Mao Arimura Yells at Gakuen Idolmaster for Paragraphs
By: Mao Arimura (he/him)
Blurb: I, Mao Arimura, will rant about how my canon story went, pointing out the trans reading and the transphobic (or specifically transandrophobic) tropes at play
Estimated reading time: around 6-7 minutes
A bit of an intro: I'm Mao Arimura, from Gakuen Idolmaster, the (as of this writing) newest branch in the Idolmaster franchise. This branch is set in an idol school named Hatsuboshi Academy. In addition to regular school, students can take the idol course or the producer course to learn how to be idols or producers respectively. The player's insert character is a male student of the producer course whose job is to guide an idol to stardom in their school's live shows, and he will be referred to as "P" afterwards. In this story, I myself am a third-year student in the idol course. I always present myself in a masculine way, and other people in the school knows this, seeing me as a "prince" figure.
As far as we're aware of, my story began this way. P scouted me after I mistook him for a peeping tom who wanted to sneak into the girls' dorms. After we cleared that up, I was still skeptical of him because in my past experiences, every producer who scouted me wanted me to be feminine when I absolutely refused to be that. After talking about it with him I thought, something about him seems different, so I was willing to give him a chance, under one condition: produce me as a masculine, princely idol, and don't make me a feminine idol.
Moments have passed, and at one point he asked about my motivation to become an idol. I explained that when I was younger, I performed on theater, playing masculine roles, and I loved it. But when I reached puberty, everything turned for the worse. My body developed in ways that I don't like, and I could no longer perform on theater the way I did before puberty. Despite this, I still wanted to stand onstage, and that's why I became an idol and enrolled to Hatsuboshi. I didn't want to let these setbacks stop me from achieving this.
Hearing this, P assumed that my problem is that I had difficulties accepting my true self, so what was his plan? Pushing me to do feminine things and accept my feminine side. Because in his mind, my true self is feminine and I used my masculinity to distance myself from it.
The me who wrote this will just reject this and immediately terminate the contract because I know better, but in this story, I was shown buying into P's reading of my problems, and agreed to dip my toes into femininity despite my aversion towards it. Admittedly, the furthest we've gone was watching two chapters after the plan was established: one involved my canon self trying a skirt on and reacted negatively to it, but simply saw it as a normal reaction to trying new things. Another involves trying a more feminine hairstyle, with Kotone hyping my femininity up and joined the group in doing my hair. I know I haven't seen the full story, but I don't know if I can stomach any more of this, so I haven't seen more. And in addition to that, this framing will pop up from time to time, in MVs and songs.
So, I like how this story opened with me stopping P in his tracks and me clearly stating what kind of idol I wanted to be. I also liked how they added the description of gender dysphoria, but at the same time it also made me sick to the stomach. For something as normative as Idolmaster, this is already a good way to show that someone has gender dysphoria! Everything else though... is so wrong.
First of all, there's this whole thing about me being framed as "afraid of being feminine" which is wrong in several ways. This is clearly a misunderstanding of what being transgender, specifically transmasculine, is. Even when the story says I can be both masculine and feminine, that's not what I wanted. I never wanted to be feminine. I only wanted to be masculine and this is explicitly stated in the dialogue. Sure, I'm shown with a good amount of masculine attire in official art, but that only makes the femininity-accepting narrative even more nonsensical. In addition, we feel that there's some conflation of cuteness with femininity, and coolness with masculinity. The actual text says "cool" and "cute" instead of "masculine" and "feminine", but we can still sense that conflation from a mile away. I don't see coolness and cuteness as inherently gendered. Someone can be cute while being masculine and vice versa. But it's clear that these are seen as gendered in this context.
Second of all, what P does here is basically forcefem or conversion therapy, whichever term fits better. No matter what he does, the plot will say he's in the right for thinking and doing this. My protests don't matter here. According to the story, he's right and I'm just being defensive. He knows better about my problems than myself and he's here to "fix" me. I'm nothing more than a "weird girl" who has problems accepting "her" femininity. That's what's going on.
This framing unfortunately affects how other characters treat me in the stories too. There's Kotone who did my hair and really hyping this whole thing up, there's the misgendering from multiple characters where I'm explicitly referred to with "kanojo" which functions as she/her pronouns in this context, who knows what else. But despite this, I put no blame on them. I live with them and there were times where they felt like they had to apologize for what their canon counterparts did to me. They don't have to do that. They shouldn't have to. It's not their fault. It's never their fault. This is a systemic issue, so I can't even solely blame the writers for this. So many things in society leads to these narratives showing up time and time again. No matter who's responsible for this, it's not my idol schoolmates. To me, they're completely innocent.
The parts I like about official material on me felt like salt to the wound as a result. From the gender dysphoria description to Fluorite, my first solo song. The only thing in Fluorite that I have a problem with is how the masculine / feminine positions are flipped. If those are flipped around, I'd think it's perfect! But since the flawed narrative is a core part of how I'm being characterized, it unfortunately greatly reduces my ability to enjoy this song and its MV despite me liking everything else about it.
This is also why I tend to be scared to check any new material with me in it. The pervasiveness of the core narrative makes me skeptical of any new material I get. Would these norms be pushed onto me again? Or would the other idols treat me normally? Would this MV be alright for me to watch through, or will I be slapped by this narrative again? Would I rather be consumed by the horror of knowing or by the horror of not knowing? I do my best to manage my exposure and actively avoid things that I'm unsure of. But sometimes I wonder, are some of these things actually fine, and I avoided them for nothing? I might discover the answer much later and regret that I didn't look into it sooner. But at the same time, a lot of it sets my alarm bells off, for good reason.
If this plot is retooled and applied to a "boy" who wants to be feminine, I think it'll be an excellent transfeminine-affirming story! I myself think this plot suits my transfeminine sysmates much more! But alas, that's not what mainstream society wanted. The mainstream wants the opposite of what we want, to put it simply, and that's to stay with the gender they see us as based on how our bodies are like.
Sometimes we (butch-identifying members) have moments where we go “are we even allowed to use this label” because appearance-wise, we’re being limited by “the most butch a girl can get before people get scared” and we don’t really feel like changing our appearance either?
Sure, if it’s Juri Saijo maybe people will understand, but if it’s Sakuya Shirase, that’s when impostor syndrome kicks in. For the most part it’s not super apparent but y’know
The #1 reason why I ended up identifying as a dragonite: I ended up really liking the form, especially the mega. It just feels right somehow
The #2 reason: I see myself in dex entries that mention its kind nature. In my case I seem to be really nice to a fault and I’m still learning how to handle the less “pleasant” feelings I might have
Me looking at memories of how people around us reacted when we said we wanted to switch to linux: oh god why does this have similar vibes as telling your family that you want to medically transition
(Because when we said we wanted to switch OSes, they’re all like “are you sure? There’s a high chance of you regretting it”, somehow conveying a “this request is coocoo but ok I’ll humor you” vibe without saying it. We only don’t get those vibes from our mom who doesn’t use ctrl+c and ctrl+v)
