Callout Post for Andrea Ritsu
It is truly difficult to cut ties with someone who is considered a staple part of the community you take part in. Many people would rather feign courtesy and acceptance than admit to harboring discomfort with individuals who interact often with their immediate friends. Behavior you deem as problematic seems to go unnoticed by the other members of your community, leading you to wonder if they’re really as bad as you make them out to be. You may fear social and mental repercussions by severing contact with such a person. Sometimes, it’s just easier to ignore your feelings of unease and keep the status quo. As a result, toxic individuals will continue to thrive in your community and continue spreading their influence, with few or no consequences.
Such is the case with Twitter and Tumblr user @andrearitsu. With almost 3k followers on Twitter alone, she is an insidiously popular person in the online yuri community. This post is written with the intention of showcasing the honestly troubling and downright dangerous behavior she exhibits and to explain why she is, simply put, not a good person and unfit to be a part of the fandom.
As a longstanding member of the yuri community, I know for a fact that I am not the only person who feels this way. Plenty of people, both people I know personally and from hearsay, have expressed real discomfort with Andrea. For a variety of reasons (which I will touch on later), however, they’re afraid to speak out. In fact, I personally don’t want any possible retribution inflicted on me, either, which is why I’m choosing to do this anonymously. I wouldn’t be doing this at all if I didn’t earnestly think that she has become an unmanageable problem within the fandom. I believe that the yuri community has really suffered with her inclusion; this post is not made with the purpose of inflicting harm towards her, but to warn people of the harm she presents, wittingly or unwittingly, to them.
Guilt-Tripping and Manipulation
The reason why Andrea has been able to go on for so long mostly unchecked, and the primary issue with her, is quite frankly her ability to manipulate the goodwill and intentions of other people. It is very difficult to raise a word against her because she seems like such a sympathetic person on paper. As a transwoman facing many prejudices and hardships, and as a purportedly staunch advocator of LGBTQIA and women’s rights, she definitely resembles a person worth admiring and supporting. The moment you’re deceived by this impression, however, is the moment where you cease to be able to speak out against her.
Andrea uses her mental illness and her status as a trans lesbian as an impregnable defense for everything she does. If you disagree with her, she accuses you of doing so because of her identity; if you attempt to speak out against her, she loudly and repeatedly livetweets the negative impact you’re having on her health. Furthermore, even if you do attempt to argue rationally with her, she’ll just spout an endless stream of arguments modeled on pseudo-intellectual Tumblr ideologies until you stop responding in frustration. This makes it impossible to ever have a dissenting opinion without severe (and often annoying or even distressing) consequences. There are plenty of instances on her public account where this happens, and I’m sure many people reading this have experienced some form of this when attempting to have a conversation with her. The example I’ve chosen to highlight is a fairly recent one from October 2015, in which one of her apparently close friends finally has enough of her and cuts off all ties.
https://archive.is/Y5TNS & https://archive.is/kyAas
As you can see here, Andrea seems to have been rebuffed (perhaps multiple times) by a friend who became increasingly uncomfortable with her until she snaps and publicly calls her out, begging her to leave her alone. This is the culmination of several days of Andrea tweeting things similar to the post she made, in which she constantly talks about being suicidal over the actions of her former friend. At this point, Andrea takes advantage of her own, rather large following to ask “advice” on a very public forum, where her friend can definitely see. This is problematic for several reasons: it paints the other party as a terrible person, it makes her look sympathetic and wronged, and it is a truly passive-aggressive way of getting her friend to feel bad.
The response that her friend finally gives is nothing short of revealing; they describe an individual who is toxic, clingy, and dramatic, with behavior that closely resembles stalker tendencies. She also summarizes the exact reason why Andrea is so difficult to pin down and confront:
“It doesn’t matter what reason I give because you will still make yourself to be the victim. You’re egoistical and manipulative but hide behind a facade of self-loathing and being a sweetheart.”
Andrea, of course, immediately acts in line with this statement in a string of melodramatic tweets.
https://archive.is/YJQHT
Again, you see the attempts to guilt-trip, garner sympathy, and cause a scene. She does this to an audience of nearly 3,000, instead of using something like a private account to air her grievances. Almost certainly, some of the people reading it are probably friends with the person she is speaking so negatively about. At the same time, she is very careful to pull back any sign of bitterness and insist that she still only wants the other party to be happy. By doing this, she maintains her façade of being a goodhearted, rightfully hurt, sympathetic individual. All at the expense of the person she originally had problems with.
As I’ve said before, this is recurring behavior. Earlier the same month, Andrea got into a fight with a friend for an unknown reason. The result is this tweet thread:
https://archive.is/n4r2T
There are several things to notice here. Andrea is the one who initiated cutting contact this time, which she dismisses quickly as “I softblocked you for 1 min,” making it seem less impactful as it actually is. She then immediately sets about trying to paint herself as the victim again: “Sorry I’m such a nuisance.” This self-deprecating language is a well-laid trap; if the other party agrees then they become the villain, but they can’t deny it either because that would amount to forgiving Andrea. The only choice they have is to not defend themselves. Andrea goes on to cement her position as the wronged party by alluding to her suicidal tendencies and mental issues, just like she did in my first example. Clearly, her ex-friend gives up soon after, but Andrea makes a point of tweeting several more times after the other person has stopped responding to her. She also says spitefully, “And maybe realize you're not as great at arguments and debate as you think you are and you are pushing others away.” Which is ironic, considering the next example I’m about to present.
https://archive.is/PopAh
In a nutshell, Andrea posted a picture of Nozomi from Love Live! with giga-boobs, to which one of her followers posted a light-hearted (although there’s definitely a hint of discomfort in her tone) reply. This devolves into a 30+ reply thread that culminates in Andrea dismissing the other person from her friend circle. The entire thing is a bit of a trainwreck, but there are a few standout tweets. Andrea continually uses pseudo-social justice reasoning to justify what is essentially just a kink she has, defending it and claiming that it isn’t problematic. She goes from claiming giga-boobs aren’t that unrealistic to accusing the other person of objectifying women. Honestly, she does a lot in this thread, and I could make a whole post about this one thread alone but I’ll leave it up to you, the reader, to go through the whole thing if you have time. What’s important is that she presents her arguments as advocating women’s rights and sexual freedom, while in reality she’s supporting an objectifying fetish that’s literally about enhancing boobs, the most sexualized part of a woman’s body. Ultimately, she concludes the conversation by telling the other person she got triggered by their comments, that they were attacking her over and over, and that she didn’t want to talk to them anymore. Again, these are all comments designed to pull sympathy, guilt-trip the other person, and give her the upper hand by ending the conversation. One of her last tweets reads:
“I thought you were a friend. But I guess I was wrong, you're just another person who tosses me away.”
It gets worse. Later on, she releases an entire stream of tweets about this person, unfairly skewing the story in her favor and unabashedly name-dropping the other party.
https://archive.is/KZSni
This is the same behavior that she exhibits in the previous two examples. The list honestly goes on and on, but from these three instances, you can see that Andrea makes a habit of manipulation and framing herself as a victim. These were all pulled unedited from her public account, and have been presented in their full context. These are all things that commonly happen to people who try to seriously disagree with her in any way, making it nigh impossible for others to communicate her. You’re stuck with either ignoring her comments (which she’ll take as agreement), or arguing with her and being subjected to multiple tweets that may or may not be relevant or logical, before you inevitably give up the conversation or are blocked.
Undermining the Yuri Community
Andrea’s interpersonal relations are worrisome enough, but her misuse of her large following and the way she asserts her opinions as fact are harmful to the yuri fandom. The most insidious thing about her is that she truly seems like she’s talking sense, but in reality, she’s actually defending a lot of things that are, if not downright problematic, then at least worthy of criticism and close analysis. There are a lot of ways she does this (for example, the self-righteous assertion that giga-boobs are totally problem-free as mentioned above), but I’ve chosen to point out two other points directly relevant to the yuri fandom.
Valkyrie Drive: Mermaid, which came out Fall 2015, is fairly notorious for being a softcore lesbian hentai show. You can read about it in the MyAnimeList article if you somehow missed it, so I won’t go into details here. Andrea is a self-admitted fan of this show, evidence below:
https://archive.is/2zEFm, https://archive.is/dKcID
In the first link, she celebrates the existence of Valkyrie Drive after watching the first episode and eagerly paints it as a revolutionary show promoting feminist ideas of sexual liberation.
Just for reference, this is one of the official PVs for the show.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5aOq5sPg_Q
Even just by looking at the PV, it’s almost irrefutably obvious that the show was made with men in mind. Andrea doesn’t seem to acknowledge this at all, taking the complete opposite route and actually claiming that it benefits women.
Now, my issue with this is not the fact that she likes it. Plenty of women-loving-women enjoy this show, even while admitting it is problematic. My issue is that she doesn’t do that. Instead, she enjoys it uncritically, and when she finds out that a lot of people don’t like it for very good reasons, she paints herself as a victim once again. The second link I provided contains tweets after the infamous scene in episode 4 of the anime, where a girl is (very explicitly) sexually assaulted by faceless men. Instead of acknowledging people’s (rightful) discomfort with the show, she instead expresses her own discomfort about not being able to like a show for fear of being judged by other people.
“Similarily, I've wanted to catch up on Valkyrie Drive -Mermaid- in the last three weeks but due to the awful scene in the episode before -that one it's beecome a case of me being worried about enjoying the rest of it at the risk of people looking down at me.”
Again, Andrea is careful to present herself as a conscientious person in this thread. She calls the scene “awful,” as if acknowledging people’s outrage with it. She also later says that the only person she blames for her “being worried about enjoying the rest of it” is herself. However, the language she uses clearly is tended to make her look sympathetic. She calls out to others who may feel the same way, says some self-deprecating things to garner sympathy, and preemptively guilts those who would judge her for enjoying the show. She never explicitly admits that Valkyrie Drive is pure fan service appealing to the male gaze, and never directly calls the show’s integrity into question. Her worry is simply that she won’t be able to enjoy her super problematic show without other people hating her for it.
Andrea takes a similar route in her handling of Sakura Trick, which aired in Winter 2014. Adapted from a yuri 4-koma, this show is definitely a lot less explicitly problematic than Valkyrie Drive, but a lot of lesbian/bi/pan women took issue with it as well, and it was a fairly hot-button topic in the yuri community when it was first released. She wrote a long post on her blog addressing, combating, and ultimately dismissing the concerns of the community.
https://archive.is/orsyY
For the sake of time (this post has dragged on long enough as it is), I’m not going to bother responding and refuting every single point she tries to make in her article; I’m just going to showcase a few, more problematic ones that she bases her argument on.
First off, she discounts the experiences of other queer women watching the show who dislike it:
“I’ve been told by multiple people now that the problem comes down to Sakura Trick reinforcing the tasteless idea that lesbian couples are just something hot for boys to look at…. Now, honestly, that’s something I found quite offensive. I know countless of men who don’t get into fan-service, and I know plenty of girls that don’t.”
Instead of digging deeper into why a (very large!) number of people really did not enjoy this show, she simply tells them, “Based on my anecdotal experience, there’s nothing wrong with the fan service and you shouldn’t dislike it.”
She then goes on to say that an example of media objectifying lesbians is the common trope of men “turning” lesbians straight. While this is true, she harps on and on about this already-obvious point for several paragraphs, as if it is the only instance of media objectifying lesbians that exists. Clearly, that’s not the case; Valkyrie Drive doesn’t have any lesbians turning straight, but that doesn’t stop it from objectifying relationships between women. She contrasts Sakura Trick with this type of media for so long to confuse the reader and throw them off track; in reality, these two types of fan service are incomparable beyond superficial elements.
Finally, and most troublingly, she addresses the issue of Sakura Trick having a large male fanbase:
“If a straight man find Sakura Trick incredibly sexy because it has lesbians in it, there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s personal sexual taste that we can not control. Your fantasies and enjoyment are always yours and should never be in control of someone else.”
This is literally the same mindset that self-admitted pedophiles have. Andrea acts as if the things you are attracted to exist in a vacuum. She excuses men who seek out Sakura Trick and other media with lesbians on the basis that as long as those men don’t act upon it, then they’re totally allowed to have lesbian fetishes. The comparison to pedophiles may seem like an extreme one, but the connection is there; Andrea goes out of her way to excuse people who have sexual fantasies about specific demographics that would most certainly not consent to those sexual fantasies if they knew about them.
There are tons of other arguments I could make about how problematic this article is, but ultimately, my point is that Andrea exhibits harmful mindsets as fact and defends them. My issue isn’t that she likes Sakura Trick, it’s that she’s willing to defend it even when receiving a lot of feedback about how people view it as objectification for legitimate reasons. She would rather excuse it and all its faults (and remember, no media exists without faults) than acknowledge that some people might take issue with something she doesn’t like - to the point where she would write a very long post arguing with them.
And, of course, she also manages to slip in some classic guilt-tripping and manipulation at the end of her article:
“And yes, I realize some of you will toss out every single word I wrote here simply because I’m transgender, and you know what? If you’re going to be that simple minded, I don’t want you reading my things anyway.”
As I’ve mentioned repeatedly, Andrea has no qualms about using her identity as a defense for any of her actions. Here, she basically implies that anyone who disagrees with her is only doing so because they are transphobic (instead of, you know, having reasonable disagreements with her statements). This is a huge discredit to the rest of the trans community and the struggles they face.
Conclusion
I’d like to close off this post with one last piece of evidence: a sex rp thread on Andrea’s public twitter account. As a warning, I want to mention that it is extremely graphic and triggering.
https://archive.is/de82B
The above is a link to a thread written in August 2015, between Andrea and a Vocaloid nsfw-rp twitter. Honestly, I think it really speaks for itself, and furthermore, it definitely explains why Andrea would be so insistent on the idea that fetishes exist in a vacuum. This post has gone on for long enough, and I’m not going to bother dissecting just how problematic it is; I can barely stand reading it without feeling severely discomforted. Again, this took place on her public account, which is followed by many, many minors.
Thank you for taking the time to read through this post, if you’ve made it this far. I really hope I’ve managed to convince at least a few people of the harmful nature of Andrea’s presence within the yuri community. At the very least, I hope that this lends some skepticism to the morality of her character. Again, my intention for this post was not to attack Andrea, but to make the yuri community a safer place by revealing already-public information about a potentially dangerous individual. I’ll be happy to answer any questions within reason and clarify my statements in DMs on twitter (@andrearitsucallout), but will not be responding to any direct replies in tweets or asks on Tumblr.
Links
Andrea’s Tumblr Andrea’s Twitter Contact