Archive for the LGBTQ Category


I’m in Love With the Villainess, Light Novel Volume 1

September 17th, 2020

I’m in Love With the Villainess, Volume 1, written by Inori, illustrated by Hanagata, out from Seven Seas, was an extraordinary read. I mean that in the most positive way. This book was surprising in ways I would never have imagined it to be, in ways that blew me away.

Oohashi Rei, an adult who has always loved games, finds herself waking in the world of Revolution, her favorite otome game. Armed with encyclopedic knowledge of the world of Revolution, and skills given to the PC, Rei, now known as Rae Taylor, sets out to do the one thing she wants most….to romance the villainess, Claire François.

From the beginning, there were little touches that had me intrigued. For instance, the novel lacks Truck-kun. No one dies. Rei simply wakes up in the game as Rae.  Although Rae is a teenager, she has not lost her adult perspective and there are decisions or commentary we get from her which are decidedly mature. About a third of the way through the story, Rae discusses something with us, the reader, and I just sat back and said, “huh.” No child thinks that way. It was about that moment, I realized I was reading something completely different.

In my review of ROLL OVER AND DIE, I said, “The premise makes it completely possible to kill your brain cells reading [the violent scenes] and not feel much. In that, I think the author does the readership a disservice.” and I’ve called My Next Life As A Villainess, “lazy writing.” These are not capricious comments. I believe in world- and character-building being key elements in making an excellent story. I have been a voracious reader since I was a child, I’m usually reading 6-8 things at once. I was a comparative literature major in college. I care about the way writers write as a reader and as a writer. I expect that world-building be done with a thoroughness that provides the story a solid three-dimensional base, even if most of the details don’t apply to this story specifically. Overwhelmingly, light novels do not do this and isekai (or isekai-adjacent) LNs tend to rely on tropes and handwaves to skip the relevant world- and character-building. I’m in Love With the Villainess does the work.

And then you hit a moment when Misha, Rae’s best friend, roommate and foil, turns to Rae and asks, “Are you gay?”…and the characters have a frank discussion about sexuality. Rae analyzes her experiences and feelings and we watch her do so – in so many words – then watch her reach an unusual conclusion, given that this is a webnovel.

But wait, there’s more. This little web novel, this penny-candy confectionery of literary effort, doesn’t stop there. There will be discussions of abuse of authority, and unfair sentencing, of political protests and economic inequality. And, they will make sense in the context of the story. The otome game is called Revolution, after all. ^_^

While all of this world-building is happening, Rae is cheerfully teasing Clare into bullying her, and enjoying every second of it. Never for a second does Rae stop enjoying herself. The more we learn about Rae, the more we come to learn about Oohashi Rei, who seems like a decent person, one we might be able to be friends with.

The only complaint I sincerely have is that there is a scene (I refuse to spoil) that ought to have been illustrated but was not. That is the only negative for this book. Thankfully…there is a manga! Yesterday I mentioned that I’m reading the manga for this series as it runs in Comic Yuri Hime magazine. There are some small differences in functionality, with each medium providing positive and negative qualities. We have not yet reached that specific scene in the manga, but I fervently pray for a few good screencaps. This is where the manga will definitely provide a benefit. On the other side, the novel format allows Rae more internal monologue and she is, IMHO, more relatable as a result.

Absolutely shout-out to Jenn Yamazaki and Nibedita Sen for the translation and adaptation here. Some of the translation lines were in and of themselves, sublime. I’ve never thrilled so much at the use of “There it was.” George Panella’s logo also gets a tip of the hat from me. Everyone at Seven Seas really pulled out the stops here for what is definitely, positively going to be one of my Top Ten Yuri of the Year. No question, this is the series to beat right now.

Ratings:

Art – 7 Adequate, but once again fails completely to illustrate anything significant or interesting
Story – 9 Takes the banal set-up and flies
Characters – 10
Yuri – 7 one-sided in this volume, but…
LGBTQ – Yes!
Service – 2 Implied and some other stuff

Overall – 9

Author Inori thanks their partner in the author’s note. That might have something to do with that discussion of sexuality.

I’m in Love With the Villainess is available digitally on Kindle and Bookwalker Global next week, in print at the end of November.

The novel series, Watashi no Oshi ha Akujyaku Reijou! (私の推しは悪役令嬢。) is available in full in Japanese on webnovel site Syoetsu ni Narou!. Volume 1, Volume 2 and Volume 3 are available in Japanese on JP Kindle. The covers for V2 and V3 are full of spoilery goodness.

Along with Yagate Kimi ni Naru Saeki Sayaka ni Tsuite, Volume 3,  which will make it over here as Bloom Into You: Regarding Saeki Sayaka, Volume 3, in December, Yuri Light Novels got a lot gayer in 2020. ^_^

Many thanks to Seven Seas for the review copy.





Rafiki, directed by Wanuri Kahiu

August 16th, 2020

Rafiki directed by Wanuri Kahiu, is a beautiful film about two Kenyan women in love in a county where homosexuality is illegal, and Church, State and Society are violently opposed to queer people living happily. Nominated at Cannes, Kahiu’s award-winning vision is timeless, with overnotes of Romeo and Juliet. “Two houses alike in dignity…” and all that, but with some deeper messaging.

Kena Mwaura is one of the guys but she, like most tomboys, is not at all one of the guys. Ziki Okemi is a very pretty girl, whose father just happens to be running against Kena’s father for the local County Assembly position. Kena and Ziki fall in love. It’s charming and sweet. You watch them wanting to cocoon them away from the derision and harm that you just know is waiting for them out in the real world. When it lands, all we can do it watch and wait…and hope.

As we watch, it becomes clear that there are several layers of storytelling unfolding. There is the clear message that the demons are in the haters, not the hated. The anger, the intolerance, the disdain, the rejection, the violence, that is where the demonic influence is. Love is…love.  Love brings joy and wholeness, but hate makes us bilious,and causes us to hurt others…which one is the one that is holy, really. It’s not subtle. Church, State and Society all look like the jerks that they are.

And there is the equally unsubtle story about two fathers, for whom wives and daughters are symbolic tools, not actual humans. Thankfully, here, the families are given room to grow, and both fathers and mothers change, at least a little. 

But there’s one more layer and this one really struck me hard – the mean smallness of society’s vision for what women should want and how men and women become enraged when younger generations just refuse to see that mean, small, barely human existence as “enough.” Blacksta, Kena’s friend, is honestly confused when Kena doesn’t seem interested in becoming his wife. “Isn’t that what everyone wants?” (At which point, I thought, in story after story after story, the villagers remain gormless. Why would Cinderella ever want something different, or Mu Lan?) The fact is, that the smallest and meanest of visions for what we “should” want is still prevalent. In the movie press kit, Kahiu says,

“While filming,we challenged deep-rooted cynicism about same-sex relations among the actors, crew and continue to do so with friends, relatives and larger society. RAFIKI brings to the forefront conversations about love, choice and freedom. Not only freedom to love but also the freedom to create stories.”

It was that theme of freedom I loved best about Rafiki. These themes were addressed at a price. In a 2019 interview with the Guardian, Kahiu speaks of the harassment she has faced, sometimes from people she loves.

The censors were not at all happy with Kahiu’s vision, either. “They felt it was too hopeful. They said if I changed the ending to show her [the main character Kena] looking remorseful, they would give me an 18 rating.” Kahiu declined and so, as the final framed play, Kena and Ziki do not end up dead, or some other more traditionally depressing ending. I will rejoice when “death or marriage” is so completely confusing an idea to young queer folks, since not having a happily-ever-after ended would be unthinkable. ^_^

Samantha Mugatsia’s Kena is fantastic. You just want to invite her over to kick back and let her relax a bit, and while it took me longer than Kena to trust Sheila Munyiva’s Ziki, I think she did a fantastic job of acting.

Overall a very solid movie. A few weeks ago, I reported that this movie had been put on Youtube officially, but I find that that link is no longer active. The movie is available to rent for a mere $1.99 on Amazon Video, which is where I watched it.  Ultimately, it’s a story of hope and for that alone, it’s absolutely worth watching. ^_^

Ratings:

Overall – 8

From a western perspective, there was nothing censorship-worthy, but Kahiu had to sue her own country’s government to get the film shown in Kenya…she was successful and it did play for a week. With luck we’ll be seeing more of her work in the near future for Amazon and a movie called The Thing About Jellyfish.





Love Me for Who I Am, Volume 1, Guest Review by Xanthippe

July 5th, 2020

Hello and welcome to a special Guest Review here at Okazu! I’d like you to welcome Xanthippe, who will be taking a look at Love Me for Who I Am, Volume 1 by Kata Konayama, from Seven Seas! I’m thrilled to have this review and I hope you will be as well.

Before we begin, I want to quickly note that this title has been polarizing and there have been some inappropriate comments made by fans of this series on other reviews. Therefore, I want to let you know that all comments to this post will be moderated. You are very welcome to state your opinion of this series, to comment on the substance of the review. Comments about the reviewer or any criticism of their person will not be allowed. I know Okazu readers understand this, but if you are new here, please take a look at our community standards before commenting. I welcome your thoughts. Xan, the floor is yours!

I’m Xanthippe, and I make comics about trans stuff. You can find my work at https://comicsbyxan.com/ and https://pandorastale.com/

Historically there haven’t been a lot of manga dealing with trans people, but two that I think about frequently are Stop!! Hibari-kun! from 1981, and F. Compo from 1996. Both are slice-of life comedies featuring a bland-as-biscuits male lead thrust into the mysterious world of trans people, and in both stories said male lead holds himself back from pursuing someone he is obviously attracted to, because they’re trans and he doesn’t know how to deal with that. There’s a superficial “will they or won’t they?” hook, but reading them as a trans person, you quickly get the feeling that they probably won’t.

These series show us trans characters from an outsider’s perspective. They’re surprisingly progressive for their time, though both still have plenty of problems. Trans people are used as a spectacle: the shocking twist, a source of comedy and drama. The mangaka appear to be working from a position of relative ignorance on the topic, and so there’s a sense in which these series end up working in spite of themselves. We get likeable, identifiable trans characters seemingly by accident, because you know deep down that catering to trans members of the audience wasn’t the goal here.

Love Me for Who I Am feels like it belongs to the same stable. It’s a modern manga and consequently feels a lot more progressive and respectful in its portrayal of trans people. The cis male lead is actually comfortable with his attraction to his trans co-star, for one thing, and there’s a lot less mining of transness for humor. But the outsider’s perspective is alive and well, and while we’re no longer being used for jokes, there’s something just a little bit fetishy in how the trans characters are presented. Like Hibari and F. Compo before it, I liked it a lot, but there are some caveats.

The main setting of the series is Café Question, a maid café whose gimmick is that the wait staff are all crossdressing boys. Tetsu, our cis male protagonist and the brother of the café’s owner, notices his lonely classmate Mogumo, who is assigned male at birth but wears the girls’ uniform at school. At his invitation, Mogumo comes to work at the café, but a conflict emerges when Mogumo explains that they’re not a crossdressing boy – they can’t be, as they are neither a boy nor a girl.

It’s proposed that the café could easily adapt their gimmick just a little bit to make room for the nonbinary Mogumo, but this provokes the ire of one staff members in particular, Mei, who is very invested in the “crossdressing boy” identity and finds Mogumo and their lack of gender perplexing. In what’s absolutely my favorite section of the book, Mei comes to accept that she’s a trans woman, her previous bluster having been a consequence of the deep denial she was in. While the overall story is centered around Tetsu, Mogumo and the beginnings of a relationship between them, Mei’s story is what stands out in this volume, at least for me. Mogumo gets the most focus, but by the end of the volume they’re still a bit of a cipher and it’s hard to get a handle on their personality.

Rounding out the café’s staff we have Suzu, who originally got into crossdressing to impress his boyfriend; Ten, who just enjoys cosplay, and the café’s owner, Satori, who’s a trans woman. She’s the character I most enjoyed: I can’t tell you how satisfying it is to have the wise mentor and most competent character of the bunch be an openly trans woman.

This is all to say that Love Me for Who I Am works best when it’s an ensemble piece about its various characters figuring themselves out. Almost everyone here is some variety of queer, so it’s striking how little these kids know about queer topics. Whether it’s general confusion about Mogumo being nonbinary (Satori has to explain the concept to the rest of the staff), or Mogumo innocently dropping a homophobic slur, it’s clear that they’re only just learning most of this stuff.

On the one hand, this would seem to indicate that the characters have some growing to do. But this is where that outsider’s perspective becomes a problem again. I don’t know the mangaka’s gender or if they’re trans or not, though they state that they didn’t know nonbinary people existed when they started work on the story (which, for a story about a nonbinary person? Yeah, not ideal). Regardless of their gender, this feels like a story from an outsider’s perspective, and so I can never quite let my guard down. Is Tetsu misgendering his sister out of ignorance, or is this an oversight on the part of the creator? I want to believe it’s the former, and if this was a story by someone I knew to be trans I probably would, but instead I’m constantly bracing myself for something to be handled badly.

Which is a shame, because for the most part the book clears these hurdles well. At one point Mogumo wonders if things would be easier on Tetsu if they were a girl, which leads to some experimentation with their gender presentation. This isn’t quite resolved by the volume’s end, though there are moments here and there that indicate Mogumo really wouldn’t be happy just being a girl. All in all, it’s a fairly tactful exploration of an experimental phase that a lot of trans people experience, but when Mogumo first wondered if they should become a girl for Tetsu’s sake, it set off some alarm bells to be sure.

And then there’s the art, which is well done and all, but there are times when the characters are presented in a way that feels objectifying and, to be honest, porny. The actual content of the book gets no more explicit than a single panel of Mogumo with their shirt off, but… I mean, look at the cover art. Just look at it. The mangaka used to draw femboy porn and it shows. It creates a weird atmosphere because the story is innocent enough, but that art style makes it feel like it could turn into porn at any moment.

It might seem odd for me to dwell so much on the book’s flaws while saying I liked it, but those flaws are frustrating because they drag down a story that’s genuinely nice and sweet with a presentation that sometimes makes you worry that someone might be looking over your shoulder and judging you. I recoiled slightly at the sight of the cover. I cried when Mei tentatively asked her coworkers to refer to her as a girl. I wish I could have one without the other.

Ratings:

Art – 7
Story – 6
Characters – 7
LGBTQ – 9
Service – 7 based almost entirely on art style

Overall – 8

I’m 39 years old – the same age as the Stop!! Hibari-kun! manga. I went through most of my life with very few positive portrayals of trans people to look to, so I’d latch onto anything half-decent. I adored Aoi from You’re Under Arrest, even though she was a minor character at best, and not always treated particularly well when she got her moments in the spotlight. Point is, I’m used to making compromises with my media. I’m used to accepting imperfect handling of trans characters because those perfect stories so rarely exist. Love Me for Who I Am is a book with its heart in the right place, a surprisingly gentle tale of queer kids learning to be themselves, and I’d recommend it, provided you can tolerate the occasionally skeevy art style. I like this book, though I wonder if perhaps I like it more for what it could be than for what it is.

Erica here: I cannot express how excellent a review this is. I’m so very grateful for this, Xan and I hope to have you back again soon!





Always Human by Ari North

June 29th, 2020

Some years back, I received an email about a comic on Webtoons that I might find interesting. And indeed, when I had a chance to check out Always Human, by Ari North, I did indeed find it interesting. I originally reviewed the webcomic in 2017.

Always Human is about Sunati and Austen, two young women who meet, fall in love and have to make the kinds of decisions all young people developing their careers and lives have to make. In a future where people’s appearance can be changed with “mods,” Austen is unable to use mods, and is unwilling to be seen as special or have her condition seen as the sum of who she is. This is a story that folks with many kinds of conditions can relate to.

Both Austen and Sunati have obstacles to overcome in their own lives, and in their relationship, but we’re rooting for them all the way. Set in a future when society does not appear to be one of those obstacles, the story lets us settle in and just enjoy the human aspect.

What really captures the reader instantly is the vibrant color palette North uses, and how the color is more than just background or tone. Tied into Sunati’s look, the color scheme adds as much depth of meaning to scenes as the words and shapes used do….something we’re used to seeing in fine art, not comic art.

When I heard it was to be made into a book, I wondered how it was going to look, since Webtoons is so specifically designed for phone consumption, with vertical format. I’m ecstatic to tell you that here in 2020, Always Human has been made into an absolutely magnificent book. North has reworked the layout completely, so the reader can be transported wholly into the story without having to adjust for the vertical layout on the print page. I love the extra touch of the hardcover book being the cover design for the webcomic underneath the dust jacket. Every detail is so well thought out.

I can only imagine how arduous a process reworking the layout must have been, so my kudos to artist North, editor Rachel Gluckstern, Rob Wall on layout  and all the folks at Little Bee, who made this a beautiful, book, a seamless reading experience and a charming story.

I picked up the hardcover and will be very glad to have this visually rich book on my shelves.

Ratings:

Art – 10
Characters – 10
Story – 10
LGBTQ – 10
Service -1 on principle only

Overall – 10

Always Human is a radiant story of love, of life and of a hopeful future.





Pride For My Queer Otaku Family

June 16th, 2020

I like this one for the feels this series made so many of us feel.

 

When Pride Month 2020 began, I was absolutely, positively sure that we would not be celebrating. I believed, from the very depths of my heart, that this Pride Month, would be about enduring, about protesting, about reminding the world that we were still here, still queer and still shouting about the same exact kind of police violence against black and trans bodies that sparked the Stonewall Uprising. I began this month on Twitter by promoting black otaku voices. I ended up following a whole bunch of amazing writers and made a couple of new otaku friends. It was only one thread, but it has become an entire skein of relationships.

This week, I was reminded that last year I posted a queer manga a day for Pride month. It was a lot of work, but it was such an amazing feeling knowing that there was so much great queer manga out there and so much of it already in English. I had thought about doing that again, but it felt totally wrong in light of the protests across this country. To some extent, these are the same protests, the same protest we have been having since the Women’s Suffrage March, since the Selma to Montgomery, Stonewall, the Women’s March and Occupy Wall Street, even. This is the march of progress, a march of defiance of hatred and violence from the authorities, of toxic masculinity and predatory capitalism. BUT – and this is a big BUT – recent protests are also very specific protests against a specific war being waged specifically on black Americans right now. This is the legacy of the slavery and violence upon which this country was founded. This is the legacy of Jim Crow and the KKK and the Lost Cause Doctrine. And I didn’t feel entirely right about obscuring the protests against police violence and with some frippery.

And then, incredibly, the Supreme Court of the United States, this week, has affirmed employee rights for LGBTQ Americans. And while the gay community has fought hard for this, frippery is also kind of our thing (as it is the otaku thing.) As a queer otaku I thought, fuck it, I’m going to celebrate Pride month somehow.

I thought hard about how I wanted to celebrate my immense pride in my queer otaku family, without stepping on anyone’s neck to do it. And I think I came up with the right way, but first I want to just tell you how proud I am of all of you. Those of you who have come out, and everything it cost you to do that. Those of you who have not and everything that it is costing you to do that. I am very proud of my queer, LGBTQ+, Gender and Sexual Minority otaku family. You are a delightful and fun and funny, you make my fandom full of glitter and joy.

On Twitter I have started a new thread:

So if you are a queer otaku and have a thing you want shared (except for fansubs or scanlations, because please don’t,) jump on that Twitter thread and I will RT and share! If you just want to say ‘hi’ in the comments, that’s fine, but I will ask straight allies to please be mindful that this is a party and today is not the time to talk about you, your allyship or the dismal state of LGBTQ rights elsewhere. We know. We’re working on it and right this second, in the middle of all the stupidest dystopian plots colliding in a maelstrom of hellish news, we’re taking a day off.

So…almost unbelievably, happy Pride month, my beloved queer otakus. I’m so very proud of everything you’ve accomplished. ^_^