Mary, 25, she/they, bi :) pro queer & pro trans!! i block terfs and blank blogs on sight, and i use the queue with reckless abandon šš DM me for my nsfw sideblog
it's always ethical to kidnap an outdoor cat and make them an indoor cat. shithead owner will just assume a car or coyote got them. outdoor cats are bad for the environment, local wildlife and themselves. the only one that benefits from an outdoor cat is the lazy piece of shit owner that doesn't want to actually look after their cat. give that outdoor cat a better life, a longer life.
when i was a tiny baby queer (aka a 24-year-old), i went to my first pride festival probably three months after i kicked ex-gay therapy to the curb and came out to my parents. being the people they are, my parents came with me. they werenāt really sure about this whole gay thing, but they loved me and wanted me to be safe and happy and wanted to be involved in what was important to me, so they came along. (i also think my mother still might have thought i might get drugged or murdered or beaten by a protester of which there were plenty.)
anyway i wanted a memento of my first pride, you know, and this one vendor was selling keyrings, and i liked it, so i bought one. do you remember those italian charm bracelets that were all the rage like 10-15 years ago? it was a keychain like that, and it had a rainbow rooster, a rainbow cat, and then just a rainbow, and so I bought it.
i run into my mom a couple of vendors over and she goes oh you bought something? whatād you get? so i showed her, and i was like,Ā āIām not sure why itās a rooster and a cat. Seems kind of random. But I liked the rainbows.ā
and my mom, who was some form of ministerās wife for most of my childhood and teenagerhood, stares at me like she thinks iām joking.
āWhat?ā i say.
āā¦itās a cock and a pussy, Jules,ā she says flatly, and that is the story of how i died at the age of 24 while attending my first pride festival.
it's always ethical to kidnap an outdoor cat and make them an indoor cat. shithead owner will just assume a car or coyote got them. outdoor cats are bad for the environment, local wildlife and themselves. the only one that benefits from an outdoor cat is the lazy piece of shit owner that doesn't want to actually look after their cat. give that outdoor cat a better life, a longer life.
HOLY SHIT GUYS, I WAS INSPIRED BY THIS POST TO TRY MAKE THE SONG AND YOU WOULD NOT BELIEVE THE SCREAM I SCRUMPT WHEN I DRAGGED THE TRAINING AUDIO OVER THE BACKING TRACK AND IT LINED UP PERFECTLY
I am so utterly fascinated by āSakiā, the 18-year-running mahjong manga in which you, the reader, become gradually, frog-boilingly aware (over the course of nearly two decadesā worth of mahjong tournaments) that none of these girls are wearing underwear and most of their boobs are slowly expanding.
I need you to understand that I have, like, an anthropological level fascination with this comic. From the perspective of someone who is also a comic artist and writer, two things delight me about it:
the fact that I understand completely how an artist gets from āthe fans can have a little hint of skirted asscheekā to āthe pussy is completely out on center pageā over the course of 18 years; and
the way in which the pussy being out is treated by the characters and diegesis as being utterly unremarkable.
Okay. Point 1. The frog-boiling.
Let me put this in perspective for you. There was already a meme about how the characters in āSakiā donāt wear underwear when I was in middle school. I am thirty now. Okay? And itās still going.
In the time since, this has stopped being a joke. It is now indisputable canon. This is not because anyone outright says it at any point. Itās because the underwear ran out of places to hide. Iām obsessed with this thought: somewhere in the over 20 volumes of āSakiā, there is a panel in which underwear was objectively deconfirmed. And it would be so hard to figure out where that panel actually is. Maybe the artist didnāt even realize it when she drew it! The frog? Boiling!!
And of course there is also the breast expansion. I donāt know how to put a spin on this. They are just expanding. Like, this happens a lot with artists: you define a character as being, in your mind, āthe one with the big boobsā, and over the years you emphasize that trait further and further so that the signal doesnāt get lost in the noise. Itās just that normallyāin like a wildly popular manga series about mahjong published by literally Square Enix, for exampleānormally there would be a point at which the boobs stopped getting bigger. Like, an editor would step in or something. Or you would get to the point where you cannot draw the character in the same panel as her mahjong tiles without her breasts spilling over the tiles, and youād go, āWell, this is now untenable.ā
That did not happen. There is no ceiling. The frog is soup.
Point 2. The complete and utter mundanity of all of this.
Itās like this, okay: thereās no shortage of trashy ecchi manga out there. Thereās a million other comics doing wildly bawdier things with wildly more improbable bishoujos.
The vibe with āSakiā is different.
Itās hard to explain this, but it feels like the world of the comic is fundamentally uninterested in the fanservice happening on the page. I cannot describe it as āleeringā, because I cannot conceive of a person in the story from whose point of view one would leer. I think the artist is probably into itāI canāt imagine anyone is making her do thisābut āSakiā the comic has no opinion on the matter.
There are essentially no male characters in āSakiā. Like, there was one guy? Kind of? At the very beginning? But he is gone now. They put him back in the toybox. He does not exist. It appears to be some level of canonical that in the world of āSakiā, almost all humans are women. Those women are sometimes romantically into each other. According to comments the artist has made on Twitter (which I cannot source), they have lesbian baby technology, so itās no problem. Itās so much not a problem that the story is about mahjong, instead of any of that.
So, like, the fiction here appears to be this: this is the, like, meta-narrative of the fanservice of āSakiā, right: itās just normal that they donāt wear underwear and their boobs are arbitrarily big. Itās been normal. It was normal before the story of the manga began. Itās just how things are. Nobody bats an eye about it, and if they do, itās in sort of a lesbian kind of way so like whatās the problem, we love lesbians here. This is literally normal for girls.
The fanservice simply diffuses into this all-encompassing aura of disembodied, ambient sluttiness. The framing of the panels demands you acknowledge it, and the story demands you already be over it, because itās mahjong time now, and weāre playing mahjong.
Do you get??? why Iām so fascinated??? Are you not a little enraptured???
Anyway, I have no idea how to end this weird post. I guess the conclusion is that women stay winning????
I have so many questions... How does one SUSPECT a manga character isn't wearing underwear? Like, sure, boobs are front and center amd you can see them get bigger panel by panel but how does this work for panties? Are there just that many upskirt shots?
Also how do you keep a manga about Mahjong going for 18 years, what??
breast development seems to be the only thing that anyone even knows our HRT does, and even then they don't seem to process that they are... you know, breasts?
I'm reminded of the trans woman who protested the state's refusal to change her gender marker by taking off her top and being arrested for it. our breasts are as real or as fake as they need them to be to harm us. whichever is most rhetorically convenient in the given moment