jjk fandom, media literacy, and lgbtq yes i’ll beat this rotting horse
with the trailer of season 3 coming out, i went to the jjk fandom wiki to see all the manga characters anime designs. but i got to kirara’s page and clocked that they state kirara’s gender as male. ik that this was a problem way before the season 3 trailer but i’m kinda shocked after all these years people still call kirara a boy. its quite literally in your face that she’s trans with gege drawing her pre-transition and also hakari stating that he’s not into dudes. i think the reason for this issue with some people not understanding that she’s trans is due to “ambiguity”, tiktok readers, and transphobes. in the manga they don’t explicitly state that she’s trans which is a problem for jjk (tiktok) readers since they won’t even form a deeper thought while reading/watching jjk. but the fact of kirara’s transness is so surface level and obvious is what really gets me concerned and annoyed with these readers since they don’t even bother to pay attention. which leads into the next point about transphobic shonen readers (mostly teenage boys who watch or read shonen for the hype) they can’t possibly fathom that their battle shonen has lgbtq characters in it so they purposely ignore the subcontext of kiara’s and other lgbtq shonen characters (like alluka, uraume, all of one piece’s lgbtq cast, etc.) to fit their narrative of heteronormativity. this is a wider problem with the anime community with dudebros bringing their homophobic rhetoric into animanga with subtextual or straight up queer in nature and become uncomfortable and therefore purposely misinterpret the text to disregard and belittle the inherently queer characters. but anyways that’s it
