Fumikoarmy

 Oh, woe is me. I planned to rewatch Ooku and see how well it all fit into my framework outlined in the previous post, but on rewatching episode 1 was hit with such density I decided to go through it more slowly, in a notes format. It definitely seems like Fumi Yoshinaga alternates between what I would consider serious structural worldbuilding, and kind of potboiler provocations, with some contradiction between the two. This makes sense, as this is a manga intended for entertainment and not a real scholarly treatise on how a country would actually biopolitically adapt to a situation where there was a 1:4 ratio between men and women. The tension therefore makes sense from a dramatic sensibility, even though it throws my theoretical edifice into chaos. No matter: Let's look through Episode 1 of Ooku from my structural framework and see what we can learn. Episode One We start with pure reproductive futurity and dramatic pathos, as a young farmer boy, presumed heir to the family line, ...

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...

 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...

 I am alive.

 

 I've often wondered if straight cis men were real, and apparently I'm not alone in wondering this. No one would deny trans mens' experiences, and gay men certainly seems comfortable with themselves, but so many straight cis men seem obsessed with proving their masculinity to the point of desperation. All of them either being gay men or trans women in denial seems a tidy theory. Perhaps this is unreasonable, but if you look at the veritable cytokine storm of no homo that is Michael Bay's Armageddon you do have to wonder. I remember the film coming out in 1998 and ignoring it because of it looked awful and there was no escaping the sappy Aerosmith ballad that went along with it. I later read a description of the plot in Susan Napier's Anime book, where she contrasted it's conservative reinforcement and reassurance of the nuclear family triumphing with the "deassurance" of Akira, Ghost in the Shell, and Evangelion. However I was requested to watch it in ...