world) is racist. Please, don’t cry racism when you see people asking not to be fetishised. You will end up making the actual movement against anti-Asian hate crimes (which have increased in recent years, need I remind you) look less credible. Once again, I am asking allies to shut the fuck up talking for the minorities they claim to represent while being batshit insane x

TL;DR: no, it is not misogynistic, racist, transphobic or homophobic when gay people tell you to stop fetishising us. Stop arguing straw men and just take accountability.

Also, maiali pervertiti are the female equivalent of straight men who watch lesbian porn. But somehow worse. That’s all, have a good day.

[unlimitedhorsepower]

been rotating t&b2 cour2 in my mind like a 5D object...

i wanted to write more comprehensive post to air some of my grievances, and of course finally releasing my exclusive statement on my special beast ryan goldsmith.

however when i started to write this i realized i have a shitton of thoughts and could rewrite the entire cour if i really thought about it, so i actually mention most characters in this self-indulgent essay of mine and you can just skim through if you were interested in my thoughts.

i talk a lot of yuri here even if i went into this thinking that ive already talked about him enough, because he fascinates me...

anyhow, here they are, my more comprehensive thoughts under the cut because theyre not spoiler free:

this is unbearably long: ive bolded some key sentences that build up to something if youd like to skim it instead of reading it. i also suggest you using Ctrl+F to find mentions of characters you care about because ive literally mentioned every single character in this in some way and it genuinely is incredibly long and convoluted.

i talk about some characters way more because i wrote those parts earlier and felt more full of energy. i also talk a lot about ryan. perhaps even more than he deserves! but he is my favourite character, youve been warned. i didnt even mean to make him seem so important because hes not, lmfao.

ill say, it can definitely be a bit confusing if its not being read it order but like, meh... i guess it was also more important for me to get my thoughts out so that i can have other thoughts again.

this entire thing got away from me and at many points devolved to me not only ragging on t&b2 but extensively discussing my alternatives which couldve imo built the entire thing into something more worthwhile...

ive added like three screencaps to make it a little more exciting to scroll through, and if i have energy left im gonna add more images to make it less like a huge wall of text, which it is. but right now i just wanna post it because i genuinely spent 10 hours straight writing this and then woke up today and spent another 10 hours writing it.

i think this is my therapy over yuris arc, because that genuinely made me sick. maybe im unreasonable and just pissed off about that specifically, but who knows. not me!

so, to begin... t&b2 cour2.

hmm.

i initially called it “good” and said i enjoyed it besides yuris arc, but that feeling was born from the sheer emotional turmoil yuris death gave me. in comparison, everything else in the cour was fine- great, even!

there can be missteps and flaws that diminish your enjoyment but that are easy enough to fix in your mind, and then theres a misstep of the sort of a character dying after the narrative spends a lot of time giving me what i can only describe as trauma porn.

i already wrote about that here, so ill skip some of the things related to yuri (i just cant get over it... i keep circling back to him throughout this document because hes such a central figure to what we got and what i thought we would get).

cour2 had such a solid basic understanding of characters, but there was just way too much going on at the same time and way too many loose plot threads. cour2 was like building a house of cards on top of a solid brick foundation and expecting it to hold water.

cour1 isnt perfect, but it was pretty good in introducing us to new concepts, new characters (three new heroes to our ensemble cast, one returning talent from the rising who needs less establishing, and the new villains, and more) and the new plot threads, but i also feel that misogyny unfortunately played a great role in who got arcs and what sort of arcs.

season1 isnt perfect either, of course, but one could imagine a sequel follows up tonally with its predecessor and also improves upon it, especially because this has been explicitly suggested by the creators (like improving on nathans portrayal, for example!).

cour2 majorly failed to follow up on the promises of cour1 and the overall promises of what t&b is like in tone and content. there were too many plot threads and too many characters. i wouldve entirely cut out aurora and large parts of yuris/lunatics “arc”. the latter i wouldve tied into LL audun and a greater plotline of mr.legend and heroism.

speaking of mr.legend, yuris hallucinations of him were excessive and felt extremely cheap. i know i said i wouldnt focus on yuri, but i feel like i have to... mr.legends force ghost saying anything will never amount to any healing or retributive action from the man himself, but i felt like i was supposed to feel it was “good” he knew those things.

i felt that the narrative was telling me that indeed, yuri had loved his father once, and he had positive qualities, but i already knew that. i also never doubted that both of his parents had once loved him- its just that those things dont take away from how poorly they treated yuri in the end.

im willing to extend some sympathy to yuris mother, but to mr.legend, never. in one of the mangas mr.legend in the past asks young maverick to wipe his memories of him ever having powers (even though the memories will return to him in due time since thats a major thing to change) so that he can be free of the guilt he feels.

even without that, i already knew that the real mr.legend most likely felt some sense of guilt over his actions, not just the mr.legend force ghost/yuris hallucination.

i know: i simply dont care! he may have been put into a shitty situation and suffered, but it was his choice to hurt others. it was him who used his status to fix fights and beat his wife and child. he was in a position of power, and he took advantage of it to make himself feel better.

side note, alcoholism keeps being equated to evil by it being explicitly referenced with mr.legend and gregory sunshine even if by itself its a taxing addiction and addicts are people who are suffering, not caricaturish evildoers. antonios drinking habits have been equally worrisome sometimes -if you look at his schedule in KOW the rising, he is very much using alcohol to drown his sorrows- and this briefly comes up in cour1.

in cour2, its played up for jokes: antonio took ivan drinking and ivan drank way too much and did funny things while he was drunk (more on this later). antonios just different actually, because hes fundamentally good.

it was shown to us that mr.legend was very active in the match fixing himself... i think it wouldve been more fitting to show child yuri spying on his fathers discussion with maverick trying to suggest it to test the waters of seeing how easy it would be to manipulate mr.legend into it, perhaps about to offer him coffee to signify hes about to change memories if he needs to, and mr.legend jumping on the offer instead of declining it and shattering yuris high opinion of his father.

maverick not being included just reminds me how yuri is somehow a secret child nobody knows about. we remain in the dark on how yuri ended up taking care of his own mother and what he did to attain the position of a judge.

we still dont know the details of who covered up mr.legends death and why and how. it wouldve only made sense it was maverick, but how the hell did he then not know that yuri must be the one with the powerful NEXT power?.. how did he in general not recognize yuri once he became a judge? was he not distrustful?

more importantly, why did he not try to manipulate yuri? wouldnt it have been a huge boon for him to find a vulnerable child who is mr.legends son no less, and to raise him into a tool like he eventually raised barnaby?

i could see that yuris mother olga (i think its officially translated as origa, but its definitely olga) actually protected him back then. after all, he was the only remaining family she had left, even if she too grew to resent yuri at some point for some reason (and somewhat understandable, given how she was portrayed in s1 accepting mr.legends treatment: she had submitted to her fate and become traumatized).

however, olga has calmed down from her potrayal of throwing plates at yuri in s1 and the change happened without explanation but an acknowledgment from the caregiver, and she is never given any depth as to why she could blame yuri so deeply and fervently in some of her more lucid (?) moments.

in cour2, she becomes just a vessel for inflicting more trauma on yuri, and its her only purpose: shes not her own character. shes a woman, specifically a mother, and thats all we need to know about her.

i know that my tinfoil hat theory of gregory sunshine being yuris biological father is implausible at this point after all that talk about hero blood in yuris veins, but it wouldve genuinely given olga much more depth to give her a reason (not a justification) on why shes been so aggressive towards yuri and blames him specifically, if yuri had been an illegitimate child or somesuch. but i wrote about that already in the linked post and its replies.

back to parental figures, i think laras mother zamira was a great character in cour1. shes not a morally good character, no, but i think her portrayal was strong? it was very clear to me that shes treating lara as an extension of herself instead of her own person. she controls her and her life, and she reprimands lara for having thoughts and feelings beyond her control.

it is her who has set lara on this path to heroism, and it is for her benefit. lara is a vessel for her to life through, and this could be easily contrasted with yuri and his burden about being mr.legends son.

however, in cour2 the entire premise is undermined when zamira is proven to “actually care” about lara. if i dont remember wrong, paolin even says that “she reminds her of her own mother”, which i was meant to understand in a positive way. this is presented in tandem with mr.legend(s ghost) somehow “really caring about yuri” in that odd scene they had together.

its also proven that zamira wasnt an unreliable narrator about her prior tennis partner pamela, because we see pamela easily blame NEXT for existing in the news as proof that she is cruel. i get the sense were supposed to think zamira was just sad and trying her best to raise lara and make sure nobody takes advantage of her like she was taken advantage of.

i frankly dont care! she had, undoubtedly, treated lara the way she treats her in cour1 for laras entire life: shes 14. it leaves a lasting mark she can never take back. “im sorry” doesnt even begin to fix it.

i wrote about yuri adopting lara here, so i wont delve into some very specific AU, but it wouldve felt much more reasonable and realistic for lara to be freed from her mother, not even necessarily in the way my pipeline dream describes, in a way that couldve emphasized yuri and his good qualities.

t&b has never been free of misogyny and other issues, but i feel like this cour really brought a lot of those issues to the surface instead of improving on them... instead of a nuanced portrayal of a fractured mother-daughter relationship, we were given something that just felt like underlining the fact that zamira is a mother, of course she cares about lara in more ways than for her own benefit.

zamira is a mother like olga, and thats what we “needed” to know about them in addition to knowing that they experienced trauma that just made them forget about their motherhood for a moment, but we learn that olga cared too, she even made those cookies. their mother-son relationship is similarly glossed over.

lara -like yuri- is done a great disservice in the process of redeeming abusive parents. shes a kid who killed a villain on accident in self-defense in cour1, and it felt significant. cour2 doesnt bring this up as a plot point in any way.

i was imagining her getting a much bigger arc that couldve overall easily tied into revealing mr.legend as a horrible parent instead of being its own distinctly separate arc.

speaking of mr.legend being exposed, it was ridiculous that yuri revealed mr.legends awfulness to kotetsu and barnaby and it fell fully flat due to kotetsus and barnabys reactions, or rather due to their lack of reactions, which was strange for them both.

its realistic enough to have yuri do something like that, even if it was sudden: it feels like he was under a lot of duress and clearly seeking help in any way he could, justifying it to himself in some “logical” reasoning for it because i dont think he would consciously realize he needs and wants someone to believe him.

before i get into that and how i think they shouldve reacted with far more compassion, i want to say that to me its clear that kotetsus career in heroism has led him to neglect kaede, especially in the past when kaede didnt know that her father was a hero. this is brought up a bit in cour1, and for example is prominent in the beginnings additional scene where kaede begs for her father to show up at the ice rink just this once.

the series shows their father-daughter relationship mostly from kotetsus side, so that we know hes trying his best and really wants to be involved in kaedes life but hes genuinely busy, but if you think about it from kaedes perspective, kotetsu hasnt always been a good father to her and kotetsus business doesnt take away from his failings.

misogyny plays a role in this portrayal, and that i cant blame kotetsu for as a fictional character, but the fact that some of his actions are played for jokes and the fact that he continues doing them bother me, like pretending hes doing yoga like kaede suggested and instead of actually doing it. i wish he was more honest with her, even about those little things!

narratively in the rising, again, kaede is forced to adopt a tomoe-like role in encouraging her own father to continue his hero work, which isnt cute to me at all. its extremely emotionally taxing to have to be more responsible than your own parent and give them advice.. in cour2 she is again protecting her father from the truth that his mother is bedridden (nothing, afaik, comes out of that by the way?).

why is kaede protecting kotetsu, and why does she feel the need to do that? shes a child! she should be able to depend on his father, not feel like she has to protect him just because hes a hero.

those things frustrate me about kotetsu and the narrative around him and kaede, because i think this moment especially couldve used to do something about this dynamic and parenting. however, every parenting-related thing in cour2 was atrocious.

kotetsu has flaws and i think he has done wrong despite trying his best (sometimes your best isnt enough!), but he isnt cruel and genuinely does care about kaede, and he cares about others even if theyre not his family (he is a busybody, after all). he is a single father and a widower whose late wife pushed him into hero work, and his old mother supports him greatly, as does his brother.

despite family being so important to kotetsu, he ends up not reacting much to yuris admission that mr.legend beat his wife and child. doesnt that seem like something he wouldve focused on? good-hearted as he is, wouldnt he have been utterly shocked to hear that someone who “saved” him couldve been so thoroughly rotten?

it shouldve shocked him more than match-fixing and clinging to the identity of a hero: imagining himself becoming a cruel parent (and a husband).

i think he shouldve admitted that his own hero career has caused him to neglect kaede, and that he didnt even properly realize until as of late how much it had affected her- that he has flaws too and cant claim to be special or that mr.legend was an outlier, and that he cant imagine how hard it mustve been for yuri to go through that.

it wouldve been far more compassionate of him, and he really has a lot of compassion for others! i refuse to watch that scene again right now so maybe i remember some part wrong, but still: in my opinion he was a dick to yuri, and very defensive about himself. he didnt try to console him, it felt like he wanted to set himself apart as a better person than mr.legend.

i dont understand why he didnt at least try to find yuri after hes stormed off and hes realized that he said stuff yuri probably didnt want to hear? thats a thing kotetsu does all the time: he meddles. he gets things wrong, sure, but he meddles, and pulls people aside to have a chat with them and to try to help (like he later on does with barnaby).

kotetsu believes in heroism and his ideals of heroes, and its also very personal and family-related to him, so for him to be more shocked by mr.legend clinging to his hero image than the abuse part explicitly was a weird narrative choice to inflict more pain on yuri. i dont think yuri felt understood at all.

i think kotetsu wouldve been able to discern the most important part of this: that mr.legend was a bad father and husband, and he shouldve extended compassion to yuri (even if yuri didnt ask for any). thats what he did with barnaby in s1 as well!

just like kotetsus nonreaction to what really mattered in what yuri told the two of them, barnaby didnt have much to say which made the entire scene feel more callous.

its a deliberate choice, and its as odd as kotetsus reaction.

barnaby saw his parents dead in front of his eyes and was taken in by maverick and regarded him as a parental figure he could depend on up until the moment it was explicitly revealed to him that maverick had killed his parents and used him like a tool.

i could understand kotetsu initially being defensive (hearing someone he was “saved” by being thoroughly awful is not easy!) if barnaby had chimed in and snapped kotetsu out of it, which wouldve also played into the idea that people need others to support them and also to “steer them on the right path” so that kotetsu manages to focus on the most important but also the most painful part even if it also hurts him to think about, including admitting to his own failures as a father.

i think barnaby shouldve immediately been sympathetic towards yuri, and it couldve also signified how far he has come from his first appearance in s1 where he explicitly had closed himself off from others, and perhaps even realized that yuri is acting like he once did and is deeply lonely.

his sudden admittance to being mr.legends son is an urgent cry for help!

canonically, the moment started and ended and neither kotetsu or barnaby cared enough to say anything nice or follow after him. i think it was out-of-character, and they were forced to act like that to make sure yuris downwards spiral would continue. it was cruel.

the plot often felt explicitly manufactured towards a certain endpoint instead of feeling natural and in-character, going so far the narrative took explicit steps to prevent certain things from happening.

the “prevention of things” was especially obvious with ryan.

this is going to be long because not only is he my favourite character, but ever since his introduction in the rising he has occupied a specific niche that couldve played into the theme of questioning who really is a hero and why, and what makes a hero.

because karina forms blue golden with ryan, i dont think i can discuss ryans lack of any real arc without bringing her up, especially because karina and ryan have both been positioned as being more of “main characters” than the rest of the supporting hero ensemble, which is why i especially expected more out of them.

karina has been central ever since the pilot of t&b, in which she is featured: she has a lot of connections to kotetsu including her childish crush, and out of all heroes, it is her who kaede calls when she wants to plan something, and ryan was introduced as a main character in the rising and embodies traits from both kotetsu and barnaby, including visually.

to begin with, ryans themes from the rising arent contradicted by cour1 setting him up as having very personal beef with gregory sunshine, the most prominent antagonist because the heroes never properly meet rosicky and LL audun is a last-minute addition (who wouldve deserved more screen time, more on him later).

in cour1, we come to know that gregory caused ryan collapse a building on himself and nobody helped him, his fellow heroes laughing at him before they leave him bleeding underneath rubble. in cour2, we see more of it and that he didnt only get buried underneath large amounts of rubble, but that he majorly injured (or worse) a large amount of civilians as well.

again, im not sure because im not going to rewatch, but i understood it was supposed to be the same instance as the one where his fellow heroes laugh at him, unless its just a nightmare he has that civilians were injured as well.

regardless, he was personally affected by gregory, and he wants gregory to not to run free, and its a fact that hes actually very emotional and acts impulsively under duress, like trying to leave sternbild the moment he thought karina was going to ditch him as a buddy (because he, like yuri, is actually lonely and wants people to understand him but gives up way too quickly).

he also breaks the door into gregorys apartment without a second thought (this is breaking&entering!), and later on we see him yelling and gesturing at blue goldens manager in a quick background scene about their new contracts.

however, his reaction to mattia allegedly ratting them out to gregory is “slightly miffed” at best, even if gregory was so close to being caught by him. it feels unbelievable to me, especially because i think his loud and genuine emotions are his strength but also his potential flaw.

i think he shouldve acted way more unreasonably emotional about it, instead of only bringing up how anyone can betray you at any time. to take a detour to karina for a bit, it was also ridiculous that karina had nothing significant to say to that.

she has difficulties speaking up sometimes, but karina shouldve been allowed to feel personally slighted by ryan after all the buddy hero arcs being about trusting each other.

it seems that she can only be given arcs that revolve around men and not, for example, her feelings about herself and being able to take pride in being a very hard-working hero, idol, and now a friend too, especially when the new manga shows her reoccurring troubles in trying to balance different aspects of her life like studying and being a hero.

it wouldve stung to hear ryan say that like he was brushing her off: did ryan learn nothing, and was he just saying all that stuff earlier to put her at ease instead of being genuine? it also ties into ryans issue of always being genuine but his eccentric personality making him seem fake/suspicious, like in the rising.

his personality felt utterly stagnant in cour2 with smug quips, however, and he was just positioned as “morally good” instead of the narrative allowing him to reasonably continue his arc and meaning for the narrative by going after gregory as a hero even when its against the law.

some of the themes of ryans character pair off with yuris and any arc he couldve been given with gregory wouldve been perfect to compliment an arc with yuri/lunatic, the truth about mr.legend, how LL audun couldve tied into that.

yuri is positioned as a vigilante, even a villain, but hes shown to save kotetsu on-screen, and he follows his code of justice very strictly. we know his reasons to act the way he does, and he is sympathetic. ryan, on the other hand, is positioned as a hero, but he can be kind of a prick and his idea of justice is remarkably lax in some ways. we can make a good guess why he acts like that, and like yuri, he is sympathetic.

they both are characters kotetsu and barnaby know well, and theyre both more severe than the titular protagonists. kotetsu has bent the rules on occasion to act according to his idea of heroism, but in my opinion ryan is set up as someone who would explicitly break rules for his idea of heroism (or lack thereof).

ryan is a good person and very much a hero, but he isnt the flawed but idealistic hero full of passion like wild tiger, or the humble and pure-hearted storybook hero like sky high, hes the egotistical heracles clad in the golden pelt of the slain nemean lion who knows just how good he is (and thats all he has going on for him, that ego of his).

its obvious that he can be a bit selfish: in the rising he uses his gravity dome to not only to save the building, but he traps all the other heroes in it, including pulling sky high from the air. from the movie commentary track ive gotten the idea that he did it on purpose since he can control the height of the dome he creates.

he also stretches out his dome later, so it begs the question if it was ever necessary to get any of the other heroes trapped in it to begin with.

he does save that building and the civilians within and causes no significant harm because he really is good at being a hero and hes not evil, but the narrative shows that he doesnt treat heroism like the heroes of sternbild do: he lacks the same sense of honorable justice our sternbild heroes have.

being a hero is first and foremost his career, which is why he brings up that “the money is good”, and because hes positioned as an experienced hero, he mustve started out as a child, given that he is younger than barnaby (even if in my opinion is not so much younger than he is).

the rising is strongly themed around justice day and the myth, and its also about him seeing the heroes of sternbild care about each other and their bonds with each other, instead of them all regarding each other as competition like hes used to people treating him, given how unbothered he is by figuring out barnaby didnt only distrust him but outright suspected him of being a villain.

due to seeing the bonds of the heroes of sternbild, he starts to “carry a heart of justice” as per the myth. barnaby suspected that he is a villain and the goddess of the story even if he ended up being more like the people cast aside by the goddess for their selfishness.

in the end he makes a choice: he can stay and keep the central bond between kotetsu and barnaby broken, or he can leave and mend the bond his hiring caused and bring the two of them back together as a duo. in the last shot, the winged lion of apollon media faces away from the camera like the way ryan leaves, while the justice tower smiles.

justice was enacted and she approves of it, and funnily ryan never thought that he could be a part of these bonds which is why he wholly leaves sternbild. in his KOW the rising schedule he meets up with a lot of people but theyre all just acquantaices, and he talks with his iguana. he moves around a lot, its in his title of the “wandering gravity prince”.

he lacks bonds like yuri lacks them, but by giving him a buddy partner in t&b2, he becomes more of a part of sternbild heroes, but its not just going to change who he has grown into overnight.

its intentional that ryan has wings on his hero suit like the ones the goddess is portrayed with, and the rest of his imagery plays into the this theming of the goddess/the sun while echoing kotetsus “tiger”.

lions are associated with the sun, even the zodiac sign leo is ruled by the sun. royals and gods have been linked to the sun in many places, so his old hero suit and title play into it. gold, similarly, echoes this sentiment.

in the opening, ryan “sun” is composed of the streets of the city and missing its center where the sponsor is displayed, but knowing the legend, its where the city was caved in, and it uses the same colours as the illustrated parts of the legend of justice day (in which the sun is displayed similarly, and yes, if you disagree on it looking like the sun, you could be right, perhaps that part is a coincidence.)

yuri is shown in the opening of the rising as well, his slide after ryans and his red moon the central piece of his background and juxtaposed with ryans hollow sun.

and i want to be clear, ryans background changes into a sky full of stars before yuris slide is displayed, which also makes sense for ryan because the heroes of sternbild are portrayed as stars more than once (and its funny for ryan to be the sun because the sun is just a star, its just closer to earth. hes not special, hes just loud about it).

its also significant to me that all heroes are portrayed with slides with a side-view of buildings in the background whenever applicable, even keith who can literally fly: it is ryan who has a momentary birds-eye view.

its the opposite of yuris, in which the lines around his red moon are buildings as if someone was looking upwards from the ground and also somewhat echoes the parts, including colour-wise, where the people are trapped in the cave by the goddess.

lunatic features prominently in the rising once yuri figures whats going on, and kotetsu gets to talk to him about how hes trying to save virgil/andrew from the burden of having killed and whatnot. the entire movie is themed around a holiday called justice day and showing mercy and who deserves mercy and why?

i genuinely thought that ryan being brought back indicates that tiger&bunny continues to question what being a hero really means, by giving the titular protagonists and the narrative someone to contrast with lunatic while ensuring kotetsu and barnaby can stay on the side of “good”/heroes for the sake of them being the main characters.

it wouldve been a purpose fulfilled for ryan to go against the law and becoming a vigilante because of how badly he wants to catch gregory: he has a huge personal reason to do so.

instead of the narrative following the logical conclusion of ryan going rogue due to how badly he wants to see gregory out of the streets, we get a scene specifically to explain why ryan cant follow through with the logical next step of his arc?

what a waste of everyones time, and i get the sense that the writers understand how strongly ryan feels about it (the foundation is there!) because it required both the company owner and manager to hang karinas fate over his head to ensure he doesnt just go on his merry way.

(i dont, by the way, understand that scene, and i cant bear to look at t&b2 scenes again... if you can explain it to me, then please do lol. like i specifically dont understand why ryan doing anything would cause harm to karinas privacy.)

not only wouldve it been meaningful for the entire narrative and ryan, this couldve so easily been used to give karina a satisfying arc that also shows that she is just as capable and deserving of an arc as the guy heroes of the cast, especially as the most prominent woman hero. now, instead, she ends up being a plot device to make ryan feel one way or another.

even if blue goldens buddy arc included ryan realizing that he doesnt need to protect karina, it was immediately undermined by “protecting karina” being his only reason to not go rogue to find gregory?

instead of letting ryan go rogue and giving karina agency in going after him by his own choice, we get that. what was the point?

one buddy pair explicitly going against the (unjust!) law couldve served to put lunatic in a different light and interrogate the hero system as a whole, and it wouldve make sense for it to be blue golden due to their proximity to the titular main characters.

realistically i imagine ryan would have enough respect for karina to tell her beforehand what hes about to do, but unaccustomed to working together with people, he would imply that hes going alone and karina puts her foot down about it: shes not going to stop him, but shes not letting him go alone, because shes going with him.

it is her decision, and it gives her agency and an active role.

they cant have a character essentially say “yeah misogyny and gender roles and that shit is kinda fucked up” and then follow it up with Absolutely Nothing and also give karina an another arc about her crush on a man.

karinas potential as a character is squandered time and time again. in s1 its incredibly easy to miss that shes almost always the 2nd on the hero leaderboard because more attention is paid to her funny moments like her “cutie escape” and general fanservice which is awful by the way, considering that for the most part of it she is a child.

its also realistic for the idol industry, and at times the show comes close to making some sort of commentary out of it but it never quite manages, in no small part because karina is never allowed to really shine.

either way, shelving the heroes couldve been more impactful for muddying the waters about the hero industry. the cartoonishly evil interference from the cops only serves to promote the view that the heroes are acting Morally Good because theyre being hindered by not the hero system and the law but the individually selfish police chief and ouroboros interference, and serves to imply lunatic is definitely Morally Bad for acting outside of the law.

it is eventually agnes who “gets everyone to break the law, together!”, and it undermines any reasonable narrative meaning for the entire thing and makes it feel like our heroes couldnt be heroes for a bit for the sake of a meaningless and boring shock twist included for some shock value because nothing really comes out of it.

having blue golden go rogue and the police going after them wouldve forced their hands into actually fighting against non-heroes and the law, not just being on the run while they try to find gregory. ryan and karina could cause significant infrastructure damage very easily to make sure the police dont catch up, and it wouldve been easy to summarise it as collapsed roads frozen over.

while i wouldve in this hypothetical scenario loved an extensive focus on this because ryan is my favourite, i think the whole “going rogue” part couldve been conveyed without taking up an absurd amount of screentime, and couldve easily been condensed for time by having the other heroes watching a news segment about it which wouldnt have felt an out-of-place gimmick given that heroTV exists as a central thing and the fact that this has happened more than once in t&b...

kotetsu and barnaby, and the rest of the heroes could be watching a live feed, and surprised to spot ryan and karina on the run because its unlike they wouldve announced thi. our hero ensemble, especially the protagonist pair, would know that theyre not evil and that they definitely havent turned against the people of sternbild, no matter that theyve now been labeled dangerous NEXT vigilantes.

they couldve been compared to lunatic, which is a very overt way to make the hero ensemble question lunatics status as a vigilante both loved, hated and feared by the general public.

it would be ridiculously easy to play up ryans “evilness” by including a reporter from that introductory press event in the rising where he just randomly used his power on all people in the room to introduce himself (why did he do that. hes so quirky and random.), and then another shot from the rising where he traps all heroes in the gravity dome and thats feels like proof enough? they couldve also recycled the animation.

the narrative couldve made a statement on positioning medias reaction to the beloved idol blue rose on the run as “ryans bad influence” instead of granting her agency, and maybe some of the heroes couldve thought that as well, leaving it to someone else (most likely kotetsu because he is our main character!) to remark that karinas not the type of person to let ryan talk her into this sort of thing and that she mustve instead agreed with him.

having ryan on the hunt for gregory feels natural, but it couldve also been meaningful for karina.

another established thing about gregory is that hes a fucking creep. and karina has dealt with creeps her entire life due to being objectified idol. in cour1, we see that guy trying to hug karina “just this once!”, and it wasnt made into as much of a big deal as it shouldve been because we focused on ryans feelings instead.

that wouldve been fine if it was brought up again, and its utterly wild to me that it feels like they perfectly paved the way for karina to have some sort of arc with gregory herself with ryan bringing up “hug the gregory”, but then the show entirely bailed on it? why the hug theme, then?

it couldve been plot-relevant for karina and the narrative to question what being a hero means for her when her career in heroism has notably led her achievements being belittled in favor of “cutie escape" -moments and even now the media thinks shes out here because of “ryans influence” and not her own choice.

frustrated karina affirming the media somehow that shes doing this for her sense of justice, not because of ryan when some civilian fan of hers tries to save her, the poor little girl, from this vigilante escapade: what wouldve yuri thought of that?

to give karina cool moments wouldve been more impactful and couldve been plot-relevant instead of the disjointed ~girlboss moments~ of rosicky telling gregory to stop being a creep which equated to so little when rosicky is also killed by gregory.

capturing gregory couldve meant something, not been a footnote, and by showing us that fight with blue golden and gregory, they couldve showed us what they half-heartedly tried to show with the quick LL audun fight scene, with karina being the one who ends up protecting ryan after he was knocked out first?

ryan doesnt even need to have his skull caved in like that, all they wouldve had to do is to give ryan a reason to use his power and not be able to let go by having to continue holding something down with his gravity, calling back to barnaby accidentally letting him get knocked unconscious because he wanted to save schneider, except karina actually saves him.

in the process of capturing/pursuing gregory, karina wouldve had a reason to give us some sort of opinion on what she thinks about creeps without it being shoehorned in and how she has to tolerate them because theres so many loopholes in the law but finally, gregory is the one she can fight back against and its because now other people agree that hes evil!

also i genuinely think ryan wouldve loved to not only capture him but to beat the shit out of gregory because he really is different than our heroes from sternbild (and i think he wouldve been justified to do so too, lol).

to exemplify the themes of bonds, karina couldve stopped him but remarked that she feels like gregory wouldve deserved it, and she couldve vocally acknowledged shes having doubts on whether lunatic is so wrong or not, because has anyone or the hero industry itself ever really protected karina from creeps? no!

lunatic is actually making some sort of point when he kills a guy who is a serial killer of women? a bit drastic but hey. it works. that guy cant kill anyone ever again.

it would mean so much for karina to acknowledge that there indeed is something wrong with the hero industry as it exists now and heroes and heroism isnt just “morally good” by default, which also begs the question whether vigilantes etc are ontologically evil by default.

and personally, i dont think ryan would disagree with her? he is well-traveled and has seen so much more than just sternbild: im sure he has met corrupt heroes and heroes who arent even nice or “good”. im sure some places have very fucked up hero systems?..

they couldve made both ryans and karinas arcs mean something by having them face off against gregory (ive been talking of capturing, but they wouldnt even had to been successful and instead gotten captured by the police themselves or been forced to retreat), and it feels so obvious to me?

both members of blue golden wouldve gained something out of it, the overall plotline wouldve gained something out of it, and the setup of the plot wouldve benefited?

the viewer would also know that gregory deserves anything coming for him regardless of the media/public opinion because he is a freak, and the heroes too could explicitly acknowledge that maybe theyve been too harsh on lunatic by not trying to understand him like how blue golden is now misrepresented by the media without any grace? is lunatic just a killer, or... he does keep talking about that justice, after all.

both ryan and karina have interacted plenty with our protagonist pair, so it wouldve served well to draw kotetsus and barnabys attention to it. continuing to question lunatics “evilness” feels so central!

some of the children already said in the cour1 in that that law class of yuris that they thought lunatic was really protecting them and kotetsu was there to hear it, and then nothing came out of that? are you fucking kidding me? he was just like nope, wrong! its evil, end of story.

its like they were given the perfect foundation to do something interesting and valuable, and they didnt end up do any of that just to punish yuri for daring to exist in the way they forced him to exist since t&b is who made yuri the person who he is... but anyways.

yuri is prominently featured in cour2 for all of the wrong reasons, but his prominence couldve been interesting instead: he couldve been standing there looking over the heroes reacting to two of their friends gone rogue and given a cryptic statement on how it seems theyre no different than lunatic in the eyes of the public now that theyre pursuing their own brand of justice...

and everyone couldve been like alright director petrov:)! but also genuinely considered this while yuri is just there, observing the discussion and wondering how their bonds with the two new vigilantes makes it harder for them to be so sure who is a villain to be stopped and who is not.

unrelated to things i think explicitly realistic or in line of t&bs spirit, if i could choose i wouldve also had ryan and lunatic interact.

i think it wouldve been in-character for lunatic to show up to question what ryans going to do with gregory once he finds the man, with ryan answering genuinely but flippantly while karina is bewildered ryan is just trying to have a casual conversation with an fire arrow dramatically pointed at him.

lunatic questions his end goal, like are you gonna kill that guy maybe, and ryans like i dunno, i didnt think that far. now that you mention it maybe i should lol? and karinas like im sorry what is wrong with you?

we couldve gotten the yuri petrov comedy hes hard to rope into by having ryan act like he usually does with lunatic? you try to be dramatic and brooding when some guy is arguing with his emotional support buddy hero girl? ryans only prior interaction with lunatic is in the rising and saying that he looks creepy: he didnt care about a vigilante showing up because he knew the mecha flying over sternbild was the thing he should stop.

its funny because ryans notable trait is “treating everyone equally”, i dont see why he wouldve acted differently with lunatic, and to imagine karina interacting with lunatic because he showed up and ryan isnt having a normal reaction to it by being concerned. but why would ryan be concerned?.. hes good at insight and im sure he knows lunatics justice is very serious to him, and ryan knows hes not a killer so why would he be concerned right now?

but yes, the barebones idea of using ryan especially as a vessel to force the hero ensemble to reconsider vigilantism and lunatic couldve in my opinion been done without the two of them ever interacting directly, because its about what they stand for in the narrative.

what we needed to see was kotetsu (and barnaby) forming some sort of opinion on this, since we mostly see the hero side through kotetsus eyes: he is the main character, after all. all the narrative had to do was let ryan to go do what he clearly wants to.

my description of this all is very elaborate and keeps the entire thing somehow separate from the other heroes, but i think the idea or something akin to my elaborate view couldve been conveyed in a fairly conservative amount of scenes, because the cour only has limited time!

theres also a huge potential for the other characters to join in on the vigilante shenanigans like what ended up happening in the end in canon with all of them “going rogue”, and ryan and karinas involvement couldve been greater than other heroes but still far more smaller once kotetsu and barnaby get their ball rolling over the matter...

t&b2 has a lot of characters, and i think they couldve made it work, but the scenes wouldve had to been carefully picked without wasting scenes on counteracting things they had already set up?..

i dont feel like i can answer the question of “what narrative purpose did it serve to make sure ryan doesnt try to capture gregory on his own?” without pivoting back to “it had to be like this so that yuri would suffer and die and our heroes would stay morally Good unlike lunatic!”.

like, i LOVE ryan, hes my favourite character! and many of the scenes he was in i couldve lived without, because they didnt really add anything of worth to the overall narrative or plotline save for reminding us that he exists.

the entire thing where blue golden separates from the other heroes to go try to find gregory in the jail itself was similarly needlessly drawn out and condensed all the same?..

i understand it as necessary somehow (for the current plotline) to introduce LL audun, but because ryan and karina dont really have anything to do with the guy, it feels wasteful.

the pacing felt awkward to me overall. i was actually bored in some of the first episodes of the cour! and after that, everything starts happening so fast: the LL audun situation is especially sped through.

in cour1, heroes got progressively taken out until only “the essentials” in completing the arc were left, which was a great idea for the sake of stretching the limited screentime available.

it also had real in-world impact, unlike blue golden getting up a while later even if gregory flaunted that “it was so easy for LL audun to kill heroes”. it served so little purpose and was a waste of everyones time for a cheap “shock” because since it happened off-screen, i easily guessed they wouldnt kill a character off like that.

in cour2, we start knocking out heroes very late to the episodes and its not even semi-permanent. it wouldve been way more sensible to have some of the cast get knocked out somewhat early to let the remaining heroes to shine! they couldve even made to go berserk by gregory, so that we couldve then knocked HIM out and then gotten most of the heroes back for a grand finale of sorts, probably facing off LL audun and accompanied by lunatic.

even in the canon scenario, subaru couldve charged in (his whole thing is that hes hot-headed and a bit stupid even if his heart is in the right place!) and thomas couldve shown up earlier, eliminating many scenes that had little worth and focused on efficiently introducing LL audun.

they couldve had that fight with him and thomas couldve swiftly explained key details about him for exposition and made it natural because we already knew hes a fan. i also think their arcs werent so bad i suppose, but them fighting together was the conclusion to the mr.thomas buddy arc, so getting knocked out for a few episodes because theyre still rookie heroes and a bit silly wouldve made sense...

especially when they already were in the last fight in cour1!

it wouldnt have been a disservice to their arcs and wouldve given others more time to shine, and it wouldve been interesting to have other heroes react that the rookie team is presumed dead? they wouldve been fighting even harder against LL audun!

which leads me to say that the one good thing about cour2 for me was LL auduns character, but his potential wasnt realized. he was so prominent as imagery in cour1, with the twins and thomas both idolizing him.

we also know that mr.legend was a corrupt hero and there probably were others? instead of auroras introduction (it was such a gimmick), and gregory getting so much screentime for being creepy, it wouldve been far more interesting to focus on the fact LL auduns time active in vigilantism overlapped with mr.legends time as a hero.

i keep coming back to this, but LL audun couldve been the perfect setup for mr.legends crimes becoming public? it wouldve added intrique to the viewer too by have mr.thomas presumed dead and LL audun fighting the remaining heroes.

that wouldve made it harder to believe mr.legend really sucked so much by the general public and many heroes! kotetsu and barnaby wouldve felt inclined to share some part of what they learned from yuri earlier?

i feel like this wouldve been such an interesting way to make kotetsu and barnaby realize even more things about mr.legend, the hero system itself, medias part in who gets to be a hero and whos not, and lunatic... in a deeper way than the canon, half-hearted attempt at sympathetizing we got, because i just think its not in-character to have them react like that!

in-show its mentioned that LL audun “started to think hes a true hero around his tenth year in prison” but it felt like pure ouroboros/maverick interference to me (even if the current narrative mightve meant it for real).

wouldnt it have made more sense that LL audun was actually a "true hero” fighting against the establishment of the hero system itself, not because he hates heroes, but because he had figured out it was already rotten to the core becasue of maverick?

his simple nature was refreshing (in the same way i really liked fugan and mugan because they were villains but also funny about it) and kept the scenes with him light-hearted, a quality ive always been fond of in tiger&bunny. i do like intense scenes, but i think tiger&bunny should also be a little bit funny and not hard to watch.

he couldve lost his grip on reality a little bit since he spent decades in solitary confinement and focused very hard on his idea of heroism, or maverick couldve even fucked with his thoughts and made him into a ticking time bomb of wanting to destroy so many random people if he ever got out?

how the hell did maverick, mr.legend and the heroes of that time, realistically defeat LL audun back then? its not explained (again i could misremember) and its not important to the canon as-is, but imagine if the canon had focused on idk, being nicer to yuri and on the angle of mr.legends crimes and what if maverick, with mr.legend in tow, had promised to destroy sternbild if LL audun doesnt let them have their way?

it wouldve been, i feel, very easy to let us catch on that maverick was manufacturing LL auduns crimes and spread them on the media for the benefit of mr.legend and heroTV, and that LL audun couldnt stop maverick because he had been honorable about it, like a “true hero”?

hundred power is extremely versatile since it heightens all senses and weve seen that it can even boost recovery, and he can activate it almost continuously: what was it that stopped him from cracking mr.legends skull like an egg once the man himself had fully lost his power, given the canon itself features mr.legend worried about having to face someone he cant realistically win against?

LL audun outright refusing to kill mr.legend and/or maverick feels like the logical conclusion to the question of why he could be defeated. it would also give kotetsu something to think about, to realize this on the screen as our main character!

mr.legend was the hero who saved kotetsu, and then he learns from yuri that mr.legend was actually an awful person, and then, as i suggest, he sees a buddy hero pair go rogue- and then they all have to go rogue?

and to bring all of that to a satisfying conclusion, he faces off against LL audun, with the man questioning gregorys claims about who the real villains are because theyve all protected each other.

some further exposition later he could learn that mr.legend wouldnt have been able to be so awful if LL audun had just killed him when he had the chance, and that maverick couldnt have manipulated barnaby and been evil overall if LL audun hadnt taken up my suggested deal from maverick to voluntarily get imprisoned to protect sternbild and had gone the lunatic route instead?

kotetsu has always been so against killing people, and i dont think hes wrong to think so (well yes i think he is wrong. i think its morally okay to kill evil people! albeit not without emotional consequences for the person taking up that burden like lunatic. but i think its important for kotetsu to disagree with killing) and he wouldnt have had to abandon that principle of his, but this troubling reveal couldve given the narrative way more depth?..

and when kotetsu talks of the goal in the rising being saving virgil/andrew from himself: couldnt he have recognized the emotional toll lunatics actions take on him, and the emotional toll LL audun has taken due to his inaction?

like a real bit of some gray morality that actually has a purpose!

thinking about it makes me want to break something- i feel like everything was so perfectly set up for something like this, and not even this scenario but the concept of sympathizing with yuri further and helping him heal!

it couldve happened without revealing that lunatic is yuri and letting yuri continue in his position as the director of the heroes after the season has concluded (i wouldve enjoyed this personally so that i can imagine him out there), because i feel that revealing mr.legends crimes wouldve changed yuris position so significantly, and for the better!

kotetsu, as the main chracter, wouldnt have had to reveal judge petrov is mr.legends son either, maybe just lunatic for example! imagine yuri seeing people condemn his father? that wouldve been incredibly cathartic? that people agree that whoever mr.legends family was, they mustve suffered, truly and deeply?

yuri couldve gotten a scene like what kotetsu got at the end of the rising, with heroTV broadcasting random people having various positive opinions on him instead as he stands somewhere, contemplating taking off his mask and killing himself for his sins and his justice and whatnot while kotetsu and barnaby arent able to calm him down?

we couldve had a dramatic scene like that, and one of the manga chapters features that scene where yuri revealed his face to the terminally ill woman who had wanted to know who the man behind the mask is: he couldve even revealed himself to kotetsu and barnaby at least since theyre the main characters and still retained his anonymity by using his fire to shield himself from heroTV.

and on the broadcasted heroTV screen people from across sternbild could thank him for what hes done: could yuri, at that point, deny himself the possibility of being forgiven in some way?

it couldve also given us the hilarious dynamic of kotetsu and barnaby at least (and just for me, as a treat, ideally most if not all heroes) knowing that yuri is lunatic but they have a pact to keep his secret.

lunatic half-bleeds to death before jumping off but he doesnt set himself on fire and we dont see him fully fall but it serves as a momentary death fakeout.

then theres an ending scene of judge petrov opening the door to the hero lounge to give a briefing (returning us to the start of the season with yuri briefing everyone about buddy heroes) and he looks incredibly beat up.

agnes asks what the hell happened to him and he says he “got caught by one of the rampaging NEXT” or something else not unbelievable but ridiculous with a straight face, and none of the heroes contradict him.

like, wouldnt it be on-brand for kotetsu to try to joke about it while barnaby tried to shush him and causing someone like keith to quip that he doesnt really get it, isnt it a secret? and agnes could just scoff because whatever are the heroes talking about now...

my dream scenario is everyone laughing about this with yuri who is also laughing a little in confusion because now he has those bonds he hasnt had before? ngl i dont care i just want to see him happy lmfao<3

anyways see how ive lost the plot of this opinions document? bible-length and ive rambled about various topics, jeez. i also said i wouldnt talk about yuri so much but he just feels like such a central character and i like it- i just wish theyd been gentle with him instead of whatever we got. and yes, im about to talk about yuri again...

its unfortunate that with such a big cast, again, only the titular protagonists are often given scenes to interact with plot-relevant matters personally and with any depth...

of course, kotetsu and barnaby should remain at the centre of it all since theyre the protagonists, but cour2 especially included us seeing tidbits from the perspective of so many random characters, it begs the question why add so many bits from characters when i think its pretty clear the fans are interested in tiger&bunny for the ensemble cast too and want to see more of them?..

sorry to fervent mario the announcer fans or something i suppose, but if cour2 had used its time more wisely, we couldve gotten great moments from various heroes in the same time we didnt get anything done?

wasnt a single writer aware that the fandom adores the titular protagonists but theres also large fandom pockets for the other hero characters AND yuri? didnt anyone think that s2 and its buddy hero premise couldve more effectively been used to give us more lore and funny moments also for the supporting cast?

this makes me, for example, think of the scenes where everyone is deliberating X rampages and gregory things.

youre telling me that weve got all of these characters in a room and youre capable of making them act in-character while interacting with each other, but you chose the most boring ways to do it in pursuit of some sort of unneeded seriousness?

those scenes by themselves couldve been majorly improved by playing into what ive seen as the strength of tiger&bunny, with the way every hero has a distinct personality easy to play up for light-hearted moments without making it unnatural or forced?..

for example, they could be trying to talk of something serious when ryan, kotetsu and subaru get into a nonsensical argument because theyre all so loud and kotetsu and ryan actually get along well, so they couldve argued on purpose to ease the mood, while subaru got really serious about the argument because hes 17 and goofy?

barnaby, karina and thomas are all collectively sighing because of course their buddy partners are acting like this, and this goes on while keith is trying to get a word out on something actually valuable he thought of but hes too polite to interrupt the conversation, so nathan has to raise her voice and be like “boys can we please calm down keith wants to say something<3 you have 30 seconds before i get mad!″

and kotetsu, ryan and subaru are forced to apologetically sit on the floor or something, just to let keith convey an actually good point he came up just now while listening to them argue. expositional scenes dont have to be boring and lifeless?

of course its sweet to have them work together, but giving them light-hearted moments wouldnt have diminished that. theres just so much potential with the cast we have, and while they had a great foundation, the real potential was never really reached.

the way they neglect the strength of their ensemble cast repeats with who interacts with lunatic/yuri. and i know- kotetsu and barnaby are our main characters here, but sometimes i feel like hes in protagonist jail, because there are so many great interactions to pursue with him that could actually add something to the narrative!

nathan was kind of accidentally framed by him in s1, but we dont really get any follow-up on that. and for me, one of yuris greatest moments is in the manga when he saves keith (civilian) from dying while keith is trying to save the two criminals from dying himself, and keith is never none the wiser about it.

but thats more of a self-indulgence than a realistic critique, i imagine. however, from this i can get to talking about the heroes i didnt yet mention, because i can see so many ways to tie the supporting cast into the narrative and not just include scenes for “fanservice”.

the peripheral material has done this and more, why not include some of it in the show?

this is all mostly just a lot of musing on how underutilized everyone was, and how a lot of it felt disjointed and a bit wasteful of the time they had to convey the entire story.

ill start with keith: it was disappointing how he only smiled through the entire cour2, especially when you think about LL audun, who pretty much shares his “simple” worldview on heroism. we didnt even see him fight LL audun at all if my memory serves me right.

he didnt have any reaction to when the heroes get shelved, and keith arguably has pretty much no other life than being a hero, but he never has any sort of thoughts about the matter.

closest we get is firesky reminiscensing on the moments they had respectively gotten their hero suits, and keith remains one of the heroes whose backstory we know absolutely nothing about. i actually thought keith would drop some backstory lore there, but he didnt.

i feel that cour1 did a fantastic job on telling us what sort of guy he is in the episode nathan complains about him to kotetsu and barnaby: he is insecure despite all of his fame and how “perfect” he is without trying by nature, and he still he tries to act even more perfect to make sure other people would like him.

cour2 didnt really give us anything? i was genuinely expecting keith to break down at some point and that he was trying really hard to act unbothered to not make anyone else lose heart, especially after kotetsu remarked in cour1 that its keith and nathan who are really doing most of the advising around here and not himself and barnaby, the real senior buddy hero pair.

it wouldve not only given us a continuation of things from cour1 and given keith some sort of arc for the 2nd cour, but it couldve given us a character-driven moment used to show us why its kotetsu who is the protagonist even if we all know keith is such a picture-perfect hero.

ive always thought that kotetsu is more approachable than keith on purpose: hes a very normal person with normal concerns that are easy for many to relate to, and that is his charm and his strength, and he doesnt particularly stand out or excel, hes in the hero business purely out of his conviction and doing his best.

wild tiger isnt the most popular hero, but he has dedicated fans, okay! hes goofy and easy-going and meddlesome, and hes trying to make the world better, whereas keith could never be the protagonist in the same way kotetsu is because hes just too good, like how nathan found his projected perfection unnerving.

to let kotetsu participate in reassuring keith (since hes the protagonist and a busybody!) besides nathan as his buddy partner couldve served as a plot point to strengthen the idea that kotetsus various flaws are a part of what makes him great, and it couldve been used in tandem to again, interrogate the narrative about what heroism is, who can be a hero, and so on and so forth.

and with regards to my earlier thoughts about LL audun, keith represents the same type of ideal LL audun at least thinks himself to be, and the sort of ideal LL audun couldve embodied if they let me write t&b2, lol.

there couldve been some sort of plot-relevant parallel there that lets kotetsu actually figure out that LL audun is genuinely thinking hes doing the right thing and gregory was taking advantage of him- something to let kotetsu take the initiative in making LL audun question whether he actually is fighting against villains or not, because LL audun randomly questioning it himself was a bit too convenient.

it couldve been a time for kotetsu to shine with what he does best, trying to talk his brand of sense into the people hes fighting against, like how he always has a lot to say when hes facing off lunatic, or how in season1 his entire plan for making people remember who he is includes him showing up in his old hero suit and talking to them.

isnt that part of kotetsus charm as a protagonist?.. and LL audun wouldve been perfect for a discussion, because his personality wouldve lended itself to a very campy “two heroes having a dramatic discussion during a fight”.

i suppose i also personally dont need or want kotetsu be really good at fighting with the most powerful NEXT power, because thats not what makes him a fun protagonist. him goofing off and slipping on a banana peel on his way to an arrest makes him fun, and him talking the socks off of his opponents is just part of his way of being a hero.

kotetsu is into the whole “superhero flair”: heroes need to have secret identities, and heroes need to be a bit campy with thematic outfits and have dramatic discussions while they fight, and thats the spirit of tiger&bunny, isnt it? isnt that what were here for?

i at least never watched tiger&bunny for a yuri petrov suffering arc, when tiger&bunny has had an uplifting message throughout even if it tackles more adult issues due to the adult protagonists?

either way, to return to keith, i just feel like hes overdue for having that sort of very human moment to his character, because his nuance has largely been confined to manga and peripheral materials... it wouldve been nice to see him get a big moment on-screen.

even in cour1, the episode with firesky is largely shown to us from nathans perspective. having keith break down wouldve also been a great way to show how serious the shelving of heroes is and making the situation feel tense because keith especially is always so happy.

it couldve been a tipping point of sorts, where everyone starts to lose heart whether theyll manage to figure out the X rampage issue or not, because despite the boring seriousness of those scenes, i at least never felt a real sense of urgency or huge concern about them not being able to be heroes?

keith confessing that he is having a very hard time with the circumstances and making everyone visibly falter wouldve actually left an impact, and couldve let kotetsu shine as a protagonist by him trying to pick up the pieces.

it couldve also have bit of a callback to that scene where in the beginning movie hes called everyone together and claimed that the heroes and barnaby want to meet each other and everyone gets upset and leaves, one by one, but i guess it couldve been more that everyone leaves buddy pair by buddy pair since the season makes a big deal of pairing them up with them buddy pairs whenever possible.

it wouldve made me sad but not in an utterly desperate way because i know that the heroes will pull through and save the day, it wouldve been a good sort of sad.

this couldve also given nathan more of a spot to shine, because shes keiths buddy hero partner! she wouldve been there for him, but i also dont want to suggest any sort of reduction of nathan to a mammy stereotype-adjacent spot where her main function in the narrative is to take care of others, but more on nathan later.

the scene where nathan offers to hire keith as a secretary especially perplexed me and was left in the forefront of my mind. it was funny and cute, but thinking of keith losing his hero status and not immediately looking into civilian ways to help like finding volunteer organizations to sign himself up for them is so unbelievable to me, sorry...

and because i think cour2 shouldve used their episodes and screentime wisely, any such things with keith couldve been, again, tied to the bigger themes of heroism and such, right on the nose in fact! i dont think its far-fetched to have a moment of hopelessness by having keith break down and then reveal later on that hes signed himself up to ten different volunteer organizations when prompted by kotetsu.

one remark and everyone figures keith is so sad too, but hes still trying so hard to help?

keith is in many ways the best of them, and even if he was so crestfallen and suffering, hes juggling ten volunteer jobs at once even as people have complicated feelings about NEXTs due to the X riots and whatever. hes trying so hard to get people to like him and hes troubled by having NEXT powers and possibly putting people in danger if he lost control somehow (like, is he bad by showing up as keith goodman without admitting first thing he has NEXT powers, and also maybe without admitting hes sky high, as if it was a crime).

it was actually so odd how none of the heroes were ever really concerned about losing control?.. especially the heroes with powers that have the capacity to be really destructive?

and to return to keith, in my opinion he wouldve also suffered with the very human desire to be a hero again: its a huge part of his identity and it occupies almost all of his time! i think he would feel guilty that even if hes helping still in his own way by volunteering, he would specifically want to be reinstated as a hero.

it would feel selfish to him, that he has such a private desire. hes also extremely introspective and he canonically spends a lot of time thinking. he couldve delivered a very neat and conscise but very human monologue on the topic and it wouldve given the other heroes a great character-driven moment to share a bit more about how they feel about the situation?

to have our hero ensemble shelved from hero work and dedicate no scene for them to talk about how they feel about it specifically is such a waste, when it couldve showcased their personas and furthered the plotline by having them remember why theyre heroes in the first place and/or why they want to continue being heroes, etc...

what bothered me with firesky was that they also felt oddly separate from the rest of the cast at times during cour2 and the trailer made their role seem far bigger than it ended up being.

they had a bunch of nice scenes together that very funny and showcased their personalities, but i was very disappointing how those scenes kind of failed to tie into the main plotline so that they were just... there. even though theyve been a part of the main cast since the start:/

they didnt even get a major fighting scene with a big bad because LL audun knocked them out off-screen.

nathan suffers from many of the things keith suffered... she also didnt really have any significant role and well, it wasnt too bad i suppose, it was just oddly disjointed.

the heroes met up at helios energy, i think, but they couldve done so much more with nathans position as the CEO of helios energy.

it has always been a footnote in the show, even if the new manga shows us that nathan is aware of various changes in the hero system before anyone else by getting to participate in the discussions about those changes as her own boss! which is also weird ethically, but i guess its not taken so seriously.

it could have been easy to make nathan more prominent because of her CEO status. what if wed gotten to see the mayor talk to a wider board of people that included the owners of the hero companies etc and nathan was allowed to be there, hearing the talk about shelving heroes and being like wow! that certainly is a suggestion, but!..

this couldve also been used to emphasize that as his buddy partner nathan knows how important keiths job is to him? she couldve even alluded to how some heroes have really dedicated their entire lives to hero work and this is no joking matter!

instead of us getting scenes of the mayor and the assistant or somesuch, we couldve literally had a character there and given her a moment to shine while keeping it plot-relevant?.. she couldve given kotetsu and barnaby some insider knowledge on how to talk with the mayor, too?

i think her being a CEO and a hero is interesting because i dont think “CEO” is a very heroic civilian job, but i dont know if id want the series to ever delve into it overmuch because i dont know how it would be respectful to nathan who has suffered from being reduced to a homophobic/transmisogynistic stereotype before...

not like nathan is the only rich hero either, its just very different to gain income from only from hero work versus being a CEO. the peripheral material sometimes comments something about it like a gag strip making nathan say she wishes the heroes wouldnt go on a strike due to her being one of the shareholders.

what this does remind me of is that i dont think t&b2 really had any significant commentary on how money makes things go around? in s1, it felt kind of prominent. kotetsus old hero company literally went bankrupt and antonio suffers from his unpopularity driving down his sponsors profits.

its why the heroes have to also keep up appearances- its not enough to just be a hero, you have to work to be popular as well. in s1 kotetsu & barnaby cant go to a crime scene because theyre doing an interview and other popularity stuff so their hero alerts were cancelled for the duration.

we get the whole “ouroboros controls everything, actually!..” and a vague allusion to affecting The Economy, but thats it?

anyway, disregarding all of that, i feel like they couldve used nathans CEO status for something. what if she had put her career and status on the line to use her connections and money to reacquire the hero suits of those whose companies had really put them under lock and key...

i also think back to momentarily developing some sort of mega optimism brain rot and thinking that karina couldve had some sort of gay crush plotline with the girl who was trying to pretend shes rampaging and how incredibly sweet it wouldve if the noted LGBT icon of our lineup, nathan, gender-haver extraordinaire, had been able to support karina with that... like yeah ryan wouldve been there for her but... hes ryan. lol

overall, i thought the buddy pairs were fun, but man, i want to see the hero ensemble interact with everyone and not just one assigned "important” character per hero. it also made a lot of scenes a bit disjointed with how buddy pairs were a bit separated, in my opinion... it worked better when it was just kotetsu and barnaby, because theyre the main characters! of course theyll have more plotlines than the others.

one thing i already found a bit strange at the start of cour1 is that nathan didnt talk with antonio almost at all, and we know the new director is a huge antonio fan (which is actually funny to me, and you can see the antonio love shining through).

but.... in prior content nathan has also been regularly paired up with antonio, and i dont mean in a shipping sense (even if that has happened as well but it has only really been to make gags on nathan being creepy because of her poor portrayal before), just that theyve specifically been portrayed as friends before.

so it feels like nathan got sidelined purposefully while making antonio have that entire thing about agnes seep from mainly peripheral content into the main show... (i have a huge brain and am a gay antonio truther, btw.)

it left a bit of a bitter taste in my mouth that someone who has some say over the happenings in the show (?) and loves antonio hasnt acknowledged their friendship in any way... and nathans portrayal prior has been unfortunate, so it wouldve meant something to see nathan get to be friends with antonio with the gross sterotypes removed?

its not enough to say things have changed and you want to improve on nathans portrayal: i want to fucking see it!

while their dynamic is funny, the above has made me worry that nathan and keith were paired as a buddy pair because the writers didnt have anything better to do with them and keith is “naive enough” to hang out with nathan without them having to address anything about nathan properly, and cour2 really didnt ease my fear about it.

like one thing nathan has done explicitly in various material is to behave in a specifically “boy crazy” way which i as a lesbian dont really care about, but i think it wouldve meant something to let nathan act in that way without making it weirdly creepy and uncomfortable, and instead let nathan be a whole person of her own.

i am a serial friendzoner of everyone except characters who havent interacted in canon (lmfao) but the purposes of respectfully portraying nathan and proving that the horrible stereotuping is over, i think there couldve been real narrative worth in her being canonically romantically interested in keith and have that relationship develop, to show that nathan is so much more than those creepy stereotypical actions forced on her characterization before.

it wouldnt have to be keith in the case they didnt want to introduce any romance between the hero ensemble, but any romance plotline for nathan couldve been used to show they really did want to improve on nathans portrayal like nathan would deserve.

it couldve easily been used for a scene in which nathan properly brings up their identity because sure, its been discussed some more in peripheral material and the rising improves on what she was given before, but still retains multiple harmful elements... and it just makes me mad to imply youre going to improve on stuff like this and then not do anything with nathan.

as far as i know, her civilian outfit in the rising seems to be inspired by a japanese comedians gag character called “hard gay”, whose ensemble includes a leather bodysuit, and hard gay isnt exactly a respectful portrayal.

i also love to read tiger&bunny opinions online through google translate, from people who would understand nathans identity/possible tropes better than i do by the virtue of being LGBT+ and japanese.

one of the things ive seen raised is that nathans declaration of self-love in the rising is more compassionate than their prior portrayal, but that it unfortunately is somewhat of a trope in itself given the wording of it, which i think further explains how i think nathan wouldve deserved a bigger role?

theres also the recurring issue of misogyny, because nathan specifically says (dirctly copied from netflix translation): “they say a man is made of courage, and a woman is made of love. so what does that mean for people that are gay? we are invincible!”

men being courageous and women being loving is a cliche, which they included as a narrative choice and is not nathans fault... and t&b2 really didnt improve on the baked-in misogyny, which ive already talked about...

and ill be honest, i dont know how nathan romance shenanigans couldve tied into the main plotline lmfao, but they couldve called back to s1 and keith asking the girls for romantic advice, except now it wouldve been keith with the younger girls in tow trying to advise nathan, which wouldve been funny.

it wouldnt even had to have been a fuck you to people who like firesky romantically, because nathans plans couldve fallen through (by for example having the guy have been an antagonistic force in some way, perhaps interested in getting close to a hero after theyve been shelved just for the gossip, like an evil reporter, to make a point about media) and they couldve included a buddy hero scene afterwards where nathan remarks how keith would not do that.

because its true, keith would not do that, and it wouldve given people something fun to elaborate on?..

instead of remarkable improvements for nathans character besides the passive “no more creepy things”, we also get that scene at the end of the skyfire episode where subarus quip comes across as somehow homophobic to me, and i genuinely dont know what im supposed to feel about it. if youre wiser, then please enlighten me.

at this point i realized that talking about each character individually might kill me, because i have so many opinions, and maybe i should focus on buddy hero pairs a little better since thats how they were given to us in s2.

i also probably have more opinions on keith and nathan than the rest because keith is one of my favourite characters and i do really like nathan too, im just frequently haunted by the narratives past crimes against nathan and the currently occurring crimes as well, lol.

talking of subaru, his buddy partner thomas, and his sister ruby, why didnt they do something with thomas and the fact that nathan has been mentioned to have a little sister she cares a lot about? that couldve tied into the plotline?

i was very surprised ruby had no particular role and felt very separate from the rest of the narrative, and how nobody except subaru seemed to notice thomas wasnt present?

subaru begrudgingly (because hes 17 and wants to be independent) asking nathan or the firesky duo for advice because kotetsu saw he was acting weird and pulled him aside to talk about it and directed him to nathan on the subject matter couldve been a fun addition.

it couldve again showed that kotetsus strength is more than just some imaginary scenario where hes the smartest and strongest with all of the answers, because its not true. kotetsu couldve put himself down about it like oh bunny, i couldnt do anything, see! its those two giving advice again!

but barnaby wouldve correctly assessed that its only because of kotetsu subaru is doing this, and without kotetsu meddling, nathan or keith wouldnt have noticed to help subaru either.

mr. thomas overall had an alright arc. ruby was introduced, but much wasnt done with her. i sincerely thought she wouldve been adopted by ouroboros after everything that happened in cour1 and the mentions of orphans.

this drives me up the wall, because yet again, they had an obvious route to question heroism and villainy, and who is a victim of their circumstances and what acts exactly are evil.

kotetsu and barnaby wouldve had a lot of sympathy for ruby just because of their own backstories and personalities, and nobody else wouldve been unsympathetic either?

ruby is reduced to “little sister who loves and supports thomas”, and thats all: she barely has any real agency, even if it was her who sought thomas out. her personality is “gentle and understanding”. she continues the theme of being a woman in the show being reduced to narrative vessels to make the guys of the show do or feel something...

i also talked about them a bit earlier, so i dont have much else to say.

but one huge unresolved plot thread is their entire company? why did they even introduce the owner and manager of jungle when they werent relevant? and why did they seemingly sabotage subaru in cour1 by having his PDA not go off when heroes were called?

i thought it was significant? i thought jungle was sabotaging him?.. nothing came out of that?!

origami rock kinda won... they had a lot of good scenes. antonio was clearly beloved by the narrative. ive also spent two days writing this post so im kinda sick of writing it and this is one of the last parts im bothering to comment about so itll be kinda short, but...

like i mentioned earlier, alcoholism was kind of painted as something evil people do and antonios drinking problem was kind of bypassed entirely, when i feel like its a major thing for him? in the KOW the rising schedule, he really goes hard in on drowning his sadness and loneliness in alcohol.

it was also made into a joke moreso, with antonio and ivan apparently having gone drinking together?.. i feel like a more healthy direction for antonio wouldve been them focusing on things ivan wants to do... like, ivan went out drinking? seriously?

i guess that does feel like a major step for him in the sense that hes less shy and far less mortified by knowing he did silly thinks while drunk which is good for him to be less self-conscious... but its also like... i dont know, just weird me out that antonio would introduce ivan to that part of his life, which i felt was just his loneliness coping mechanism.

last but not least, kid cat... they really got the short end of the stick. they even lived in a dorm together and nothing ever really came out of that? it felt like a waste. i already talked about them a little bit.

paolin didnt really get a separate arc but she did really shine in cour1 at least, and maybe its just me but the whole situation around laras mom and kid cat being shoved into it soured their entire thing for me, especially the part of paolin comparing laras mom to her own mom, again... oof. that shit hurted.

i disliked that paolin was pushed into somehow vaguely motherly/caretaker-esque role with lara with her even looking up those damn parenting books and her fun energetic and somewhat goofy personality wasnt so well preserved. i wish a girl character was allowed to be goofy while still having serious and cool moments: they could do this with subaru but not paolin.

i already talked about karina earlier, but again, even if its actually incharacter and natural for karina to be be “the responsible one” in her dynamic with ryan which i do enjoy, i cant help but notice the narrative forcing all girl characters into that sort of role... i would include nathan (haver of gender) in this, because i feel like being goofy on the occasion is very central to her as well, but hmm.

its not even that i dislike karinas and nathans dynamic with their buddy hero partners, its just unfortunate that all girlies had to do similar things, because i cant ignore it... t&b2 really goofed with that.

it disappoints me personally that even if i dont understand how it wouldve made any sense wrt the narrative, i wish paolin had allowed to show her gender non-comformity somehow?.. i probably had my hopes up after hearing about them essentially saying they want to add a bit of representation into t&b2.

but i suppose that mainly meant ruby mentioning she has two dads and the girl with an ex-girlfriend.

all of the girlies got sidelined, which ive already talked about...

i feel like karina got the most major arc which does make sense because shes more of a main character than the rest, but it was also taken a little bit too seriously in my opinion, i wish the characters clearly treated it as karina being a teen who has a crush on some old guy because teens do that.

it was also kind of like a waste for me... i didnt need so many scenes about it personally. shouldve made karina do things for herself.

i have to admit that for a moment i genuinely thought that karina talking to that fake rampaging girl about her unrequited love for an ex-gf was going to awaken some feelings in karina, lmfao.

another thing about mr.legend i didnt manage to fit anywhere is that we still dont know his name? hes just mr.legend, even yuri doesnt say his name. it makes sense, but narratively, this ensures that mr.legend remains the stuff of myths. it feels like this is what they wanted, but it sucks!

to give him a name behind the hero gimmick wouldve brought him down from his status to that of a normal human. ive always been certain that petrov is yuris mothers maiden name as well, so dropping mr.legends name wouldnt have immediately implicated “yuri petrov” of anything.

nobody even knows he had a family! it feels like maverick scrubbed all of that clean, just in case.

as for mattia, i think his character has worth but is used wastefully: not only is he the one to develop the drug that drives much of the plotline, he gives us more insight to the worldbuilding of t&b and normal peoples opinions on NEXT powers. he doesnt hate the NEXT, but if he could choose, he would have NEXT powers himself.

this sets him apart from other similar characters like ben or saito, who are both normal people at the periphery of the heroes without NEXT powers who have been portrayed heroically in the past, since he explicitly wishes he could attain a sliver of the heroism he sees barnaby have, and he thinks he needs a NEXT power to be able to do so.

this couldve been, yet again, used to reinforce the theme that heroism is so much more than just having a powerful NEXT power. mattia couldve also been used more intelligently, and while connecting him to barnaby is nice to give him a new friend, some of his functions couldve been covered by kotetsu or some other members of the hero ensemble.

it couldve worked better if, for example, the hero ensemble had more strongly reacted to suspecting mattia to have ratted them out. i already said that i think ryan wouldve been more than annoyed about it, but the moment couldve been used to showcase various characters and their reactions to it!

i think the moment couldve been drawn out instead of being immediately resolved, maybe even included something about how mattia needs to prove himself to not to be a spy for ouroboros, not because i think its reasonable, but it couldve meant something to have our heroes be utterly wrong about someone!

i come back to this again and again, but it couldve been used as a point that the heroes arent necessarily right just because theyre heroes, and that mattia couldve worked with saito and proven himself to act more “heroically” (alongside saito!) than how the heroes treated him.

and, unfortunately, the narrative itself undermines mattia because of auroras existence.

she introduces a huge plot hole for me. mattia has worked hard to try to develop a NEXT drug, and has actually gotten results, its just that he hasnt gotten the specific result he wanted: why doesnt he just mail that drugs composition to aurora and have her complete it, since her unclear NEXT power seems to have no limits and gives her a vast intellect without even trying?

in fact, when theres any sort of problem, why dont we ask aurora about it? if shes so important, why havent we ever heard of her before? her inclusion didnt feel natural at all.

i really hated aurora, because her character felt so cheap and gimmicky in every possible way. sure, she was foreshadowed in cour1, but since she obviously didnt exist in s1, it felt incredibly stupid that there conveniently is one single person ouroboros has to assassinate to ruin all relations between people who have NEXT powers and those who dont...

her power makes no sense: if shes so fucking smart and has been Thinking of ways to better the world for literally decades, then why capitalism all over the world?

i do think its realistic to expect she cant force the world to become an utopia, but the way shes introduced and dealt with doesnt really give me a well-nuanced view of her. she looks to the side and saves some lizard species form extinction with an idea.

i think her character couldve been interesting if they had used the whole season to set her up and i guess made the themes of the season somehow align with her and “not being able to fix the world alone no matter how smart you are etc” and included her as the brain and LL audun as the brawns and how neither of them could ever fix the world alone according to their opinions, and only in their bonds can our heroes find the most of their strengths, including connections with other people like how kotetsu could chat with a child in s1 to ease him down from his rampage at the ice rink etc.

buuuut i feel like that couldve been the plotline for some other season altogether. now that we know LL audun, he could get him back later and see how hes doing, etc... in the case he was given more nuance or something and not just sent back to jail, i mean.

theres also the moment where aurora opened her eyes and i guess i was supposed to feel it was significant but i genuinely didnt care. like okay. yeah i noticed that. no i dont care that the day was saved and “she felt comfortable closing her eyes again”.

was that purposeful?.. the implication that shes closing her eyes from the world?.. and she only opened them when she realized she personally was in danger?..

that was so wild to me, i still dont know what the purpose behind that was, but that certainly was how the overall arc felt about yuri. eyes closed, who cares if some guy suffers for no reason.

rosicky was interesting to me, and it was a waste she got shot before she could have any sort of discussion?.. she just felt like a cheap trick to get yuris body fucked up. it couldve been an interesting moment overall, but, well...

not like were going to get anything about yuri reacting to how all of that went down? so it was just... weird.

and then rosicky died and gregory "won” their little squabble, and i wish gregory had fucking exploded because lunatics been making some points and i fucking hate him...

also just to return to the ouroboros ties of the season, they made ouroboros so all-powerful it was stupid and lost a lot of meaning to me. like alright, they can do anything, why are we even fighting, and why is rosicky alone in charge of this operation... makes no fucking sense, its such a forced situation.

the ending of cour2 was... well, it existed. i mean, i dont personally mind kotetsu retiring for good overmuch i suppose, but i think with everything that happened (especially in the way i think things should have happened) he couldve just continued as proof that even people without NEXT powers can be superheroes...

and also as a some sort of proof that it was mr.legends refusal to change any part of his hero image that really did him in: kotetsu could cling to his heroism while accepting hes just a guy without powers and not make it such an issue.

and i suppose if he retires, i wouldve loved to see him take some sort of director-like role instead: i dont think he would be able to let hero stuff go completely, but him being a senior you ask for advice would still give him a lot of things to do.

right now its also a bit of my fear, if they have any thoughts of continuing tiger&bunny in any way ever and yuri had to die so that kotetsu could take over the spot he ended up occupying as a director...:( genuinely makes me make a sad face in real life.

by the point we got to the end they had already fucked up the entire premise and any message they wouldve hoped to send and if they had some sort of uplifting message after yuris death, i failed to understand it. but it felt like a giant fuck you to the fans of the show called “tiger&bunny” to get that last bit of tiger&bunny pair disbanding because of reasons.

i mean, theyre not even remotely my favourite characters and i dont think about them overmuch, but leaving it more open-ended wouldve been so much more fun for so many fans? they really fucked up the shows undercurrent of interrogating who can be a hero and why in the first place, but like...

yeah that shit sucked ass sorry. i dont even have anything to add. people who showed up to see more kotetsu and barnaby content getting that half-hearted discussion about where theyre gonna go from here and then showing their plaque in the “true heroes” hall...

i feel like it undercuts kotetsus character so much, because hes always been the “underdog”, and hes pulled through everything that came before this. they explicitly mention that hes been working really hard to supplement his waning power, and then leave it at that: if i was supposed to understand from that part that kotetsu isnt really retiring or anything, it didnt really come across due to the other circumstances.

and again, i dont even really care about kotetsu! its just that he really exemplifies the tone of the show as a fact, and i like to think i have a modicum of media literacy. and by undermining the uplifting message of the show, they directly undermined him, and by undermining him, they further muddied the spirit of t&b.

i feel like an ending i wouldve killed for is one that couldve included that sort of tour of a museum, but it wouldve showed mr.legend paraphernalia being moved away from “true heroes” and also included our protags being inducted in there if they so wished, but leaving it more open ended... and definitely proving that mr.legend was not worthy of being thought of as a hero.

it was weird that the second league isnt brought up at all during the entire season from what i can remember? i dont even have anything significant to say about it, but i think second league heroes are and have been important, just by existing, to the narrative asking the viewer who really is a true hero and who insnt and what it all means.

they just didnt care, just like they didnt care about that question and yuri. again, they fully ignored anything they had set up before, and kept introducing new characters when old side characters couldve been brought back.

i have some thoughts on the police chief being a younger version of the police chief from double decker... im unsure if the implication is that double decker is more than a spiritual sequel and its not just cameo, or if its something more.

mattia did off-handedly mention that hes developing now trying to develop a drug that takes NEXT powers away if i read and understood it right, which would, i guess, make a canonical disappearance of NEXT powers possible.

i have actually never seen double decker myself, but i understand it references tiger&bunny while being separate and clearly “in the future” from it, and as far as i understand, it doesnt have people with superpowers.

i personally think that imagining double deckers world as a canonical sequel to the world of tiger&bunny sucks, but i dunno what the real implication there is.

i also want to talk about the art direction of t&b2 since im airing out my opinions and complaints, so why not: the art direction kinda sucks. everyone has been smoothed and thinned down and the essence of t&bs charming style has been lost in some ways.

you can really see the jump between older art and the newer art with ryan, for example... ill talk about ryan now because this is my post and i love this guy.

he is downright ugly in some parts of the rising, and i love calling him ugly, but in a serious way, yes, i think hes explicitly supposed to be handsome (because what else does he have going on for him even except being loud and looking good lol).

hes just a different kind of attractive than barnaby who is pretty, and theres various scenes in the rising where you can see that barnaby has more of a button nose while ryan has a sharp, short nose, unlike yuri for example, who just has a large nose overall (and its his charm point!).

ryans most notable quality is that his eyes are drawn to look hooded and deep-set with straight eyebrows that make his strong brow even more prominent, and he usually has a very distinct wrinkle across his forehead.

and what does he look like in t&b2? certainly nothing like that.

i know that the rising has a much larger budget for the designs than the episodic show, and either way they wouldve had to simplify ryans design to translate it into the episodic format. and we all know the goofy parts of season1 they fixed in the bluray release...

that never was a huge problem, and i wouldnt mind it. yes, i guess ryan couldve been changed for marketing, but he looked like that through-out the entire movie and was hugely popular regardless and BECAUSE of how he looks. but its not just ryan, its that the art direction changed drastically, and it made all the characters look so much more generic and samey.

just after the scene i screencapped above, you can see barnaby and ryan from further away with less detail for a scene that passes by quicker, and you can see that less care was used to make them look good but they still were kept distinctive and different. (and sorry to barnaby, i caught him in in the middle of a movement, so he looks extra goofy.)

t&b2 doesnt even have a lot of scenes that i can remember that really let the chracters emote and make goofy faces: kotetsu has always been hugely expressive! i want to see him make a funny face! kotetsu is also the main character, and part of his thing is being an Old Man (even if he isnt even that old for real, but thats beside the point).

he has wrinkles around his eyes in that shot even if its not hugely detailed, and in contrast i feel he was very smooth in t&b2. the art direction felt as aimless as the bullshit plotline, and equally as uncaring towards established characters!

everyone was drawn very samey. another example to me is the scene in cour1 where thomas inspects keiths pectorals is just sad, because hes been thinned down like everyone else. what was there to inspect? absolutely nothing.

this screencap from s1 has more to inspect than the scene where keith is supposed to be noticeably buff. by the way, this entire scene with the girlies and keith has more personality and goofiness than most of cour2.

and heres a screencap of keith from that episode, where his face shape and features are distinct.

ts been a decade and i know that anime production has gone through changes in this time and netflix-style mass drop of episodes may be harder on people in general, but comparing my s2 screencap below to the screencap above just makes me miss the old style because im scared to but s2 keith next to the one above... his eyebrows were so sadly thin and so were his face and body.

you know, lunatic doesnt even have a distinctly large nose, and his eyes arent even particularly sunken and he doesnt have many wrinkles around his eyes like i think is charming for him, because everyone is just smoothed down... and the above screencap isnt even a good example of it, but the charming thickening of lines at some parts is entirely missing in t&b2 from what i can remember? i feel like the linework used to be stronger and more interesting overall.

anyhow, yes, t&b was also fixed up for the bluray release but i feel like the atrocious-looking parts are kind of funny to look back on. i wonder if theyll be editing s2 visually? (and please revise the entire storyline for yuri too, thanks.)

speaking of s1, where did this entire sentiment disappear to? into the ether?

also, i cant help but be plagued by thoughts because the episode i got those keith screencaps from, kotetsu & barnaby are interviewed by kids who are taking the reporting very seriously, and their reaction to kotetsu saying the person he looks up to is mr.legend is lukewarm at best.

then barnaby talks of his parents and robotics, and they light up, which is funny because barnaby is way more popular, but it also narratively, in my opinion, shows that especially the new generation of sternbild thinks mr.legend isnt that impressive and would be more willing to accept that despite the myths around him, he was a man who severely sucked.

theyre ready for new heroes to commemorate, ones that really deserve it, and they (even in cour1!) dont see lunatic as a villain but an antihero who protects them.

oh well.

thanks for reading, even if you didnt read all of it and just read interesting parts or skimmed through it! i guess writing this was like free therapy for me because i need to deal with how deeply yuris cour2 canon arc affected me lmfao.

i dont think ive ever been so blindsided and taken aback by the total surprise i felt at the direction his arc took and that definitely factored into how deeply it fucked me up because if i couldve anticipated that yuri could for example die, i wouldve been a lot more normal about it.

but out of all things, i cant believe that tiger&bunny would do that to me, and make me see all of that pain... genuinely fucked up not going to lie. fugan and mugan and their father being shot to death is one thing because its shocking of course, but yuri has been in the show since the start.

yuri has existed in the minds of people for over a decade, now, so it feels so unexpected they would so callously kill him off, it feels entirely uncharacteristic, and i feel like its not something that anyone couldve expected, and maybe it wouldve been less shocking if season2 had come out like, say, an another year after the rising...

but still, i dont understand how we make the jump from yuris portrayal and the overall themes of the rising into t&b2 and his role in cour2. its wild, i dont know how to get over it.

breathing through gritted teeth how i published a few fanfics with yuri in a huge hurry before cour2 dropped because i wanted to have them started in case some major yuri details drop and ill feel compelled the rewrite the yuri parts of them but huh... well.... cry laugh

i love imagining scenarios with my favourite characters, but i tend to include yuri in the core ensemble cast of heroes: trying to imagine any post-canon shenanigans feels so hard right now like watching a VHS reel that ran to the end and has to be rewound, and actually makes me incredibly sad.

theres that new audiodrama coming out with ryan featured in it and i cant even be excited because i just get sick, like physically... i guess imagining myself casually engaging with tiger&bunny content makes me feel like im spitting on yuris nonexistent grave. woe is me. fuck you tiger&bunny2 cour2. TL;DR - my opinions, this entire post condensed somehow:

the whole arc for yuri felt like a giant fuck you not only to him and all of the fans too, and same with the ending kinda

ryan was brought back for a fun cameo only because he never became plot-relevant really so what was the point lol? screentime waste

plot points set up in cour1 and further before were ignored and scenes were specifically used to counteract them?!

big misogyny moment for all woman characters of the show

hero ensemble overall was underutilized

new characters/excessive focus on side characters like the fucking mayor and the police chief in cour2 felt gimmicky and unnecessary and generally didnt add much worth. i dont care show me my funny heroes instead

they tried to do too many things and lost sight of why t&b has been so great and why the idea of a more self-conscious t&b is so exciting: of course the show has had a lot of flaws, like nathans initial portrayal, and to imagine a show that has the same spirit but improves on those flaws is amazing. its just not even remotely what we got</3

never expected a flawless show but there are flaws that you can headcanon away and there are flaws that undermine the entire theme of the show this far. i dont know how to make s2 any better after seeing cour2 without totally ignoring any of it happened

cour1 wasnt even bad. it was solid. shit just hit the fan in cour2

the art direction was a huge downgrade, but maybe it was just budget constraints, so i dont know how harsh i want to be about it.

leave a comment if you want, lo, i love to talk, its relaxing. i also mightve mixed shit up so dont embarrass me too much if you notice any overt mixups since i really did marathon the cour once and i dont know how i can bear to look at it again. i also have some confusion over some parts of the story which i detailed above in my manifesto so if you wanna educate me, please do, lmfao...peace out...

[dimitrscu]

I feel like Malenia is proof the fandom at large isn't as progressive as it thinks. I say this because every time I see or get into a discussion about how the fandom treats her, without fail someone will say, "But people like X female character. It's not sexism." And I'm like, "I'm describing the disproportionate rage towards Malenia, visible double standards, bewildering character assassination. And you're here giving me the 'I have a black friend' defense for fictional characters? Fucking A."

They always tend to use Maria in that argument like come on now, just because one character doesn’t get that treatment doesn’t mean it isn’t happening to another. People who straight up deny this shit goes on when there are some, like fan artists, who have had to deal with these toxic fans, and have even spoken out about it only to get shut down and told that they're making it up lmao people were so fucking annoying about it I swear. There are artists on twitter who have even said they just don’t like to draw Malenia because they don’t want to deal with the shitty fans. And then things only got worse when LMSH became a thing because then all the rape comments and gross porn was everywhere. Legit can't look at that guy the same way after seeing all the vile shit people say about him and her. It’s not the guys fault of course, he seems pretty chill. But some fans thought they’d use him as an excuse to vent their hate towards Malenia. There’s this weird group of fans who like to think their hatred for her isn’t fuelled by misogyny because they’ll say things like “Nah, I just hate her because she nuked Caelid and hurt my boy Chadahn.” And I’m like okay I would believe that if it weren’t for the fact you like to make/like/comment on content of her getting assaulted. Some people say they hate her yet are obsessed with porn of her. Specifically rape porn. Kind of makes me think that part of your problem is in fact her gender. They could be normal about it and just hate her for what she did, but no it has to be about “putting that woman in her place” all the time.

But the sheer level of hate she gets for the most ridiculous things is honestly just insane. There ought to be a character study on these fans because I get that Malenia is a difficult boss for a lot of players, but holy shit the reaction to her was so over the top. And the fact they still can’t shut up about it too. She unfortunately got it from both angles because people either rant about her boss fight, or go on about the lore and her fight with Radahn. Or both. Girlie stood no chance when you think about it. People who use the excuse that her boss fight is hard and therefore the hate is justified. Yeah like I said, I would believe that more so if all the hate wasn’t centred around wanting to physically assault her and "put her in her place". Souls games have always had hard bosses and I’m sure the next game they make will have something harder than she is, but I can’t honestly say I’ve ever seen people act like this about Nameless King or Gael or Isshin or Orphan before. I mean I wonder why, right? It’s just kind of exhausting at this point and I don’t doubt it will all come back once the DLC drops. This is actually why I’d be quite happy if we don’t see her again in any way. The odd reference in an item description or something would be fine but please don’t bring her back just for us to fight again, I can’t be dealing with all this a second time around.

[futuregws]

Major L to that person on twitter who said hellch**r and m*leven are the most hated ships in this fandom because of misogyny and that we wouldn't ship byler or steddie if they weren't two "white boys". Then most people responded something like "all these ships are white", "you added "white" because "two boys" would come across homophobic", "straight people want to be oppressed so bad". Funniest thing to happen in a long time. Really shows how unhinged and homophobic some of them are, but how hellch**r shippers are just a loud minority.

Also so tired of non mlm saying most m/m shippers are just f*joshis as if a lot of us aren't queer, many are queer men. (And I'm also sceptical of people who say this because I've seen too many t*rfs refer to gay trans men when talking about f*joshis.)

I'm so tired of this stupid people, literally the only reason they ship ed*ssy is bc she's white and fits societies beauty standards, they have to be very ignorant to have the nerve to say that the only reason people ship Eddie and Steve + Mike and Will, is bc they are white, it truly shows some internalized homophobia if not just straight up homophobia, I love the comments calling them out bc at least gives me hope that not everyone lacks this many brain cells. The only reason why they are hating on this mlm couples is bc it threatens their ship and its gross the actions that they are having it shows a lot how this people are, and the misogyny thing I'm not even gonna comment much on that bc people nowadays will throw that word around way too much, just bc someone doesn't like a celebrity/character that is a women doesn't mean that person is misogynistic at the end of the day we are still people with opinions and different tastes and stuff that we dislike or like, it's okay to not like something about a women it doesn't make anyone misogynistic it's called being an individual with their own thoughts and feelings and opinions, now what does make something misogynistic is the words used when describing those women but not liking them doesn't mean ANYTHING

[stardustedknuckles]

The beauyasha fandom in its heyday was a wonderful place to be and I'm forever grateful I got to be part of the phenomenon in a real way but my god I do not miss the routine of unfollowing a new round of wlw every time Caleb said more than twenty words in a row.

Like folks were straight up like "we don't dislike him because he's autistic, it's that-" and they proceed to list off a list of autistic traits. Of which he had many, largely why so many identified with him. And when folks pointed that out they got hostile about how neurodivergence doesn't mean they have to like him and those of us who weren't crypto radfems were like. Nobody said you had to like him. They're seven flavors of dickhead, you're bound to not mesh with one. But you keep describing his traits using words like white male and male privilege and misogyny and lesbophobia and I really don't think the problem you have is the one you think you have. Do you hear yourself.

Every fucking time.

My favorite thing (extremely derogatory) about it was like so many of them were ostensibly Beau stans? Like most of them would fistfight about how well they apparently knew and related to Beau and I'm sitting over here going "Beau would fucking take your kneecaps for implying she can't check him herself when necessary AND for talking shit about Caleb. In that order of priority." especially that one time everyone insisted Travis/Fjord had stepped in to make him stop because Beau/marisha needed that for some reason. The slashes are because people lost the ability to separate character from player and it was bowlgate all over again. (I don't want anons asking about that so just in case, that refers to the fight they had about the bowl and calianna way early in the series. Like in the teens/20s. I wasn't back on Tumblr or in the fandom until episode 110 and I was still hearing about it. It was bad.)

They're all assholes. Beau isn't magically a better, more permissible asshole because she's a girl. She's the asshole I'm attracted to, but that is not at all an observation that imparts objectivity and Caleb was never ever an edgelord kylo ren character like I kept seeing. He was critical to Beau becoming who she was. She loved him and he loved her.

There's a reason I follow like 10 critical role blogs at this point and like 8 of them are artists and not commentators. Absolutely abysmal how much of being a fan of a wlw ship permitted and encouraged the ideology of terves even among people who overall meant well.

I miss a lot about the b/y heyday but not that. Not even a little.

[manstrans]

the transandrophobia/transmisandry argument is so fucking exhausting because like you don’t really see this in other communities, at least not rn anyway. for example, and as a tmoc the first issue that pops up is obviously on the topic of racism, as a nonblack Latine i would never tell a nonlatine Black person that calling specific antiblack racism antiblackness is wrong or that they’re anti-Latine for it, and likewise a Black person would never say that calling out anti-Latine racism specifically is being antiblack. we both recognise the need to fucking call a spade a spade. it’s important to have the overarching umbrella of “racism” to describe general racism and xenophobia to describe xenophobia, but that doesn’t mean that words like antiblackness, anti-Latine hate, anti-Asian hate, or anti-Indigenous hatred/genocide/erasure are therefore unnecessary. that’s not how it works. but maybe this kind of thing is less common in communities of color because we have more overlap (for example, you can be AfroLatino, but you can’t really be a trans man and a trans woman in the sense of having the lived experiences of BOTH a binary trans man and a binary trans woman, and while bigender trans people who consider both their manhood and their womanhood to be trans do exist, it’s not the same as having your lived experience mesh both worlds together in the same way as being a mixed poc)

so maybe for a closer example, like, yes this was a prominent belief previously on queer tumblr, but now if someone says biphobia is “misplaced homophobia” or something in the year of our lord 2022, i would simply have to laugh because biphobia involves very specific things that aren’t directed at gay men and lesbians (the idea that we’re all cheaters/sluts, that we can’t pick a side or are confused gay/straight people, bi erasure, etc) as well as things that stem from general homophobia… or for example, if someone refused to acknowledge the fact that while homophobia specific to gay men and lesbophobia are related, they do have specific differences in the way they manifest (for example, lesbians having a higher risk of SA from cishets and corrective SA in particular, and being fetishised, while gay men are fetishised it’s in a different way and less mainstream because the cishet male gaze doesn’t allow for it, and gay men have a higher risk of hate crimes resulting in injury or death and not involving SA). and it’s the same with transmisogyny and transmisandry, they both stem from transphobia and misogyny (because newsflash, all transphobia was misogyny the whole time, asshole!), and they have a lot of similarities, but the way that transphobia manifests is different depending on the perceived sex of the victim. recognising the differences is important, and i see a lot of arguments against the use of the term(s) transmisandry or transandrophobia where people (and notably, this is mostly cis people who have no fucking stake in this at all) claim that trans men are saying transmisogyny doesn’t exist or the word is not important, which is far from what any of us have been saying—we’ve been saying that we ALL need language to talk about our specific issues without it being derailed to talk about how transphobia affects other trans people. we just won’t stand to let our issues be silenced or dismissed, because they frequently are and have been since people started even acknowledging trans people exist at all. i’ve met many, MANY people who don’t even know that trans men exist, much less any trans person who isn’t a binary woman or man. now that i pass, when i tell people im trans, if i don’t SPECIFICALLY say something about, like, idk casually mentioning my menstrual cycle or something specific to being transmasculine, ive noticed if i just say to someone “i’m trans” and they know my masculine legally changed name, they ask me what my name is because they assume i must be transfeminine, and the idea that i could be transmasculine doesn’t cross their mind for a damn second.

my point ran away from me a bit here but the point is, you should never, EVER try to take away the language a marginalised group uses to talk about their oppression, even if you’re also marginalised, but especially if you have privilege over them (ie the cis people who are involved in this argument, who, again, greatly outweigh the trans people opposing this language both in number and especially in social privilege, which honestly i think they’re intentionally leveraging both against us to tear the trans community apart because if we can’t stand together we WILL buckle under the weight of cis supremacy). and ESPECIALLY groups that are erased and shoved to the side in discussions of oppression, like bisexuals, intersex people, asexuals/aspecs and aromantics/arospecs, and of course also trans men in particular and transfeminine nonbinary/genderqueer people in particular. honestly noticing the similarities between the treatment of trans men and more visibly ‘masculine’ nonbinary/genderqueer people (including those who are transfeminine or transneutral with masculine secondary sex characteristics) is something that i think could help a lot to bridge the gap, because both trans men/transmascs who aren’t men but can pass as men at least partially, and transfeminine/transneutral nonbinary/gq people who can’t or don’t want to pass as women, are highly erased and silenced in the trans community and the queer community in general, from all sides. but idk. it just feels like we are starting here by asking for help and receiving so much rage and accusations of bigotry simply for asking to be recognised that i honestly worry about if this damage is already beyond repair :(

Thank you for sharing!!!

Yeah there's a lot of problems that some people intentionally exacerbate, but I don't think it's beyond repair even if it can seem like that sometimes

There's a lot of trans people of every demographic who support us! It can just get drowned out sometimes

I think it's important to seek them out so it's easier to form that solidarity

[gojuo]

Now I'm about to say an opinion that you might not agree with ( or you might do) anyway hotd was a mistake . Blackcels claim (the show made the greens much more sympathetic than they were in the book) but this is only true for alicent and aemond and rather than them being sympathetic it's more that they're a lot less villainous and alot dumber aemond literally can't control vhaegar , alicent didn't know they were plotting to make aegon king. But beyond that, the adaptation choices of the screenwriters are so strange. If you wanted to have sympathetic and likeable (or whatever that means) characters among the greens, it's much easier to acheive that with aegon, heleana and daeron whose terrible traits mostly come into action after the start of the war. Have the first be a lazy hedonist nonetheless quite innofensive and disinterested in power (similar to how tyrion appeared in got first season/first book or maybe theon) the second a joyful princess who is popular with the smallfolk thanks to her kindness (similar to sansa or margaery) and the third a dutiful nice boy with chivalric ideals (similar to jon or rob). Here you have your sympathetic greens without having to alter the story at all. It would have made the three's eventual downfall into cruelty or madness during the dance much more poignant if they used to be likable too. Instead aegon is a loathsome sadistic who enjoys watching his bastards kill each others and a serial rapist, helaena a weirdo who barely has any lines and has zero social skills and daeron was scrapped from this season and never gets mentioned at all. while criston who was the most grey character in F&B during the civil war, whose also has ambiguous motivations , and was Jamie's idol as we have seen in AFFC has become this incel jerk who got angry at Rhaenyra because she doesn't want to abandon her privileges to eat oranges with him because Americans showrunners are this creative you know.

And aemond of course the bloodthirsty psychopath who was described as fierce from birth and called his half sister a whore after learning of their father's death, whose also a true genocidal that put the likes of Ramsay into shame has been turned into a poor meow meow who didn't mean it. As for rhaenyra, her whole personality was revamped, her bad actions erased and she was given a righteous purpose *vomiting* in the form of a prophecy to make her daenerys reborn again. it is very convenient for the screenwriters that they can justify any change or stupid adaptational choice with "the book is green propaganda" or "the book is an untrustworthy historical account". Then why even adapt it if everything written is either false and made up or propaganda ? Say you want to make your own fanfiction instead of lying and saying that the show is the true version of the events. (Bitches want us to believe that Rhaenys made a girlboss entrance but the maesters never write that because of misogyny uknow)

In the end, I have to admit it's petty of me, I cannot enjoy this adaptation when the characters I disliked the most during my readings are glorified and the few I liked or find interesting at the very least are not exploited at all or given the worst interpretations

My only joy is that Daemon hasn't been whitewashed so that's a small win for me I guess?

I agree to a certain degree with all of your points. I think the biggest reason why this show fails is that it wanted to start the season with the GC 101 and end the season with the Black Council, all in just ten episodes... That was a godawful decision because the writers do have SOME (not all) good ideas but the execution of those ideas is straight up garbage because we only have 10 episodes which is just too little time. This is the biggest problem with HOTD and it annoys me to no end. The character relationships are so beyond shallow all because we’ve had so little time with them before the war starts. They are hardcarried by the fans’ interpretations of said characters & relationships and not by the writers’ actual writing. The season should have ended with Aemond's eye getting slashed out because that was THE moment of sides being drawn and the first moment of betrayal in the cold war being waged between Alicent and Rhaenyra, but noooooo of course we couldn't have had the Greens being wronged being the cliffhanger of the first season bc they're not allowed to be the victims 🙄🙄🙄🙄

[qweerhet]

"Suddenly having a body type that is subject to violence" oh you mean like every woman's body type pretty much no matter what? A lot of y'all act like being a guy is somehow harder than being a woman and tbh should shut the fuck up because it's not

yeah so "reproductive control" is a different kind of violence and is experienced differently socially/interpersonally than "fatphobia and queerphobia and ableism and All This Other Shit" and You Know This, you're just being disingenuous. experiencing reproductive control is just like, straight up different interpersonally than this intersection.

misogyny in general, and transmisogyny in particular, are already pretty intertwined with the intersection i'm describing--if you're a woman who's oppressed for being fat and hairy and varsex, you should damn well know that these are axes of oppression that would be shocking as hell to suddenly start experiencing after a lifetime of not.

people who have been conventionally attractive, skinny, and "nonthreatening" their entire lives experience culture shock when suddenly, for the first time, becoming fat and experiencing something that i don't quite have a grasp on the words for the underlying oppression of, but the idea that "hairy fat people, particularly ones with deep voices and facial hair, are uniquely dangerous and predatory, and should be socially mocked and attacked preemptively."

like yeah, i am definitely saying that if you've been (read as) a skinny conventionally attractive woman your whole life then you haven't experienced that violence. this isn't fucking rocket science.

transmascs who were already fat and hairy and balding and varsex prior to transitioning usually don't experience this culture shock, and women who are any of these things already experience this social violence, so again--not rocket science. no idea what point you think you're making.

p.s. binary+cisnormative language and referring to the entire trans community as "y'all," and as if we are some amorphous entity with singular interests and rhetoric, makes me think you're a radfem.

[mirqmarq428]

Mir reviews:

Anchorman: the legend of Ron Burgundy

This is one of those movies that your dad shows you when you're 15 and he remembers it as good manly fun but you feel icky sitting thru it and feel bad for laughing at its jokes, then mostly forget about the bad parts when 5 years later you notice that it's free with your cracked youtube app. Just me? No. According to youtube, it's somehow rated PG-13. Different times, man.

Tl;dr: this one is worse than you remember. 4/10

le Plot:

Will Ferrell plays the titular protag-kun, a popular local news anchorman. His news team is a deeply closeted gay cowboy, this mostly reasonable cologne fanatic, and an autist whose IQ is canonically 43.

The actual protagonist of the film is burgundy's "love" "interest" whose name I forgot already since her name isn't on the poster. Her dream is to anchor on national news, and she will have to stand up to institutional sexism, personal misogyny, and casual sexual harassment at every turn.

She is hired on, the boys all make moves on her, she fights them back brilliantly. Ron doesn't just want her body, he "loves" her (meaning, he wants sex but would like to be all romantic about it). Through a fair amount of bullshittery mixed with some genuine chemistry, they hit it off and make out. This is shown thru a short interpretive montage of them riding white unicorns thru heaven over rainbow pathways.

Despite promising to keep their relationship private at work, our "hero" immediately brags to the guys and tries to explain how it feels to be in love.

One day disaster strikes as burgundy is late to work due to being a oblivious pretentious asshole (he throws a burrito out his window while driving and makes the motorcyclist next to him crash, then the biker throws his dog off a bridge as punishment). Despite the men's reservations, our hero fills in for her boyfriend and delivers the news. She's great and everybody loves her. Then Ron barges in and is horrified that a _woman_ (gasp) would take his job. They shout about their misunderstandings for a while.

Despite continuing to work together, their relationship worsens further. Eventually they physically fight, and he is fired and sinks into an alcoholic depression.

End of the movie. Time to shake things up. A panda at the zoo is giving birth, this is the biggest thing to ever happen and must be reported upon. She goes looking for the perfect angle, but a random evil reporter dude knocks her into the pen of Kodiak Bears. They can't find her so end up calling Ron. He glows up quick, gets the band back together, marches down to the zoo, find the girl in with the barely-sleeping bears, and jumps in like a dumbass. His dog returns from presumed watery demise and talks the bear down (dogs and bears share a language in this world ig). They get lifted out and he lets her report on the panda birth. The. Fucking. End. Carry on Wayward Son plays over way-too-short credits (there are lots of cameos I think weird als in this one but I can't find his name on well).

le Review:

4/10 do straight men really?

I liked: her arc. 43 IQ bro was a good guy. The vibe is mostly goofy and whimsical.

The male gaze here is overpoweringly putrid. Burgundy isn't the worst, but he's still pretty bad. There's a point early on when she points out to him that he has a very visible erection in the middle of the office and he hasn't even the sense to be embarrassed.

I guess his arc is accepting that women can be equals in the workplace even if they're sex objects.

I guess her arc is accepting that she can be in love with him _and_ achieve her dream.

"toxic masculinity" is not strong enough to describe this filum. This is Nuclear Masculinity, the all-poisoning radioactive cumstain of Gilgamesh himself (but even less gay somehow).

The ending is reductively egalitarian, to the point of advocating pure tokenism. Yeah this one woman is really good at her job so let's make her a public figure to feel better about ourselves. We care.

Ugh.

[queersturbate]

man I just found out this feature exists wtffff anyways hiya! I came from ur light edit on tiktok and u commented that if u wanted ppl to ask questions to ask them on ur tumblr so here I am

I don’t really have a specific question might I say? Just that why do think light is gay? I’m not disagreeing I just want to know? Low-key believe that I’ll start agreeing myself haha

Sorry if this is stupid light is just one of my all time characters and I wouldn’t miss a chance to hear more information about him/how ppl see him

Have a nice day/night wherever u are !

hey!

i mean besides the fact that I'm gay and when i look at his behavior, attitude and mentality and have a gay recognizes gay moment, i have a few pieces of evidence that suggests he's gay-coded purely by accident since the creators of death note are homophobic lmao. they are so homophobic and so against Light being gay that every piece of evidence they try to put out to make him more straight, ends up making him gayer.

anyway to start off with the obvious and most like "LOOK" evidence, in death note how to read 13, there's a little note on one of the pages that says something along the lines of "Light cannot fall in love with women" and it specifically said women, not anyone or people in general. im too lazy to get my copy and take a picture

but anyway the way Light views women is yes misogynistic but a lot of gay men have this deep rooted misogyny ingrained in them because they have no attraction to them, they can't relate to them in a way that straight men and straight women who are romantically interested in each other relate to each other. and because society tells gay men that they should be attracted to women and be interested in them in a way that gay men just can't, especially ones with internalized homophobia, like Light, these men create a very misogynistic mindset because they start looking down on women with the thought of "i am not attracted to you like i should be, therefore you are below me"

listen to me CAREFULLY right now, i am NOT saying that every gay man is misogynistic. i am not excusing misogyny for the sake of gayness. i am not saying gay men deserve excuses for being misogynistic. I am not excusing misogyny. read that again, if you think i am trying to justify misogyny. I am Not. i am simply pointing out how internalized homophobia can lead to misogyny, and we all KNOW Light has misogynistic behavior. he looks down onto Misa, Takada, Naomi, etc. He looks down onto Misa the most because she is a very beautiful, hot model that everyone adores but who adores Him the most. But because he is not attracted to her like she is him, he sees her as far less and insufferable, especially when expressing her love for him, because he doesn't understand why he is not attracted to this super hot model of a woman who is in love with him. (Light looks down on everyone, yes, he has narcissistic personality disorder and believes he is superior to everyone, but with women it's a lot more on how i described it.)

Anyway, it's clear that Light is not attracted to women and has no desire to be with them, right? it's clearly said in the death note how to read. let me explain how he is attracted to men. SO Light, the creators, the voice actors, etc have all said that Light has never felt understood, he is too up on his own self made pedestal and he cannot relate or find himself in other people. He feels alone, not to make Light a Joker kinnie which he definitely is, but Light feels like no one understands him or sees him. Light can roll a lie off his tongue with no hesitation and get away with it. No one will see past it. Light is a hardworking honor student who is considered to be one of Japan's best and brightest, yeah? but like he's not and that's only what people see.

Not to bring lawlight into the topic of Light being gay but of course i have to because before L, Light probably wouldn't have even considered liking or enjoying a woman's, for reasons above, or a man's, for internalized homophobia and impossible standards reasons, company. L was and is the only other man who saw Light for who he is, and not only wanted to look deeper and didnt want to look away but basically said "yeah me too" at all of it. there's multiple instances of L basically going "Kira is a fucked up human with fucked up morals and he is dark and evil and so am i" but Light is Kira and they both knew that. every time L would say something like that and look directly and Light and go "Light, one of the best and brightest in Japan, I think you are those things." and Light felt seen and recognized and angry because why the hell is he doing that and relating to him and he's not supposed to be looked at this way. L is not supposed to see him.

im leaving this a but unfinished, that's my bad on my part, but you can always ask me to finish my thoughts because they're a bit of a jumbled mess in this answer, but also I have a lot of posts discussing Light's sexuality and the significance of the rain scene, the foot massage scene, L's death and how it deeply affected Light. but again you can always send me another ask i love talking about Light being a homo

[olderthannetfic]

Speaking of fetishization and all that jazz, recently the term fujoshi came up in real life for me and a friend asked me what it meant. For transparency I’m only 25, didn’t really fall into fandom until covid. Essentially I said it was a japanese term sometimes used in fandom so it depends who you ask. It could be 

Rotten women: this is the most technical translation and I’m pretty sure the actual word is a pun about rotten eggs or something. It means rotten as in spoiled, as in “spoiled for marriage” 

A derogatory term for women who are ruined for marriage because they like gay porn 

Women who likes gays porn 

Women who like BL/boy love. The male equivalent is fudanshi. BL is gay mlm romance genre for manga. GL is for girl love, but I think GL is less popular of a genre/not really a thing. I’m pretty sure the porn equivalent is yaoi for gay porn and yuri for lesbian porn(still talking about manga/anime) but I could be wrong. BL and yaoi might mean the same thing I’m not sure. The important part here is fujoshi is for women who like BL and fudanshi is for men who like BL. This is the most correct term unless someone is trying to use it as an insult. I’m pretty sure this is what comes up when you google it. 

Straight women who fetishizes gay men

Transphobic term for a trans man that actually just a “straight women who fetishes gay men” 

(me still talking to my friend) 

Now if you’re wondering why all this exists we need to go back to the early 2000s and I’m pretty sure 4chan. If I’m right, fujoshi already meant rotten women and was used to describe a woman who was ruined for marriage, but around this time it started being used specifically against women for liking gay porn/ BL manga. An intersection of misogyny and homophobia where women aren’t just ruined by jacking off, but even more ruined if they jack off to gay porn. Oh no the horror! How will women ever marry straight men if she masturbated to gay men? She is now ruined for straight men. I find this whole thing absurd, but honestly I forget that people “aren’t supposed to even masturbate” before marriage. Got to keep yourself completely pure I guess. Like I understand the concept of not having sex before marriage(even if I really don’t agree) because I grew up hearing that but the idea that you shouldn’t even masturbate or you’ll be ruined is so stupid to me it makes my brain short circuit. And of course it's misogynistic as all hell. At this time it's a Japanese term used in Japan against Japanese women and it's later reclaimed by Japanese women. Reclaimed as in “wait you guys can have porn and be horny but we can’t!? Well fuck you then I am rotten woman and you can go fuck yourself” At least thats what I think they mean when they say its a “reclaimed word” All I know is that its a misogynist term used against japanese women then reclaimed by said women. This is when “it just means women who like BL definition starts” 

Short time later it slowly but surely gets used in western fandom by people(mostly women) who ship mlm and by women who like BL and in the latter case it literally means that. This is when “it means a woman who fetishes gay men '' crops up Now I wasn't around at this time and there's a lot of mud throwing and shit when people talk about early tumblr and shipping culture. From what I can tell lots of time it was just used as an insult against people who shipped gay stuff, but there were women who would act gross towards gay men. My opinion is that is kinda like lesbian porn. I don’t give shit if someone like lesbian porn. I give a shit if someone is gross to me personally, like a guy wanting to watch me giss my friend, but its non of my business what kinda porn someone likes. What a weird thing to give a fuck about. And shipping isn’t even always porn! Lots of times its just porn, but lots of times its just about the most interesting relationship on screen which normally isn’t the romantic one. I have a whole theory that the most popular ships being between friendships not romantic leads is because romantic story lines aren’t great. Take zuko and katara vs aang and katara. Zuko and katara have a whole arc where they learn to trust each other and we see their relationship grow and change, but with aang and katara we mostly only watch them crushing on each other which is just not as interesting. 

I said more about how the term gets pretty transphobic and how fetishization is a good criticism lots of times but i’m pretty sure I’m out of words lol 

--

腐女子 is a pun on 婦女子. They're both 'fujoshi'. The 'fu' character means 'rotten' or 'fermented' as in tofu: 豆腐.

English-speaking antis are just morons about language along with everything else and completely misrepresent this word.

Yeah, it was 2chan crying that girls liked something other than them and then women being like "Joke's on you: I'm proud of that".

(In general, insecure douchebags dislike their partners masturbating because they foolishly assume that if a partner has zero experience, they won't be measuring the douchebag against anything. In reality, you can tell if sex was bad without anything to compare it to.)

BL is a genre term for m/m stuff aimed at an assumed female audience. It tends towards romances, but that's not the definition AFAIK. I imagine that women who like gei komi probably also call themselves fujoshi, but the point of the 'fudanshi' term is to denote men who like the "for girls" stuff, not just gei komi.

Is GL used much? I usually see queer women using 'yuri' to talk about f/f manga.

You can drop that "porn equivalent" nonsense though. Aside from some English-language fanfic, there has not been a consistent terminology for softcore vs. hardcore. Both 'BL' and 'yuri' can cover the full spectrum of content.

[musclesandhammering]

Hi, just wanted to say i respect your willingness to stand up for your opinions.

I know you have got some push back re your thoughts on the classification of Cas as gay to the potential exclusion of other LGBTQIA+ identities.

Its valid to be upset that Cas is reduced to just one when he hasn't identified specifically as any particular one and could fit other definitions better. That said, most people only seem to be using gay as a general term, almost an alternative shortcut for queer. Its not accurate but not meant badly.

I think partly using gay to describe Cas is because its shorthand for the uneducated and partly because it recognisably for a straight audience pulls Cas firmly over to the opposite spectrum (a way of saying that he is definitely not hetero but homosexual for less educated people about the differences).

Given that even now, with all the discourse on 'open for interpretation' on the confession scene, there are too many people insisting it is not queer at all this adamant insistence that Cas is gay is really just a fierce opposition to that view point.

The truly awful consequence is that representation is so minimal that people are left to argue over the scraps and it divides the queer community.

The key is for queer artists and producers to make more content - written by people who know and understand what representation should look like and make those stories engaging to the general audience. Thats hard though, takes time and cost money so adding in a shout out to queer art programs.

https://deadline.com/2021/06/out-loud-list-2021-out-in-hollywood-lgbtq-tv-pilots-1234779522/

Hi! So before I answer this I should acknowledge that I’m in a really weird place on the queer cas discourse spectrum because I’m someone who 1000% believes Cas is nonbinary and also part of the queer community (asexual, demisexual, omnisexual, or pansexual would be my guesses but I’m open to debate) but I also vehemently despise destiel and the confession scene. So just…. disclaimer lol.

But yeah, you’re definitely right that a bunch of people use “gay” as a shorthand for “member of the queer community” instead of to mean just plain “homosexual”. And that’s totally fine! It draws a firm line for cishet people, is easier to understand for people who aren’t as educated on lgbt matters, makes people feel more included, and also is just a lot less of a mouthful than, say “omnisexual” lol.

And I also totally agree with you that the fact that some straight people are trying to nitpick the confession scene and claim it wasn’t romantic and Cas isn’t actually lgbt is…. Absurd. Even though I hate that scene and wish it didn’t exist, it does, and it very much was a romantic confession, and people need to accept that. And frankly straight fans need to realise that there were plenty (and I do mean plenty) of indications all throughout the show that Cas is definitely not straight. Straight people clinging to him is just sad at this point.

However………… what I was mostly referring to in my initial post (and all subsequent posts in which I argued with the troll) are the rabid destiel shippers that refuse to believe Castiel is anything but a gay (homosexual) man who’s head over heels in love with Dean Winchester. And, trust me, there are a lot of them.

These people tend to despise any woman who comes near Cas (Meg, Hannah, etc) to a point that verges on misogyny, trash anyone who claims Cas could even have the potential to be attracted to more than just men, get angry at people who suggest he’s asexual and thus not attracted to anyone, and are often dismissive of his genderqueerness as well….. all because they see these things as threatening to their precious ship. *eyeroll*

When I come across fans like this it becomes really hard to see them as just fellow members of the lgbt community who disagree on the topic of his sexuality because 1.) Let’s be real, a lot of them are straight women who just fetishise gay men and 2.) It’s pretty obvious that they don’t actually care about representation (despite the fact that they’ll scream queerbaiting any day of the week, lord knows), they just care about gathering evidence to support their toxic trash ship. And if that means calling people homophobic, they’ll do it, but if it means insulting other non-homosexual lgbt fans, they’ll do that too.

I’m glad you brought up the issue of lack of representation on a broader spectrum, though, because that really is the heart of the matter. I said earlier that a lot of these shippers are straight women- and that’s true- but there are also a lot of them that are queer people themselves that are so starved for representation that the second they see two men share a meaningful bond, they start shipping it. And they’ll blindly go to the mat for said ship. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a great couple, and it doesn’t even necessarily have to be genuine queer subtext- it can just be a platonic male friendship- but lgbt fans are so goddamn starved for lgbt rep that they become a little crazed and obsessive when they think they’ve found some. That’s what I think happened with a lot of destiel shippers. And that’s not their fault! That attitude could absolutely be resolved by having more queer romances and a larger variety of queer characters in tv and film. But, idk…. I guess we’ll see if that happens :/

Thanks so much for this response, though. It was super polite and intelligent and informed and I LOVE getting in-depth asks like this! <3

[cardentist]

the insistence that trans men face a lesser kind of oppression than trans women is no different from the insistence that bisexuality is a watered down form of gayness

all of these groups can have different relationships with their oppression thanks to how they’re presented and perceived by society (invisibility in media vs overt demonization in media for instance) but these differences being boiled down to one group being distinctly More Important or More Authentically Oppressed than the other is legitimately harmful.

on the surface both of these ideas seem to make a sort of logical sense. trans men are trans people But Men, and we all know how men are treated by society. bi people are like gay people except they also like people of a different gender, and straight people like it when you do that. add on the relative invisibility and there isn’t much in the mainstream to challenge those ideas. 

the truth of the matter is that invisibility affects more than just mainstream media. this idea that bi people or trans men have lesser experiences with oppression are gut instinct because their voices, their experiences, have a history of under-representation. people don’t Hear the experiences that the people in these groups face and then create conditions within queer (and activist) spaces that treat those people like their voices matter less because they’re privileged. this creates a cycle where these groups are devalued and talked over because these groups are Already devalued and talked over.

this all pares horribly with the atmosphere in discourse (and particularly exclusionist) spaces where identities are used as social capital that is enforced by tearing down whoever it is you think is encroaching on your space. it’s not uncommon to see posts talking about the experiences of one identity that goes out of their way to exclude whatever’s being spoken of from another identity that they see as lesser, deliberately putting another identity down and crushing their voices in the conversation to lift themselves up. (the sheer amount of times I’ve seen a post start with “trans men Never-” while describing something I experience in my daily life is exhausting)

the most insidious thing about this is the fact that when you create an environment where oppression is social capital then someone trying to assert their lived experiences with their oppression when you view them as under you is considered overtly aggressive and is often framed as bigotry within itself, because theoretically if they’re equal to you then your social capital has been lowered. you see this Constantly within ace discourse, with people doing things like calling asexuality Inherently homophobic because they didn’t want to acknowledge another marginalized group’s oppression.

this can be particularly dangerous when it leaks into broader and more serious subject matter and colors how people look at and talk about a marginalized identity’s experiences. one of the bigger arguments in these spaces was that trans men are literally incapable of experiencing misogyny and this notion was enforced by people directly discrediting trans men talking about their experiences (telling people that they’re lying about their experiences, that their experiences didn’t happen in the way or for the reason that they said they did, and sometimes intentionally misgendering the person to discredit it). I had personal experience with that which was, not great I gotta say.

this kind of target vitriol isn’t unique to any of the mentioned groups, in fact it’s something that goes both ways. there are trans men who are absolutely Horrible to trans women. but well meaning people in activist spaces are particularly skittish to stand up for trans men in this situation because they’re Aware that trans women are particularly marginalized (which they are) while also being affected by the lack of visibility for trans men. I’ve seen people who engage with Nasty discourse defending asexuality, nonbinary people, transness in general, bi/pan people, etc who outright Refused to get involved in when it was trans men on the line because it wasn’t Worth it to them. that’s definitely anecdotal evidence on my part but it’s emblematic of a bigger issue.

moreover, there’s a common trend in and around queer spaces where people identify vulnerable groups based on how established they are and go out of their way to hurt those on the outskirts because they know that it’ll be tolerated. from asexuals to nonbinary people to mogai to neogenders to pan people to intersex people to polygamous people to bi people and beyond. what you’ll see a lot of is transphobic cis women extend performative activism towards trans women while being overtly transphobic towards trans men and justifying it with the fact that trans men are Men and therefore they’re punching up.

this wasn’t really made with one solid thesis in mind and I honestly could keep rambling until the sun died out, but to cap things off I want to remind people of something that I still think about to this day.

quite a few years ago trans men were looking for a term that they could use to describe their specific experiences with the intersection of transphobia and misogyny, particularly when trans men were being pushed out of spaces talking About that intersection. obviously “transmisogyny” was taken, so someone came up with the idea of taking that word as the root and changing it to be clearly and obviously about trans men. which is how the word “transmisandry” came about.

if you’ve lived through gamergate you probably just flinched reading that if it was your first time, which is fair. the point of the term was to make its meaning as immediately identifiable as possible. if you know what transmisogyny means and you know what misandry means then it’s not too difficult to put together what transmisandry is supposed to mean if you’re seeing it for the first time. that said, it (perhaps predictably) sparked quite a bit of controversy. but the criticism it got? was that trans men didn’t Need a term to describe their own experiences. trans men aren’t oppressed for being men, “transphobia” should cover all of their experiences because they don’t Have unique experiences, trans men don’t Deserve a term to describe their own experiences. a lot of this was attributed to ignorance after people started pointing out how fucked up that reaction was, how it was kneejerk, but I don’t think that’s an excuse anymore. I don’t think it should Ever be an excuse.

nowadays people tend to use “transandrophobia,” not because the meaning is any different, not because it’s a functionally better term, but because people weren’t Willing to overlook their kneejerk reaction to Not take a term away from another marginalized group because their ability to talk about their own lived experiences in their own spaces mattered Less than momentary discomfort.

[leonardalphachurch]

ask game: simmons and/or delta

oh i only saw the preview for this and did simmons. delta coming soon i guess

late af but this was actually really fun i don’t think about simmons enough

Why I like them as an insane person i can say this: simmons is fucking insane. he simultaneously thinks he's the greatest person fucking ever in existence and literally the lowest of the low. he wants nothing more than to be the best subservient underling ever and to murder his boss to take over and run everything. if he doesnt have a rigid structure he loses his mind but he literally only chooses to be in the most chaotic situations possible. he would kill without a second thought but havea moral crisis over drinking milk out of the carton. hes gay and hes homophobic. whats not to love. hes maybe the literally the funniest sleeper character.

Why I don’t too relateable LMAO. also not a fan of the like, weird nerd misogyny hes got going on. imagine if chorus like actually had him learn to respect his team instead of just jokes about him being afraid of them.

Favorite episode we’re so fucking bad at this please. maybe the one were he makes wash his dad. that was so funny.

Favorite season SEASON 4 he was so good in season 4. simmons has LITERALLY no loyalty and we stan him for that.

Favorite line i feel like simmons doesnt really have a lot of good one liners? he usually plays straight man and his comedy is more situational. but like we also have shit trash memory so. uh his eulogy for sarge was funny. WAIT NO its when he says that he can- here let me pull it up

Simmons: If you want me to multiply two big numbers in my head, that I can do. [...]

Grif: What's thirty-two times fifty-six

Simmons: Thirty-one thousand, four hundred fifty-two.

Sarge: Is that right?

Simmons: Yes.

Sarge: That's pretty impressive.

Simmons: Eh, you know, it's a gift.

the answer is 1,792. he says it with so much confidence. he’s off by thirty thousand. grif and sarge just believe him. PERFECT encapsulation of simmons' character.

Favorite outfit halo 3's maroon that was like, a little magenta? so fucking good

out of armor outfit he'd wear a button up 24/7. this exact fucking shirt

simmons this you???

OTP is there even a question that its grimmons. hello

Brotp simmons and church are good together. literally the only way i can think to describe them is like. platonic kismeses. they argue about technology and star trek. they made out once when they were drunk and neither of them talk about it.

Head Canon

-hes trans and gay. thats basically canon

-hes got ocpd (and a billion other anxieties)

-hes a software guy not a hardware guy which means he has no fucking idea how to take care of his cyborg parts

-hes really into weaponry (as all good reds are)

Unpopular opinion i dont think simmons’ dad was incredibly evil i think he was just like a normal abusive father. he just doesnt seem like his backstory should get to be that interesting

A wish make grimmons canon stop fucking queerbaiting oh my god

An oh-god-please-dont-ever-happen he isnt straight. dont make him straight

5 words to best describe them

anxiety, math, contradictory, kissass, spreadsheet

My nickname for them cinnamon

[clocks-are-round]

Tucker for the ask meme?

Finally got around to finishing this!

Why I like them: I like that he’s complex. uh *checks notes* that’s it, i think. He had some funny lines in BGC. Nothing else specific is really coming to mind. Alright it’s the next day I’m back— with nothing more to add. I love all these canyon dumbasses I’m just bad at verbalizing those feelings

Why I don’t: I HATED Tucker in the early seasons. Hated him. So much. I don’t feel as strongly about him in season 16 as I know a lot of people do (I’m more frustrated by some writing choices regarding tonal whiplash), but they could’ve done better. Season 18 though… Tucker did not exist in season 18. In fact, there is no season 18. Full stop.

Favorite episode (scene if movie): The one where he was aware of Wyoming’s time looping was pretty cool.

Favorite season/movie: I think he had some good stuff going on in the chorus trilogy. It’s been a bit though. Specifics are fuzzy. I need to rewatch.

Favorite line: “For the record, I want you to know: rocks aren’t people.”

Favorite outfit: Maybe Halo 2? Looks nice. For out of armor clothes in fanart, I think sweatpants really suit him.

OTP: I don’t really have a Tucker otp but Tuckington is pretty cute. I’m a hardcore grimmons fan but Tucker & Simmons is one I think I’d be interested in seeing. Like, just to see how someone would write that. My only noTP is sucker. Pre-season 16 is fine, but otherwise it feels like “no doesn’t actually mean no it just means she’s playing hard to get” which is uncomfy vibes.

Brotp: Tucker and Kai’s dynamic is so fun. Gotta love your friend who you go back and forth giving each other shit but when it comes down to it you care about each other and you both know it. That’s the vibes. Also Kai as Tucker’s wingman > Kai dating Tucker imo. I’d love to see more of Tucker interacting with the reds, because his dynamics with Church, Caboose, and Wash are beautiful but while those are can’t-go-wrong classics, variety is the spice of life.

Head Canon: Personally I write Tucker as straight. I’m not opposed to other headcanons, but for a few reasons I decided to make him the token straight guy. I HC that they were exaggerating the number of Tucker’s Chorus kids but it’s still A LOT.

Unpopular opinion: I can see where people are coming from about season 16 Tucker, but… Also I’m okay with it. Yeah, he learned to be a leader on Chorus, but season 16 wasn’t about lack of knowing how to be a leader. It was about tackling those negative things baked into his brain and not just setting them aside temporarily but staring them down and acknowledging it was a big-ass problem. It’s HARD to change coping mechanisms and habits of any kind. I’ve toned down my self-deprecating humor in the past couple years, but it was a thing I did for most of my life. Change is hard. And you often don’t realize there’s an issue until it’s pointed out. I’m not excusing his past behavior like “oh yeah, totally okay to be misogynistic and objectify women!” no. Absolutely not. But people are allowed to change and grow. But again, let’s have him be past that now. Or at least catching himself and apologizing if he slips up.

A wish: season 18 never happened because it doesn’t exist and Tucker still has his sword. I don’t want him to become some mentor or whatever the fuck i jusT wanT hiM tO havE hiS GODDAMN MOTHERFUCKING SWORD. He knows how to handle his own sword best after all. bow chicka wow wow.

An oh-god-please-dont-ever-happen: Thankfully this didn’t happen because NOTHING EXISTS AFTER SEASON 17, but no more character regression. You acknowledged the misogyny so stoppit. You’re done with that now. Also, never stop portraying him as a caring dad. You KNOW even if he felt intimidated at first he’d come around and at least visit his Chorus kids fairly regularly.

5 words to best describe them: Insecure, caring, overwhelmed, playful, peacocking

My nickname for them: My current tag for him is //dr fuck but that will change at some point ‘cause I’m not a huge fan of it