oops! a really long post about two manga I like
1. Ace and aro frameworks as queer frameworks
So there's this post I saw on here months ago that I still think about all the time, because it so perfectly describes how I feel about this topic. A lot could be said about this, but I’m trying to keep this part short, because the rest of this post is already so dang long. So I will summarize my thoughts as: one of the beautiful things about being aspec is how it forces you to distinguish what you want out of your life and relationships from what you’re expected to want. Ace and aro frameworks tell you that romance is not inherently more meaningful than other forms of love, that you can build the sorts of relationships that make you feel fulfilled in whatever form that takes, that your worth and maturity are not determined by how many romantic or sexual partners you’ve had. What do you want once you’re freed from the pressure of what you’re "supposed" to want? What sort of connections to others make you feel seen? How can we build community so that being partnered doesn’t become a de-facto requirement for financial/social/emotional support?
These are ways of thinking that have the potential to benefit anyone. Yet my personal experience (from myself, and from talking to other aspec folks) is that people outside of ace and aro spaces often just… aren’t all that interested in what we have to say about this stuff. We might be included in general queer spaces, but a lot of the time we are viewed as some kind of fundamentally unknowable Other that gets included on a technicality but whose experiences aren’t applicable to the rest of the queer community. And this attitude gets reflected in media, too. In queer-friendly ensemble casts we might, if we're lucky, get one ace character who shows up to tell the audience "also some people 👆are asexual and/or aromantic!" and then gets promptly shoved aside so the narrative can get back to the interesting stuff (because obviously a character who doesn’t date or have sex can’t possibly add anything interesting to a story). Basically, the attitude even in the most inclusive spaces is: well, I guess maybe it’s okay for aces and aros to not date or have sex because they’re weirdos like that, but us normal people still need to do those things.
What I’m trying to say is, both in real life and in media I see a lot of siloing of identity. Aro people are in their aro box and gay people are in their gay box and straight people are in their straight box and so on, and none of these could possibly have any commonalities with or learn from each other. But I think that we deserve attempts to engage with queerness that go deeper than "what label can be put on this person so that we can fit them into the correct and discrete box that perfectly encapsulates their experience". Especially when it comes to ace and aro philosophies; being able to choose how to structure your life and relationships shouldn’t be a freedom granted only to those who have exhausted all "normal" options.
I don’t want to rag on media that’s doing surface-level inclusion — there’s a time and place for it, and certainly there are plenty of people for whom that’s their first exposure to these ideas or to characters they see themselves reflected in. And since there are still many places in the world where queer people are denied rights or outright criminalized, simply stating "yes this is a real and normal thing" can be very powerful. But just speaking for myself, I am not interested in the "ace character shows up to give the audience ace 101 and then disappears" or "the creator said this character was aspec in an obscure livestream but nothing related to that ever appears in canon" kinds of stories anymore. I want to see stuff that actually engages with the underlying ideas that ace and aro frameworks bring to the table — and treats these ideas respectfully, not as something that only applies to those boring aspecs over in their little weirdo corner, but as something that has the potential to help anyone.
And stories like that exist out there, too.
2. The Summer Hikaru Died & Kemutai Hanashi
[This section includes manga spoilers in here for both of these series, including some minor things from Kemutai Hanashi that the scanlations haven’t caught up to yet.]
In The Summer Hikaru Died, Yoshiki is a closeted gay teen in a homophobic rural village, whose best friend Hikaru (who Yoshiki was shamefully, guiltily in love with) dies and gets replaced by a monstrous doppelgänger. While Yoshiki is initially drawn to monster!Hikaru (aka 'Hikaru') as a replacement for the original Hikaru, over time he stops seeing 'Hikaru' as a Hikaru substitute and starts genuinely caring about 'Hikaru' as his own person — one he has an indescribable bond with over their shared experience of feeling monstrous and out of place in the world. It’s stated on the page that 'Hikaru' doesn’t experience romantic or sexual attraction, or understand how humans split love into separate categories (e.g. platonic, familial, romantic), but that he does deeply love Yoshiki in an uncategorizable way. And, likewise, Yoshiki doesn’t have romantic feelings for this new 'Hikaru' the way he did for Hikaru, but he becomes extremely devoted to 'Hikaru' to the point that he’s willing to give up parts of his own humanity just so they can stay together. Both of them agree that their home is with each other.
Yoshiki’s romantic love for the original Hikaru is a meaningful part of him, but is never treated as inherently more profound or meaningful than his non-romantic love for 'Hikaru'. It’s never suggested that Yoshiki will be missing out on some vital piece of human experience by staying with 'Hikaru' instead of finding a human boyfriend capable of feeling attraction towards him. And 'Hikaru’s rejection of labels, and the uncategorizable nature of his love for Yoshiki, is ultimately what frees Yoshiki to envision a future where he might be able to belong somewhere — because maybe Yoshiki can’t quite accept his own sexuality without feeling shame yet, but he can accept 'Hikaru'. And if he believes that if an eldritch monster deserves happiness and love and a place to belong, then he can start to believe it about himself, too.
Kemutai Hanashi is very different story- and genre-wise (being a quiet slice-of-life manga about adult life and not a teen horror), but it shares a lot of thematic similarities. Takeda and Arita are two men who used to be high-school classmates, who reconnect in adulthood and eventually decide to start living together. They don’t have romantic feelings for each other, but they also don’t find it sufficient to describe themselves as "friends" or "roommates"; Arita in particular is tormented by the absence of a word that will make people understand what a significant place they take in each other's lives. Other characters frequently assume that they must be gay and dating each other, that if they’re not dating they’ll eventually both have to move on and get "real" relationships, and insist that they can’t have a long-lasting relationship that isn’t sexual — all of this building up to one of the most gut-wrenching manga chapters I’ve ever read (it’s genuinely so well done and it’s a travesty that hardly anyone in anglo animanga spaces seems to know about this series. Please, please, go read Kemutai Hanashi. I’m so serious.)
All of that is really excellently written in and of itself, but there’s another piece to this, too — Kemahana also has a straight couple, Hinako and Ryuuji, whose relationship is considered abnormal by the people around them (in that they are unmarried, but living together and raising Hinako’s daughter from a previous marriage). It’s implied that Ryuuji doesn’t talk to his family anymore because they won’t accept the relationship, and both he and Hinako have insecurities about how others perceive them. But in later chapters, Ryuuji explains that seeing Arita and Takeda’s relationship reassures him that it really is okay for him and Hinako to live the way they are — that it’s fine to have a relationship that others don’t understand, and that hasn’t been legitimized by the prevailing social institutions like marriage. What matters is that the people inside of the relationship are happy with it.
This is what I mean by these manga going beyond surface-level portrayal of queerness to engage with something deeper. In both series, the rejection of labels and of the pressure to prioritize "normal" experiences of love (and the rejection of romantic love as a singularly special form of love), is what frees all the characters, even the ones who aren’t aro or ace or even any flavor of queer themselves. And this, I think, is kind of the point. There isn’t some special type of relationship or ideology reserved exclusively for aspec people. Anyone can do any of this. You can be allo and be in a QPR, or stay unmarried, or not date, or want just the sex without the romance, or do anything at all. You can decide that sex and romance are very important to you, but with intention and the knowledge of why you feel that way, rather than because it’s just what you’re expected to do. The point is, everyone deserves to be free to live the life they want — queerness not as a disconnected set of individual identities, but as a philosophy that supports all ways of living. We aren’t confined into our separate, mutually exclusive silos.
This is also why I don’t buy the "this would be better representation if it was a normal gay romance" fandom sentiment I see surrounding TSHD in particular. It’s not that it would be bad for it to be romantic, it’s just that that is quite simply not the story that the manga is setting out to tell. It could have chosen to tell that story if it wanted to! It’s certainly the way I expected TSHD to go based on my entire lifetime of reading stories that insist on settling all the characters into romances by the end, and it probably would have been the more popular choice with readers. But Mokumokuren didn’t go that route, on purpose (as is clear from their various statements about it), and I think it’s useful to consider what a story isn’t doing as well as what it is doing when thinking about the goals of a text.
In both these cases, the mangaka have intentionally chosen to tell a story that is not explicitly romantic, while still making it undeniably queer. And my personal opinion is that if the characters in TSHD or Kemuhana did turn out to have straightforward romantic-sexual feelings for each other and ended up in typical romances, the stories would actually not be as effective in achieving their underlying goals. Kemutai Hanashi has even addressed this textually via Arita’s storyline. So I can’t agree with claims that these manga "should have been" straightforward BLs, or that a romance would make them more meaningful or better representations of queerness. They are meaningful representations of queerness in and of themselves.
3. These stories are queer stories worth telling too
Related to the "this would be better representation if it was a BL" sentiment, there’s another statement I’ve seen come up often in the conversations orbiting TSHD (and also more generally in the conversations around non-normative relationships in fiction) that goes along the lines of: "QPRs/non-normative relationships in fiction are okay as long as the work also contains other [aka, 'real'] portrayals of queerness".
I really do not like these statements. I can be generous and understand what people mean to say when they say this, in a good-faith interpretation — they want stories that take queerness seriously and don’t treat queer romance and sexuality like something dirty. Because, yes, there are some works that pull the "noooo they aren’t in love, the bond between these two guys is just so strong it transcends attraction :)" thing because they want the plausible deniability of not having to commit to it being gay. But, IMO, it is usually very clear whether a non-normative relationship in a story is being used to avoid or to engage with queerness. (TSHD and Kemuhana are both doing the latter.) And if a story is using it to engage with queerness — to handle these types of relationships thoughtfully and purposefully — then it is still a worthwhile queer story even if there isn't some other, different representation of queerness in the story too.
I get particularly prickly about this topic because "ace and aro people are totally welcome in LGBT spaces as long as they’re also a real LGBT identity too" is an actual real thing exclusionists said when they were trying to push aspec people out of the queer community. I had people tell me this, both online and to my face in IRL queer spaces, verbatim, and I just have no patience for this stuff anymore. I want fellow queer people to stop throwing aces and aros under the bus by treating aspec stories as only conditionally queer, as if our perspectives are insufficient in and of themselves, only meaningful as long as we can tack on some proof of additional True Queerness that makes it count.
(Conversely, I also do think aspec fandomers need to reject the "noooo of course these guys aren’t gay (ew) they just have a bond that transcends attraction :)" thing as good aspec rep; if a story is trying to hide behind aspec people in order to avoid engaging with queerness, that is not something to celebrate. I know we in the ace and aro communities are starved to have literally any stories about people like us out there, but a story that is doing that is not interested in treating ace/aro/non-normative relationships as textually queer, either, and we will not benefit from it. The not-throwing-fellow-queer-people-under-the-bus thing goes both ways, and we will all be better off for it. But we really need people to be open to engaging in discussions about this without immediately jumping to the assumption that a text not canonicalizing a gay romance is always a choice rooted in homophobia. Sometimes the author has reasons for it that include wanting to tell a different type of queer story.)
Inevitably, I’m sure people will disagree about story intent and where a story comes down on avoiding vs engaging with queerness (hell, somehow there are still people who insist that TSHD is queerbaiting despite using their eyes and brains to read it). But I would much rather have the conversation be about examining the text itself, and the mechanics of effectual storytelling, than about whether ace and aro stories get to count as "really" queer or not.
I really like the ways that both of these manga engage with ace and aro queerness, not just as a matter of individual identity, but as an overall philosophy. Both of these series treat non-romantic relationships as just as meaningful as romantic ones, and intentionally choose to center types of love that don’t fit into standard platonic vs romantic or friends vs lovers dichotomies, while also remaining very, undeniably, queer. That’s really special to me. It’s so rare to find any piece of media that handles the topic of aspec characters and frameworks earnestly, as inherently valuable, and with such nuance and care. Sometimes I can’t believe these series exist, and are as well-written as they are.
Anyway, go read The Summer Hikaru Died and Kemutai Hanashi. And then maybe go pester publishers to finally license Kemuhana in English so I can purchase physical copies of it. Please. For me. For Pride Month.
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