disclaimer: hopefully no one will see this. if someone does see this, i am not transphobic. headcanons are one of life’s greatest joys. i love yapping and if someone saw this, i would love a long talk, even with my dissenters! buttt!! i’m not saying this to start shit, so if anyone wants beef, you can get blocked 🥴🙏🏾
started thinking about this recently after my new-to-this-character, surface-level, heuristic stereotyping wore off: canon!zanka definitely ain’t real feminized ‘cause the internet would’ve CRUCIFIED a girl who ran away from her traditional elite nuclear family to join a band of grungy, working class misfits and didn’t become the best to ever do it offscreen in three short ass years. and so would the in-universe society of gachiakuta, which, as we see through stories like Noerde and Amo’s, does retain some real-world issues of sexism.
the lowkey DUMB jokes we already get now would be littered with the B word, the thirsty caricature art would be disgustingly fetishized, and the discussions around janka would look even fucking crazier and more racist than they already do. y’all think they bitch Japanese men unnecessarily? that’s actually true, too. but a Japanese WOMAN can’t even BREATHE around Western audiences before she’s a provocative brat-tamer.
Kyouka skates by because she isn’t actually super counterculture, especially in anime. In the west, her version of the mysterious villain relative archetype is typically given to older female characters, because (occasionally miserable and/or gross, probably ugly) childless (cat) older lady is storytelling shorthand for counterculture meaning evil somehow?, but it’s a familiar one. female Zanka’s birth family would be all SOME people could think about, and not in a “y’all are interesting lemme poke around in your psyche” way. all around sickening work😭🙏🏾
now i’m trying to decide what to with my wrong-ass fic. ugh. i, like millions of others, frequently suffer from thinking you know. you don’t know. it hasn’t been long enough for you to know.
anyway how do we feel about “zanka’s not that feminine or he’d experience misogyny under current cultural interpretations of media” as a take guys?
shameless self-promo of both:
the wrong-ass fic, which is an easy read, and actually good in most other ways: https://archiveofourown.org/works/77709586
and the beautiful lovely fic that gave me this realization, wherein i poke around in goka and zanka nijiku’s psyches: https://archiveofourown.org/works/78293696