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big UKE here

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one time my mom and i were talking about autism and she said if i got it from anyone i got it from my dad, a man who has been buying and sorting pokemon cards for several months straight and likes to memorize license plates and then quiz my mom on them. and then she remembered that my father is not actually biologically related to me (#childofdivorce) and lost her shit laughing. i got that proxy autism

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Citrus Con '25 postmortem

This weekend I attended a virtual con exclusively about BL fandom called Citrus Con and generally, it was a chill time. I met some nice people, ran into a few of those "wait you work with X?? I've been friends with X for years!!" situations, a friend and I judged people silently from inside our DMs, normal con stuff really!

But I also noticed a LOT of misinformation going around. Misconceptions and things that are straight up wrong and often racist or xenophobic that have been floating around the BL community for twenty years are still coming up and I wanted to take a minute to hopefully set the record straight on a lot of things.

Shut the fuck up about illegal activity. Good lord. This was a CORPORATE SPONSORED EVENT and people were talking about series they were in the middle of scanlating or where to find links to content. At one point a representative for DL-site, who was a SPONSOR FOR THE EVENT, came into chat to inform people discussing Drama CDs that they sold english translations and then the chat just KEPT TALKING ABOUT ILLEGAL DOWNLOADS. Like, if i was a company picking events to sponsor I'd probably pass on this one next year.

Weeb terms. Something I saw a lot of was people using Japanese terms as if they inherently mean something different from their English equivalent, or using Japanese terminology completely incorrectly. It's bizarre at best and racist at worst. I also heard a lot of people touting to be some sort of authority in the community grossly mispronouncing japanese words. Quick break-down: Fujin - This just straight up isn't a thing. It sounds like some google translate nonsense but currently the accepted terms for BL fans are all explicitly gendered. If you say this in Japan, best case you will be mistaken for a 貴婦人 (kifujin), a word for elder fujoshi, and worst case 夫人, married woman. A friend I spoke to said they mostly hear people just say 腐 (fu), for "rotten" which is coincidentally not gendered. Seiyuu - This means exactly the same thing as "voice actor." they're completely interchangeable. There's nothing wrong with saying "seiyuu" but you're probably pronouncing it wrong-- it's 4 syllables. I personally find "voice actor" or even "VA" to be much easier. There's a ton more overly specific Japanese words that get used despite having perfectly good equivalents in English! Seme/Uke - These are actually great words and I love them but "uke" does not sound like "ukelele!" While we do have English words for these, "top" and "bottom," BL has this silently agreed upon convention that one man exclusively tops and one man exclusively bottoms in anal sex, which is always the pinnacle of sexual intimacy in these stories. The words "seme" and "uke" refer to something that has no basis in reality. Shounen Ai - Way back in 2005 or so, Aarinfantasy, which was THE place for BL content and socialization, had a landing page that defined some common BL jargon and they used the terms "BL," "Shounen Ai," and "Yaoi" to describe increasing levels of explicit content. This is completely false and to this day I have no idea where it came from but everyone took it as gospel. "BL" covers the whole genre, and it is a marketing term. Books that are marketed as BL get shelved in the BL section (not just in Japan-- specialty manga stores elsewhere in the world are also starting to do this). Things that may have more LGBTQ themes (eg, My Brother's Husband or Until I Meet My Husband) get shelved in the LGBTQ or Autobiographical section. But anything from a story about two boys who hold hands this one time to a balls-out BDSM smutfest may be marketed as BL. "Yaoi" is a much older term in Japanese fandom originating as a self-deprecating term (and if you go far enough back, invented by cishet male internet trolls), and if you use this word in japanese spaces, you'll sound weird(though apparently awareness that foreign fans still use the word still is increasing). Shounen Ai is specifically BL about school age boys. This is usually high school or coming of age stories. A BL work about office workers can never be considered Shounen Ai, no matter how tame it is. Bishounen - See above. This term specifically refers to school-age boys and would be rude as hell to refer to a grown-ass man as. The literal breakdown is "beautiful boy." When I was 14 this was a perfectly acceptable term to be throwing around for cute anime boys. Now, in my 30s, it comes off as kinda creepy!

There's no such thing as "realistic BL". That's called LGBT manga, and is often autobiographical in nature (though there's some pure fiction like My Brother's Husband). There's tons of good stuff out there too! Just not in the BL space. BL isn't real. It's not depicting a real relationship any more than A Court Of Thorns And Roses or 50 Shades of Gray, though obviously there can be varying levels of toxicity or lack thereof. It's a set of storytelling conventions with shared thematic elements and rules and while it has evolved and become more "progressive" in recent years, it's still all just pretend. BL is not about real men. And to that end,

You cannot just assign a gender identity or sexuality to a creator. Or to anyone really. But especially not a stranger you've never met who is still alive. BL is written primarily by women and a lot of people are uncomfortable with that and are desperate to show that their hobby is unproblematic and go looking for examples of gay men writing BL (regardless of how misogynistic the idea of a fictional story being "lesser" because it was written by a woman is). Being Out in Japan is also typically very, very, VERY different than in western countries. Again, this is something that's changing in recent years but it's more of an open secret, where the mindset is more that there is simply no reason to bring it up. I also saw the words "repressive society" get used and boy do i hate that phrase because what it means in practice is "I don't understand these backwards barbarians and their inferior collectivist culture that is different from the great individualist culture I come from."

Broadsweeping generalizations about Japan and Japanese language in general because you saw something a lot in anime or because you saw a Japanese tiktoker do something one time. Come on man.

Independent Academics. This is the one that's really been bugging me. 10 years ago, we called people with no special qualifications who weren't associated with an institution but liked to do research investigative journalists. If they weren't looking to sell their discoveries and self-published them online, we called them bloggers. There's nothing wrong with being an investigative journalist or a blogger but an unsuspecting BL fan looking at the profile of someone on twitter making some sort of assertion is probably more willing to accept the words of an "academic" as fact than a blogger. I'm mostly seeing the term in fandom media circles and like. It's not that deep. There are real BL academics! Professor Anna Madill at the University of Leeds has done extensive field research on BL across cultures, including with Chinese fandom and even here on Tumblr. You can take a look at the papers she's published, the journals she's published in, heck you could probably even try emailing her, and compare that with what you see from an "independent academic" if you like. I'm sure that no harm was meant when people started calling themselves "Independent Academics," but think about what impression you had of this word when you first read it. Did it maybe give the person a greater sense of authority on a topic than they really had?

No one is forcing you to translate anything. This isn't about citrus con specifically it's just a pet peeve I have with the BL community. If you didn't do a good job with a scanlation and you KNOW you didn't, simply don't post it. Don't include a page that says "omg please go easy on me im a noob translator" just don't fucking post it! And don't go "recruiting" translators, if you don't have a translator then you don't have a scanlation group. If you can't write well in English, passing your translation off to someone who doesn't read Japanese isn't going to make things better. And for god's sake if you're going to shamelessly do a shitty scanlation built on the back of google translate or deepL or whatever, at least have some fucking shame and try to hide it.

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The caretaker still needs to be cared for. The healer still needs healing. Those who notice all still need to be noticed. The protector still needs to be protected. The giver still needs gifts. It's okay to want your energy reciprocated. You deserve to be loved as you love.

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i don’t know how to explain to you people that no matter what a country’s government is like i do not and will not support the US indiscriminately bombing that country’s civilians and i don’t know why that’s a controversial take tbh

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when sartre said "hell is other people" he failed to mention that heaven is also other people

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Why isn't "too scary" a good enough reason to never drive a car

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tumblr is basically a gay bar in a mental institute

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I'm going to say it. The (word in parentheses) meme is way better for tone indication than tone indicators

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Scar : Wuthering Waves

The drippy effects are kind of unrelated but it felt right to draw him this way. Chaotic and distorted :3

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im in love with this gif. everyone here looks like they belong in a gay bar

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Unknown to many, Godzilla and Ultraman starred together in Greetings From Japan!, a short film to promote tourism.

Image via @giovatron

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Right now the Kickstarter for "Aces and Aros: An Asexual and Aromantic Comics Anthology" is three backers away from one-thousand total backers! It's also $47,177 headed for our THIRD STRETCH GOAL of $50,000!

We're down to 16 days left and you can help us meet these goals, support queer art, and show love for your ace and aro community during Pride all at the same time! Backer levels start at $1 and physical anthologies start as low as $30! Come join in and help us make great ace and aro art!

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Vega Intro ‘Street Fighter EX3’ PlayStation 2

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ppl who celebrate fictional character birthdays are annoying pass it on

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