Aye, and Gomorrah

On rude doujinshi.

“Poets and story-tellers are guilty of making the gravest misstatements when they tell us that wicked men are often happy, and the good miserable; and that injustice is profitable when undetected, but that justice is a man’s own loss and another’s gain — these things we shall forbid them to utter, and command them to sing and say the opposite.”  (1)

From the looks of Genshiken’s chapter 123, Kio Shimoku is doing his best to have the club-as-fujoshi-social re-assemble after the great harem crash and get back to being productive. Unfortunately, Kio Shimoku has very little idea what actually goes on within fujoshi socials, so he’s going to have to wing it a bit.

One distraction can be had in Kuchiki attempting to pillage the sacred Genshiken doujin collection; note that Ogiue takes her responsibilities serious enough, at least against Kuchiki, to complain about him raiding the male-gaze Kujibiki Unbalance stash. Why she should even care is beyond me. Perhaps they are in trust from past members, like Sasahara or are considered to be liquidate-able collectors works that might fund future group excursions. No more box ’em, trash ’em and then (ooops!) torch ’em when the ciggie butt goes awry, (pace Saki).

The other doujinshi-ish note, according to the preview at Ogiue Maniax [https://ogiuemaniax.wordpress.com/2016/05/01/reading-is-fundamental-genshiken-ii-chapter-123/] is Hato’s now revised first effort. Apparently it is hardcore yaoi and raw enough to give even Yoshitake pause. Whether it is an original character story or a parody of an existing property is yet unknown. If one wanted to read too much into this, one could speculate that the Hato continuum has been levelled up from “in denial” and “fantasy is fantasy” to “oh yes, can I have another?” (2)

Hato-as-chan is still aiming for %100 rotten-girl fujoshi status and identity within the club-verse but the base unit is now a “would consider IRL male:male desire” fudanshi, even if a discriminating “it’s only him” one. The Hato continuum can be fully ascribed as “queer” rather than “just visiting”, if there was any room for deniability before. (3)

Making lewd BL doujinshi is now the primary task of the fujoshi Genshiken – even if they lean on the talents of a trans-fujoshi to crank up their power level. While this might leave them open to the charge that their fandom is far more monolithic and limited than the male-interest fanning of the earlier guy-Genshiken, it must be noted that rude doujin over-production was and remains the most outwardly visible power of Japanese female fans.

No women fans, no Comiket.

Run the numbers, check the historical attendance and participation figures. You might turn up your nose at the product, but you would need MKULTRA level brainwashing to scrub out the historical fact of their presence and influence within the larger Japanese fandom over the last 20+ years. While Maiden Road might not yet be as big as Akiba, it is still one heck of a valuable commercial market. The women don’t make a lot of fuss, they just do the work, show up and vote with their wallets and their enthusiasms.

Yet the female fandom remains opaque to snoopy guys (and uninitiated women); at least those of us who stop short of Hato’s commitment to embedded reporting. At the risk of committing gender essentialism, a clueless guy might listen to western slash-y fen podcasts on any number of shippable fandoms to get some feel for the social vibe. Be warned; the learning curve is steep and the terminology is maddeningly contextual, serving as both shared affective exchange and shibboleth to the uninitiated. Do Japanese fujoshi post fannish podcasts? If they do, Kio Shimoku should get out the headphones, steel himself for hours of shipping/ pairing-talk and keep the notebook handy. The alternative is to simply recycle five or six existing thin manga/ anime portrayals of fujoshi clubs in perpetuity. And one study by Galbraith.

Fujoshi Rumi, 801-chan, Princess Jellyfish, the rotten girl arc in Girl Saurus X, and one or two others. Two or three young women in a casual fannish friendship doesn’t cut it. We need pure examples of fictional yaoi enthusiast girls’ clubs and there are not that many of them out there. If you have any other candidates, please leave a note in the comment section, I’ve been having very little luck finding a good sampling of examples and it has stalled a major essay on this issue.

Back at the Genshiken, it is going to be all yaoi doujin time all the time, again. True to the theory-moe roots of the Genshiken as a special club for extreme enthusiasms, the interest remains “libidinized” and highly committed to “secondary production” and/or the appropriation of commercial content by the fans and the work of transforming it by adding the missing secret ingredient: SCHMEXY!

The manken and anime clubs do not (overtly) do this. If individual members are too public in their ecchi or even hentai enthusiasms, past practice at fictional-Tama-Art-University was to ease them out and point them toward the pit of pervy-ness that lay beyond the Genshiken club room door. The propensity of otaku and rotten-girl fans to start monologuing about lewd cartoons was always one of the main reasons why otaku and fujoshi were considered distasteful to proper Japanese society. Amateur pr0n enthusiasts who had nothing but their weird fetish stories to talk about.

The Genshiken was and remains a light fictionalised restatement of Dr. Saito Tamaki‘s views on otaku fandom: libidinized enjoyment and appropriative secondary production being the two most accessible components of his schema. In many ways, the current Genshiken also suffers from a shared original sin with Dr. Tamaki’s analysis, in that it gets mighty thin when it turns to female libidinised fannish enthusiasm.

All that Dr. Tamaki could venture was a vague asymmetry of interest in the thematics of the raunchy materials – the girls to be more interested in something involving inter-character dynamics, while the guys to be more interested in T&A and quick nasty sex. There was also his diversion into shota and robo-shota, following on his fascination with the outsider artist Darger which later post-lacanian essayists, especially female ones, conflated into crossdressing and otokonoko genres.

Finding Tamaki-sensei’s seal imprint on the poured cement foundations of the Genshiken does not dismiss the enterprise. If anything, it raises the stakes to a level of theoretical discourse that might even threaten the happy unfolding of a nice sweet tale of fan-hijinks, friendship and romance. Kio Shimoku must be praised for keeping the god on the wires hidden up in the rafters. (even if Hato remains the virtual-lesbian fujoshi and Risa the shotacon threatens to drop in) The audacity of his project remains: Tamaki’s introduction of This is what I fap to shocked the critical discourse surrounding otaku studies for almost a decade. Azuma’s database remains an attempt to de-sexualize the sex-laden praxis of fandom. The complaints of the Ota-king echo a lament for the eclipse of red-blooded shonen action-adventure (no sex, no relationship garbage) primacy. Only Eji, with his relentless critique of the mechanics of the genre’s accommodation to statist and capitalist power escapes Tamaki’s geas.

As well, few feminist theorists of CJVC escape the questions that he tentatively posed; if anything they have spent the better part of the last decade and a half mapping the nature of the asymmetric interest that female fans have in their supported and self-created libidinised content. Tamaki-sensei wisely admitted that he had very little idea about the details; his venturing was tentative and incomplete, even as it was subject to the conceptual flaws in Freudian-Lacanian schemas surrounding the formation of female subjectivity. What Tamaki-sensei never followed up, what still is glossed over with simplistic notions of “avoiding masculinity‘ and “herbivore men” is how supposedly asymmetric interests spilled over into not only queer camps, but into the shadow-queer of straight readers’ imaginations.

Even if only to recoil from them and so re-affirm our norms, we straight boys (and girls) share in the odd habit of considering and/or making up reflections and shadows of the “queer”. At very least we are surprisingly prone to doing a bit of tourism when they show up in odd little comics that pander to our imaginations. Yo! My brothers (and sisters), these queer don’t exist, except as fictions that play out behind our eyeballs and between our ears. If anything that looks like them does, it is because some of us went off the reservation and re-created them. Google the weird whole-body costumed cross-players called “dollers“. All of these odd little “queer” are as ‘real’ as vampire-aspiring goths. This just cranks the rage factor among their detractors. Dammit you perverts aren’t even real perverts! You are fake-poser pervert perverts! (pervert!). The Japanese meanwhile will call it “asobi” and remain as indifferent to it as to sail-boarding maniacs, as long as you don’t disturb your neighbours.

It’s a hobby. (…did I mention pervert?)

Meanwhile, back at the clubroom, the Genshiken fujoshi are tasked with the project of illuminating the variety and depth of fujoshi interest in devising fake -ahem-, fictional, repurposed, shadows and reflections of male same-sex desire, so that the general readership can peek in and determine if this is fun or wrong or comprehensible or whatever. We even get an undercover guide; too bad that Hato also gets used as a smoke-screen when the background material runs a bit thin. We still need the Hatos though, unless we will settle for Joshiraku and endless chapters of cute girls doing cute (boring!) things.

Hooray! She brought cakee!

We still need a bit more than one jointly drawn Ogiue-Hato smut doujin.

Some token cosplay might later round out the media mix. If Risa Yoshitake pops up, we will get a highlighted schism between shota-interested fujoshi and shota-eschewing fujoshi. Missing will be plastic models, Visual Novels, Otome games, character goods, voice actor fixations and radio show/ drama CD bonus content, autograph-hunting, mangaka signings, vidding/ niconico mashups, blogging, forum posting, reviewing, criticism or pirating.

Later, a digression: Since the earliest days of Western Star Trek K/S Slash, the fen have practiced the secret, occult rituals of vidding. To be honest, I never really sought any out. Then lookie what falls into my clutches. Sure it looks like an AMV (fan-created Anime Music Video) Yup; a harmless, humorous juxtaposition of music and video clip. Pay it no mind. And I am positive that Japanese fujoshi would never never do anything like this:

This is fannish secondary production: this is your mind on fannish secondary production.

Perhaps there will at least be some token, good-example over-spending on approved and licensed fan products.

No yuri though! (or full-page floral background portraits!) (4)

It still remains a serious charge that Kio Shimoku’s young fujoshi do less serious obsessive fan-age than their male precessors, or even Watashi ga Motenai no wa Dō Kangaetemo Omaera ga Warui(!)‘s anti-social (anti-) heroine Tomoko Kuroki. She is so far gone that she will cluelessly play with an electric “magic wand” massager while fanning out alone in her room. Try to imagine any of the Genshiken rotten girls dropped into a Kuroki doujin-reading or otome-game-consuming mis-en-scene. You have to admit that Kuroki’s despair-laden fan-power level is far above any of the Genshiken fujoshi. And what’s with the drama CDs that supposedly have bishie guy voice actors yelling insults at the listener? (?!?) They sell those?

“Who am I to disagree…”

If the Genshiken is to be, at least in the near future all about lewd BL doujins, we should return to the question of secondary production/ appropriative parody/ transformative work that is derived from the Genshiken franchise, both manga and anime. Kio Shimoku made a point of showing Ogiue transfixed with Hato’s take on her published characters. Added to his secondary output; Kujibiki Unbalance, Pretty Ramen Angel, the Project G (5) curated pseudo-doujin, the anime’s second season episode 5 yoai howler and his not-a-sequel Spotted Flower and it becomes glaringly obvious that Kio Shimoku values, if not solicits fannish takes on his oeuvre. The only problem is that he makes so much of it himself as to over-awe would-be parodists with his output!

However, if he has been holding off adding synthetic fan-production to Nidaime, in hopes of a flood of authentic independent production, he has waited far too long. The original Genshiken was loaded with chapter extra glimpses at Unbalance and the conjured-up club-works surrounding it. These lent a look and feel to his introduction to the fandom. Time to get editor-san at Afternoon Magazine to hire a yaoi/ otokonoko genre veteran like Suemitsu Dicca (find your own samples (6) ) and start dropping in some examples of synthetic Hato-drawn filth.

A few years ago, Genshiken-themed doujins were in short supply – at least to us thieving, leeching outlanders. Say what you will about the long Madarame harem arc; it at least seems to have spurred some renewed interest in secondary production surrounding the Genshiken and the scanlation and dissemination of such products around the world. These are not to be found on the usual grey aggregator sites. No Manga-[insert random animal name] here; if you want pr0nish Genshiken wares, be prepared to harden your browser and anti-virus software and prepare your heart.

Opera Developer Edition comes with a built-in VPN and adblocker. Adblock Plus and incognito mode won’t hurt either. A bit of Google-fu with the terms Genshiken, hentai and doujin should reward the curious with an impressive pile of dubious tributes to Kio Shimoku’s creation. It is worth noting that similar searches done even two years ago yielded up far less in the way of results and involved a lot more obscure nonsense to get at them.

Rejoice! There is no longer any shortage of amateur Genshiken pr0ny cartoons on the interwebz.

What they concern themselves with is in some ways even more fascinating than the naughty pictures.

At this point this essay breaks down.

The proper way to approach this would be to pick the biggest site, whomp up a spreadsheet and plow through every single instance of the 211 smutty doujins listed. Many are duplicates and/or scanlations into different languages. Many are identified by the Comiket number at which they were released, so these could be ordered by proper release dates. Done that way, I could at least offer percentages and sample sizes about all manner of pairings, sexualities imputed thereby, diffusion through different language markets, yadda yadda yadda.

Maybe later…

In the meantime, it must be noted that there appears to be no sudden spike in source output from 2012 to 2016. Genshiken is well-known, but has never been a barn-burner parody property. Only one or two titles per year seem to make it to a table at Comiket. Winter 2015’s Comiket catalog listed one work; with Hato as an Adult Video star but it was only on sale for one day. Anyone going to Tokyo can spend hours in Mandrake trying to find it (or reg up with Comiket, use the online catalog if it is still up, search out the listing, follow the link to the blog page of the circle and send off some horribly machine-translated email. Good Luck Mr Phelps.)

Or we could try to find some online Japanese sales:

げんしけん (Genshiken)

同人誌 or 同人 (doujinshi or doujin)

パロディー (parody)

Searching   げんしけん 同人 パロディー

…yields up such wonders as http://doujin-labo.com/げんしけん/
“free erotic doujins for your smartphone reading!”

Another site:
http://d-upp.com/%E3%81%92%E3%82%93%E3%81%97%E3%81%91%E3%82%93/

…yields a few older already extant titles. The machine-translated reviews are opaque:

“I only Deremashimashi soup duct images produced in Tochigi fleshy grade best Ribusaimega prime My Girlfriend’s a Geek to place your Chatcha system ice milk of Harigane banana at the top and bottom and the back of the mouth ($ 0.00 Smile) of Dakudaku please !! “

That sounds dirty. Best to save this for advanced research.

Yet without any systematic approach, how can anyone make sense of all this, beyond noting that we have a fine pile of smut available?

Here are a few superficial observations; based on a scattered sampling of the material and referencing an earlier survey of the material some two years prior; this is what Genshiken fans who have sufficient drawing chops to make a doujin wanted to see their fave characters do.

The Madarame harem arc has had a noticeable effect on the subject matter if not the available volume of material. Newer efforts consider the notion of Madarame finding hot love with Angela, Sue and of course, Hato. First generation efforts were limited to Saki or all the girls if a rapey orgy was set up.

Keiko is glaringly absent; she just doesn’t make for good fantasy scenarios. Newer efforts are also Kuchiki-free. One back-cover illustration even highlights this with a grumpy “Hey what about me?” cameo.

The Harem effect is contagious. One of the funnier efforts have Yoshitake, Yajima and younger sister Risa sneaking into Hato’s apartment and jumping him when he returns. Rika even does a Lupin III clothes-off-dive at Hato.

One artist spends a lot of time and effort answering the question “How would Madarame and Hato even have sex?”. Thirty some pages are devoted to Madarame and Hato-with-wig-on going mechanically through the process of inserting Mada into Hato-chan. Then the entire sequence is repeated for 30 more pages with Madarame and Hato-without-wig. There is no extreme fetish-play, both puppets are respectfully enthusiastic about the other and the entire romp is only a bit naughtier than Keith Harring wallpaper.

The impulse seems to be somewhat along the lines of “You couldn’t imagine those two doing it? Here’s what it would look like!” I suspect the artist is informed by gay male light erotica. Just so you don’t miss the point, important phases of the procedure are given near-duplicate panels (which later repeat minus wig) so that all curiosity is sated. This reminds one of the pose-books sold to aspiring artists; perhaps it is intended as a fanfic writers’ reference?

Ok, that’s what it could look like. (Btw; an image search plugin will do wonders if you feel compelled to hunt this crap down. Go nutz!)

There are also two other more conventional Mada x Hato-as-chan works available if a too clinical approach is not enough. Ratings: enthusiastic prosaic male:male. With all the steam, one would think there would be much more MadaHato and/or HatoMada but I can find only three examples and the last of these occurs as part of a “try every route” (except Keiko) effort.

This is surprising. One would think the HatoMadaHato pairing would spur the legions of creative fujoshi to fill in what “should have happened”. Perhaps the aggregator sites don’t bother hunting these down. At this point, one could easily scour Tumblr space and put together more pages of cutesy, mawkish Mada & Hato making longing glances at each other than contained in the extant doujins on the subject. Get someone who knows Japanese to make a cover “Western rotten fans love Hato and Mada picture book” and bemuse the Japanese fandom at the next comiket.

Plot is never a big component of pr0n. When the plots are not burlesque or tender, they go off into fetishized violence and rapey manipulation. A first-generation trilogy has Saki blackmailed by an appropriately disgusting Haraguchi into degrading sex, which he videos for the enjoyment of the First President. The video gets loose onto the net and Kousaka and then Saki go psycho with big kitchen knives and kill both miscreants and then their friends before finally killing each other over a three-volume release.

In a lighter story, the “Angela misses her plane so she heads to Madarame’s apartment” doujin is sweet, even as she enthusiastically takes him. The finger sucking foreplay is inventively depicted and a nice touch. Angela is of course drawn as athletic and voluptuous, even as the whole romp is rendered in messy “na-me” quality sketching.

The previously noted Ogiue-got-uked doujin has a follow-up. How many times can Sas peg her? The buildup is well done and Sas even brings over cakee before they retreat to the bedroom. Public health protocols are followed. The circle appears to have given it a rest after this encore.

One Mada x Sue effort has Sue showing up soaking wet in a rainstorm at Mada’s door. Sue changes into a big Mada dress shirt. Hato knocks on the door so Mada hides Sue by spooning with her under a blanket and pretending to be asleep. Hato lets himself in but then leaves. Excited Mada and Sue go at it. Hato-chan returns.

From the earlier days of the Genshiken, a few SasMada efforts survive, They follow-up on Ogiue’s original speculations in the manga and avoid the scenario in the anime fantasy sequence.

Then there is Ohno. Lots of Ohno. Ohno and Tanaka. Ohno pr0ny girl on girl action, Ohno cosplay fucking, Ohno getting gangbanged, Ohno with mammalian over-expansion, Ohno leading Ogiue, Saki and even an early Keiko into a degrading life of sluttery and probably much more and much worse but I gave up at this point because the stuff is too nasty and mean-spirited.

So far nothing has made it over to these heathen shores that might pass as a really feelthy example of how Hato would draw a HatoMada bondage fest. The few available attempts are vanilla and light-hearted. Both parties’ guy bits are invariably ghosted-out. Both Hato’s and Mada’s junk spend most of their time phasing into an alternate space-time continuum.

This brings up an odd characteristic of doujins in general. The boy-girl stuff revels in big manly-man meat displays, with only the slimmest, token pixelation, black bars or other concessions to censorship. There is probably more cartoon sausage in straight pr0ny doujins than in BL or even hard gay pr0n – another reason why I favor yuri.

I find the entire “I am supposed to identify with the symbolic disembodied junk” thing just too weird a vibe to indulge in. It has a creepy high school coach feeling. For me, there are only two reasons why anyone would need a big cartoon veinous member in their smut. Neither are applicable for me. Consider this one more plug for sensitive wimmen-authored yuri.

Similarly, I am disappointed with the cut-to-the-chase emphasis during most of the sex scenes. While doujin sex allows the artist to devote pages and pages and pages to intimate acrobatics, most of these involve ramming character A’s cawk (and/ or sex toys) into character B while character B makes odd expressions and thrashes about on the sheets, table, couch, toilet, shower floor, etc., etc., etc..

Earth to doujin artists: More foreplay, please. Foreplay that does not involve orifice-ramming would be even better. Again, sensitive yuri pr0n does a much better job with this kind of stuff. Unfortunately the Genshiken girl-on-girl doujins are pretty well old-school nasty and fail by this measure as well.

Back to our in-club Ogiue. Are “our” characters “making love”? Some of the time, Yes. Some of the time they are just “making out” and too much of the time they are just being deployed as inelegant sex-puppets.

I’m running out of funny pix, have something random

One correspondent brought up the shock that a guy fan might face when confronted by a fujoshi friend with a BL doujin pairing that violated his core sense of order within the mythical imagination; a jarring trespass, one that perhaps the guy never even knew he cared deeply about until he saw it despoiled by the depredations of the rotten tribes.

Once again, we are deep into Dr. Tamaki’s post-Lacanian thicket. The lacanian “trauma’ of imagining a cartoon character in an eroticised setting is not just that one may suddenly feel aroused by the scene but that a sense of the sacred had been rendered in a profoundly profane manner. It is as bad as walking into your washroom and finding your fave deity taking a dump, smoking a joint and grinning.

Creative blasphemy has its own thrill. If the shock is great enough, one is tempted to speculate as to why we were so affected and offended. Then one wonders if one could re-create the effect… (7)

All this leads as well to the differing potentialities of lewd doujins and text fanfiction. Both are secondary productions/ transformative works but the obvious visual bias of the doujin form inexorably leads in the direction of direct representation of all that schmex that was inexplicably left off-screen. With the “this is what it would look like” bias, there is less room for elaborate what-if plotting. A doujin is not a derivative erotic manga. Few attempt the leap. There appears, at least for this limited sampling, a pronounced lack of more elaborated story-telling, as one would find in such typical fanfiction exercises as, say the “curtain-fic”. We have no Mada and Hato out shopping for furniture then coming home and making out. No Mada and Saki looking for curtains for their new apartment either.

I am probably doing this wrong in any case. The idea behind the classic slash curtain-fic is to have two unlikely action-adventure-ish male characters act all newlywed-domestic towards each other. The women find this funny and tender. Genshiken critters are all too domestic already. Maybe Keiko advising Yajima and Rika on the proper manners and movements required for the tea ceremony would be jarring enough?

While we are at it, why no “losers club” Kuchiki-Keiko romps?
There could be all kinds of high regret vs romance material to exploit here. It is a wonder that Kio himself has not Spotted Flower-ed both of them yet.

Even if circles sell out a publication run, no one can expect to get rich drawing Genshiken doujins. The economics of convention sales are brutal, (cf Noppe) almost as brutal as the wages and work conditions for a journeymen mangaka. Far better to apprentice to a master plumber. No matter how vile the doujin, the poor idiots who made it spent innumerable hours drawing it and selling it could have chosen any other more popular series to waste their time on. Something about the Genshiken called out to them, fitted them with magic shoes and danced them to exhaustion.

While both lewd doujins and lewd fanfics are transgressive, despoiling acts, both are also extreme examples of tribute; acts of “love”, or at least of “affect”. And just in case you missed the set-up, consider Hato’s unfolding desires: not towards Madarame but towards mastering the art of creating a tight, readable narrative to go with all his naughty drawings. The portrait of the artist as a young male crossdressing fudanshi fujoshi BL mangaka must proceed and graduate through the successful mastery of the same acts of secondary appropriative production as the doujins that feature him and her, as well as their fellow fanning characters as fantasies pitched at we the readers’ desires.

Perhaps what we outlanders miss in all of this “production” is a curious side-effect of the historically high rates of literacy and engagement with popular fictions within Japanese society. Even the smallest town will have at least one giant slab of stone with the name of some long-dead poet or author carved deep into it, commemorating that worthy’s struggle to preserve and expand the realm of Japanese culture. Japan venerates its auteurs. While not all writers, film-makers, mangakas or even smut-drawers are judged to be worthy of the laurels, all are at least afforded the honorific of sensei within the small circles of their enthusiasms. They might toil away in poverty or end up clerking at a municipal government office, but their wager with memory, history and culture remains on the table.

We never really did this. Perhaps that is our loss and why their efforts carry with them, no matter how lewd and puerile at first glance, a whiff of the dust of the grave.

Ars longa, vita brevis

ENDNOTES:

(1) Yes, I just prefixed an essay about amateur pr0n with a quote from Plato’s Republic. It’s all downhill from here.

(2) Someone or some ones sanitized the Uncyclopedia Making Up Oscar Wilde Quotes page. Great sadness!

(3) Previously I have expressed extreme discomfort and distaste at the habit of some activist writers, especially academic essayists throwing “queer” and “queering” around. It seemed to be a strategic, almost fashionable move that described non-normative or fluid ideas and practices in sexual and gender identity in such a way that only a hypothetical biblical patriarch could serve as the heteronormative baseline. Then I ran into a ridiculous twitter-bot, an expansion on the theme of self-care reminders; take a drink of water, take a deep breath. This one defiantly adds a little extra: “Take a drink of water. That water is now queer!” “Take a deep breath, breathe out. That air is now queer!”  Point made.  It ain’t “queering” that should be feared, it is “curmudgeonization“. The latter creeps up on you and the next thing you know, you are screaming “Hey you kids, get off my lawn!”

(4) Another thing that really, really needs to be done is a scrape of extant online manga about doujin-drawing to build up a gallery of bad drawing. Hato’s “where should I go” panel and Yajima’s sketch efforts must hold pride of place but there is so much more of it out there. Only an authoritative collection can soothe the broken hearted longing I feel now that I know that Kio-sensei will never do a shoujo-style full page floral background portrait of any of the Genshiken critters.

(5) And you wondered when the heck Kumeta Koji of SZS fame drew a scene for the Genshiken? (above, first illustration) The quasi-doujin bonus Project G can be found on a few of the pr0n aggregator sites, even though it is work-safe. Some versions have been scanlated. Why it never appears on conventional aggregator sites lends insight into what everyone expects from doujinshi.

(6) Earlier posted link redacted. I should look closer at the stuff I link to. YIKES!

(7) I tried this as a thought experiment. Anyone can do it if they care to try: It can only work as PorcoCurtis. Curtis is a such a Uke-Hime. And now I have despoiled something precious to my heart. I blame the Genshiken.

Chapter 122: Kobayashi Maru Jigoku Omiai

Wherein mixed metaphor and weeaboo Japanese collide to pick apart the ruins of Madarame’s romantic prospects. SPOILERS ENSUE

I’m cheesed off.

I didn’t think I’d be so cheesed off.

I am also cheesed off for being snookered into being cheesed off

I am cheesed off at Kio Shimoku for putting me in cheesed-off land.

That so-and-so can write.

On the surface, chapter 122 looks simple, almost sloppy. No way: it is a finely crafted little bear trap, well sprung. This one was made to take a leg off. If something is there, it is there for a reason. What I tell you three times is true and will be on the test.

I am furious.

Deep breath!

Why so surprised when chess pieces move the only way they can move.

I am a good, right-thinking person. Why point that thing at me?

This needs to be taken apart. Examine all the sharp, shiny little pieces.

Where to start?

First, visit Ogiue Maniax for the latest corrected excerpts from the 4chan/ tumblr script for Chapter 122. Or you are reading this long after and the usual well-crafted English fan-translation is already available. I hope the scanlating crew is not mightily chuffed at all the amateur dodgy attempts that floated around. They have taken umbrage before and considering the work they put in, this is understandable. Yet the urge of the fans to find out, especially for this chapter must be equally understandable and ultimately, forgiveable. Nuance suffered, folks had their ships and their hearts broken. What did we learn from all of this? How did it play out?

Lets put this sucker up on stands and tear it apart.

Thanks for all your support

Think wayyyyy back. When Ogiue was conflicted and Sasahara was interested, the club did not impede. It supported. And it gave them room to work things out. No one piped up that if you don’t chose Ogiue, perhaps you should stop coming by the club, get a job and move away. While there definitely was a bit of “matchmaking” from Saki and Ohno, no one chased them, ogled and spotlighted them.

Madarame Sou-uke.

Although adopted enthusiastically by Hato upon joining the Genshiken, it was originally an Ogiue fantasy, as detailed in the infamous yaoi episode in the second season of the original Genshiken anime. It is, in effect the latest and last manifestation of Ogiue’s original sin and one that Ohno and the original female Genshiken crew are complicit in. ( Ch44, p27)

A crossdressing fudanshi or male fujoshi or a trans* fujoshi?

Hato Kenjiro will not be “male” in the Genshiken. The Hatos have learned from bitter experience how males are “accepted” in female-exclusive fan socials in Japan. Not! As well, Hato finds something in BL that strongly affects him and wishes to process it as close to the original as possible. The distinction would be between the theoretical scopophilic (or scoptophilic, K. Nagaike 2005) and the threat of participatory engagement in fujoshi fantasies.(1)

The male-ness of a fudanshi imposes a different calculation upon the enjoyment of fujoshi stories. His participation within a social that values exchange of these stories imposes a strong presupposition that he will share his experiences, at least in abstracted form. It would be hard for him to avoid becoming a vehicle through which the female members of the social would enjoy how their cherished scripts and tropes play out.

What do you mean by Fu-Danshi

K.Nagaike’s improbable Japanese heterosexual male BL fan aside, what exactly does the term “fudanshi” connotate on the street or in the aisles of Comiket, among Japanese fans. Is it “I’m a guy who reads BL” or is it “I’m a guy who probably is interested in guys and reads BL“? Unfortunately English language academic reports list few examples of fudanshi/ male BL fans. One mentioned in an early McLelland article (2) is nominally heterosexual. The Nagaike article that speculates as to the existence of straight fudanshi as “herbivore males” still eludes my grasp, but the summary smells fishy. Over %90 of the Japanese audience for BL and yaoi is reported to be female. The remaining %10 is a mystery but if one estimates by the two existing amateur studies, the heterosexual and asexual male readership makes up only %1-%2 of total Japanese readers. It could even be less. Noted Bara artist Tagame Gengoroh is listed as the co-author of the follow-up 2009 study and ventures therein that it would be reasonable to assume that some of the respondents who self-identified as neither “gay” or “bi” could be “closeted”, given the stigma still attached to male homosexuality in Japan.

How does this apply to Hato?

Betcha this question sounds stupid. Fer chrissakes, Dude, you are reading the gay pr0ns. You like, right? Hato always previously denied real-world same-sex interest. Fantasy is fantasy. This also added an extra plot excuse for becoming-fujoshi; the “containment field”. Maybe it is “a guy who reads BL but is too scared to really try real guys“. Who knows? The confusion is Kio Shimoku’s fault; he has gone out of his way to make Hato non-conforming to categories, even non-conforming to categories of non-conformity.

Hato’s identity: Hato.
Hato’s sexualty: Hato.
Hato’s gender expression: Hato.

“Real guys don’t do that” aside, there is always the strong suggestion that the fudanshi is adapting fujoshi stories to his same-sex desires. Whether or not to call them gay/bi/non-binary/pansexual/would-consider-romance-or-fun-with-a-male-under-certain-circumstances varies by individual social context, but in the end, yuppers, they are, as Hato is, “gay”(etc.,). At least in the eyes of the Genshiken fujoshi.

Is Hato trans*?

It is a stretch to consider Hato a “full” “conventional” trans woman. Not yet. At best, Hato is an emergent trans-fujoshi, at least; a “fujoshi world field exploration module”, an “avatar”. Hato’s denial of real-world same-sex desire leaves only the problematic “I’m not gay it is only him” canon BL pronouncement to explain his developing feelings for Madarame, as well as the confusion and conflict surrounding these. If Hato was to decide that ze was deemed male at birth with “the heart of a girl” Hato’s desires would be, after surgery and hormones, heteronormative by law if not custom in Japan. Note that the Stands, as subconscious guilt-complexes consider Hato male. If Hato was at core “female-souled” the BL shipping urges would be, as above pointless. It might work if Hato had two souls and the Stands were out to excise the “accursed remainder” but that gets too twisty-psychological to follow in a comic book story.

The older Hato variant in Spotted Flower is gender-queer but eschews a fundamentally female “core”. The idea of breaking and surpassing identity rather than fitting into one remains imperative. The goal of becoming a cross-dressing male BL mangaka is what unifies the project.

Affective and Transactional membership within a fujoshi social.

The position of a member within a fujoshi social will be a mixture of the these two concerns, as in any activity-related social. The closest studies available to mortal outsiders of such Japanese socials would be those of female executive drinking groups. (more here) Note that in one study, a member was excised from the group when her emotional neediness became a burden on the group. Friends will help to a certain degree, after which point the burden becomes too great upon the “wa” of going out and getting hammered on the weekend to de-stress.

In the case of a male fudanshi, the transactional demands would easily overwhelm the bonds of friendship. Even in the case of Hato-as-fujoshi, in full female-presenting mode, the friendships are tenuous. Yoshitake Rika values Hato as a novelty and as a pro-level producer of new and spicy smut drawings. Valuing the Hato output and advancing club interests is seen as one in the same goal. She considers a pairing between Hato and Madarame-is-a-loser as dangerous to the club and dangerous to Hato’s output (and possibly to his mental stability). Curiously, she does not see a pairing between Hato and Yajima as threatening to the club social or to Hato’s output.

Whether she sees Yajima’s layout and pacing skills as complementary to Hato’s drawing skills or whether she can approve a slightly variant heteronormative pairing, or has, even unconsciously framed Hato-chan as a virtual lesbian and slotted Hato in a neko to Yajima’s butch girl/tachi role is beside the point. Hato’s presence in a social that Yoshitake has anything to do with – and remember she is exemplar of a tendency, not it’s sole adherent – depends on a fully female-presenting Hato. Lesbian fujoshi are not a problem; they are still women and the desire discussed in the social is abstracted. “That happens in all-girl schools, no big deal.”

No Boys allowed

I had long groused about the lack of emotion and longing displayed by the supposedly crushing Hato, especially Hato-as-chan. The Niko trip chapters have whacked me upside the head for not realizing how overwhelmingly constrained Hato was when participating in the club. In rotten-girl mode Hato can do demure or can do fujoshi-overload. That’s it. Anything else risks the great project.

At Comiket, when only with Madarame, Hato could doff and don the wig as needed, otherwise Hato’s presentation becomes a straightjacket.
Comiket is “Holy Ground”; a truce operates within its boundaries.
The one time Hato ventured, in girl mode in the clubroom, to list the reasons why “loser Madarame had moe” Yoshitake’s urge to sanction the transgression was set in motion.

Hato-as-chan is so committed to her project and yet so insecure about its fragility that she can literally only discuss attraction for Madarame in the context of acted out BL tropes, of othering her his-self as exchanged fantasy. This is probably the cruelest trick of the internal consistency laid down by the author. There is absolutely no way Hato-chan could ever consider mentioning to the rest of the club that Hato spent any innocent social time with Madarame, even as Hato-as-kun just hanging out with Madarame.

Doing so would break the spell. Hato would no longer be “passing” for a fujoshi. Hato would be an odd cross-dressing gay guy with a boyfriend who needs to fit in with a club full of women.

Only in the light of the enforced girl-mode of the Niko trip does the magnitude of the cruel joke become apparent. Instead of facilitating and encouraging male:male romance, it effectively adds further levels of prohibition against it. If you date a guy -poof- you are back to being a guy and guys don’t sit well with the club as it is. Hato loses all.

I wonder if Yajima Merei now “gets it”. How does she feel about how she kept after Hato to drop the masquerade?

Fantasy as fantasy as a reactionary force.

I have previously quoted critics and essays which have echoed Saki’s chidings: the male-male desire fantasies of fujoshis do not necessarily include comfort and familiarity with real-life male gay people, let alone real-life, politicised LGBTQ+ communities. Kio Shimoku’s renderings of them echo these observations. Realistic concerns may even be seen as intrusions against the structures of these fantasies. This is in marked contrast with ‘western” slash communities that long ago adopted a more inclusive and politicised stance. After all, approximately half of slash fan readers are male, presumed in some degrees “queered”, by all extant studies available. (Pagliassotti. Aoki/Viz)

The Japanese fujoshi social is not anti-gay. It is merely real-life-gay avoiding. Males, gay or not are raw material. Gay males are still seen as males with male privilege and freedom available to them, as long as they pay token obeisance to Japanese rules of hierarchical male social organization.

Gay males who might take umbrage at their portrayal in extreme BL/yaoi narratives are a threat and a nuisance; they heckle the stories or get angry about portrayals even if no real etc., are being depicted. It is just guys asserting their male privilege, again. Password the forum, post a disclaimer and switch to silent running.

Elsewhere in Asia, fujoshi enthusiasms end up as being conflated with homosexual practice whenever a government clampdown rolls around and the fujoshi are an easy target. The distancing effect is powerful, multifaceted and hard to counteract.

As for gender-queer, gender dysphoria, non-conforming or minority gender expression, these are interesting as varieties of raw material to the fujoshi project, but any momentary real-world consensus over status, presentation, rights, etiquette, let alone “political correctness” or solidarity just gets in the way of a good hawt tale. At best, it might make for a few points of verisimilitude in a story. Why bother; it will just draw attention and bring the spotlight back on the easy female target. Progressive social movements are useless and always end in internicine mayhem, circular firing squads and clusterfuckery. Why stick your neck out? This is not relaxing. Best to avoid it all. We’re just here for the skin and the feels. Did the guys ever worry about similar concerns in their pr0n?

Note for the purposes of the Genshiken, these tendencies, remarked upon by academics and commentators are exaggerated and simplified.
Kio Shimoku does his research to create his fujoshi Genshiken but it always hews towards the larger, broad-brush tendencies within the literature.

History stalls without electricians… rusts…

For all I know, contemporary fujoshi socials in Japan liaise with LGBTQ+ groups and turn out for pride marches and the Genshiken is completely lost in the past. Perhaps there is even a gay male blogger in Japan who is rating BL tales on a scale of hateful shit to ridiculous fun to sensitively realistic and supportive, in a parallel to the great project that a certain lesbian blogger has undertaken in the west for yuri. If not perhaps there should be. Godspeed!

Such a real-life, politically engaged fujoshi group would never find itself caught in, let alone setting up a classic unwinnable Kobayashi Maru exercise.

Whereas Kio Shimoku slipped one over on us. How much of it and the extent of his purpose remains to be seen.

A test of character for the command-track candidate and the club itself. How better than to expose the weaknesses in the group?

Wither Madarame?

Madarame has been constructed as being very shy around women; recovering from a 3 year fantasy crush on Saki-as-Ritsuko Kubel Kettenkrad; prone to fugue episodes of pre-emptive over-geeking with women he considers attractive; a mildly pervy fan of loli and now jousou/ otokonoko fantasy pornography and lately severely unmotivated, to the point of loser-dom.

Yet he does have good friends, he tries to do the right thing and his insistence on the individual right of the fan to like and enjoy what fantasies they fantasize over has built him into a figure of admiration among the Genshiken readership, and not just male readers.

It was a shock to hear Madarame described as being “wide open” and “full of openings” or unguarded. Being ungarded and open is generally considered a good thing, except when male privilege is exposed by placing a poor schlep in the sights of a male-male rape (or at best forceful seduction) fantasy.

Those “forceful” pairing conventions are sacred within parts of the fujoshi fandom. How else is a conflicted, emotionally inarticulate hunk of testosterone supposed to express societally forbidden, overwhelming, madness-inducing desire? Just don’t point that at women. Here you go Bowser, go nuts on that pant leg.

Deeds not words.

Kio also raised the ante a bit while throwing in a few blocks and dodges. Hato-as-chan is the only one of the harem-ettes to break the embargo and visit, clean and cook for an injured Madarame. (Kio you sneak: you slipped some sanitized Hurt-Comfort into the tale!) Sue appears only as chaperone. Keiko; you blew it – Keiko would never get domestic for a guy. Angela might, but we never saw any evidence of this. Only Hato “made miso soup” and cleaned up the mess.

Beautiful Fighting Girl

Too bad Hato’s Nadeshiko no Genshiken is not exactly Madarame’s favourite fantasy girl. Sue is closer to the physical form, but Saki, especially as the vengeful Chairman Ritsuko busting an upskirt creep, was closer to the ideal of a heroic female character. Do not mistake Keiko’s dismissive cynicism for an engaged heroic stance. If Hato-as-chan had presented closer to an engaged, active female character; say in a persona closer to the sassy, teasing Suruga Kanbaru of Monogatari fame; as long as Hato became flustered when confronted with the possibility of affection, Madarame would already be shacked up with Hato. Too much demure femininity triggers Madarame’s hesitancy and self-sabotage fugue reflexes.

The end result is that Madarame finds the male Hato persona far easier to talk with, to discuss any feelings that he thinks he has developed or sensed from Hato. To this end, Madarame accepts that his desire might end up being same-sex, if not “gay/queer/bi/etc.”. However the circumstances are so wildly out of normal bounds (not: Holy shit, I suddenly find guys of this type attractive!) as to be beside the point. For shy, unlucky-in-love Madarame, this is like winning an all-expense paid trip to Comiket on Mars. It is not going to happen again, so why worry about social categories.

Hato’s mistake is thinking that Madarame has fallen for Hato-as-chan and that this will be a thorny path because Hato-as-chan must be Hato-as-fujoshi and society will frown doubly on a romance with a gay fujoshi transvestite. A secondary issue also pops up, as it looks like Hato doesn’t have much experience with male friendship.

Madarame’s mistake is not seeing how intensely Hato as superficially an emerging- gay- male- fudanshi- who- crossdresses is invested in a far more complex project of becoming-fujoshi while in female- presenting mode. Mada should have made it clear that he prefers to talk with the male version; that his curiosity and interest considers the male persona dominant, or at least co-equal and that the male version is, for now who he cares to “let’s see what happens” with.

“The girl version always fans out too much. She should drop the sou-uke stuff! She makes me nervous!”

Madarame is diffuse as to his desires. He wants to “try it” and see what happens. Who is this Hato creature? How did he end up like this? What is in that BL stuff that turns his crank, that hides behind and lies beyond the weird butt-sex and dominance drawings? What really does Hato get hawt & bothered about? Will sex work? How and how much? Is it needed? Perhaps all night drinking and game-playing is a good enough consolation prize if the sex stuff proves too terrifying.  Is the lad huggable? Will it feel good to be hugged? How much romance and how much bromance? Will stripesu work when they are “packed” panchu?  Is there anything in all those BL stories that doesn’t have seme and uke and just has two guys that like each other? How do two guys make out, or even kiss? What happens? Questions, questions, questions.

Who knows? In fairness Kio Shimoku could have done more on these kinds of questions. He already had Madarame’s guy posse holding vigil with him after the wrist-break and discussing the hawt bits of their newest doujin score. An exploration of how and what boundaries would get pushed past with a guy who can also crossdress and “likes you that way” would be novel. Were they too far off in “No Homo, well perhaps Homo a bit, hey, but only you so far“, for Kio to manage?

But Kio can sure as all heck give the general impression that Madarame considers Hato a once in a lifetime chance to find out without taking any major hit-points.

Who says, beyond hard-core fujoshi and male ‘phobes, that a straight guy can’t have gay male friends? Get used to it. You don’t have to jump them and they don’t jump everything in pants, do they?

The easy way to find out would have had Mada and Hato-as-kun hanging out:
“Yo, Hato, why all the sempai? I know “Sempai notice me” but you are really into it. What gives?”
“Eh? long story ‘bro, gimme another beer…”

Too much to ask?

Would such an experiment have broken Madarame or Hato? I doubt it. The problem seems to lie only with the conflict set up by Hato’s project of becoming-fujoshi within the Genshiken social. The Genshiken could have not only made clear that they approve of Madarame and Hato, but demonstrated this by pulling back, making some space for the two of them, discouraging any need to for HatoMadaHato scripts, banishing the seme/uke/sou-uke as it applies to the two and made it damn clear through deeds that Hato-as-chan still has full %100 fujoshi status within the Genshiken, even as Hato-kun is hanging out with Mada on the weekend.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t run a destructive test on the participants or the group social.

For a test, we need Yoshitake Rika, the Genshiken’s own light, polite and stealthed version of Kaminaga. Not exactly Loki the cruel trickster demigod. She even means it well in her own clumsy way. And she does get off her ass and organise things. Still, her views on Hato and Madarame-is-a-loser were plainly set out. She views the pairing as potentially damaging to Hato, and to Hato’s output. And she could really ship Yajima and Hato and hope to see a rebound.

Whether or not she has voiced any more complicated concerns about Hato- as- almost- girl suddenly dropping to a glaring Hato- as- gay- guy- who- has- a- boyfriend- and- who- hangs- around- the club- in- a- wig- and- dress should have been alluded to, but lurks none the less. Such a creature could well be almost as disruptive as another Kuchiki.

When an event is put together to see Kuchiki well and truly out of the Genshiken, why not take the chance to end the harem nonsense? Especially if it resolves Hato and to a lesser extent Sue and gets Madarame and his sorry “I can’t make up my mind” ass out of the way as well.

Will Madarame nerve up to say he likes Hato or Sue? Did Yoshitake ever consciously sit down and factor the chances? Probably not. Angela and Keiko are disposable outcomes. Sue is a wild card, but is suddenly no longer antic and is being shy. It is doubtful that she could stand the spotlight of an organised public “omiai” ritual. Madarame is an indecisive coward who is stuck in “good to be king” stasis. Hato will be in pure fujoshi-girl-mode; easily flustered and/or prone to fanning out. If they really really like each other, they can bloody well prove it under the glare of the spotlights.

This should be a fun group trip. What could go wrong?

So much for a plausible motive for Yoshitake Rika. For the author, all heck is being set up to break lose. This story looks at first like it is all about Hato, but it is also about Madarame and about the Genshiken-as-character/ the “character” of the Genshiken. The chief custodian of the Genshiken is Ogiue as president. She has done wonders in upping the productive output of the club and has not fallen into the trap of the manken, by doing all of the output herself. Most of it, but not all. She can rightfully claim to have mentored and encouraged Hato, Yajima and even Sue as assistant. She has curbed her impulses towards destructive rivalry with Ohno’s formidable cosplay ancien regime; The two tendencies work well together in the current club.

But the harem problem has slipped by her. Hato’s crush is none of her business. As for Madarame, she must know in the back of her mind that she started the sou-uke thing. She has never quashed it or even properly limited it because she is guilty of it and that kind of guilt brings up terrible memories.

Please note how robust and detailed the plotting of all this is. Mere accident of Kio Shimoku’s ad-hoc plotting? I doubt it. Such attention carries with it risks and responsibilities. No one gives a flying monkey about the plot and motivation holes in UQ Holder, as long as the skin and the magic battles keep coming. Genshiken fans expect more: when something happens and happens the way it does, they impute motive. They feel shocked and even betrayed when events play out in an insensitive manner.

The stage is set. Hato and Madarame and Sue will be in the forefront. The harem is really a reluctant love triangle. Sue’s interest is late in the game and tentative. She is almost shut down by the weight of her emotions. The real action will be between Madarame and Hato. Drunken Kuchiki provides the chance for Madarame to speak freely, if hastily with the Hato he can speak freely with. He declares that he felt something from the valentine’s day chocolates and then with with Hato’s sudden disappearance.

What he hears is a surprise. Hato clearly feels something for him but is pushing him away. “I felt something too and was scared. I am not the fantasy girl you think I am. Compared to the real women interested in you, I am barely able to hold my own as female-presenting. Romance would fail. Chose someone else“.

And then he adds one little bit too much: “Oh by the way, I can only draw girls’ boy-boy porn while crossdressed“. Huh? This is all too ridiculous! Next thing you know, Mada is on top and male Hato, glowing with booze and makeup is doing his best to deny any fantasy implications of the mishap. “Sorry, you get no handful of breast. Sorry that I disappoint.” Fantasy is fantasy and reality is flat-chested and very, very composed.

And then Madarame brings up BL fantasies and Hato is lost. And Mada’s hunt mode has been flicked on. One Kuchiki bathroom run save later, Madarame is left to consider how it felt. “Holy crap, I took the initiative. Hato is actually kind of cute. Holy crap does this mean I’m gay? Maybe this is a special case because he can also be a shy, chaste otokonoko? Wait a second; there ain’t such thing as a shy, chaste otokonoko; them critters are sex-demons. Hato is a shy chaste something else that looks female. Whatever, I liked being the forceful one. No sou-uke here. Was all the sou-uke stuff so that girly-boy Hato could be sou-uke to a sou-uke? Does not compute.”

Felt good though.

Meanwhile back at the ranch, Hato’s brief foray into boy mode only served to point out how tightly he has been sewed into his girl costume for the rest of the trip. He’s sleeping in a room with two other girls, experiencing girl-talk and his cover story is that he is a full, legendary “boy born with the heart of a girl”. Do not break cover. Maintain fujoshi mode at all costs. No slip ups or wig removings allowed. The great project is on the line. All fujoshi, all rotten, all the time.

Only briefly in male attire did he get a chance to marvel that he “was taken seriously” while walking back to Yajima’s house. That part must remain sealed away the next day.

At the temple in Niko, Hato and Madarame can talk for a few moments. Perhaps it would have gone down somewhat the same way without Keiko goading and stirring the pot. Except that Hato is now reeling from realizing that Yajima has developed a crush on (must be) him-as-him. And that ze has thrown the one thing that Keiko cannot process, Madarame interested in him-as-a-guy in her face.

Face to face with Madarame, Hato manages to get out one subtextual bit of “context” or warning. When presenting as female, Hato must devote complete attention to staying in character and avoiding any mistakes that would break the illusion of female presentation. And that means fujoshi presentation as well.

Then after the “thrill of the forbidden” misstep, and some encouragement by Ogiue, Madarame is back for the mandatory thorny path warning. Then Hato fans out as only Hato the fujoshi can. MadaHato, HatoMada, seme, uke, sou-uke. Perhaps Hato is dead sure that Madarame is crushing on girl-Hato. Perhaps Hato is very scared of real male-male intimacy. Perhap Hato feels comfortable enough around Mada the uber-fan to let loose. Or all of these and none. But Hato is still locked into the absolute need to discuss any future relationship in full-metal fujoshi mode. Hato has accepted the stands into her, but here and now they own her tongue. Hato cannot say “I like you.”

Despite all this, Madarame is surprisingly considerate and reassuring. He does not make any promises of soul-mate-ry for life, but neither does he make fun of what clearly makes him uncomfortable. He does not act blunt and dismiss Hato’s fujoshi-voiced desires.(3)

Thank goodness he didn’t. Turns out they had an audience. Even that does not deter Madarame.

This is great buildup. Madarame is treating his desire seriously, even if it is same-sex desire. He is treating Hato’s conflicted feelings seriously. He is also worried about hurting Sue and letting Keiko and Angela down respectfully. He knows that things are getting weird in the group and its “wa” is under threat.

Then something happens offstage and it all turns into shit.

Madarame is overwhelmed. He refuses to announce his decision. His mind plays out the next day; when he has chosen Hato-as-chan and he is left in a cold sweat. He asks if there are any group thoughts on the situation. Did he really want them to decide for him or was he seeking to gauge if there was any consensus on who would be the most suitable choice? Was it only to take that into consideration as he plotted how to how to finesse his decision? Did he already realise that the situation was out of control and unwinnable unless he jumped on the grenade? Choose one, three will be miffed. Choose Hato or Sue and the spotlights will incinerate them.

Angela was always scary and impractical: the language barrier was too much, even putting aside the long-distance problem. Keiko was always out. Sex at the cost of being made to feel like shit continuously. Banter with The Adversary is fun; the morning after you wake up in hell.

If you decide that you are forced to deny any chance at love, must you spell out the true reasons in excruciating detail or can you just give the unforgiving crowd what they will accept and what they deserve?

Angela; “you are too much of a sex bomb for me, and too far away.” Keiko; “you are so goddess-like that you bring back painful memories of Saki”. Sue; (between you and me, you see how hostile this place is to any love, let alone what I was considering, please do me a favour and go along with this excuse:) “I like it better when you are pestering Ogiue with fakee-lesbian attention. it’s fun and hawt.” Sue takes the hint and runs with it.

Now that we have made same-sex desire an abstract, not-serious issue we can finesse Hato. Isn’t dating a guy too stressful? (on the other club members’ maturity levels? good job, not Ogiue – enjoy your Sue!) Hato should be free to pursue (the project of becoming-fujoshi which I will not burn to these children, I’ll just call it ) being a cross-dressing fudanshi (and fudanshi means likes the idea of same-sex romance, may or may not be up to it in real life) without having to suffer (this nonsense).

“I now take my leave. Your win Yoshitake-san, enjoy.”

(“The more sensitive among you, once you digest it, might get the motive and the subtext of my excuses. Thanks for all the help, oh club of fans who will dream of queer romance but trample any real manifestations of it.“)

“Oh Shit, not Kuchiki!” Gehhhhhhhh! Phhhtt! Phhhhtttt!

“Guess he bought the story.”

Or Madarame just sputtered “Hah-hah I was just joking” gibberish to get out of a jam and then Kio had Kuchiki drive home the point. Released on the Easter weekend by chance. Thank goodness Japanese folks don’t understand Easter and the fuss surrounding the whole passion thing or there would have been roosters crowing.(4)

Fans who cared deeply about the emerging, fierce individualised queer-ness of Hato and the long slow build-up of Madarame accepting that there was something between them recoiled at the crudeness of the Hah hah hah, No Homo vibe that came out of nowhere like a slap in the face.

And it hit me too. I was really surprised how it hit me. It took a while, and the testimony of concerned fans to process the depths of why the fail shook me. Even if you don’t think that Hato was right for Madarame, you don’t shit in people’s corn flakes, repeatedly. …Just because you can and it is an easy gag ending to the harem arc. Even to do so to hammer home a point about how your fictional fujoshi social is unworldly didn’t need three bowls of shit-flakes.

Unless we were supposed to taste the shit in the subtext.

Madarame did win a few maturity points from this bruising exercise. He is little more confident around women he is interested in and he can control his impulse to self-sabotage. If anything, he has seen how tragic such impulses can be. He was not afraid to think of dating a guy, even though he never felt he wanted to before; he did not go into “gay panic“. He took his desires seriously. He could politely pursue, even manage some polite “forceful” behaviour, which is expected of courting Japanese manly males.

He has lost once more on the fields of love but he is not defeated. And he has learned a lot about the need to keep one’s affairs of the heart private. He does not have to be forced into a relationship, he retains the agency to decide and to reject easy, yet problematic opportunities. He may empathise too much, as an excuse to avoid troublesome situations – he will have to learn that sharing one’s heart with another will always be complicated and fraught with the possibility of hurt – but the impulse is better than pure horn-dawg “gimme naow!“.

However he did let himself be bamboozled into losing the chance to explore with afforded respect and privacy what would have happened, not just with Hato, but with Sue and even Angela. His fault for going along with the much-too-public harem omiai set-up.

What of Madarame and Hato?

Even now, while I have difficulty seeing a fluffy vanilla BL romance happen easily and naturally between Hato and Madarame, goddammit they should have had a chance to fuck up properly trying! How does a straight guy navigate friendship and maybe a little bit or a lot more with a gay or non-binary or queer male friend? Maybe that’s a story that Kio Shimoku wanted to tell, but couldn’t. And he couldn’t let them bumble off into the sunset.

Anything could have happened.

Everything was prevented.

Plenty of old-school guy fans are uncomfortable with Madarame “going over to the dark side” and make a big fuss over what never threatened male status and privilege in earlier eras. I wonder who and what has jerked their puppet strings. Probably nothing more than a bunch of other schoolyard losers yelling “fag”. A serious 1950’s “beat” or 60’s  guy-o-the-world wouldn’t give that kind of chickenshit a second thought. “Part of the road, enjoy the journey…  At least it was real.”

Worse, they don’t have the time or curiosity to see the critique and examination of a female fandom as a logical extension of the critique and examination of the male fandom that the original Genshiken was. They see only Hato, the “annoying trap” flailing around, freak out and miss the nuance; the valid observations of female fan productivity (yo, dudes, aside from trolling 4chan, what the fuck does the reactionary male fandom produce? As in make? Like, uh, stuff?), gained at the price of the range of interests; not much gaming and model making or fan- reviewing in the new club – only cosplay defends the earlier multi-modality of the Genshiken.

They also miss the biting critique of the isolationist tendencies in the fujoshi homosocial as well as the part of that critique that has just played out to bitter disappointment among the western fans closest in approximation and outlook to the fujoshi members.

It is a crying shame that chapter 122 hit the diaspora Hato-supporting fandom so hard; they have struggled to put their early isolationist impulses behind them. The troll brigade hates them not only for their “queer” but for their social engagement. Fuck the troll brigade; the only author they respect is Ayn the Reaver and her petulant, narcissistic cant. Reavers make lousy fans.

The Doctrine of Authenticity was, for brief time being effortlessly honored in the Genshiken. If Madarame could convincingly be portrayed as being interested, then he should have had the in-story freedom to do so. If Hato, for all his confusion dared put at risk his single minded project to become a fujoshi in a fujoshi social because he and she started to feel something they couldn’t understand toward Madarame, would the ‘verse have imploded because of this slight glitch in sexualities and gender roles? It looks like they never were taken seriously enough to have the in-story free will to try. The hammer came down and decreed that that kind of feeling is too complicated or too troublesome or can be papered over as a joke.

And the Genshiken, the club that would not betray its members, as Ogiue’s high school friends betrayed her, as the University manga (manken) club betrayed her, as Hato’s high school art club betrayed him, failed. Failed miserably, tittering and tee-hee-ing over the small chance that two guys might feel something for each other, even if it only turned out to be friendship, in in-verse “real” life.(5)

The Kobayashi Maru exercise is a fictional test of character in the face of certain destruction.

The Genshiken; Ogiue and Ohno as executive officers, Yajima and Yoshitake as bridge crew and the rest of the assembled members performed below expectation. Hato was the sacrificial hostage, the eponymous damaged ship. Madarame’s performance was nuanced; on the surface shockingly below expectations, even if his excuse to Hato can be translated and subtext-read as “I only want you to be able to have a trouble-free love that leaves room for you to pursue your great project.” The Sue bullshit excuse either damned his performance or telegraphed that he considered the rest of the club the enemy within. And Kio’s framing the entire night, with Kuchiki breaking the tension but reinforcing the dismissive mood, walks the same dangerous knife-edge.

Chapter 122 was meant to question whether or not the club was truly as accepting and safe as it should be or claimed to be. What instead went down looked to many as small and ugly.

Endnotes:

(1)  It is a position beyond that of a male yuri fan. The most I can so “participate” is as fantasy, manga or anime voyeurism, making note of a few tips regarding foreplay and perhaps absorbing some of the ambience surrounding the romantic melodrama of the stories. Unlike the fujoshi experience however, yuri works better for me when written by a tojisha author. The fujoshi artifact has yet to evolve to the point where many gay male authors are successfully melding realism about gay male behaviour with the female “feels’ and interpersonal character dynamics/ drama that fujoshi readers prize.

This distinction is not that important; the fujoshi project has other aims. Contrast to realistic lesbian identity graphic novels in the west to yuri.

(2)

“One high-school boy says that “It’s not that I’m gay”…. He goes on to say that he and a group of two or three girls buy these magazines and share them. The girls ask him “Ma-kun [his name], how about turning gay (homo ni nachaeba?)”, to which he replies “they say such irresponsible things but, basically, if it’s beautiful then either is OK,” a statement which is followed by the character warai, signifying laughter (presumably the speaker is suggesting an ironic stance to his last statement).

Males who read such fiction, he observes, do so in a context which brings them into proximity with women (as in the reading circle described above). These men are exposed to very different constructions of masculinity than those they would find in a reading circle comprised of other men. Moreover, the images of masculinity present in shōnen’ai fiction are obviously attractive to many women, so a man who is sexually attracted to women, may, either consciously or unconsciously, seek to cultivate them.”

Male Homosexuality in Modern Japan: Cultural Myths and Social Realities p.246 Notes [https://books.google.ca/books?id=5SssBgAAQBAJ&pg=PA246&lpg=PA246#v=onepage&q&f=false]

More on the idea of the straight Japanese fudanshi would be more readily available if the Nagaike article was not locked down behind academic paywalls. The Google Books excerpt seems to indicate that the actual study of Fudanshi was done by a japanese aca-fan in 2008-2009. Approximately %20 of the respondents identified as “straight” or “asexual”; which would mean they comprise appx. %2 of all BL readers. Nagaike seems to impose a reading of “herbivore men” on the practice and -to my mind, distressingly – follows up on Dr. Saito Tamaki’s excursion into shota, which she does not differentiate the otokonoko/jousou  genre from.

Do Heterosexual Men Dream of Homosexual Men?: BL Fudanshi and Discourse on Male Feminization by Kazumi Nagaike pp. 189-209 IN: Boys Love Manga and Beyond History, Culture, and Community in Japan, edited by Mark McLelland, Kazumi Nagaike, Katsuhiko Suganuma, and James Welker (2015) Citation: https://muse.jhu.edu/books/9781626740662
Excerpt at: https://books.google.ca/books?id=QAIbBwAAQBAJ&lpg=PT235&ots=IEOdW_57SF&dq=Do%20Heterosexual%20Men%20Dream%20of%20Homosexual%20Men%3F%3A%20BL%20Fudanshi%20and%20Discourse%20on%20Male%20Feminization%20by%20Kazumi%20Nagaike&pg=PT235#v=onepage&q&f=false

I would not be surprised if Kio Shimoku has his mitts on the Japanese study.
The rest of us will have to wait until someone translates:

Yoshimoto, Taimatsu. 2008. Fudanshi ni kiku [Talking with fudanshi]. Self-published.http://www.picnic.to/~taimatsu/common/milk/milk_postal_taimatsu.htm.

Note that the 2009 follow-up study lists Tagame Gengoroh as co-author.
http://doujinshi.mugimugi.org/book/396607/

More: http://d.hatena.ne.jp/taimatsu_torch/

https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&hl=en&prev=search&rurl=translate.google.ca&sl=ja&u=http://picnic.to/~taimatsu/index.htm&usg=ALkJrhhoWTTK5M2pzzo0fAcy12Xjt_wJ7Q

Note that for both studies, sample sizes ran to 100-110 respondents. Finally, there is one further avenue for situating a Japanese male in somewhat sympathetic relation to the BL genre, without necessarily positing a fudanshi:
As a Cosplayer: if you cosplay bishies, you are going to be up to your neck in subtext.
As well, the urge to provide a bit of fan-service to female supporters must be extremely strong. As in cross-play, it would be clumsy to impute sexuality to the participants without first-person testimony and survey data.

(3) Perhaps Mada should have just came out and said: “Isn’t it a little early for pillow talk? Sorry lambchop, I don’t put out on the first date… ” But camp impulses aside, not going there was a real good idea. Hato was convinced that Mada saw him as some fantasy, and not as “just a guy”. The only other odd thing that does not fit was Yajima encouraging Hato to bring up HatoMada when Hato met Mada later. I can’t believe that Yajima was calculatingly trying to sabotage the meet. More of an “authenticity” issue I guess. I doubt that Hato needed he permission, but the reminder was there.

(4) Btw; never never mention to a famous American crime reporter in Japan the parallels between the Christian Harrowing of Hell subtext in the Easter story and the Buddhist “Ksitigarbha/Jizō Bosatsu” vow of forgoing Buddha-hood “until the hells are empty“. The tale predates the xtian mythos and is an obvious influence. Maybe it has some other local meaning in his situation – he’s known to be in a long fight with a very persistant troll, but he blocked me on Twitter for mentioning it. Come to think of it he blocked another twitter account of mine last year. What the heck did I do wrong? I give up!

(5) LATER:  Another thing that really bugs me. The great harem ending works against the “Helmut” option. Honestly, these two losers need to to be friends more than they need to fumble with each other…

“Friendship is far more tragic than love. It lasts longer.”
— Slavoj Zizek

Kujibiki Unbalance Rakugu Shinjuu

… Something came up. Go on ahead and I’ll catch up with you later…

“The thing that is obvious to many not-young women is that no guy is owed anything just because he has an idea in his head of what he’d like. This is a very serious problem globally, apparently. These guys feel that their sincerity means they deserve the girl. And, to some extent, that is how this scenario is presented. Touko’s feeling are honest and sincere, so of course Yuu will come around to falling for her. But why? If Yuu doesn’t feel it, why do we assume she must eventually do so? This bugs me a lot. In real life, on Quora and in media.

Which leads me to the, I think, obvious conclusion about Yuu. What if she’s asexual? If so, she’s never going to have those feelings for Touko or anyone. She might come to love Touko and continue to admire and like her, but never have sexual interest in her. So, then I can’t help but see Touko’s coming on (to be crude) to Yuu as another burden, rather than a blessing.

Both these things nag at me while I read this manga. And I worry that Yuu’s agency will be stripped from her as the narrative continues.””

-Erica Friedman, Yuri Manga: Yagate Kimi ni Naru (やがて君になる )
Review in OKAZU, January 6th, 2016
http://okazu.yuricon.com/2016/01/06/yuri-manga-yagate-kimi-ni-naru-%E3%82%84%E3%81%8C%E3%81%A6%E5%90%9B%E3%81%AB%E3%81%AA%E3%82%8B/

“The dream which one comes up with on one’s own is a fantasy that is ultimately not possible to share with others. Although, of course, imposing it on others is always possible.”
–Furuhashi Teiji, quoted in Mizoguchi, 2008, Ch6.

“Even if I might just be trying to force my own desires… All of our desires are just… Things we force on others anyway.”
-Hato Kenjiro, Genshiken ch 66

 

My previous post went over like a lead balloon. One more time; I have no knowledge of how the heck Kio Shimoku is going to play Chapter 122.. Jeesh, why do I even feel like I have to write that? It was pure speculation rendered as fanfiction; partly because I smelled a set-up, partly because there were problems with MadaHatoMada and also because there were a few things I wanted to work on – including that dreaded “default position”. I was not gloating, or if I was, it was over figuring out a plausible resolution, rendered as an overdone snippet of Mada speechifying.

I even had Mada go out of his way to emphasise that he was leaning towards Hato, before he pulled a noble (chicken-out) sacrifice. Amirite about Hato’s first love or not?

I have been true to my project. That solution was pure “Myth of the Oarsmen“; duty, honor, planet Genshiken. The alternative is scopophilia, which is presently manifesting itself to excess.

As for fanboy tears, most of us are too fascinated with the imminent train-wreck to shed much. Just because Genshiken is now about fujoshi fanning and features a boy in a skirt, it is not a work from Slash-land or a radical genderqueer manifesto or an allegory of feminist empowerment.

Hato is not going to wake up like Neo in a pod to discover that she was dreaming the entire Genshiken after a bullshit virus-fever and that she should go back to virtually running the algae photosynthesis factory controls for her wimmens-only cyber-dystopia that mixes elements from Joanna Russ, The Matrix and Ghost in the Shell, and completely leaves out men. They all died off last world war.

“OK, I remember now, but why does my avatar now look like this?”
“We found some old records while you were sick and voted to switch over our avatar design specs. It was all in this amazing ancient book of wisdom titled “Dykes Like Us”.”

My grumpy fanboy brothers; the Genshiken could be far more hostile or even oblivious to our patronage. Just sayin’… No Homo or not, it is still all about us guys. Note too all; spend too much time counting scalps and you’ll miss the razor blade in the shiny shiny apple.

Whoops, a sci-fi yuri-esque digression or two. I wonder how that wandered into my train of thought?

“Look, call it denial if you like, but I think what goes on in my personal life is none of my own damn business.”
–Robert Mankoff cartoon

Like it or not, the heart of Hato Kenjiro is front and center in the dramas surrounding the new Genshiken. Without him (and her), we guys are just peeping into the sacred spaces of a female fandom; we are Kuchiki. If you want more Genshiken, you’re stuck with Hato, the fujoshi planet field exploration unit. It would have been so much easier, if not boring to have made him a femmish-presenting out gay male.

Unfortunately, Hato Kenjiro is not “gei”. Hato Kenjiro is a fujoshi, which is like saying that he is a duck that thinks he is a cartoon robot cat from the future. The simple declaration of his desire to “imagine desire and so desire as fujoshi women do” is such an insane defiance against the order of forms as to reek of privilege if not madness, were he “real”. It would be like Donald Trump announcing that he could get pregnant if he so chose, because he is very rich and has the “really really best scientists”.(1) Perhaps it is even more extreme; like a male middle-class teen in some midwestern American town deciding that he could become pregnant because, “Hey! if Donald Trump wanted to, he’d do it, so I should be able to!” And this doesn’t have anything to do with thinking that he is two-souled or born to the wrong gender either, just to notch up the count on the impossible delusion scale.

Give the kid a John Varley anthology and tell him to go back to studying for his college entrance exams. Hopefully he will figure his life out and not get rich enough to do something hurtfully stupid to other folks in the pursuit of remnants of his teenage dreams. (2)

Hato Kenjiro as a well-behaved construct owes much of his appeal to this kind of fancy. There must be a few guys out there who like reading BL and yaoi and probably most of them would enjoy the chance to fan out with other fans, even or especially if these other fans were rotten girls (or rotten women, or.. etc..) But how many would crossdress to do it? (Aside: I hope the Hato Kenjiro character has not caused any IRL pressure to be brought upon them – c’mon Stan, you’d look great!) And how many would deny that their real-life desires ran towards the guy side of the avenue?

At this point, anyone so ensnared in such customised and bespoke desires would be driven to consider, examine and elaborate them. “Why yes, it seems that I am more drawn to guys than girls, but the muggins gay scene does nothing for me. For some reason I really like the way the relationships play out in this, that and the other BL stories and those yaoi dojins. Oh well, such is fate, now how do I get me some?”

It could make for very odd advice columns in gay male magazines. Dear Doc Feelygood, I grew up in a small town in rural Japan and…

Eventually either the fantasy or real world physical desire would win out. All groups socialize their members or the disaffected withdraw from the group.

The larger question remains. Why the heck, beyond weird storytelling is Kio Shimoku doing this?

I think we must include all, including nominally heterosexual fantasy otherings by the fandom as subject to his project. We must also consider isolating homosocials and the isolating effects of fandom from a larger riaju world, both in its satisfactions (safety, friendship, enchantment/ re-enchantment) and discontents.

Do issues of real world desire and gender expression come into this tale? Beyond “otokonoko” hobby crossplay, I don’t think very much does, at least on the surface. Kio Shimoku has been very clear about tossing out disclaimers. They may strain real world credulity but they are more than sufficient for a romcom manga.

In Hato’s case, fantasy and the social surrounding it are far more urgent to hir desires than any needs of the flesh that involve another person. Hato definitely cares about Madarame, but the uniquely Hato-ish way that care comes out is custom-built for serial comedic failure.

This is sleight of hand by Kio Shimoku. We would have no trouble deciding what Hato was if this was kinked heterosexual desire. “Uh, I have these fantasies about you in rubber underwear, cat ears, tied down with octopus tentacles, singing show tunes. And we’d probably switch roles once we got to know each other better, just for variety and by the way, I insist on blabbing about these romps to my friends before and after, if you go out with me”.

“Cause I really like you.”

I’m not saying it couldn’t work. It would just make for a rather specialized Tinder profile. If the vehicle of these desires was a hot girl, she would get a post-punk band out of it. (Ask me about the short-lived 1980’s “Dover Beach Young Communist Faction“, “Natasha” and her leather-boy posse sometime… Or not, as it was pretty well was what was on the label.)(3)

Beyond the questions of non-traditional desire, same-sex attraction, non-binary sexualities and non-conforming gender expressions lies the question of whether the desire expresses as paired intimacy, group bonding, hobby social activity or even competitive sport. Of such things, sweet dreams are made.

Who am I to disagree..

I may be pushing the analogy too far. Plenty of healthy confused young’uns mess up their first crushes with the usual bucket load of commodified fetishisms that they have absorbed from web pr0n. Usually someone they know will eventually “well Duh! Smooth move, asshat! What the fuck did you think would happen?” them.

Part of the blame for any Hato & Mada train wreck must fall on the Genshiken social itself. The harem sweepstakes have become crass; plenty of lobbying and side-bets on who would make the most interesting pairing but very little pre-emptive harm reduction. Ogiue and Ohno in particular have let this slip by. Both have executive authority, seniority and experience in somewhat functional relationships. It might be a bit unfair to drop the load onto them but why is Yoshitake doing all the pot-stirring? Why is Yajima Merei the only one who seems to think that it will hurt like heck? As one Genshiken fan has noted; very creepy but in-character with what can go wrong when University clubs turn into soap operas.

The Genshiken has featured at least two other fannish socials that have gone bad and hurt people. Is Kio Shimoku taking the dangerous mountain road turn too fast to make a point?

And let us not forget that “Madarame sou-uke” was not a Hato invention. That one carries over from Ogiue’s  SassMada dojin. In many ways it is the last or latest manifestation of her “original sin”

Is this set up is meant to suggest that a lack of practical real-world relationship interest/experience by fujoshis, plus the oddity of same-sex crossdressing fujoshi-but-a-guy pining, plus their drooling need for BL fannout has kept the rest of the Genshiken from raising any caution flags? The closest thing to harm reduction might be the entire Yoshitake-inspired plot as battlefield surgery. Fail the HatoMadaHato story as fast and hard as needed and rebound Hato at Yajima. Who Madarame ends up with is of no importance as long as it isn’t Hato. Best if he shuffles off stage. Ditto with Kuchiki. I wonder what will Yoshitake do if any new males show up wanting to join the Genshiken? She appears to have no qualms about defending an exclusive female space. I doubt if even an “out” gay male fudanshi with super drawing skills could slip by her shields. I wonder if a lesbian fujoshi could. In some ways she is an outwardly sympathetic steathed Kaminaga.

Meanwhile, as passionately pro-Hato correspondents have pointed out, we could view Hato and the Mada crush as the best an inexperienced, conflicted and confused crossdressing, “I’m not gay, It’s only you, No I don’t think I am a girl trapped in a body deemed male at birth, I made the female me to isolate, contain and process my enthusiasms for BL and yaoi, participate in the socials that surround and perpetuate the genre and experience the desires that are stirred in me thereby. One day I hope to try a variant of them in real life, eventually without the wig and dress, if I can only find someone who wants me the way the characters in my fave dojins want each other” young person could manage.

Whew! Tall order.

“Oh, and I’m going to blab about it and draw it into dojins so I can share it all with my fujoshi friends!”

Jeebus Buddha and Bob! This is going down the rabbit hole again. At least I have come up with one neato residual from the exercise. The next thing that Kio Shimoku or some ambitious BL author should come up with is a raunchy comedy wherein the uke is a gay guy BL mangaka, the reluctant seme-draftee is a shy gay-leaning civilian male and the mangaka is mining their relationship hijinks and tribulations for material. Add much trope overload. What made for an obnoxious yuri tale (Manga no Tsukurikata) could be retreaded into a bucket o laffs for a rotten audience because watching guys run themselves through the wringer is a hoot for the gals.

Just credit me as Character Design consultant and forward a reasonable fee via the contact form.

Given how nasty it could have played, Hato was being exceedingly, (even touchingly) earnest in their crush by dropping plenty of formal cautions in Madarame’s path. Unfortunately these came out like melodramatic romantic clichés: “I push you away, sacrificing my love, because I am conflicted, pursuit might sway me/ I need you to chase after me“. Then came the too-much-information flood as fannish excess. This too could be read as touching, because Hato trusts Madarame enough to think that Mada will understand the fanning impulse behind the weird. Unfortunately that was probably too much to ask of a celibate straight geeky guy.

The “shut him down hard” solution has not been used.

Dammit Hato, you used up all of Madarame’s “weird turn pro” reserves. Mada overload. Coolant leak, core shut-down. Emergency power reserves dropping.

Nor has the famous Hato-chan self-control slipped. Hato-chan’s self-control never slips. Hato-kun might blubber and teeter on the edge of bat-shit crazy; Hato-chan is bullet-proof. The worst that will ever show is a blushed face.

The Hato continuum is crushing hard, but never hard enough to let go of their first love.

If only Hato could shut up about the sou-uke and seme stuff. Of course hir can’t. The seme/uke convention is the currency of fujoshi exchange and Hato wants to participate in that exchange more than anything else in hir life. What Hato finds lacking in “gay” and in “straight” is hiding in BL. Hato want! Once Kio Shimoku came up with this algorithm, all manner of neato consequences popped up.

I have noted that there is something excessive, something that meets the bet and redoubles it about Hato deciding that it was inevitable that Hato-chan would end up as girl-bottom. To quote professor Rod Serling;

“Who eats the sins of the sin-eater?”

Did Madarame have to be conscripted as sou-uke just so that Hato could become sou-uke to a sou-uke, the ultra-uke or uber-uke. The lowest of the low, the lower depths, donzoko, a prince (and princess) of hell? Jigoku Otokonoko?

De Profundis:

“In the empty clubroom, I sat down and wept”

The lore of BL and yaoi makes the uke the most interesting character of any pairing. The ukes are the ones who get to crank all manner of conflicted emotions to 11 and beyond. All the girl emotions of the nominal readership, plus all the conflicted guy emotions that the girls consider exclusive male property and project onto male-dom, because in real life we disappoint and definitely need an upgrade. Just don’t point that mess at women, please.

“He protected me when I was crazy and I protected him when he was drunk.”
– Sherman on his friendship with Grant.

The Hato ship is a powerfully romantic idea, for at least a significant part of the fandom but its foundations remain ridiculously unstable. Hato is wonky. Of course everything will go sideways. Mada isn’t exactly Mr. stability himself, but at least he is predictable. And I’m not going to give up harping on how BL enthusiasts hold any male friendship in such rarefied regard that they must conflate it with incipient lust. Any Mada and Hato interaction needs a lot more work getting the two together to see if there really is anything there before asking if there is anything that needs “it”, and before they even consider “it”. Banging Mada and Hato together minus acclimatization is sloppy and cruel, as well as a sure fail. Unless the fans want and consider such details irrelevant.

The infamous Genshiken second season Ogiue yaoi fantasy bypassed vanilla BL take-it-slow setups in favor of an occult freemasonry imputed to all males. Betcha didn’t know this but if the yaoi requires it, all us guys invariably prefer man-schmex to girls. Only a super-freak like alt.yaoi.Kousaka cares to play both sides of the street for louche fun. Told ya this stuff was heavyhanded.

“I’m not gay, its only you” looks more polite, but is there for the contrast and the heightened shock when the madness strikes. Even if carnivores only kill one member of the herd at a time, they still regard the entire herd as ambulatory food storage. Oh well, we’ve been doing something similar to womenkind since the neolithic, so a bit of enlarged perspective might annoy, but won’t kill us guys.

One counter-intuitive aspect of assuming a default state of male swing-any-way-ness (magic BL lurv madness or too much beer may be required) is that on the surface it doubles the absolute potential for pairing breakdown via infidelities and dumping. It is assumed that women favor stable, monogamous, OTP (one true pairing) endings, if only because the real world imposes social and economic penalties on women who fall out of relationships while giving a free pass and/or praise to males who play the field.

One more time, with expository notes:

Hoggamous, Higgamous (guy audience porny) yuri (and heterosexual harem grinders) polygamous.
Higgamous, Hoggamous (gal audience, at least serially) BL (as shoujou/ romance derivative) monogamous.

The idea behind the “could go any way, anywhere with anyone” baseline is to isolate the deterministic, transactional variables of sexuality and gender so as to run simulations on the adhesion properties of various iterations of “romantic love”. Somewhat like computer modelling the search for new antibiotics in moldy dirt samples. If it invents and refines new delusions about how to run the romantic process it is considered to be worth the extra complications. Bonus points for hawt artwork.

Unfortunately few pairings, straight, BL-ish or otherwise offer any absolute guarantees when put up against a mangaka with a mortgage. Angela or Keiko instability easily sets up Spotted Flower. Either can vanish at the drop of a hat and all that remains is the Disappearance of Kousaka Makoto for the pieces to roll plausibly into place. Hato or Sue, as most complex offer a small hope that the author will have more material with which to drag out the story before moving on to the next arc, but this in itself points out a further structural bias.

There is a virgin-angst vibe in the Genshiken, as with other Kio Shimoku works that posits the beginning of intimacy as the beginning of the end of love. Only Ohno and Tanaka seem immune. Saki-Kousaka and Ogiue-Sass give off as much heat as Yajimacci’s mom and dad. This is by no means unique to Kio Shimoku, but his works favor the rule.

Once Angela or Keiko lapse, the current harem fuss could quietly reset and begin all over again. Magic Madarame syndrome.

Along with stability/ fidelity, one should as well consider privacy and it’s enabling condition, normative behaviour. Riajuu is boring, therefore the more riajuu a pairing, the more it will get more privacy.

I wanted to spin out another MadaHatoMada fanfic to consider an  alternative to an Angela ending, but couldn’t get much further than Hato and Mada realising during their continued walk, that if they announced a “try it”, they would get absolutely no privacy ever. That wasn’t as much of an issue back around chapter 119 when I buried a short fluffy scenario at the end of the second addendum to the post that would not die. But now the no privacy effect has been further cranked by the Mangaka.

“Sempai! We are going shopping for some thick sided rectangular god-of-the-corporate boardroom seme glasses for you. And a suit that fits and then a visit to a hair stylist!” Cue the paparazzi. “Hato, Hato, how fares your fundament this morning?” Next door Sue would stalk Hato, the rest would take turns stalking Mada. Soon both Hato and Mada would have to sweep their premises for microphones. Hato would have to switch to illustrating technical manuals, lest every single panel he drew be scrutinised for hidden context and clues. Tubs of lotion and econo-sized packages of rubbers would be left at their doors.

Could classic sparkling fluffy BL play out under withering spotlights?

Hato can’t keep quiet during Chapter 121. Maybe they were both planning to say nothing until they could each mull over the other’s drawings and hentai games? Mada now has to come clean for chapter 122 and Kio Shimoku is being unfair. I am not saying that HatoMadaHato should be hidden in a closet, but sheesh, a little discretion would have gone a long way.

Why is Kio Shimoku highlighting naff club behavior? Saki is matter-of-fact about having real-world gay friends. Madarame, now in self-imposed bohemian mode doesn’t seem to think that a cute otokonoko-ish boy-girl-friend is as much of a hurdle as dealing with forceful female desire – at least until mechanical concerns are brought up. Something about being open to all manner of fantasy otherings vs IRL conservatism, reticence even fear is being suggested.

Could Kio Shimoku be advancing the concern that the very process of fantasy othering carries the risk of reducing one’s capacity for real world empathy and openness to new social arrangements?

Is the fandom truly more open-minded than the riajuu? Was it all an illusion and the Genshiken members are just a few steps away from passive acceptance, even support of right-wing retrenchment? Gate, Thus the JSDF etc. has tons of BL gags, even as the latest anime episode features a snickering corrupt Japanese journalist who is even harder on the heroic military than the “foreign reporters”.

Bad domestic press, Bad!

Awww heck, the Stargate franchise had its asshat militarism too, we still lapped it up and forgave it. Of course it had big-bads that were a lot more powerful than the American military industrial complex. Fantasy pohos with swords and spears tack a bit too close to the The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere for comfort.

Holy right-wing sound truck parade Batman!

Is the Genshiken truly a safe space for “live” same-sex couples? If Mada Hato happened would things get uncomfortably juvenile in the clubroom? Does a freak couple deserve any tatemae, or is it just a case of Madarame’s lack of tatemae privileges infecting the pairing?

The club members and alumni make twice yearly pilgrimages to Comiket. Would they muster to show support at a pride parade? Could they even back off and let the two be?

They (as proxies for their Japanese readership) should get their heads up and their game on. Some rightists in the current government think that sexual minorities are unnatural freaks and that too many women are shirking their baby-making duties. Abortion is illegal in Japan. There is “only” the widely used exemption for “economic hardship”. Contraceptive technologies are less widespread than in the west. Wink and small freedoms could vanish. Would Genshiken fujoshi be able to process the threat to their freedoms? Could fans be silenced if another right-wing governor of Tokyo decided to hit them in the Comiket if politicised dojins started to show up at SEALDs demos?

One further extreme question: by over-adopting canon of BL scripts is Hato Kenjiro acting out a “safe” form of self-hating denial. Is this an ultimate fantastic blowback, in effect a “new sin” of the genre that arises from the complaints first posited in the yaoi ronso debates made two decades previously?

Because if HatoMadaHato were ever to happen, Hato’s unstoppable need to share would move from self-sabotage to self-harm. And there would be Mada harm o plenty.

Hato and Sue are about equally matched for a “lets take things real slow and not hurt each other” relationship, but the lack of discretion that comes with Hato messes things up. Hato is a leaky bucket. Yoshitake pokes Hato, Hato blushes, then spills. Hato-chan is custom-built to exchange BL gossip with the other club members. Same-sex intimacy has no intrinsic value to the fujoshi field exploration unit, only exchange value.

It was my nature, cried the scorpion as both sank beneath the waves.

If Yoshitake pokes Sue all she’ll get is blushing, running away or an obscure anime quote. Poke Angela and you’ll get an enigmatic smile. Poke Keiko and you’ll get braggadocio and /or a punch in the snout, depending on her mood.

the Stands may have left the stage, their terrible legacy remains. Hato’s desires remain abject and alien to the core of their being; the Hatos must be danced through them, as a puppet is made to dance. And a puppet’s face bares scant signs of turmoil.

Clearly Hato needs some consciousness raising. Hato needs to believe that they deserve the formal respect and privacies of honne. The entirety of Hato has yet to give themselves permission to desire their desires and to love.

Hato-as-chan rarely (dojin production night shadow was another) lets down their guard to others in desperation. In the moments after Sue released Hato from her pin and looked through the MadaHato drawings, we saw a Hato who could express emotional turmoil. The honesty and raw pain of the moment frightened and shamed Sue. A similar moment of truth would have won Madarame.

How to arrive at one during this drunken evening at Yajima’s house? Can chapter 122 preserve the goodness of the club and get the club members to shape up, support, encourage and make safe a place for whatever happens?

Ye gawds that reads like mush, but the Genshiken is guy-written josei-ish slice of life manga. You got to admit that it is making a damn good go of slipping weightier themes in with the yuk-yuks.

Can fantasy support and inform reality so that reality can act better? (4)

 

 

(1) Don’t think too hard about this one, unless you are heavily into that variety of slash.

(2) The son of a Japanese billionaire, Mitsutoki Shigeta decided that there was a far more efficient way to become the father of a large family. http://www.thenational.ae/world/southeast-asia/thai-surrogate-offers-clues-into-japanese-man-with-16-babies#full

(3)”Natasha” (names changed to protect the foolish) was young, tall, thin, beautiful, crazy and enjoyed drinking her posse under the table. The few stock commie phrases she yelled out were a fashion accessory, like the hand-painted red hammer and sickle on the ass of her tight leather pants. The rest of the faction‘s program involved conspicuous intoxication, mild fetish exhibitionism, 2.5 chord guitar rock and trying to get into Natasha’s pants. Too exciting for me, but sure was fun to watch at the bar.

(4) Earlier I had a low probability notion that Kio Shimoku would take the easy way out and have Madarame collapse into his usual self-sabotage routine. At that point, some of the women-folk who are taking this seriously would be tempted to step in and break the stalemate. However this approach fails because the group still misbehaved and the breach needs to be healed.

Also I smashed the Hato ship and this time neutered Madarame in the process. He had it coming. Mada should have dragged Hato off to a hotel earlier that afternoon, before the little fool could indulge in dramatic self-sabotage. Even a simple “I like you” from either of them would have sealed the deal. Or end it there, humanely. There wasn’t anyone left after Hato’s “date”. You couldn’t buy a used scooter with this level of hemming and hawing, let alone attempt a hookup. It was a freaking miracle that Madarame didn’t just collapse and go along with another drawing of lots. He probably was too afraid he’d get paired with Keiko. Seriously disappointed in Mada(/his portrayal), especially after he showed some backbone…

Whatever. this was too much fun to trash, so here it is as addendum:

Heavy Object.

“Let me make one thing completely clear…” Madarame took a deep breath, a gulp of beer and continued:

“I didn’t want to insult anyone or hurt anyone’s feelings. I had long ago given up on any chance of having a 3D relationship. Every time I felt even a little bit of interest in a girl, I always screwed up and wound up being the jerk or the insensitive guy or the creep. I took a vow of “2D forever”. Even so, Saki slipped in under my defenses and look what happened. I thought I didn’t mind the hurt. I fell for a fantasy of Saki as Ritsuko Kubel Kettenkrad and was content with that. But of course everyone knew, including Saki and it ended up hurting her too. She had to keep up the pretense that I felt nothing towards her. After it was all over she cried, just for a moment. I didn’t mind hurting, but that made me feel like shit all over again, on top of ending it.

I am not up for this romance thing. At first I felt only at ease with Hato. Now that things are getting serious, it is all complicated again. All I could do was try to keep the balance in the harem and hope everything would stay friendly. If only one of you were interested in me I probably would have done my usual super-geek-out thing and frightened you off. Or creeped you out. I am used to that. It doesn’t hurt any more. Or maybe it does…

Now I’m in a real-life harem game. At least on the surface. Real life is far more complicated and random than a game. The harem genre is a well-defined structure…

Madarame took another big gulp of beer.

…But with this setup, it looks like a harem but all the characters are off, there are no save points and the stakes are too high. The harem genre has stock charactes that add a reassuring, even soothing feeling to the experience. There is the childhood friend, though perhaps I forgot her when someone moved away when we were still kids. There is the cool aloof beauty who will step into the tsundere role. There is usually an athletic girl character. Sometimes she even looks like she might be interested in one of the other girls but she will decide that the lead is interesting. There can even be the cute male underclassman who is often mistaken for a girl, like in “Girls Are Dinosaurs” or in “Lovecraft Aliens Love Comedy”. His role is to provide a manageable whiff of homeroticism. Many harem stories also feature a clingy little sister to add the spice of forbidden desire to the plot. The point being that the main character should get to experience a full range of desire, from pure to forbidden.

As harems go, this one jumbles up all the character types. It is too complicated for me to even…

“Madarame-sempai, stop!” Yajima Merei held up her hand. She looked angry.

“What, uh?”

“You heard me. Stop talking. shut it!.” She stood up. “I’m fixing this. Hato is mine. Both versions. If you two idiots were hot for each other, you’d have done something already. The rest is drama. You are going to do “we-should-no-we-shouldn’t” and the “I want my fantasies” forever or until you both go crazy or jump in front of a train. Chose him tonight or not, the drama will just keep going until one or both of you get hurt bad. And the rest of us will all feel like shit for having encouraged it. It stops here.

She turned and glared at Hato.

I am the only one here who can put up with your nonsense… And for some reason I don’t even understand, I like you.” She looked out at the rest of the club members and then back to Madarame.

“Hato mine!”

“So sit down. Or do you want to fight me for him?”

“Uh Yajima, why are you…” interjected Hato.

“You too. Be quiet!” Yajima looked back at Hato. “Do YOU want to fight me? Arm wrestle?” she flexed her right arm. “You try any judo nonsense and I’ll sit on you. You’ll probably like that. In fact I know you’ll like it. Too many sou-uke boys in this room.”

She then noticed her mom and dad staring at her.

“Oh! crap… Mom, Dad, we’ll talk later.” Her face was flushed with annoyance and embarrassment. Steam seemed to float up from her.

Yajima-san, please…” said Madarame.

“NEKOYASHI… SIT!” Sue yelled out. “SIT!”

Madarame looked at Sue and dropped to the floor. He let out a loud sigh.

Yajima looked over at Sue and held out a thumbs up.
“Good job Sue!”

Angela clapped and made a whoooping noise. “Not sou-uke! Susie’s Uke… Uke no Susie!” Then she looked over at Hato. “YajimaHato!”

Keiko looked annoyed for a split-second then grinned. “Told ya so!” she said, leaning back and crossing her arms.

Sue returned the thumbs up and exclaimed: “Good Job!” She too had a fierce grin on her face.

Hato’s face was full redder than red.

Yajima still standing looked again at Hato, then around the table. “Any questions? I now declare harem season over. Please enjoy the hospitality of my house.

I think I need more beer.”

She sat down. Hato edged closer to refill her glass.

-30-

Anyone have any other alternatives aside from a zombie attack? Less than 2 weeks left if you want to throw your version into the guess how Kio Shimoku pulls it off hat.

Win an internets.

LATER: Don’t skip the comment section! 

To denounce the error of truth and love

Some AU Chapter 122 fan-fiction; because Kio Shimoku can be a real demon of mis-direction when he wants to be. The only thing worse than being a stick-in-the mud, old-school cis het fanboy is being one with a plausible scenario that screws up everybody’s ships.

The Second President.

“Time to choose. This has gone too far”

Madarame turned to face them all.

“I choose Yoshitake Rika-san – but only if she dresses like a boy.
That got your attention, didn’t it?”

“Ok; Not!”

“I apologise to everyone. My deepest apologies to Kuchiki-san, whose celebration this trip is supposed to be for. Hold tight, I’m going to fix things for you.”

“My thanks to Yoshitake-san for trying to clear up the Harem, You were right, This could tear the club apart. Seeing what is happening tonight, I fear that it has already started. I must stop that even if it means ‘decide or leave‘.”

“I am the second President of the Genshiken, a club that I loved and am still very proud of. The new membership is different from my time, but in many ways just as exciting and even more productive. I will not be the reason that it breaks into pieces. I resign as harem-lead and circle-king.”

“Thank you Keiko Sasahara-san for your interest in me. You are right; like Saki-san, you stand in the riajuu world and can point out the obvious things that we miss. You are strong and beautiful… but I must consider the future. If we went out and it did not work, how could I ever face Sasahara-san or even Ogiue-san, your brother and your soon-to-be sister-in-law? Even while it worked it would be very uncomfortable. It is way too close; too much like a small village drama.”

Miss Susanna Hopkins. I am comfortable around you and I am very happy that you are now comfortable enough around me to look my way. What would happen if we ruined that?

You are a vital member of the club. I hope to watch you as your skills catch fire and you become a force at Comiket. And yet, neither of us know the slightest thing about real-world romance. The chance of it working is slim and the chance of bitter misunderstanding is high. And then I would never again be able to trade obscure otaku jokes with you.

That I could not bear.

Hato Kenjiro-san. How did we end up here? I tripped over you when we were both drunk and tired. You cooked for me and cleaned up after me when I broke my wrist. We both have a head full of fantasies swirling around us and most of the club looks at us as a pairing. I always said I didn’t mind… but I do mind! I don’t like being thought of as a sou-uke. And I don’t know if I can be a forceful seme either. These fantasies leave no room for me to just be me, a guy.

You gave me Valentines day chocolate and I felt something. Earlier I told you that I was not afraid of trying it, even as you tried to persuade me to give up. Thank you for your objections; If anything they re-doubled my interest. I don’t think I have turned gay and I don’t see you only as a guy or only as a girl. I wanted all of you. I have become greedy.

But you made your point. And we missed two bigger issues. Neither of us have the slightest idea of how to do 3D romance, let alone that we are two guys. I don’t think that is so much of a big deal; unless we try to behave like something in your dojins or in my trap games. That will not work, I guarantee that. And then we will grow to hate each other.

Right now, you are drawing, you can become a dojinshi artist, you might even follow Ogiue as semi-pro or pro. And you are an important member of the club. You said it yourself: If something was to go wrong, we would never speak again. And I fear that even if nothing went wrong, how you fit in with the rest of the club would be forever changed. You say that if I can understand that you have thought of both MadaHato and HatoMada that you will stop running. You have made me think of both of these and all the junk in my head from my trap games too.

And I am not afraid.

But I have also thought of how much effort you have put into becoming a fujoshi. I said I understood that you were a fudanshi. And you said you were a fudanshi. I was wrong and you are wrong. You are not a fudanshi, you have never wanted to be a fudanshi. You are a fujoshi. You are as real a fujoshi as the rest of the women in the Genshiken.

As a fujoshi you fit into the club. As a crossdressing fudanshi with a boyfriend, you de-stabilize the club, you break the magic circle, you destroy all the work you have done, you risk your friendships, you threaten the club. You can call me a coward but I have seen you with your first love. I have heard your true heart beat doki-doki.

I will not stand between it and you.

Had the stars been different, something different might have happened. Even now I hope that I can be your friend. But I am not your sou-uke. I am not your seme. I cannot even be your love. I must be your sempai, the second president of the Genshiken, who served this club and passed it on to Sasahara-san who passed it on to Ohno-san, as she passed it on to Ogiue-san. One day, it might be passed to you.

I will protect what was entrusted to me.

Susana-san, do you recognise the line: “No one will be happy. Everyone will be equally unhappy together”? That is the Japanese way. I will get my bags, catch the late train, get home, start looking for a job and think of moving close to it when I get one. I will see you all at Comiket, and maybe at the University culture fair. Do not disappoint me, become great.

Kuchiki, I return to you your harem fantasy. Don’t break it.

(Much angry grumbling from the group)

I am so full of shit right now that I am going to explode.
That cannot be helped. And I leave the story without a good ending.

I will try one last small hope. I will “look with unclouded eyes” at the one who has been right in front of me all this time.

Angela-san. (Ohno please translate – I must get a smart phone to help translate) I thank you for your earlier suggestion, but I would not care to be shared with you… or to share you. (pause) I think I would want you all for myself. (pause)

I hope that does not disappoint you. (pause) I know you have a wicked sense of humor. I thought that you were just playing with me when you went on about my fingers and stuff, but then you keep travelling all this way to come here. Thousands of miles, so many times! (pause) I know it is fun to visit with Ohno and Sue and the club, but I have been a fool not see anything else. I could be wrong. (pause) …But you were ‘first girl‘. First Girl always wins – if you still want to. (pause)

You are beautiful and scary and powerful and funny and I apologise for all the times that I have run away. I never meant to hurt your feelings. Please forgive me. I must learn from my friend Hato-san. (pause)

It is my turn not to run away any more. (pause)

And long distance does not look so far away any more. (pause)

Also; forgive me for being calculating, but if I am a complete loser and you dump me, It won’t hurt the club. I am new at this, please treat me well. Tell me soon how you feel.

I love you all. Speaking from my true heart and as your sempai and as the Second President of the Genshiken, this is my final decision.

And now I need another drink.”

-30-

 

 

C’mon! You have to admit it WORKS. Uses all extant parameters, dissolves the harem in such a way that everyone saves face, appeals to hierarchy and responsibility getting in the way of true whatever, leaves lots of room for happy fantasies, makes our loser hero so damn noble – he can snap to when put in an executive role – and lets him jump on the grenade heroically.. Only Angela can save his sorry ass if she wants to.

The fear of a runaway-harem-train-crash might be enough to overcome the fear of a sexy blonde gaijin bombshell who thinks he is cute. Pretty easy heroic sacrifice. Twist the other arm. Ooooh you forced me!

Booo Hisss Cheat! Yell the pro-Hato faction. Of course. I admit it.
Just sayin’. That’s why the patriarchy is a rat-bastard. It is always too easy. It owns all the default settings. The game is called Monopoly for a reason.

Doesn’t mean that I don’t think the pro-Hato forces of truth and justice aren’t up for the good fight:

Madarame: Hato, you’re the only one I can be forward with.
Madarame: Whatever’s stopping you from accepting that we could be serious with each other, I’ll help ease your worries.
Madarame: Seriously, don’t think the fact that we’re both guys means that we can’t work out together.
Madarame: Dang yeah, I’ve definitely thought about topping you.
Madarame: Sure man, I get that choosing you means I’ll have to consider role-reversal when it comes to sexy times.
Madarame: (literally in front of every one else, including the girls who are openly vying for his attention) Okay let’s continue our date in private, Hato.

Fuckboys: UHM YEAH, MADAHATO? IT’S JUST NOT REALISTIC. WHEN IS HE GETTING TOGETHER WITH SUE.
– muravie’s Tumblr

And:

“I’ve given up on trying to convince those types. Even if Kio dedicated an entire chapter to Hato and Mada getting it on in graphic detail, they’d still find a way to NO HOMO out of it like “Naw man he tripped and accidentally slipped his penis into Hato and because it was dark he couldn’t tell it was a man he was fucking so totes no homo Sue end when lmao”.”

#their tears are delicious though #they sustain me
-andialex’s tumblr

Even without the deep draughts from the tear bucket, they do make a persuasive set of arguments:

“Without a DOUBT Madarame is way more interested in Hato than any of the others he went on dates with, that’s just utterly blatant. And they’re able to discuss all this so candidly! They’re both trying their best to be totally honest with each other and say how they really feel and what they need and what they want, and it’s all looking just really good and really healthy, you know?

I feel like if they got together, they could have really good communication and that goes such a LONG way in a relationship. They could work out for sure, they really could.

This chapter IS beautiful, oh man. ;_; I love them both.””

-Hatomada’s Tumblr

Point taken. Well pitched. The “Fuckboy” contingent has been letting our end of the argument slip a bit. I fix.

I, or anyone else can write fanfic sequels where Angela told Madarame to go fuck himself, she is nobody’s last choice. Mada leaves, moves away and occasionally pops up again at conventions. (Which begs another question; where are the older Genshiken alumni?)

Or Angela and Madarame walk off into the sunset. Or Hato lends Rika boy clothes and they walk off into the sunset. Or Hato grabs Mada after the speech and sweeps him off his feet in a tango smooch. Or zombies attack just as Madarame is about to reveal who he has chosen.

For a manga about fans who take the stuff they love and make their own stuff to add to the love, there is a serious need for more Genshiken fanficton. Not to be a pest, but Hatozine Vol2 please! I’ll read it. I’ll help. Sorry, I have not enough cred to org it.

Now what do I do with this? I put it up here on this blog of course. Feel free to toss noodles at my ears via the comment section.

What next? I don’t think Kio Shimoku or any of his crew troll obscure English language blogs or English Tumbler space looking for ideas, or to frustrate obvious plot-line speculation by fans. Some time around March 25 we’ll get an idea of how Kio Shimoku wants to play this. If I come close I’ll buy myself a chocolate donut. If he does something else, I’ll look to see if he does it better and try to figure out why he did, what he did.

It’s a hobby.

No, wait. Put on your tin-foil hats and adjust them tight. Get your red and blue pills ready. The big secret that you are not yet ready to understand is that Kio Shimoku sends his minions to read this blog. He’s gonna be sooooooo pissed off that I guessed his solution for chapter 122 that he CHANGES IT. Yuppers! So if you get a nice juicy MadaHatoMada canon ship in chapter 122, it is so because of moi, this post and all my friends at the IATPT. You owe us all big-time. Don’t believe me? You aren’t ready for the TRUTH, Sheeple! Or you suspected it all along, forcing me into revealing it in a purposefully clumsy way as a false flag operation to cover the tracks of the great conspiracy. At least you have no idea yet about the Duck.

And there is no duck.  (1)

Yup, Uhuh!

Or I could just be desperately clinging to old stories. please see:

http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/film/2015/12/what-do-when-youre-not-hero-any-more

(You may have to reload a few times or turn off javascript to get around the effing sign-up pop-over.)

Thing is, I’m trying to get around all this. Maybe I just want ALL the alternatives. Mada walks away in disgust with everyone. And Mada walks off into the sunset with Angela or with Keiko or with Sue or with all of the girls or with all the girls plus Hato, as boy, as girl, as boy-girl. And Mada walks off with Hato and then…

No one said the modernist subject has to be a hysterically unified ego-structure. Duh; Joyce, Elliot, blah blah blah. We were fucked the minute they invented the movie camera. Read The Wasteland as screenplay, yadda yadda yadda. How sophomoric of me to mention this.

Does the way the walking off is done have to salve something in the way I want the forms of the symbolic order to play out?

Do the characters have to start acting brutally honest with each other and themselves? Is that just a fallback? Will I put up with some gay-lite if they act honorably and honest? What if Hato is being devious and Madarame is a poor little deluded lamb? What if Madarame is going to turn evil and exploit poor lovestruck Hato? Can they be equally deluded and make funny mistakes over and over and over again? An idiot guys’ guide to fakee gay relationship fun via BL tropes. Try this and fail! Hijinks Ensue. Ok Lets try the idiot guys’ guide to a fakee pervy-queer relationship fun via Josou game tropes. Even funnier fail. Haw haw Haw. Serves you all right.. Should have stuck to cis / het behaviour.

Don’t laugh too hard. In my youth I watched a horribly stupid and somewhat emotionally damaged young couple try to learn how to do “normal” romance by watching 1970’s soap operas. The results were ridiculous but probably better than their earlier attempt to figure out true love using massive amounts of recreational hallucinogens.

Or Mada and Hato walk off into the sunset and slowly figure it all out, with kittens and long walks in the park and finally after many many a chapter, in a special comiket-only 18+ dojin by “some other mangaka“, (special low comiket-only price Y1,000) the happy couple engage in a marathon of yaoi schmex acrobatics to consummate their union then hold each other tightly, talk of their futures together and profess true, unending love, forever, yawn and yawn ever, as Mary Jeanne Johnson once suggested; like happy, married, middle-aged lesbians. Of course she then added: “real gay guys don’t do that”. But what does she know? MJJ blogged before cialis, perhaps even before poppers. Heck, even before Shoujo Sect.

But hey… They could also turn into 70 meter tall kaiju and wreck Tokyo. (Bad fanboy in denial, Bad!)

HOLY SHIT! HOLY SHIT! HOLY SHIT! HOLY SHIT! Chapter 122 will be an extended plug-piece for the new Genshiken Eroge Visual Novel! Yes, you can get all the endings! If you clear all the routes, you get naughty bonus stuff too!

(I just collapsed in a pile of fannish steam out of my ears or something!)

Probably not. Dream on. Some folks will be disappointed.

I could, at this point bring in a few poignant essays from writers, with female and/ or non euro-ethnic and/ or not-straight and/ or not-cis identities about the shit of trying to get through the academic maze and/ or the publishing industry with that old white guy at the gates (gates also staffed by unpaid rich white girl interns) and in their heads, but shit…

The idea that anyone is going to give anyone else a juicy $150K tenured job for life at a university teaching other rich folk’s kids the magic of writing is soon going to vanish down the toilet of the “sharing economy” aka the new serfdom. And fanfiction will displace official fiction as they merge into each other on Amazon. Then Bots will get better at writing and all of us can go home. Gresham’s Law. Freedom of the press means freedom to own one and crank it yourself, and you are reading this hideous mess on yours. Ps: it is also your own personal music and movie studio. Enjoy, please don’t overload the interwebs.

Meanwhile, I get more new content then I can possibly even read at the cost of all my time and a $30/month DSL charge. Let’s so not go into the failing economics of creative production and distribution. It will all soon go belly up and if we want more Genshiken, we will have to make the trip to see Kio Shimoku perform the latest chapter of Genshiken as Rakugo; live with subtitles up on a screen. But we have to all strip and change into yukata first, so we don’t cam the show and bootleg it up onto the web.

Guess I should start running ads on this blog.
Nawwwwwww. Not yet, Feels like work.

Serves Kio Shimoku right for opening the Pandora’s Götterdämmerung of fan-fiction and secondary production in an age when the traditional male gaze diffuses under the pressures of new economic realities, distribution methods and electronically aided production. He will weave tales that take us through the long night ahead. When he falls silent, others will take up the storytelling.

At least none of his characters pirate their manga and anime. No one in Japanese manga or anime ever pirates their fave stuff. They never even go to Book Off for used copies in great shape, for Y100.

Dog most assuredly is not barking.

Let ten thousand flowers bloom.

25 more days.

Ps: the Ogiue Maniax write-up for chapter 121 is up:
http://ogiuemaniax.com/2016/02/26/nayami-heat-genshiken-ii-chapter-121/

 

 

(1)  Later: I just want to make it perfectly clear that the “red-pill” section above is a pure “down-the-rabbit-hole” bat-shit whooohaah attempt at conspiracy humor. You know like that meta-joke Stargate episode… or sumthin’..  What with current US politix, I thought it timely. I haven’t quite lost it… yet. Occasionally over-enthusiastic, guilty as charged. Also, I have nothing against HataMadaHato ships. I think they are cute. I’m not picking on Hato. Just wanted to point out the obvious biases in the structure.  However, I have been reminded that some folks don’t share my sense of the absurd and others find me a bit hard to follow, so I just thought I better… Oh heck, screw it… 

A month later, after the mess that is chapter 122: 
Well this reads like suck in the light of chapter 122. That was not a resolution. That was not a serious response, to anyone and from anyone. I am ashamed of this post but I will leave it up. There is still a lot of Hato, especially in female presenting, full-metal-fujoshier-than-thou mode that is deeply troublesome but during the trip, Hato was locked in her like a straightjacket. She could not break character, lest she lose everything. Besides, the Genshiken is about fans and geek and Hato’s fanning is as legitimate as anyone elses. But that also means Hato should have the right to dial it back if needed.

And Mada… Mada was pursuing, Mada almost went through with it. Only the thought of having to be the lead in a Genshiken no-privacy-ever dojinshi collapsed his resolve. His responses to the others were perfunctory. The response to Hato-as-chan was an invite to pretend it was all a rotten fantasy and damn everything. And so they did. In too many ways, far more insulting than “and then they woke up and it was all a dream”. An honest confession demand an honest response. None was given.

The club did not help, it hindered. Yoshitake was allowed to run her setup. I wonder if she now smiles her work to see. She always assumed that Hato was gay and Madarame would run. I don’t think Madarame suddenly has eyes for guys in general but he felt something real for Hato. He should have been allowed to. Was he “fooled”? Perhaps some of the melodramatics from Hato pushed buttons, but who the fuck was there for Mada when he was stuck at home with a dead wrist? Was that all delusion? Even Hato’s fannish enthusiasms are shat upon. At least I tried in my stupid thing above to value them. How can they even ever face each other again?

We didn’t hear enough from Hato in male mode.We never found out what the two talked about when they continued their “date”. Ogiue was ineffective. Ohno was out of range – no fairy godmother help this time. Sue folded like a house of cards. The entire club was drunked up and then scared shitless of what they had done. This fails the Genshiken, fails the general readers, fails the readers who cheered for a gender-diffuse, non-binary, trying to figure it our Hato (Kio, that is really is low), Fails the stick in the mud middle-aged guy readers who were trying to get their thinking past the angry ghosts of earlier times and even fails the rabid fuckboys who could have lost a bit of the fear that hides behind their snark. It fails as comedy, it fails as tragedy, it fails as slice of life. Fail fail fail.

Damn you Kio, you shat in our cornflakes. Repent!

 

nao wot?

HUH?

The temple dates are over. Someone is looking overwhelmed…

Whaaaaaaaaaattttthapppppppppeeeeennnnnnnneeeeeeeeeddddddd?

Chapter 121 raws have appeared and the course of true love remains rocky.
Please, Mada, don’t screw up!

(and wtf is roku/ro-go-go-san/sa/za-go ?)

 

Much Later: Turns out the cryptic 65535 on p13 isn’t Japanese number slang;  5-5 = go! go! No  ro-go-go-san-go. It is a Japanese forum-slang reference to counter memory limits in old-school games. For instance, the maximum amount of cats that one could ever lure into visiting in your Neko Atsume game, or something. Somewhat like “power level over 9000!” but more in context of “At Maximum”or “Overload!”,which could apply to confusion level, embarrassment, or any number of things.

Meanwhile, a fresh review of chapter 121 is up at Ogiue Maniax: https://ogiuemaniax.com/2016/02/26/nayami-heat-genshiken-ii-chapter-121/
What’s all this talk about Saki? Why did her name come up? Keiko? Sounds thin to me.

 

Kio Shimoku, Madarame & Hato vs Akio Nakamori

Meanwhile, one more backgrounder thought about Madarame and Hato, in the wake of the suspense over Chapter 120 and beyond.

What if one of the meta-reasons for Madarame’s gradual, growing attraction to Hato Kenjiro, even for Hato’s existence was Kio Shimoku’s response to a decades-old torrent of ridicule directed at manga fans by the man who coined the term “2D complex” and first used “otaku” as a pejorative against them?

Akio Nakamori’s second article in the July 1983 issue of Manga Burriko (see Galbraith below) asked: “Do Otaku love like normal people?”

“No, otaku do not love like normal people because they are attracted to fictional girl characters”

Read the nasty origins of Madarame’s 2D forever complex for yourself, in: “Otaku Research and Anxiety About Failed Men” by Patrick W. Galbraith  www.academia.edu/12327055/_Otaku_Research_and_Anxiety_About_Failed_Men

Oh snap! That’s inconsiderate towards those who read Hato as a trans-person. Kio Shimoku goes out of his way to make Hato blurt out Otoko otoko otoko every so often to muddy the waters. Read the article and think of Madarame and his character development, stretching back to chapter one of the Genshiken.

Long game Shimoku-sensei, long game…

LATER. much later: 

Here is Matt Alt’s 2008 translation of Nakamori Akio’s first derisive work of “otaku-ology”: “This City is Full of Otaku” on Neojaponisme
https://neojaponisme.com/2008/04/02/what-kind-of-otaku-are-you/

 

PROGRAM NOTE: Please check out the previous post, including the comments. It has been updated and added to; on January 30, 2016, (and again, more on Feb 01, soooo tired!) to more fully thrash out wither MadaHato. Lots more mulling over it all. Don’t be shy, please read and weigh in! Fan-mind assemble!

The squeee heard ’round the world

Wherein the shock of chapter 120’s apparent developments causes a mild case of dis-associative writing conceit.

AKA, the post that will not resolve! Updated and added to on Jan 30; even more stuck in on Feb 01, 2016… Some one stop me now!

Our 53rd “Genshiken used to be good but is now nothing but gay fujoshi shit” discussion is now in session.

Mudakun, confused: Soooo… Chapter 120 raws are out. I was expecting Madarame to just stand there, or to get all angry and bitter and spit out at Ogiue that he’s been set up to be the coward. Hato can back out of something that the Hatos got too deep into and the girls can have their melodramatic story of failed boy love. Swear a lot, then go home and call a moving company.

Mudakun, sympathetic: On the other hand, Mada has sure shown some spine, going after Hato, not giving up after a classic manga “thorny path” speech on top of Hato’s earlier “I am not the pretty thing you think I am” speech. He might be wondering what the heck he’s getting himself into, but he feels something and he’s acting on it. That’s commendable… Manly even… Am I committing a spoiler? Ok:

SPOILER WARNING! SPOILERS AHEAD!

Mudakun, angry: I think Keiko was right after all. While Hato might not be consciously setting out to fuck Madarame around, the Hato continuum is such a great big screaming drama-queenish mess that anybody who gets sucked in is gonna get hacked up. Ya’ dont put your hands under running lawn mowers. Scorpion and frog…

…Closest thing to Hato acting honorable were the two attempts to back out, but both times Hato wanted to save face and be the hero. “I am not the perfect girly girl I present as, choose someone else !!!” “you are not ready to walk the thorny path, you are only in for cheap thrills!” Such self-sacrifice from the conflicted kouhai. C’mon; what is bugging Hato is that Madarame is leading, not following and that the Mada-sou-uke script is in shambles. Also it looks like shit is getting real and maybe the Hato continuum ain’t ready for butt-sex intimacy. Maybe Hato fears that a real m:m romance will jeapardize their membership status in the magic Genshiken circle of fujoshi-dom?

…Also, not buying the “Brave Mada” thing completely either. Hato as proxy for Shimoku-sensei has set up the readership by running a wish fulfillment script for the fen-dom. Mada is patheticly overwhelmed by the harem interest. That doesn’t sound like a recipe for true love or even a weekend of fun. The Hato-wanting-Mada story still feels like Hato is dancing to an internalised fujoshi script and acting it out for his idea of a gift for the Genshiken wimmens, as proxy for the shipping (assumed rotten, female) readership. I don’t buy Hato’s want-him-at-first-sight pity-moe and I don’t think they know each other well enough to have any other reasons to suddenly want each other. Any evidence of even “he’s my type” physical desire? Do either of them look at any other 3D male body parts? Even each other’s? At least Rika thinks Mada has a sexy neck and collarbone. Sure Hato has ingested metric shit-tons of yaoi, but then hitting on the first vulnerable guy in sight isn’t exactly fair ball, is it? I read nothing but opportunism and sempai pity-moe from Hato and “Hato is interested in me and I’m not as scared by that as I am scared of interest by Angela, Sue or Keiko” from Madarame.

Mudakun, analytical: Well, one thing you gotta hand to Kio Shimoku; He has dragged whatever straight male audience of otaku his series had left into gradually accepting that the senior geek character could go soft-gay (as opposed to hard gay?) for a crossdressing and rather confused young.. ahem.. might as well use the rude gay term, twink. Assuming the author still wants to sell shit, this is quite a high wire act. And Shimoku has now started drawing boy-Hato as overexaggeratedly “cute”, Check this out:

Mudakun, confused: Yikes! That’s not just rotten girl bait! Pretty boy Hato! That’s massive ‘phobosity-inducing poking at us insecure guys and possibly some service for whoever… Does Shimoku plan to write Hato into a boy band? I hear that some of the managers want droit-de-seigneur from their charges.

Mudakun, angry: You give him too much credit. Kio Shimoku is just running a boys-in-skirts retread. Otokonoko, otokonoko, otokonoko. If it wears skirt it’s a girl… etc. Figures that if that “Dicca” mangaka can sell a few pervy fujo retreads to straight boys, that mining the “Reversible” market will extend the life of a long-in-the-tooth franchise.

Mudakun, analytical: I would remind all of you that no one has got nekkid with anyone else and a tub of sex lube yet. Aren’t these charas still (if not paired off) all angsty, clumsy virgins?

M,sympathetic: There still is plenty of time for the happy couple to talk it over and realize that while they both might be uncomfortable with the idea of fucking, there is something there… Something, maybe like friendship? What a roundabout way to go about it. This, by the way is what I call the Helmut error, and even Sedgwick makes it. It assumes that everything for guys leads inexorably to guys fucking, all the time, above all else. The goggles – they are hard to avoid, both for the rotten contingent and for a gay community that wants to see any affirmation of their lives in the crushing weight of straight narrative. This is understandable as sex is very good, but all indications, including the dating scene in modern Japan sez that this is in no way absolute. Straight or gay, folks, even male ones, can be hesitant and choosy.

M,angry: Yeah, yeah, yeah… I’ve heard all this before, but ya’ know: The complainers on 4chan and some of the forums have a point! Where is all the geek lore? Where is the otaku social stuff? It has been all romcom hitch-Mada-up for a year (or more like 3) now. And you haven’t heard it all yet… Get this: Some anon on 4chan said that in the dialogue in ch120, as Mada is going on that he’s not completely scared off yet, stooopid-Hato comes out and insists that Mada has to be the uke if they are going to go out. The Uke! Fuck That!

M,analytical: Any idea what Mada has to say about that?

M,angry: Fuck what Mada says, he’ll probably just mumble something or whatever. Thing is, that’s a pretty shitty way to start off a relationship. Kio Shimoku is being nasty! Neither of them know jack-shit about how to do man-sex – not that I do either, but it sure doesn’t sound like something one tries to fake from what you picked up from trap games and yaoi. One of the big complaints that real gay guys have about yaoi and BL is the whole seme/uke thing.

Behold the fearsome seme!

M,analytical: Maybe Shimoku is after a bigger de-construct of fujo fantasies and will go into rude grotty details of the scared couple making a terrible mess of man-sex. I mean, it is almost a miracle that they can hold hands without one or the other getting hurt, the way they have been written. The first kiss is going to end up with at least one broken nose. Could they even get up the nerve to try a first kiss? What if one of them doesn’t smell right to the other? Shimoku will have to get them both really drunk first! Then someone can ralf all over someone else.

M,less angry, now skeptical: Yeah, I mean putting aside that they are cartoon characters and can be written as realistic or unrealistic as needed, the only way that either of them has ever considered same-sex desire has been through fantastic representations of it – BL and josou games.

M,sympathetic: Careful… Remember that for angsty virgins even vanilla m:f intimacy will be clumsy the first few times. No matter how much porn they have read. Same for romantic relationship stuff. If you put heavier conditions on same-sex romance and -urmm- the mechanics, you come off a bit phobic, neh? Similarly, where were the objections over Angela, Keiko or Sue being interested in Mada? Not much to go on there, neh? Isn’t the whole premise of this dialogue contaminated with an undercurrent of phobosity; fear of a gay or trans* Hato and “mourning” for the “queering”/”gay-ing” of Madarame? That, in the very least looks sad. Didn’t we expect more from ourselves than that?

M,confused: Isn’t it easy to blame-wash discomfort as something a lot worse? We are working on it. If anything we were lulled into a false sense of security by all the denial being spouted within the story. Sure, the denials became more and more strained as the story went on, but these mirror the not-gay/ fantasy-shadow-of-gay of lots of BL and yaoi, plus the long-standing slipperiness of public identities like “gay”, their application to same-sex practitioners in Japan; plus the whole sociology/ gender studies thingy about “men who have sex with men”. You could run a grad seminar on sexuality and gender issues on the Genshiken.

If Hato and Madarame do become an intimate couple, will either of them ever admit to being “gaei” (or however Japanese folks are pronouncing it this week) or “bi” or non-binary, or queer or any other of our familiar western labels? Or will the happy guys just take refuge in “I’m not… , it’s only him”? Or Hato will finally cop to “The heart of a girl, so the couple are now all progressively and nominally “straight” again. Perhaps they’ll just call it a “hobby”? Kio Shimoku likes to tease his readers.

M,now skeptical: It would have been easier if the readership was not put in the position of either assuming a default state of heterosexuality for the characters, then adding “fantasy sports” to their tastes as a side effect of their pervy fannish enthusiasms and had, in the matter of those who grumbled and dropped the series, just assumed that all the Genshiken characters were all going to be “just-so” polymorphously perverse as a story-telling trick: The Genshiken as a slow, toned-down, better behaved Rocky Horror show.

M,sympathetic: That would have made all the characters read as obnoxious posers, rather than conflicted, shy young-adult fans. The only odd thing is that their hobbies involve displaced, fantasy minority sexual and gender expressions, while they themselves default as angsty straight virgins. They just like reading about under-age lolis, magically sexy girly-boys and bishie guys (or rugged oyagi) struck by fits of lust and passion for each other. No fantasy lesbians though (so sad…) The ‘phobosity is a side effect of the exoticism. We are into a more complex “othering” than simple fear/dislike/phobia.

Besides; once we have invested in sympathetic characters, the doctrine of authenticity calls; we want them to “be happy” by being true to themselves. Hato can announce to Madarame “I hope this doesn’t freak you out, but I feel something” Madarme can then decide. Everything above-board, upright and very boring story-telling. If only Hato wasn’t such a conflicted tangle of desires and denial… Both Keiko and Rika have addressed this obliquely within the story.

M,now skeptical: Hmmmph! Are you sure that lurking the rotten-girl feed on Tumblr and those little fanfiction experiments haven’t swung you from one extreme of bias to another?

M,confused: Ok, Angela is still paper-thin, but at least from Kio Shimoku’s slightly nihon-jiron perspective, athletic carnivorous convention-going American girls might be predisposed towards a ride on the yellow taxi and develop a geek crush on Mada. Angela is alien and aliens do alien things. My past objections to her characterisation still hold; the character type is troublesome, even if the way he draws her and the few lines he gives her softens it a bit.

Sue is still best girl because she and Madarame are equal in otaku lore and fanatic devotion to the culture – they have been trading obscure references since day one. The only thing wonky about her chara is how she bounces from exuberant fannish whirlwind to paralysed shy Sue. I know that the second version is to level her up from joke character and is supposed to manifest only if she is experiencing any “feelings”, but the execution has been a bit rough. Her little talk with Madarame has fixed this a bit, but not enough. I used to think SueHato would be a great power couple but Spotted Flower convinced me the YajimaHato is better, because the Hato continuum is a heck of a lot of work. And don’t tell me that Yajima Merei would put up for any BL uke-seme nonsense. Guess seme-uke doesn’t come into play if you are with a woman, boob job or not…

Keiko? Keiko is Keiko. As The Adversary, she is still the most believable, but shouldn’t she be raging? She just proposed to Madarame, even saying that she would support his useless ass and he stood there paralysed.

M,now skeptical: Ok, I buy all that. Let me recontextualise: I question not the gayness but Hato’s sincerity. Hato trying to back out might even be read as the last honest part of him trying to trick himself into behaving decently. Asking Mada to be the uke? Jeeesh! That’s like asking the girl you are meeting for a first date if she will please wear rubber undies, cat ears and high heels later that night. Hato is running on a script: from sempai crush and the Stands cheering section onward to little miss Nadeshiko no Genshiken. It reads as selfish and predatory and devoid of love or even friendship.

M,analytical: All our desires are just things we force on others anyway? Still, would sincerity be a big issue if it was a m:f crush?

M,now skeptical: I recall that someone had a very cynical reading of Sasahara going through the motions of not freaking out while reading Ogiue’s dojin. Brain to Sass: smile and compliment her silly gay smut = get into her pantsu. WIN!

M,analytical: Point taken; aren’t we all the big mushy romantic.

M,sympathetic: Look, you might be a bit right about my point of view shifting, or at least acknowledging how other fans can get caught up in their enthusiasms. What’s wrong with that? They are pretty damn resourceful; they “add value” and make “secondary product” and do what academics call “transformative works” and they came up with the link for the raws really fast, because I was too lazy to sit on /a for days waiting for the post. Pretty impressive. We all get more material out of our fave franchise as long as we don’t freak out and go all phobic. Some of their insights are GOLD! It’s not like the Genshiken fendom are doing Nazi S&M bara and stuffing it in our faces. Given that Kio Shimoku wants to be the numero uno producer of fanfiction for his own property and routinely sucks the oxygen out of the room, it’s a wonder anything gets made.

Besides, you were pleased as punch that you snuck into Hatozine, and lookie how all the other pieces in it were good. No horses got frightened. No Mada screaming that his butt hurt. And what of all that other weird fic you wrote in order to quote: “work out the possibilities”.

M,analytical: Hey! You were there too. We can’t blather on about fandom and dojins and fans making a story their own and never know how it feels to do it, can we? It was all worksafe. You gotta admit that the Sue and Hato-kun piece wouldn’t have come together unless we got all the other crap out of the way. And a Qualia rip-off is as good an excuse for a multiverse as any. We LIKE Qualia. Gaku is frighteningly romantic in a psycho lesbian way. Gaku could out-psycho Muracielago; maybe not the first 600 times, but she wouldn’t give up. Gaku never gives up. She’s in love. “What other purpose does my existence serve?” You know she is lurking in the wings. Much psychotic mojo is bound to rub off. Just wait until Keiko shows up.

M,skeptical: stop self-promoting. You even wrote a gay Hato and happy (absent) Mada into the mess. Besides, if it was so much fun, why haven’t you fixed the dialogue yet? What about all those tips your beta reader red-pencilled up for you? Got bored and distracted again?

M,sympathetic: We had better things to do IRL, neh? And please remember that the one probability-variant Hato was out about his sexuality, had had a lot of interaction with his Mada before-hand and the happy couple were working it out without the stupid BL stuff. We had to throw in at least one Mada and Hato pairing, vanilla as fuck, or it would fail as a multiverse.

AHEM! GENTLEMEN! Aren’t we a little off-topic?

M,confused: Uhhhh, right, Ok; Here’s another thing I don’t get. Many of the past works by the mangaka have relationships that barely hold together and then painfully fall apart. Or deal with their aftermath. They are serious and big-time realistic – well except for the in-verse Genshiken spin-offs. Spotted Flower suggests that Saki breaks it off with Kousaka – or vice versa, or did he get hit by a beer truck? So far though, the Genshiken ‘verse rules are that once paired, folks stay that way for good. BL scripts: are they still big on happily ever after? The wimmins love that kind of stuff. Pure Shoujo. Is the Genshiken going to stay monogamous?

M,now skeptical: Yeah, good point. Mada could turn into the bad guy and develop Magic Dick syndrome. Worked once, lets see what else it can do. What if Mada starts spouting “I’m not gay, its only Hato – but you are cuter” lines? He could, even innocently, completely destroy the Genshiken. Was Kio Shimoku dropping a hint when he had Kuchiki bring up up the “circle queen” trope with Ohno? “I really like Hato, but the physical stuff doesn’t work for me“, confides Madarame with a sad face… Keiko would fall in an instant. The rest of the harem might waver, but a few would fall. That would salve a lot of bent phobish noses, including mine. One pretty boy while in University; not like it’s murder, incest or folk dancing.

4Chan as usual has much to say: http://boards.4chan.org/a/thread/136565463
Ooops that died, try this : http://desustorage.org/a/thread/136565463   and this:
http://desustorage.org/a/thread/136702355/ as well as this earlier thread:
http://desustorage.org/a/thread/135778607/

M,sympathetic: That’s pretty harsh.

M,now skeptical: What do you think powers the whole josou/ trap game thing? It could even be considered a working evolutionary strategy if it gets Mada out of his shell of intimacy-fear and it eventually leads to sex with women, pair bonding and baby making. An alternative to “childless single men who masturbate to anime and do not matter in the over-all course of humanity” (see previous post). Hey: maybe that’s why Hato kept trying to back out. The Hato continuum suspects treachery. Get used as “training wheels” and then Saki changes her mind and it’s “see you ’round kiddo”. It’s that old yuri trope, retreaded.

M,confused: So in a way the seme/uke stuff is standing in for larger issues of who can bail and who gets left behind once the initial thrill wears off? Also; are we missing some big joke for the fujoshi community; that Hato is just as improbable a seme as Madarame? Maybe Hato needs to go all judo-psycho on a sempai, any sempai to avenge the hurt that Kaminaga caused him? That’s a great way to run a romance; not. I keep thinking that Kio Shimoku is more likely to poke at fujoshi foibles after setting up their expectations, then to completely pander to them. Madarame has a head full of otokonoko games, Hato a head full of yaoi. And I am willing to bet a cookie that Hato is being written as still thinking that Madarame has fallen for a fantasy female Hato. Big mistake. It sure reads as if Madarame has always seen Hato, kun and chan as a guy otaku with a taste for BL who has a crossdressing hobby and who will blubber “I’m not gay”, all while having a head full of male:male fantasies. Fantasies that were made by wimmen for wimmen. So far into the wrong closet that he is half-way to Narnia.

Gawd! Maybe the problem is that Mada has developed a severe case of Hato-moe! All that hemming and hawing and denial and running away and “No! I get to be seme” (pout!) stuff is the twink/otokonoko version of tsundere?

M,sympathetic: Poor Madarame, odds on he will lead with his heart on his sleeve, rather than as a gormless horn-dawg who got a chance to give it a spin around the block. Mada doesn’t think that Hato is chan or even a josou game otokonoko. Hato however is not “all in” in the romance department. Hato is acting out. Mada will ache for Hato long before Hato aches for Mada. Perhaps Madarame is fooling himself into thinking that while not the girl that Hato presents as, Hato does have the heart of a girl, rotten as it may be, trapped in a boy’s body.

M,now skeptical (not the least bit raging any more): Kio Shimoku seldom writes characters that ache. Very reserved, very Japanese. Perhaps we have finally hit on the reason for Keiko’s inclusion in the Harem; she at least shows emotion! Is this a subtle social-class thing as well? File that one away…

At the very least Kio Shimoku has pulled off one further slight of hand. He has managed to make desperation into an attractive after-shave for Madarame. As if ill-socialized nerd losers can suddenly go HoYay, “get lucky” and find true lurv. Or is the subtext that shy, tongue-tied losers weren’t motivated enough, or could not put aside their fears until they twigged to man-love? Scary as all heck, all that shyness just meant that buddy was LATENT. That’s a real old bogeyman. It causes nasty IRL fallout too.

M,confused: What about the rest of the Genshiken and the other harem members?

M,now skeptical: Right! Good call! Are their motives and behavior acceptable, or must they be denounced? Once again, I nominate Keiko for most authentic and honest. She has no BL sloshing around in her head and only suffers from relationship cynicism. She is the only reality and morals-check in the whole excursion, even as she has let her competitiveness get the better of her. …Or she is hubby hunting. Mada would be a marry-up and would make for a good provider if she could clean him up and send him out to bring home the bacon.

M,analytical: Second that; but her deferring to Sue is odd. A few minutes earlier she had characterized Sue as borderline autistic. Of course Sue did win the New Year’s eve games for Mada and since Keiko considers Madarame a loser geek, another geek would be an acceptable pairing. Plus as an outlander, Sue could later evaporate. Picking up after Sue wouldn’t be demeaning. Playing rebound girl to Angela would be.

Sue of course is amazing and deserves happiness, but she has a fierce pair of the goggles as well. Part of her will always be cheering for a BL romance played out in front of her eyes and that blinds her and biases her towards cheering HatoMadaHato on, despite the obvious problematics of the pairing. Add to that how she feels guilty for outing Hato’s secret stash of MadaHato sketches and killing (for 2 weeks) his fan-love. She is as prone to let a trainwreck occur in front of her nose in the name of storybook lurv, as the rest of them.

Angela has a similar weakness: she may be interested in Madarame for all kinds of reasons, but again, the goggles get in the way. Her reasons and how serious she might be about Madarame are opaque. Her past romantic life is a cipher – we assume that she takes what she wants but no one has wormed the details out of Ohno yet, and Ohno supports her as best choice for Madarame – which should mean something. Despite this, her “Hato is Madarame’s heart” stuff is pure shoujo tripe. Her fujoshi tastes have blinded her and she has stripped both Hato and Madarame of their reality as human beings by cheering on a fantasy script.

M,confused: I don’t like how Rika fits in. Playing Loki the trickster is going to backfire. On one hand she is quick to “get real” and announce that yup, Hato is probably 3D gay, denial or not and Madarame ain’t, so it might start all gushy BL but it won’t end pretty. The VIP member will get bruised; output of good steamy yaoi clench illustrations will decline. Weighed against this is her natural urge to stage manage a far-too-complicated plot. HatoMadaHato to launch, much drama to ensue, followed by heartbreak and then friend Yajimacci gets her heart’s desire. Hato the creative wunderkind gets a babysitter. Dojins flow freely through the land of the Genshiken. Perhaps the shock of a broken heart will even be the kick needed to jump-start Hato’s story-telling engine. Madarame therefore is expendable to the greater cause. Hey wait a second; How happy is Yajima going to be if Hato really IS gay? Setting your friend up for a future of “Geh, he’s out with some guy again” doesn’t seem to be that nice a trick. Or does Rika consider Yajima so “manly” that she will be enough to “cure” or at least stabilize Hato?

M,analytical: Yajima Merei is acceptable as all heck. We can at least look at Spotted Flower as one possible fate for her and her alternate self doesn’t seem too phased at being stuck in a weird relationship with a possible Hato. Japanese society is full of good sensible wifeys who put up with the odd habits of their spouses, as long as it keeps freak hubby productive, happy, out of trouble and devoted. So you have the heart of a guy after all, but you’ve always wanted boobs? Fine, whatever. Keep drawing. The fool needs me.

In real time however, Yajima is a mess. Her angst is going to be the way Kio Shimoku levels her up and showing the end product before you show the shovel work that got there is a bit of a cheat. Her early “why don’t you stop crossdressing?” insistence made her look like a ‘phobe but of course was just a setup for her “awakening desires”. She has beheld the smoothness that is Hato-kun and she feels something she thought she would never feel. She has just begun to give herself permission to feel it and it is driving her crazy. On the other hand, smooth-boy sure looks to be as queer as a 300 Yen coin or better, in deep deep denial and therefore a great candidate for a starring role in a BL tale. Yajima, while not as vocal about it as the others, enjoys her BL. She also has her pride. Hato-chan still bugs the heck out of her. Too bad Rika decided to give her desire a nudge. If she sits quietly, she is complicit in the inevitable trainwreck as she waits to pick up the pieces. If she tries to stop it, she is jealous and will most probably fail in any case. That would crush her – she has very little confidence in matters of the heart. Either way, she’s guilty as fuck. But she will still stand by and watch Mada and Hato go off hand in hand.

M, analytical: And then there is Ogiue blundering into the fray. “Go after Hato! Sass went after me, so of course that’s the way it has to work“. Funny how Hato-chan had not yet rejoined the group, was just hanging around, waiting, waiting, all by her little lonesome…

M,skeptical: It all boils down to the absence of women in BL tales. The only roles that gals can have in a BL tale are cheerleader or “that bitch”. The women of the Genshiken cannot put their desires foremost in the face of a juicy 3D ship. Another thing: It looks to me like Kio Shimoku has abandoned almost all of the fan-lore in favor of stealing the focus on emotional, relationshippy stuff from Shoujo/BL/Josei: only he is going to do it “meta” and by adding disappointment plus “reality don’t work like that”, prove that he can hold his own against the standards. And he wants to snooker otaku guys into reading the stuff. Josei manga for guys. Hah hah hah!

M,sympathetic: Hey, you still after him for moonlighting at Paradis?

M,analytic: You have to admit, he’s moving towards Josei territory. And moonlighting a thinly veiled spin-off at a josei/yuri/what the hell izzit??? smutty magazine is a damn fine insurance policy. “Wrap it up, you are cancelled” they say? “I have prepared for treachery!” Paradis even allows for 18+ steam. Where else could you shop a sex scene between a cynical but still in-love big girl and her manic “new half” lover? I bet that Kio Shimoku could even make it tender. Dirty, but tender and slightly melancholic. Might be even better than yuri smut. Boy’s got needs, ya know…

M,confused: whoa! you all are too pervy for me to keep up with.

…Heard that one before…

…Yeah…

…So, hand in hand into the setting sun are they? Where they off to?

…Liquor store and a pharmacy first!

…Gehh!

…Manners! Don’t ‘phobe out!

…It’s Ok if they are both in Lurv. Its OK if they are both just out for kicks. Consent concern!

…Eyes wide shut!

…Crying Game!

…Whatever… lunch time!

wrap it.

A FEW DAYS LATER:

Mudakun, skeptical: This is problematic, reopening a post to process new developments. We should be writing a new post.

Mudakun, analytical: I think it is better to cover this like “breaking news”, but you are right in one way; there’s a big danger of it looking like we are covering our bets and “explaining our position” in a way that reeks of bad faith. And the whole “dis-associative discussion” conceit is getting strained.

Mudakun, sympathetic: But lookie at all the developments! More info about what is going on in ch 120 from Dr ogiue Maniax’s post [http://ogiuemaniax.com/2016/01/29/final-fantasy-genshiken-ii-chapter-120/]. Lots of great comments here (please visit the comment section!) on this post and at his blog – (Jeesh I went overboard in his comment section; embarrassment! )

Remember you made this blog so many years ago precisely because you were overdoing it commenting on other people’s blogs! 

Also: this is a major development in a series that anchors this blog, its research and the hearts of the disparate fandoms that follow the Genshiken and CJVC. To radically simplify; the guys who liked the old male-otaku comedy slice of life social anthropology in the first iteration of Genshiken plus the (assume mostly, not all) women who have invested in the romantic tension between Hato Kenjiro and Madarame Harunobu. Note that as in the Genshiken, the latter seem to be more productive in terms of secondary/transformative work on the canon. This is a force-multiplier for their points of view.

Add to that the phenom that we must process this as western fans, which involves an odd dynamic apart from Japanese readers and fandom – they get the chapter and mull it over. We wait for -ahem- unauthorised fan translations and the more rabid of us search out copies of the original Japanese. These are then “understood” from a range of; completely by the pictures, through “somebody said that chara said this” to “review with care not to drop too many spoilers” through to fan scripts and finally, a month or more later, the careful fan translations that we all rely on.  You have to admit it is a different, more drawn-out “reading”, one that may even have its own benefits in terms of building and maintaining a certain kind of, even obsessive fan interest.

Mudakun, confused: So what is happening is kind of like real-time, dragged-out, play by play, pop literary criticism? Jeesh! It is all really tenuous. We read too much of our own biases into the scraps and wisps that we glom onto. Take chapter 120’s indications that as Hato is telling mada that if they go through with this there will be MadaHato and there will be HatoMada.

As Dr. Maniax has lead his review with: (Yikes!) Anal Sex!. But of course it is nowhere that simple. What, and with what nuances is Hato dropping the bomb? In the immortal words of Bill Clinton, “what do you mean by sex?” Is Hato saying; “You wont get any boobs or pussy from me, and at some point we will have to consider the possibilities of each others’ backsides? Well, heck, plenty of male:female couples try it, even some female:female couples use toys to play in the back lot. Depends on how slow and considered and safe and extremely attentive to consent folks go about it, neh? The possibility for getting hurt is high. There is plenty of discussion about the symbolism, politics and best practices about that in minority sexuality’s discussions and lore and even boring straight folks can find lots of consideration about going there, if they take the time and effort to educate themselves.

Or does Hato Kenjiro refer to his/her/their fantasies instead or as well? Because the Hatos have been pretty well recognised within the Genshiken as having a habit of drawing “hardcore” stuff. Lotsa mosaics when flashes of it are shown, but it is strongly suggested that the sex presented is “rough” and comes with a bit, (or more) of bondage fetish. Note that Hato’s ukes’ hands are often out of sight, behind the back. They ain’t scratching their tailbones. Hato doesn’t seem to do happy western-vanilla-slash style holding hands, happy glances and buddy-skinship.

Hato-as-written-chara aside; this would be perfectly in keeping with a critical representation of the harder yaoi artifacts within the Japanese BL fandom, by Kio Shimoku. Lots of criticism has been raised at the fandom for this kind of stuff; even if straight (and faux lesbian for straights) pornish smut manga etc., gets just as nasty; the politics of representing gay males by straight women, as overwhelmingly into overblown rough, over-dramatic angsty sex is downright regressive. But defenders of the practice from the ranks of Japanese female hardcore yaoi fans are adamant that they need this, want it, fantasy is fantasy and they’ll even go out of their way to hide it well behind lots of warnings, disclaimers, book slipcovers and very secure, passworded online venues. “We apologise, but we ain’t giving this up, it is ours!”

Go back and review the Nagaike stuff, if you need a refresher on the extremes of fujoshi practice, Recall hat we did a messy walkthrough of her first big thing, some time ago: https://heartsoffuriousfancies.wordpress.com/2013/03/10/the-girl-looks-at-the-boy-looking-at-johnny-while-his-father-is/ 

(and remember to play Patti Smith’s Horses at the end -pure punk slashy stream-o-consciousness eroticism! Hawt as blazes!)

I would even add the testimony of BK, friend of a friend -aw heck we worked with him years past, back at Uni. He had to suffer being a campus “gay spokesperson” back in the neolithic age. Had been to Japan a few times, liked the gay scene there. When asked about yaoi, his comment was: “Yeah I’ve seen it, but it is wayyyy too rapey for me.” So I draw a line from one or two points on a graph? What else do I have? Outlander academics including Dr. Mizoguchi ?

Some points of discussion from within CJVC (gleaned from past posts)

Mudakun, skeptical: Yeah, yeah, yeah, thanks for the seminar, professor. But you are falling for Kio Shimoku’s trick. Of course a certain part of the fandom, guys, not-too knowledgeable stodgy and uncomfortable with “gay stuff” male fans (yup, that’s us!) are going to get snookered by this. Shock and Outrage! Mourning for Madarame’s lost heterosexuality. One can even argue that Hato tossed it in the way of a pursuing Mada for exactly that reason. “WhoooHooooo! Butt Sex! Scary, scary butt-sex! And guess what? My fantasy version of it is gonna hurt you bad, and I might just need that so much I demand it as a precondition, even if I have no freaking real life experience in it or how horribly it can go wrong.” Is this what Hato is saying? Step back and it is obvious that if Hato wants Mada and Mada wants Hato, they can figure out (be written as figuring out) almost an infinite variety of ways to achieve and/ or give each other/ share pleasure, orgasms without sending each other to a proctologist for surgical reconstruction and fistula/ hemorrhoid/ anal wart removal. As some gay guys have pointed out in “ask a gay guy stuff” web video explanations to confused straight guys: “we’re guys, we can figure out what we like.”

So I call “Red Herring!”

Counter to this the very persuasive arguments from those who advocate for a sympathetic reading of Hato’s frustratingly evasive behaviour. See comment section, (really.. please, go read the comments… Feel free to add also)  Where “we” read “dancing to a script like a puppet” others have advanced the equally possible and far more sympathetic reading that Hato is wracked with insecurity, prone to self-sabotage, damn committed to making sure his “trap” persona will not under any circumstances “trap” and desperately doing what small things he (and she, they…) can for Madarame because he (and she, they…) are wracked with feelings for Madarame and cannot figure out how to “honorably” and significantly show these. So Hato is left with presenting to Mada as Nadeshiko no Genshiken,  cooking him meals and cleaning up his place. That’s all that Hato can do: “care” for Madarame.  Oh, and valentine’s day chocolate…

Which actually puts Hato in the most traditional (and sympathetic) of all female courtship roles. The rest of the women interested (a bit) in Madarame are not into doing domestic stuff for him. Is this a snuck-in critique by Kio Shimoku? That’s a minefield in itself. Feminism “ruined” the modern Japanese young woman, etc. VS. Japanese males still need to be taken care of by their fufu‘s because they are helpless and infantilized?

Mudakun,analytical: Also of note: correspondant Winter (below) picks up on our throwaway Hato-Moe idea and amplifies it – if I may restate: Madarame has “interest” in Hato, Hato has shown interest in him and it is flattering, even pleasurable but then Hato backs away. With a woman, Madarame would (to stay in-character) feel too uncomfortable to even ever have that much interaction. But Hato is suddenly bringing up objections. Trouble is that Madarame has gone into “seek” mode and is looking at the Hato objection dance and reading it through the lenses of 10,000 romcom heroine protestations. It is beginning to look cute, even endearing. It is beginning to trip a “chase’ switch in Madarame. Ogiue blunders in and validates this course of action. Madarame might be wondering why he is suddenly chasing, but he also must feel a rush of power, or agency, of no longer being the wishy-washy coward. Suddenly from being least adventurous in the lists of 3D love he finds himself as the most adventurous and damn if it doesn’t feel good. And all of Hato’s protestations are beginning to look cute. (Though if that is what Kio Shimoku is pulling, a bit of a lampshade would go a long way, just saying…)(Maybe we get one when we get to read the fan translation?)

Worse (or better) Hato must really be tripped up by this. If Hato really wanted to save Mada from a tragic thorny path relationship, Hato could, in the words of any savvy 16 year old female, cis or otherwise, “slap him down hard”. “Fuck off creep. Do not want you. Get lost Now.” Problem solved. It would hurt, but such is self-sacrifice. But Hato looks to have been snared by Mada’s sudden show of resolution. Hato is blubbering. Sou-uke! Thorny Path! MadaHato! HatoMada! Grotty physical concerns. Rotten fantasies. Difficulties in crossdressing…  Dry skin, got a headache,  oh heck, is that my phone?, I completely forgot this appointment I had 600 miles away… 

D’awwwwwwww…. thinks Madarame, staring at the curious boy-girl in front of him. How cute, how moe…

Mudakun,sympathetic: Another angle to be considered from our reactions and the fandom: “Can it work?” Bill Clinton time again; what do you mean by “work”? The rude version, we put forward, above: One pretty boy at University, it’s not murder, incest or folk dancing. A kinder reading could be written as “puppy love”, “first love” or even (cue heroic music and sound of engines starting in the fog) “We’ll always have Paris”.

So far, Genshiken couples look pretty long-term, except of course for the alternative universe of Spotted Flower. Without AltHato’s chewing out AltMada for being a coward, this would be easier to consider. Add to this that past major works by Kio Shimoku are relentless in the showing of how young relationships fall apart and one has to admit that a romance between Harunobu and Kenjiro might not be a for always thing.

This can be played in a number of ways too, from regret, long-simmering anger and the need to give it one more try (stop dressing up like a tart every time AltMada drops in) to, (again cue Casablanca music) “This looks like the beginning of a beautiful friendship“.

Mudakun, skeptical: Fuck You Muda! You swore you wouldn’t hook up the arduino board to the summoning grid and drag the angry shade of Dr. Sedgwick into this, at least not yet. Put Hato-chan on the plane, walk off into the foggy night with Hato-kun as bros’ after all that confusing stuff has been worked out? Do you really, really think that Kio Shimoku has decided to do a Russian Reversal on Dr. Sedgwick’s Between Men and use the female Hato as a transitional object; not to go from intense male friendship to male:male intimacy, but from intimacy to intense male friendship?

???

Pull the other one, it has bells on it and makes a pretty noise!

Mudakun,sympathetic: You gotta admit, that would be one heck of a tale. Now that Queer Theory is out and about. running around in academia and underlying the plot-lines in western cable-tv series, everybody – including stogey straight writers get grab the bits and rudely jam them into improbable tales. Do you think the creative class was going to endlessly keep their distance and be content with warmed over Freud? How many more stale stories can you spin out of pappa-mamma, fer chrissakes?!!

Mudakun,analytical: If Kio Shimoku was really, really into stretching it, he could spin this out in such a way as to mollify both the old guard guy fandom and the more romantic, don’t-need-graphic-sex-angst BL fens. Mada and Hato have to talk it over more, right? Both have problems talking. Precedent and parallelisms in story telling suggests an Ogiue/Sass-like examination of Hato’s drawings, including the really repressed MadaHato ones.  Madarame has to bring some of his raunchiest loli-pr0n to the session too – Mada’s trap games are by no means vanilla grade, not if reports on the genre are to be believed. (for details please review the Girl Comics essays via archived links in the earlier post: “Through all your houses wandering” [https://heartsoffuriousfancies.wordpress.com/2013/10/27/through-all-your-houses-wandering/])

The obvious reaction must be: “Fantasy is fantasy, this stuff looks like it could be really hurtful in real life; do you, me, us, really need this?” Then they are back to tentatively pawing at each other, trying to re-invent “making out”. They are both scared and flustered, even more than they are horny so things will take some time. Besides, they have plenty to talk about. They are, after all otaku…

-ahem- mind if I engage the playset field?

Mudakuns, the rest in unison: Oh fuck, why the hell not?, we have the multiple voice thing going, might as well crank the self-indulgent knob to 11. More fanfiction! Blergh! You really have been corrupted by the Tumblr crowd!

Mudakun,analytical: Try this: Genshiken club room, a few days after the trip. Enter the wimmens. Madarame and Hato-chan are sitting next to each other, reading a doujin, pointing out stuff. A BL doujin. Bonus for Hato with wig off. Bonus for Madarame dressed better than usual, but disheveled.

“Sooooooooo… what happened, spill it” That’s gotta be Rika who asks. Sue makes perhaps angry-snide obscure quote. Ogiue frowns, requests decorum. Cue Ohno, senior fairy godmother of all happy relationships:

“So, how is it going, you both look a bit tired. Happy but tired. All good?”

Both beaming,  completely confident; either to answer: “We stayed up all night playing video games.”

Further prying questions, some regarding sex acts; response by either along with much blushing: “He should learn how to floss properly” “Hey you ain’t exactly sweet breath-san either… You are squeezable though… that’s fun” Affectionate shoulder bumping. Turn to stare at each other “Are we in a hurry?” “Nope, no hurry here, Do I look hurried?” “Not you, how’ bout me?” “Nope, you good.” Both turn heads, stare at the rest. In unison:

“Answer your question?”

Girls outraged, press home for details, Sue poking for HatoMada and MadoHato, plops sketch pad down in front of him. Hato draws nice vanilla western slash-fen style hand-holding guys, smiling at each other, no schmex.

“You liek my new, more realistic drawing style?”

Genshiken girls reaction shots, shock, disbelief, disappointment, beaming, d’awwwwww, entire range…. Rika enraged that numero uno source of in-house smut has just been destroyed.

Kio Shimoku chuckles, commences next story arc. Potential for serious drama kept in back pocket. Parts of both fandoms grumble; all keep reading. “Hah! Managed to pull off an aspirational, activist sensitive happy-smiley Shoujo-style compromise resolution. Shit, I deserve an award for this one.”

Mudakuns, rest of them:

Blerghhhhhhhhhhhh!  

FROMAGE!

Cheat!

…Whatever…

(updated January 30, 2016)

STILL LATER, FURTHER CONSIDERATIONS :

Mudakun, now really skeptical:  I am not convinced. Something is still wayyyyyy wrong here.

Mudakun, concerned: Oh Double-Snap, we’re back? Again? What’s the matter – Heh, I know it’s been a shock; Madarame in pursuit of a boy, turning down Sue’s confession. Turning down his last chance at Angela. Turning down a common-law proposal from Keiko. Still, if that’s the way things have worked out, Amor Vincit Omnia, neh?  An author can write anything he or she wants to. Give it a rest. Go back to sleep.

I hope we are not doing something as naff as going off into a mild state of male hysteria over the symbolic death/ becoming-gay of a long cherished geek icon? We might have well saved a lot of time and effort and just gone with the lazy bubba short-form solution: “Yeah, Genshiken: used to be good, is all this gay fujo shit now…”

Mudakum sympathetic: Oh Puh-lease! If anything we are just over-fanning on our favourite past-time. We have a bit of free time in our life now, right? And isn’t this a good writing and thinking exercise? Add to that a bit of fun with photoshop. Still can put the word-things one after another and make with the sense thing! Lookie, the web-thing is not a fricking mess and we are getting familiar with Twitter and Tumblr. …Have even figured out #tags. Ojisan ain’t Amish. Don’t be so uptight! Roll with it!

So, what’s with reopening the post?

Mudakun, skeptical: Something didn’t feel right. Something still doesn’t feel right.  A few points: The Harem Arc has been going on for three years real-time now, since Jan 2013’s Ch 84 when Mada quit his job after the fall festival, declaring: “I want to be a loser” In Genshiken time, perhaps 5-6 months have passed. One could argue the fun started earlier in chapter 82, with Yajima Merei suddenly fantasizing about Hato.

Girl; you need that “signifier”. otherwise it’s yuri!, or fakee-yuri (wait, where have I ???)

Two things happened to launch the arc. Madarame went NEET and Hato’s Kaminaga-Stand appeared, impelling Hato towards Madarame. “We” were wrong about “no physical attraction”. Hato-as-puppet, controlled by the Kaminaga-Stand is very interested in Madarame’s neck:

And while we’re here, this is about the time that Sue started to act flustered. Should we have been calling this the Love Trapezoid Arc instead, all along? Sue will go on to find the super-secret HatoMada stash in the next chapter. This will confirm that Hato has gone gay for Madarame, Stands notwithstanding – they are him, after all, right? Perhaps that is emblematic of the whole problem. The stands “stand-in” as (paranoia) agents of delusion, avoidance and denial within Hato’s BL obsessions. They vanish when he “accepts” them. But they leave one last parting gift: Hato’s desire for Madarame Harunobu is still framed and bounded by the conventions of an odd genre of popular, amateur erotica – a genre that Hato, by rights should not be playing around with.

The damn BL stuff has “queered” Yajima. It has queered the heck out of Hato, or to use a better contextualisation; imposed a less than optimum set of fantasy narratives upon the emerging sexuality and gender expression of his character. It will go on to get its paws on Madarame. Sue? Not so much, perhaps she was insulated from it by her admiration/yuri-flavored sensei-crush on Ogiue. It has also “queered” the mangaka, and to the extent that we have been Stockholm syndromed into cheerleading a once improbable MadaHatoMada romantic plot, it has gently “queered” some of the readership – just a teeny-tiny bit. The effect is minor; Kio Shimoku is handling the “killed-virus” version, rather than the active pathogen.

If the Genshiken wasn’t, if this was the manga or anime club, or the campus radio society, perhaps a young guy named Hato, with a cross-dressing hobby might be written as beginning to hang around with the graduated senior member who has recently quit his job and is decompressing/ bumming around in the clubroom. The story then would be of how an angsty virgin closeted gay male who has adopted one of the older traditions of the Japanese gay community can come to terms with his emerging sexuality and reconcile his desire with the etiquette of hitting on a straight friend. Whatever; give him a backstory with some theatre or film-making or acting experience – of course he got snookered into a female costume – that’s an old chestnut. One of the other club members, the “big girl” has also been wondering about Hato. She generally doesn’t trust men, but Hato puts her at ease. Campus life story ensues.

It’s not the Genshiken that is the secondary character. It’s the damn BL!

Mudakun, sympathetic: …And Hato has been lately crossdressing at the club for kicks, under the cover story that he doesn’t want his professors to hear that he is goofing off and not working on his big research paper. I remember a certain student who wrote for 3 years under pen-names at a campus newspaper…

Mudakun, skeptical: late-onset “chuny” again! But isn’t the whole BL exercise an agent of female agency? A “fatal strategy” that inverts and disrupts the patriarchal order, or some such tripe? Sure one can look at any MadaHatoMada as a blow against hetero-whatever-hegemonic-woowoo, and two points for queering-everything-until-queer-is-this-year’s-newest-fashion-accessory but the story is all still about the guys. Aren’t Hato and Mada just doing the same thing as Kuchiki, jumping in and flailing around center-stage in women’s space? They are just performing with more panache and fanservice for the women.

It is the BL stuff that is making everything feel forced. All fictional tropes of romance get in the way of the romance as much as they enable it. Everybody follows the scripts and worries at the same time, that when they say “I love you” it will sound and/ or feel fake. Without the BL background, Hato, the kid with the odd hobby might end up out-and-about in guy clothing and run into Mada. Both get gloriously drunk and Hato blubbers out his bro-crush. Mada, feeling adventurously free and bohemian, if not a tad intrigued by the presence of a bishie Hato goes along with it – he might even jump in with enthusiasm. Next morning they both feel scared crapless for making out. If you are cheering them on, insist on mutual blinding world-class hangovers – the pain will give them time to get over the shock of whatever clumsy and limited intimacy they were able to manage before passing out, while putting it in context. Problem solved.

Mudakun, analytical: The Genshiken is all about how the fandom gets in the way, even as it weirdly empowers relationships. Yes empowers. Younguns in Japan are nowhere near as frisky as they used to be or they should be, if Japan is not to depopulate. Or they are all as frisky, but a crappy economy, changing social blah blah, round up the usual suspects has put a damper on pair-bonding. And yet, the Genshiken as social for a fandom of libidinized imagination (doujin culture, aka amateur peer-made porn) offers the happy tale of 3 paired off couples. A better score than showing zoo pandas panda-porn to get them to mate! Sure Saki had to put up with her martian-boy-wonder paying more attention to ero-games than to her. Sasahara had contextualise Ogiue’s habit of drawing male charas that looked like him boffing other guys, then learn to “be more forceful in his seme” with Ogiue. “Right! No males, cross-dressing, gay or otherwise with my woman unchaperoned! And you get spanked tonight for doubting my resolve!” Gehh! Reads like 1960’s Heinlein.

Only Ohno and Tanaka have the romance bits worked out. All they worry about is economics. Oh wait; Ohno does get fearsomely jealous if Tanaka makes an outfit for another woman without first clearing it with her. But Tanaka has shown no alpha-male rage over the legions of rutting slobs who photograph Ohno at convention shoots; an actress’ lover cannot be jealous of her audience. As well, the Genshiken came within a whisker of pairing up Mada with Sue Hopkins. It may yet pair Alt-bent-Hato with Alt-Yajimacci and  Alt-Mada with Alt-Saki.

Trouble is the new Genshiken does not run on heteronormative moe and cosplay. It runs on women’s melodramatic fake-gay smut. The question then becomes: If you bang moe boy and BL girl together, do you get adhesion? So far, not so good. The Kaminaga example suggests that rotten girls and oblivious, strong riajuu guys are a better match – which runs closer to IRL field data. Fujoshi are practical (and the guys, if they twig to their girlfriends’ hobbies can continue to dismiss the stuff, secure in the knowledge that at least their girlfriends are very, very interested in sex. (win!)) It’s similar to IRL art-school students. Exogamy is the preferred norm, at least among undergraduates. Two artistic egos stuck in a one-room student flat is a recipe for homicide, not romance. Grad students might look for alliances of convenience within their field, but even then it is rare that they spark within their cohort.

The MadaHatoMada problem remains. Madarme and Hato will always be framed within a discourse of the tropes of BL, as MadaHato or MatoMada. The seme-uke pairing conceit will not vanish, because it is the “genre marker” that stands in place to signify the whole damn “Night at the Opera” over-the-top narcissistic event horizon of soap opera melodrama; shame, violence, fetishistic sex because intimacy is beyond their reach, jealousy, lustmord and regret and A cruel god rules over us, that runs around nekkid, rampant and grinning in the genre. That’s Entertainment! Fortunately, Japanese rotten girls have yet to discover Hannibal-slash or there would be same-sex eroticized cannibalism lurking in the wings as well! The only other alternative, the escape hatch is the “frozen time” of the perfect vanilla male:male lovie-dovie friendship. And because there are not a whole lot of real-life stories of long-term male couples to draw on, these run on the thin side. Hetnorm=unfair again.

Lookie at the example of Kinou Nani Tabeta? (What Did You Eat Yesterday?) Activist outlander reviewers have noted, if not grumbled about how asexual the couple is. Japanese het couples act neutered after a long period of marital bliss too, but a gay couple is expected to keep up appearances and be a bit more true-to-their-desire-as-reality-and-discretely-yet-confidently-demonstrated-social- fact. In other words, stuck in the campus gay spokesmen role again. Jeesh, they cook for and groom each other. Miso soup and haircuts.

Mudakun, skeptical: Bad example! You know that there is politics around THAT manga. Woman BL author doing activist “normal-life” representation of gay male domesticity. Severely enjoined from scaring any horses. Also, perhaps a “real” gay mangaka’s series got bumped because a vanilla BL author’s take on a gay male couple was easier to sell. Perhaps you scrapped a post because the whole kerfluffle was really the publisher’s call; capitalism is unfair; “this space program runs on bucks, not Buck Rogers” and it is a bad idea to juxtapose a (straight female) BL mangaka to a gay male mangaka and let that proximity appear to be a fight for scarce magazine page space, for the entertainment of the peanut gallery. Everyone shut up, salute the flag and keep marching.

Mudakun, sympathetic: Yup, happy ever after into the sunset, just like a yuri genre “story A”. What do you want from a Uni romance rom-com? Rubber Biscuit?  And like the yuri genre’s story A, isn’t the freedom of agency available to the true, if unconventional love the whole point? It is not as if Hato and Mada have to be inevitably torn from each other like the fifty-plus young women in the 1920’s Flower Tales. The same societal change that has made marriage, even dating a near-toxic chore to %20-%40 of young Japanese folks also allows the freedom for two guys to make eyes at each other. No one cares.

Mudakun, skeptical: Besides, there is still male privilege. Yukio Mishima was married, fathered children and yet was notorious for his liaisons with fem-ish demimonde gay guys and his later “koha” manly-man patriotic society death cult. Guys can get away with all kinds of shit in Japan – as long as they keep up some token display of obeisance to the order of forms.

Here’s an alternate Hato, lest all the other “nice” versions become cloying:

Mudakun, was sympathetic-now horrified: Nooooooo! Ugh! proto-fascist, oblivious to politics, artist-is-beyond-good-and-evil Hato is not good at all! Will become a famous mangaka by filching Spinrad’s Iron Dream and retreading it as a manga; featuring the crossdressing/ emergent trans woman political savior “Sam” Palin, “her” rival turned sidekick/lover Dougie Trump, and their growing troupe of sexually liberated and reactionary minded politicians and billionaire allies, as they beat down the forces of lefty-commie-wimpery in global Mahjong Tournaments!

Mudakuns, rest of them: Ugghhh sickness! feel nauseous. Need fresh air!

Mudakun, concerned: I believe that IATPT Bulletin 1147 does not apply in this case. This is a low order probability fork. Anyone care to drop a dime on it? Do I hear a seconder?  -brief shuffling, check email, etc – Ok, that’s fixed, except for the fall-out with an older, bitter Madarame joining the Japanese Communist Party to atone for his doomed romance with that monster.

Mudakun, skeptical: Where the frick were we again? Oh yeah. Pairing up Hato Kenjiro and Madarame Harunobu seems forced. But breaking them up seems forced and unfair too. Turning them into best bud ‘bros after some unsatisfying groping feels like a cheat. Yet none of this would be a problem if it was girl+boy rather than boy+boy-perhaps-in-denial-about-that-girl’s-soul-he’s-got; marinaded in BL sauce. And Hato is a big perv. Is Madarame into really pervy trap games like Boku Pico too? It would be easier if he hadn’t tossed all those S&M AV’s. Evenly matched depravities could go happily wild on each other and the bystanders would cautiously applaud. The freaks are out tonight. Let’s do the time warp again…

Add to this the “meta” that all these contradictions, kept aloft and in play, are money in the bank for Kio Shimoku. Easy stories end too soon.

Mudakun, sympathetic: So the Genshiken can keep going for all eternity? I guess he can put a happy Hato and Mada couple into the background and bring in a few new members. Now that he has a gay male (or male with emergent trans woman) couple, he could even dare to bring in a -gasp- lesbian(!) Fool around with the idea put forward by the Japanese cultural critic whatsizzname that CJVC perviness sucks the oxygen out of much of the energies that would otherwise go towards IRL activism to advance LGBTQIA rights. Or play with the idea that otaku spaces can serve as safe “queer” spaces, or if they can’t; doesn’t that need fixing? The Genshiken was a pervert dumping ground for other clubs that, thanks to its recent female membership is now powerful in the fields of its interests. Its power derives from its schmex-fixation. Might as well get an honest days work out of the stuff.

(Feb. 01, 2016)

Hato-zine

Hot off the presses. Get your copy Now! 
http://hatozine.tumblr.com/post/136614729817/hatozine-a-genshiken-fanzine-for-hato

Shimoku-sensei can be proud and happy that his characters have slipped out of the pages of his work and are running around on the net, and in the hearts of his fans. I am honored to have snuck into the fray. Check out the fine essay by Ogiue Maniax‘s proprietor and Genshiken blogging sempai. Congratulations to all the contributors and the powerful editor/ organizers!

Now stop reading this and go read Hatozine!

Cover art from Hatozine  by Kori Michele

What just happened ???

Ch 118: Sue and Mada have much to discuss.

117: Explaining my position

 

The legal man agreed
We had a case and indeed a duty to
Right these Wrongs, as it were
The Price would be four thousand in front and
ten for the nut.
I wrote him a check on the Sawtooth
National Bank,
but he hooted at it
While rubbing a special oil on
his palms
To keep the chancres from itching
beyond endurance
On this Sabbath.
. . .
Later, from jail
I sent a brace of telegrams
to the right people,
explaining my position.