NO ONE LIKES A BLACKWOOD

Title: IS~Otoko Demo Onna Demo Nai Sei~
Author: Rokuhana Chiyo
My Rating: 4/5

I've written about this manga in detail before and everything I said there still stands. I enjoyed this manga quite a lot and I love that there is a manga with a positive, realistic portrayal of intersex people, but I wish it weren't so...conservative. It seems like so often I read or watch something and I'm like, yes, it's awesome that this is out there, but I want more.

One of the main things that bugged me was Haru's relationship with Ibuki. Haru and Ibuki met and fell for each other when Haru was in high school and was being forced by the school to attend as female because his birth certificate said female. Ibuki does continue his relationship with Haru even after he finds out that Haru is intersex and feels more male than female, but they have a lot of problems and it's really played as a "straight except for you" thing. But what's even worse is that it really feels like the main reason Haru never takes testosterone or has top surgery or anything is because he feels it would alienate Ibuki even more. He hates his body. The doctors keep trying to push him towards female hormones because of his birth certificate, and the one time he gives in and says yes, he ends up not being able to make himself take them. But even though he knows there is the option of T if he wants to fight for it, because his therapist, who is on his side, told him he could do that, he is always stopped by the thought of losing Ibuki.

The other thing is that over and over the manga talks about how they can never have sex. Sex is envisioned as heterosexual PiV sex only, and since Haru can't have that sort of sex, he can never have sex at all. In the end, he and Ibuki do get together, but it is a very platonic scene. There's a hug and they cry, but there's not even a kiss, much less a sex scene or even a fade-to-black. I really wanted the story to acknowledge that there are other ways of having sex.

Also there was some hinkiness with gender in that often gender roles were depicted as something innate. Haru was able to become friends with the girls in high school, not just because he was forced to go to high school as a girl, but because of some (physically) female part of him that allowed him to relate to them. And later, Haru ends up adopting an intersex child whom he names Nozomi, and he raises Nozomi as intersex. At school, Nozomi tells the other kids that zie can play with both boys' and girls' toys because zie is neither a boy nor a girl. As if that's something that only zie can do because zie is intersex.

There's probably other stuff I'm forgetting as well, but despite all that, I did enjoy it a lot and do recommend it. I wish it had been better than it was, but it's good for what it is.

You can find scanlations up through vol. 9 (of 17) here. The first eight were translated by a different group, then it was picked up recently by Dokukinoko Scans, and as of chapter 38, I'm working as their translator (so you can be guaranteed it's good; no idea about the earlier stuff).

1. I'm excited about the Three Weeks of Dreamwidth fest that will be starting Monday, April 26! I'm definitely going to host a trans commentfic meme in my journal and hopefully will be able to participate in other fic-writing activities.

2. Also, speaking of DW, you know what? I find myself getting really excited when someone friends me over here. It's not just "yay, someone wants to read my journal" happiness, but something more. It's excitement about DW as a community. On the other hand, I notice that now when someone friends me on LJ, there's still that "yay, someone wants to read my journal" feeling, but also "man, I wish they were on DW".

3. I am less excited about the new Firefox. I don't like my tabs opening directly to the right of the tab I'm on, rather than at the far right. It's not so bad for opening tabs from DW/LJ/Twitter/etc. but gmail is always on the far left for me, so opening anything from gmail then opens it in between that and my other permanent tabs. :(

4. This is frightening. Vajazzle? Really?

A couple weeks ago I decided to put away Twilight Princess for a while (I was getting really annoyed with trying to get up Death Mountain with those stupid boots and the guys and everything) and play Lego something instead.

So I tried Batman and fucking hell, that has some complicated controls (at least the Wii version). I played part of the first level and then had to turn it off in the middle, so I'll have to start over eventually, but I don't think I will for a while. Also whoever told me it was really dark was right. It's very hard to tell what's what. I realise Gotham is ~dark~ and all, but it makes for an annoying game. Still, I think once I get used to it, it will be more fun.

Between then and now I have pretty much just been playing Plants vs Zombies, which also has the advantage of me not having to get up from my desk. :p But tonight I broke out Lego Indiana Jones to see how that was. It definitely was an improvement over Batman, but still not as good as either Star Wars.

For one thing the whip, man. The whip is a horrible, horrible weapon. Like really. It was a good job I had true jedi (LOL I know that's not it, but you know what I mean; I am too used to the SW terms) by the time the natives were attacking me at the end of level one because I died like five million times trying to kill them. I want a gun. Will Indy get a gun at some point? Or maybe there is another gun-totting character? I miss my blasters so much. (I never liked the jedi characters, either.)

Aside from the whip, though, I had a lot of fun on level one and will probably be playing this quite a lot for the foreseeable future.

I finally finished watching season three tonight, woohoo! Now I just have, uh, almost all of season four to catch up on. :p But I still feel accomplished.

( Spoilery for the whole season )

I think I'll take a break and watch something else before tackling season four. I have been meaning to watch Big Bang Theory, so I've got season one on my hard drive. I chose that of all the shows I have on my to-watch queue because it's a half-hour show, so if I do like it, I can get through it much quicker.

So first we have Disney deciding that The Princess and the Frog didn't do well enough because it was about icky girls and that alienated boys. Therefore they have changed the title of the upcoming Rapunzel movie from Rapunzel to Tangled, and made it all about the guy who comes to rescue her. Because there are so many kids' movies out there about girls and absolutely none about boys! And the solution for making something appealing to a wider audience couldn't possibly be having female main characters who aren't "princesses". Any of the Pixar movies could have been about a girl without changing anything in the plot, yet apparently no one can imagine a girl having an adventure or doing anything but wangsting about Prince Charming. (Not that Princess and the Frog necessarily follows that mold; I haven't seen it. But just in general.)

Then today I saw that according to SyFy's Merlin website, "not even the most charitable person could call [Gwen] beautiful". Also she apparently has "wonky teeth, uncooperative hair and glasses" (did they c&p from the Ugly Betty website or something!?) and her entire purpose in the show is to angst about her looks and how no one could possibly love her. Now, I don't watch Merlin, but I am pretty sure that's not her main plotline, or even a subplot (at least from what others have said about it). The only way I can figure they came up with this bio is that someone saw a black girl and having never seen the show, this is the only sort of story they could imagine for her. (Black girls can't possibly be beautiful, right? And gosh, she doesn't have straightened hair! Well, then, it must be unruly and a source of angst!)

So a few weeks ago I finally imported my LJ to DW and have been going through the old entries a month at a time and deleting everything that's just random chatter so as to keep things a little more organised over here.

Anyway, I'm up to April '03 now and oh, so many posts about hollyweirdos and establishment! So nostalgic. I can't believe it's been almost seven years since those games started.

But the reason I'm posting is that I'd totally forgotten that at one point I had written Wright Brothers slash as part of a joke for Hollyweirdos. I meant to write something silly, but it came out serious (though it still makes me giggle just because). We called it Orvilbur and the tagline was "their love is so inventive".

1. I got my lyrics site updated two weeks in a row. Rehauling my requests queue really took a lot of the stress away from that, so I am no longer in avoidance mode.

2. Watching A Child's Child the other night really made me want to work on the manga again...so I did! I had been poking at another chapter of Yasha, but dragging my feel on it because it seemed so long. The problem with Yasha is that the books are not divided into chapters, so I have to just find a place where it seems like a good break, and this time I decided to tackle sixty pages at once, which I don't think is going to work. So I'll try and cut that in half, but in the meantime, I should have another chapter of A Child's Child to post tonight or tomorrow. :D

Daily Happysong:

Remioromen - Kasa Kurage
My favorite Remioromen song ever. It's just super, super pretty omg I love it so.

Oh no, it's been two weeks since my last batch of Holmes reviews!? Clearly I'm slacking off. XD

Scenes from an Unusual Domestic Arrangement by recessional Rec
5000 words. "There are so many things in this world that make us miserable, Sherlock," she said, by way of answer - answer to it all - certain he would follow her, "that I think when we have the opportunity to be happy, it is a tragedy when we get in our own way."

This is OT4 with Mary orchestrating the whole thing, which is pretty awesome. I really love her in this.

The Case of the Calf-skin Notebook by damned_colonial
3200 words. Sherlock Holmes and I had been living together on terms of the greatest intimacy for some months before I discovered a way to make him relinquish the remarkable control he held over himself.

I liked the structure of this, alternating first-person Watson and third-person Watson. At first I didn't see the point of that, but it becomes clear in the end (and ties in very well with the case Holmes is on, which I really appreciated).

I liked the sex bits less. I am totally down with the whole "Watson finds a way to make Holmes stop thinking for a few minutes" thing, as well as Watson being a bit dommy, but...I don't know. It just felt off to me, like the build up didn't quite match the payoff. It's all "ooh, what mysterious sexual trick will make Holmes 'relinquish [his] remarkable control'?" and then it's just a finger in his ass. Kinda ordinary! The finger-fucking itself was totally hot, but...yeah, idk.

Finger Exercises by lavvyan
5200 words. A love story told in seven much-beloved fanfic tropes.

This is cute and I enjoyed it. It's very much movie canon, going off in its own direction rather than trying to get back in line with book canon as so many movieverse fics seem to do.

One thing that kept me from really getting into it was that I kept getting stuck on the fact that Watson and Mary were living together before they got married. I mean, Victorians were all about being proper and that doesn't seem proper at all. XD Is there something I'm missing about Victorian engagements? I admit to not exactly being familiar with the period. But it seems like even if it were acceptable since being engaged meant they would soon be married, it would be a huge thing if she then left Watson before the marriage and married someone else (which she does in the story), because then she would clearly not be ~pure~. Victorians were all about appearances, right? idk, someone with a better grasp of the period please answer my questions!

Nothing Between Us and the New World by ariadnes_string
9900 words. An old army buddy convinces Holmes and Watson to investigate a series of robberies at his inn on the Cornish coast. Watson is sure Holmes has only agreed to cheer him up after Mary's death, but there may be more going on under the surface.

This is all right. The writing is decent, though not really my style. I think that goes for the story overall. I see it was written for the prompt "I love we-suddenly-discover-we-are-in-love stories. Or UST where each of them are obviously into each other but since this is 19th century London, they don't say it until the end. Maybe there was a misunderstanding at first and they both think the other isn't interested, and OHH how wrong are they" and yeah, it was never going to be for me, especially as it leans much more towards the former than the latter. Wish I'd seen that beforehand and saved myself the trouble. Still, if you like that sort of thing, I'm sure you'll enjoy it.

erda has a post about a fest to celebrate DW's one-year anniversary and create more content for DW. I really like the idea, especially of commentfic fests (DW is so great for commentfic with the longer limits!), and have decided that I'm going to have a transfic fest in my journal.

I think I'll have it like a kink meme, where people leave prompts and then the responses are posted directly to the prompts, rather than a porn battle type, where the prompts are collected and then you choose from a list. It's just easier to run it the first way. It would be multi-fandom, of course, and would accept fic for both canonically trans characters and those who are trans just for the purposes of the fic.

Currently the trans fic master list is at 176 stories total, so it would be awesome if the fest could generate enough stories to take us over the 200 mark, but even if it just got a handful, it would still be worth it.

I'm pretty excited about this! I have no idea when the actual dates will be, but I will post with more info once things get hammered out.

I downloaded the movie version of A Child's Child (Kodomo no Kodomo) last night and watched it. It did make quite a few changes from the manga, but overall it was a good adaptation. The kids were great, too. I loved the girl they got for Haruna especially, but all the kids were really good. It made me really want to get back to the manga, argh. I need to finish up the chapter of Yasha I'm working on, though.

Daily Happysong:

Gelugugu - Anpanman no March
This is a punk cover of the Anpanman theme song. It's one of my favoritest songs ever. So bouncy and catchy!