Weekly Thoughts 2/18/23

Hey! I thought I would try this out as a regular thing, to talk about something that’s been on my mind the past week.

This week’s topic is inspired by my current readthrough of Assassination Classroom. I’ve been reading it on lunch breaks at work recently. I have always really liked Nagisa, and I just got to the Time for Nagisa arc, where we meet his mother and learn about that relationship. It reminded me of something that’s always bothered me: Just let androgynous characters be nonbinary! It’s way too common for there to be characters who exist in queer spaces in manga that have some reason in their backstory for being that way without actually being queer, and like, can they just be that instead?

Nagisa’s backstory is that his mother is using him to live out the life she had wanted to live, but failed at. That’s why he was sent to the school, why she’s pressuring him to go on to her preferred university and career path, and why she made him grow his hair out and at times dress like a girl. For the narrative purposes of him needing to learn to track his mother’s moods, there is no function to his mother wanting him to be a girl other than to give her another way to control his life. But why can’t he just be nonbinary, or exploring his gender expression on his own terms? Nagisa is an idol, a perfect little androgynous monarch, and I’m annoyed I can’t just have that.

A similar thing happens with Kuranosuke in Princess Jellyfish. The whole backstory of him and his mom really works for me, but at the same time, dude’s a crossdresser. Why go out of your way to explain that a man who regularly dresses in women’s clothing and goes through life like a woman, and still identifies as a man, somehow doesn’t qualify as a crossdresser? If that was just the weaselly way the politicians explained how a Diet member’s son isn’t queer to avoid public backlash, then that’d be one thing. But it’s also what he says about himself. Come on, Higashimura, can’t you just let us have this? I made a crappy cosplay based on him! Let him be mine for real!

A similar phenomena happens with sexuality, as well, where a character will feel attraction to their own gender, but “not,” and the issue is never explored to its conclusion. I read through Tomo-chan is a Girl recently after seeing memes from the anime, and Mifune and Ogawa have that kind of arc with their love for Tomo. We’ve seen other characters, most notably Misuzu, swoon at Tomo the ladykiller without any lasting or lingering sexual attraction, so we know that what Mifune and Ogawa are experiencing is not the normal “she’s so smooth” effect Tomo has on women. They legit have frequent conversations about what their feelings mean and what to do about them. I get that they’re comic relief, they were never going to get anything big, but it would have been nice if by the end of the story, they weren’t still like, “But it’s not like I like girls!” At least have them stumble to confess to Tomo once Misaki is off the market, right?

So yeah, please let me have these nice things…manga at large? It would be really nice. At least we got Crona.