Posts

Showing posts from February, 2026

The Antifascist Praxis of Gatchaman Crowds

It's a well known point that I won't belabor too much that Gatchaman Crowds insight was visionary. At the time it seemed to predict the 2016 election and beyond, and even now revisiting it reveals it may have even predicted people becoming dependent on sycophantic chatbots. At the time I praised it mostly for how it seemed to be demonstrating a better, healthier form of heroism that typical comic book superheroes. But the show itself, in all of its elements, is full of the spirit of antifascist resistance. It was baked in from the very beginning. Fascism doesn't have a theory or text because it's basically a psychological or sociological breakdown. Good primers on fascist theory have been written by many, although Umberto Eco's landmark work on Ur-fascism is a good start. Fascism has a lot of flexible elements that can combine in novels ways, so a certain degree of psychological and social vigilance is needed to be on guard. And it just so happens Gatchaman Crowds...

Ooku: A Gender Revolution?

 Introduction: Or Why This Took So Damn Long About a year ago I was commissioned to write a report on the 2023 Ooku anime with insights coming from my new transgender status. Since this was a big deal, I considered writing such an important gender manifesto to be a crucial task, and spent a lot of time reading gender theory and living my trans life to try and put together a Grand Theory of Gender to analyze it with. At the same time however, I learned something about being trans. I think it was early on, reading the observations in the book Nevada by Imogen Binnie or maybe even Whipping Girl by Julia Serano. It is now widely known that the Matrix is intended as trans allegory. The first movie can be easily read through this lens, of discovering the true self you were denied all along and the feeling of coming into the power of being your true self. So you kind of get this inflated idea that you will be the Gender Messiah, where your insights from HRT will let you bridge the gap bet...