Well, since sunbaenim can't be bothered to help themselves, and managed to be insulting in the process, they're taking some enforced time off.

last edited at Apr 9, 2019 10:07PM

sunbaenim, given that matsuri_wins has made their wishes to disengage clear, and has so far followed through, I'm insisting at this point you do the same. You have either not bothered to read their post, or did and chose to disrespect one of your fellow users simply because you're looking to keep arguing with them, and I'm not on board with that.

Further, take your theories about who they are elsewhere. This is not the place for it.

PB is candy, so her DNA is actually DextroNougatic Acid.

We don't have an anonymous system, but you can contact mods privately on the Discord (check the stickied messages here) or the IRC.

This is quality material.

last edited at Jun 27, 2019 12:10AM

Seriously, DY4Y, don't get them started. It leads nowhere good.

What you don't see offscreen is the two other girls holding on to her ankles.

This is PB we're talking about here.

Even if she can have a child naturally, she'd still choose to go the science baby route.

Everyone else seems to have standard anime proportions, which are admittedly kind of inhuman to start with but acceptable, but Tomoko's looks huge for her body, like some kind of living bobble-head. Maybe because hers is the same size as everyone else's, more or less, but placed on a much smaller body.

That one with the book and video game is exactly the kind of relationship I'd love to be in.

I think a huge problem here is you seem to be blaming trans people for objecting to a weaponized characterization of mental illness, rather than the people who are literally, and intentionally, misusing and devaluing the term.

To use your analogy with being called gay, using it (and faggot and similar terms) as an insult, generic or not, is indeed marginalizaing toward gay people. But if someone who isn't gay objects to being called that, they're not the ones at fault. It's the ones using gay as a synonym for something bad. Similarly, trans people being called mentally ill by people who are using the term to devalue them and invalidate their experiences are not at fault when they object.

Put the blame on the people who are actively placing stigma on mental illness by using it as a synonym for "what you feel isn't real and you're not valid", where it belongs.

Am i the only one who got the Finding Nemo reference? Mashiro named her great white shark plushie Bruce.

Also, Mashiro's sister is a complete pervert. >.>

While it may have been a Finding Nemo reference, that itself was likely a reference to the movie Jaws, where the mechanical shark prop was famously named Bruce.

When quoting a comment that has an image in it, please remove the "![]" part. Particularly if it's a large image.

last edited at Apr 2, 2019 5:21PM

It's also a ship that opens the door for KotoNico, so who are we to argue?

It wouldn't surprise me if a lot of those attitudes of what a "real" trans person should be still prevail in various places, including Japan.

Oh, they most certainly do. I've seen it in manga before. I just personally see no reason to be mad at this manga in particular. At least regarding this topic anyway. The way it keeps implying trans ppl should just turn the other cheek is way more annoying to me than Akira being feminine.

One weird thing I notice in many trans related mangas, on this site at least, is that the trans woman ends up quitting her job almost as an expected part of transition, and goes to work in a gay bar or something instead. I assume that reflects some kind of weird cultural expectation.

It's worth noting that up until very recently (and maybe still in some places), even in North America it was very difficult, if not impossible, to get approved for hormones or surgery without living up to those stereotypes. Makeup, hair (natural or a wig), dresses, heterosexuality (or at least lying about it) up to and including a requirement to divorce if you had a wife. It wouldn't surprise me if a lot of those attitudes of what a "real" trans person should be still prevail in various places, including Japan.

Unfortunately, that won't take long.

I always find Nozomi and Maki work well together, she draws out something soft in Maki she usually tries to hide. But thinking about it, with Eli she'd have someone she could be serious with too, so as a threesome they'd basically meet all her needs.

In any case, I can't get over how happy Nozomi looks here.

^ Baby don't employ me, employ me, no more.

I see this story has continued down the same path it started. I decided to skim another chapter or two thanks to the yuri tag getting added. To each their own. This isn't for me.

As for trans people being mentally ill it is simple fact at this point since gender dysphoria is listed in the DSM 5 aka the book that contains the world's consensus on the diagnostic criteria for mental illness. It is literally the book that defines what is and is not a mental illness.

It is literally the same book that defined homosexuality as a mental illness in earlier editions. It is fallable.

Aside from which, being trans is not presently defined as a mental illness even in the DSM, the discomfort of dysphoria is the issue dealt with there. And that, in part, is because in many places you can't get treatment paid for by insurance unless you have a diagnosis to bill it under.

Not to mention* trans people are constantly barraged by messages from many directions who aren't medical professionals calling being trans (plus other gender variance) itself a mental illness as a way to belittle or invalidate their experience, so you can kinda see why there'd be a wee bit of resistance to seeing that carry over into fiction.

This is the second time today I've had to put spoiler tags on someone's post.

I think I have finally figured out why this one makes me so mad. It's because it's trying to be so "inclusive" of "societal minorities" that it's on the brink of being ridiculous; and because of this approach, it is making literally every LGTBQ person that it portrays have some sort of obvious mental flaw. I am no fan of having my community being portrayed as one big mental illness.

But if they were straight people then it would be okay? The idea that you can't these types of people as anything other than Mary Sues is dumb.

Given that being heterosexual hasn't been considered a mental illness and treated with everything from electroshock to mandatory sterilization, while being homosexual actually has, it's a valid sore spot. To say nothing of trans people and others frequently being called mentally ill and not just by edgelords although lord knows there's enough of them.

Eh, the idea of the original idea barely resembling the final strikes pretty close to home, I think. You have an initial idea, and sometimes that can be pretty awful, and then you stick with it and it kinda turns into something.

Well, sure—in the The Lord of the Rings, the character of Strider was originally a hobbit in wooden shoes named Trotter. But the point for our purposes here is that authorial intention can be pretty elusive even when the author is willing to say (which they notoriously rarely are), and sometimes the author is only marginally more qualified to interpret their own work than anybody else.

Yeah, I get that. Plus, sometimes in more complex works the author may set up perfectly valid symbolism without really being aware of it themselves. Or alternatively, do it on purpose but forget to bring up those nuances when speaking about them later on. There's stuff that's perfectly clear and natural when you're in the zone that you might not spare much thought to when you're out of that writer's trance and thus can't really communicate it in interviews and such.

“Authorial intention” is one of the most vexed questions in literary interpretation, and most of what can be known about such intentions needs to be inferred from other contexts anyway.

It also doesn’t help that one of the most complete explanations we have in English of how a writer composed a major literary work and exactly what they were thinking at each step of the process is by Edgar Allan Poe, who would have us believe that at one point the title character of “The Raven” could have been a parrot.

At which point many readers say, “Uhhh, OK . . . if you say say so,” while backing carefully away.

Having written stories myself, I can entirely believe this anecdote.

“Quoth the parrot, ‘ . . . ‘ Um, OK, what does the parrot quoth? Needs to be something witchy that goes with a “beautiful dead woman” theme . . . ‘Polly want a lover,’ maybe? Nah, meter’s all wrong. And it needs to be a drab parrot, not too colorful . . . Hey, that’s it—a mynah bird!
‘Quoth the mynah . . .’ Then change “Lenore” to “Dinah”? Ugh, I could use a pick-me-up . . . now where’d I put that laudanum?”

Drive the Polish literature teachers batty, that would. Lol

Eh, the idea of the original idea barely resembling the final strikes pretty close to home, I think. You have an initial idea, and sometimes that can be pretty awful, and then you stick with it and it kinda turns into something.

Please, let's not keep that rolling. BugDevil hasn't posted on the subject for six hours now, and I'd really rather people not goad them into yet another big, fruitless argument.