Archive for the LGBTQ Category


LGBTQ Comic: Legend of Korra: Turf Wars, Part 3

September 16th, 2018

The final volume of Legend of Korra: Turf Wars has dropped! 

In Part 1 and Part 2, Korra and Asami were rudely interrupted on their vacation in the spirit world by the intrusion of a greedy real estate developer on the spirits’ domain, a humanitarian aid crisis being mishandled  by the Republic City government and a violent gang turf war. All of which had it been written in 2014, might have seemed absurd happening all at once but, in 2018, feels a bit on the nose.

Because this is a 3-part American YA comic that was meant to be a sequel to a popular cartoon, the plots and any and all emotional complications were wrapped up relatively quickly and neatly. Any discomfort family and friends had with the idea of Korra and Asami as partners is wiped away in a panel or two per complication, long traditions of homophobia are declared “need to be changed.” The greedy real estate developer – after having been saved more than once by Korra – comes around to the only actual sensible idea. Asami asserts her corporate power, Zhu Li takes over the Republic City government (and I weep with joy at the idea of a world in which police, military, corporate and political power are all held by women with a sense of responsibility, wrested from the grasping hands of selfish and greedy men.)

Art is once again handled beautifully by Irene Koh, who has reported on her Tumblr that a sequel series is in the works, although she won’t be working on it.

It would all be perfect, except for one nagging thing. Several times this volume Korra and Asami agree that they “should talk.” I understand that thin page count means that neither plot nor development get the time they deserve in this comic, but the thing that annoys me most is that they never have that talk. A panel or two where they agree that they work better as a team isn’t really the talk they need, and while I deeply appreciate that the final pages are focused on their love for one another, I really wish we had seen them have that talk. ^_^; On the one hand, I think it’s that I’m just more used to manga, where longer page counts means that talk takes two chapters, and on the other, I’m old and that talk is really an important tool in terms of healthy relationships. ^_^

On a lot of levels, though, I’m not unhappy that we get the end we wanted from the cartoon here in the comic, with Sato Asami and Avatar Korra saying “I love you” to one another, as they celebrate the victory of peace and progress in the city they love. There’s a bunch of young readers out there, for whom this will be a life-changing comic.

Ratings: 

Art – 9
Story – 8
Characters – 9
Service – 0
Yuri – 10

Overall – A very solid 9

Thank you very, very much to Okazu Superhero Eric P. for his sponsorship of this series! 

If we do indeed get a sequel, I’ll be really interested to read it. (And I look forward to whatever Koh has planned, as well. She’s definitely someone to follow.)

What did you think? Let me know in the comments!

 





LGBTQ Manga: Shimanami Tasogare (しまなみ誰そ彼), Volume 4

August 27th, 2018

The fourth and final volume of Kamatani Yuhki’s Shimanami Tasogare (しまなみ誰そ彼 ) covers an enormous amount of ground.

What began as a story of a young man being bullied for appearing to others to be gay, (a sexuality he hadn’t come to terms with for himself) quickly becomes a tale of the community and family people who are sexual, romantic and gender minorities create for ourselves. 

Here in Volume 4, we get to experience stories about some of the individuals in Tasuku’s new community. Some of these bring us resolution of one kind or another. 

Haruko comes home to find Saki in hysterics. Her family has learned about her relationship with Haruko and she’s devastated. 

We learn that Chaico’s lover is dying in the hospital and he has only limited access because he is not family.

Tsubaki’s father is outing the folks at the salon all over town and it’ll take an act of bravery Tsubaki isn’t ready for to shut him up. Luckily for Tsubaki, Tasuku is ready to act now and he is at last able to stand up and say “I’m gay.”

Haruko and Saki visit Saki’s family, and facing them together, say that they want to be married. Saki’s mother rejoices, and her father comes to accept the thing he’s never wanted to admit.

Chaico’s lover’s son calls Chaico to his lover’s bedside so he is there when he dies.

And before the wedding Tasuku has a chance to invite Misora, so she can be there with her friends.

But the thing I really want to talk about is Dareka-san. I wondered out loud this morning how Dareka-san’s name will be translated. The character whose fearless leap off a roof begins this story remains a mystery at the end. It’s most likely that Seven Seas will go with a direct use of Dareka-san, and I hope that they will include a note that “dareka” means “Who is it?” or “Who?” This a no-name word, Mrs. Whatsit-like in it’s ambiguity. And while “Who” has entered the lexicon of fictitious name-construction with The Doctor and a Wrinkle in Time‘s Ms. Who, I would hope that rather than use a gendered English honorific, Dareka-san might get something more appropriate to their ambiguity, like Mx. Who. Probably all my thought on the topic is moot, and Jocelyne will just go with Dareka-san, but it’s still worth the mental effort of imagining how it might be rendered in a way that works in English and keeps both meaning and sense.

This volume front and centers issues of homophobia, harassment of and access, equality and representation for sexual and gender minorities in Japan and, while it’s not pointed, it doesn’t let society off the hook. But it probably can’t help itself when it ends with  a smile. This is the second LGBTQ media in a row that ends with a same-sex wedding in two days and this series is doing some groundbreaking of its own in Hibana magazine, side-by-side with Nishio Yuhta’s  After Hours. 

While 4 volumes seems too few, Shimanami Tasogare is a tightly wound, beautifully told story of the LGBTQ community in Japan, with both obstacles and triumphs laid out neatly for anyone to understand. 

Ratings: 

Art – 9
Story – 9
Characters – 9
LGBTQ – 10
Service – 1 on principle, there’s nothing salacious

Overall – 9

I look forward immensely to this series coming out next year in English and getting to hear your opinions!





LGBTQ Cartoon: Steven Universe, Season 7

August 26th, 2018

Steven Universe, the blockbuster cartoon about a magical boy is groundbreaking in a dozen ways. In previous seasons, it has dealt with complicated feelings about family, shown us both abusive and functional relationships, discussed war trauma, and repeatedly discusses betrayal, trust, loyalty, friendship and love in its many forms. In a cartoon. For children.

In Season 7 (by Amazon’s reckoning,) Steven Universe delves deeply into those concepts of betrayal and trust. Very deeply. Very, very deeply. This season also complete the process of humanizing the Crystal Gems. In the first few seasons, it is very clear that human relationships are genuinely not a strong point for them. We see this even more starkly in flashbacks to their lives before Steven. In this season, we see the Gems resolve and move through a number of lingering issues by taking part in that humanest of excuses to party – a wedding.

The season begins with secrets, chaos and confusion and geas.
The season resolves with love.
The season ends in chaos and confusion and we have no idea what’s to come.

This season was amazing.

There was not one iota of rebuke or snark in Ruby and Sapphire’s wedding. This is not an episode – heck, it’s not a series – that ever thinks to say, “in your face, haters!” As Steven sings clearly for all of us, caught in the middle of interesting times, for just one day, let’s only think about love…

…and Nell Brinkley. And cowboys. And when the next soundtrack album will be coming out. And holy shit that ending! And all the other stuff. What a season. What a series.

I have repeatedly said in public – often on forums for which this is wildly inappropriate – I want a Peridot/Lapis fusion. I want them to become Azurite. And I want to talk about why. So buckle in.^_^

Someonesomewhere commented that they didn’t want a Peridot/Lapis fusion because they felt that fusions were always about “love.” But I want to talk about fusion, because while Sapphire and Ruby’s fusion is absolutely about love, we’ve seen so many kinds of fusion, from Rubies fusing to make a larger Ruby, to Amethyst and Pearl, whose Opal fusion is not once driven by love – but is instead driven by desire to protect Steven. And we’ve seen non-consensual fusion.

For me, fusion is about trust. Garnet’s words bear that out when she tells Greg that to fuse one must have a gem of light at the core of one’s being and a person who can be trusted with that light.

Lapis has been horribly emotionally scarred, from long before we met her and repeatedly after we do. She can’t trust. She’s never seen trust. Peridot keeps trying to trust Lapis, and getting hurt when she betrays that trust. The moment they fuse will be a profound change for a gem who has been our PTSD poster child. And, selfishly, I really want to see that moment. ^_^

Ratings:

Art – 8 I love, love, love, the capsule-shaped fog on the Beach City Boardwalk
Story – 10
Characters – 10
Service – Sapphire in a tux counts for 4
Yuri – 9

Overall – 10

Gahh! January is so far away!





LGBTQ Live-Action: Otouto no Otto Television Drama (弟の夫)

August 19th, 2018

Last spring NHK Premium launched a 4-part live-action television drama based on Tagame Gengoroh-sensei’s manga Otouto no Otto (published in English by Pantheon as My Brother’s Husband.) This drama starred Sato Ryuuya as Yaichi, the protagonist and Baruto (Kaido Höövelson) a Sumo wrestler from Estonia, as Mike Flanagan, the man who married Yaichi’s brother and who bring chaos into his quiet life. 

The Otouto no Otto TV Drama (弟の夫) follows the books fairly closely. Canadian Mike Flanagan arrives at Yaichi’s door on a trip to visit his late husband’s hometown. Yaichi’s daughter, Kana, is ecstatic to find she has an uncle and a foreign one at that, and insists Mike stay at their home. With Mike’s presence a palpable reminder of his failure to stay connected to his brother, Yaichi finds his values challenged and is made very aware of his own, albeit passive, homophobia. The harder he is pushed by other’s people more overt homophobia, the more his own implicit homophobia is uncovered. In the mean time, Mike is able to provide a role model and advice to a young man in the town who knows he’s gay, and meets a former classmate of his husband Ryouji’s, a deeply closeted man who own internal fear makes Mike uncomfortable. 

By the end of Mike’s stay, we can see that Yaichi has grown in his understanding and acceptance of his brother and, although it’s too late for Ryouji, it might not be too late for the next kid in town. 

The dialogue cleaves closely to the original, with one notable omission. In the beginning when she meets Mike, Kana says that it’s weird that Japan won’t allow same-sex marriage (not in those words, the line was closer to “it’s weird that they can’t here.”) This line was scrubbed from the drama, presumably as it was too close to a criticism of the Japanese government’s policies and NHK is Japan’s national public broadcasting organization funded by public fees. It is pretty amazing that NHK aired this, but….let’s also remember it aired on a pay cable channel, not one of the main network channels. I had written NHK to ask if they planned on airing this on the USA-based NHK cable network TV Japan, but they said flat out they had no intention of doing so. So I’d count this a half step, rather than a full step forward for representation on Japanese TV. 

The DVD comes with a director interview as an extra. There are no subtitles for the audio track, but if you’ve read the books, you can follow the dialogue without problem.

The cinematography is very small and claustrophic, without being intrusive. It gives a feeling of being in the room with the characters, without being up into their faces. Sato Ryuuya was excellent as Yaichi (and as Ryouji for a few scenes) and really communicated all the many layers of discomfort he was feeling.  Nemoto Maharu was a fantastic Kana. It’s a pretty pivotal role, as she has to say what the audience is thinking most of the time. And Baruto did a pretty good job, considering he’s a sumo wrestler, not an actor and not Canadian. His English is heavily accented, but you know what? Who cares. ^_^

A friend of mine who is deeply embedded in the Japanese LGBTQ community said that they had heard this drama wasn’t that good, but we discussed that this drama wasn’t targeted to the LGBTQ community, as such. It was about them, as so many LGBTQ-themed works are. It was targeted to a straight, mainstream audience of nice people, family people, good people who just happen to have a lot of deeply held opinions about why being gay is bad and will make you live a short, unhappy life (in part, from decades of late-night TV specials about being gay in Japan.) On the other side of this, a Japanese acquaintance – who is admittedly rather more worldly than many other people – commented that they liked the drama quite a bit. They represented the presumed audience much more closely, I believe, than anyone in the LGBTQ community. Nonetheless one cannot draw conclusion from an n of 2 and your mileage may vary considerably, depending on what you expect from this drama.

Ratings:

Overall – 8

From my perspective, as an adaptation of what is a fairy tale about the gap between tolerance and acceptance and how much unpleasant shit lives in that gap, this was a very well done television drama. 





Live-Action: Blue is the Warmest Color (La Vie Adèle)

August 5th, 2018

In 2013, the Palme d’Or, the highest award at Cannes, went to a movie adaptation of Julie Maroh’s comic, Le Bleu est une couleur chaude. That year I was able to review the English-language edition of the graphic novel, Blue is the Warmest Color. It was an uncomfortable read, but for all the right reasons.

This summer, as part of my unusually high consumption of LGBTQ non-print media, I’ve watched several gay movies, including Call Me By Your Name and Love, Simon and the live-action television adaptation of Tagame-sensei’s Otouto no Otto (My Brother’s Husband) , I thought it only fair that I finally make some time to watch the movie Blue is the Warmest Color.

I rented this movie on Amazon Prime Video, but it is also available on DVD, if you prefer a hard copy.

The movie is just under three hours long. The best thing about it is the acting. Both Adèle Exarchopoulos (Adèle) and Léa Seydoux (Emma) do a fine job of making stone soup out of a mostly empty plot. 

Where the comic was nuanced look at Clementine’s spiral into drugs and death, the movie is a very conventional “girl realizes she’s gay” story. Adèle is a typical high school student. Her friends are obsessed with boys and sex and she isn’t. She tries to care about the attractive classmate who wants her, but realizes she’s faking it. When she sees Emma, she finds herself interested and when she meets her, even more so. Emma and Adèle become involved, they move in together and, ultimately after some years, they break up.  As the movie ends, Adèle has become a school teacher and she seeks Emma out once more to talk, hoping, somewhat pointlessly, to get back together. 

All of this would be satisfactory to me but for the director’s specific foibles.  Abdellatif Kechiche, the director, has some serious issues about mouths. Clearly this director wants to be *in* the mucus cavities as things go on. There are many extended, close-up eating scenes, including 3 scenes of eating spaghetti in red sauce. The first one was weird, the second one was gross, by the third one, I just felt like I was being forced to deal with the director’s fetish. All kissing and sex scenes were likewise extended and focused on oral activity.  

What was a fraught tale of dysfunction and emotional pain becomes a nice, slightly bourgeois, weepy romance, with some lesbian pulp moments.

IF you are looking for a lesbian romance with explicit sex, with good acting filling in the many spaces between the dialogue, this is a good movie. If you were looking for an adaptation with any reference to the source comic, this is not it. Adèle is not the comic’s Clem, this Emma is not Maroh’s manipulative Emma.

Ratings:

Acting – 10
Characters – 8 They were all too likable
Story – 7
Cinematography – 1 This movie is a brutal waste of the medium of film. It could have been filmed on a cell phone for all these closeups. No need to take up a movie screen.
Lesbian – 10

Overall – 7 I was hoping for more drug despair, not breakup despair.

Where the comic is about two people who were extremely bad together, this movie is about a woman who met the love of her life and lost her for no particular reason, just because that’s how it goes sometimes.