#zombie 6

[wingedzombiealpaca]

little redraw of a scene <3

[apolloendymion]

One thing I noticed about ZLS is that Lily never uses personal pronouns -- she only uses her name. At first I thought this was just a cutesy kid quirk, like Elmo speaking in the third person, but after watching her backstory episode, I think there's a bit more to it.

If you didn't know, Japanese personal pronouns are more customizable than ours. Like their honorifics, there are lots of them, but only a few see wide usage in the modern mainstream. There are two common pronouns used by young boys (boku for little kids/kiddy types and ore for teens/tough guys), but young girls only use watashi, the "standard" pronoun. Adult men will generally switch to watashi as an adult, since boku and ore aren't acceptable in a professional setting (although in anime, they'll usually use ore). If I were Lily, a character who wants nothing more than to be seen as cute and childlike, I'd be kinda pissed that my only pronoun option was the polite adult one! Instead of switching to watashi, which would be seen as a step towards maturity for a dmab person, she refused pronouns entirely.

It also stuck out to me that her dad only used her deadname. It seems to me that he saw Lily Hoshikawa as her stage persona, and he clearly viewed her transition as a phase she'd grow out of. I think Lily is saying her name at every opportunity as a way of insisting that her name is Lily, and as a way of explicitly gendering herself, rather than using gender-neutral watashi.

I'm not a native speaker, so please correct me if I'm getting something wrong.

[spacespheal]

Franchouchou pokémon sprites

[ash-lyne]

Lily renders from zombielandsaga.com

[grindhousecellar]

[80smovies]

Zombie 6 Monster Hunter / Horrible / Absurd / Antropophagus 2 / Rosso sangue (1981)