Dungeon of Blue Bites

So I’m doing some research and of course the first mahou shoujo was by a man, the reason is obvious because our comics industry TODAY reflects Japan back in the 1960s. It wasn’t until the “Year 24” group it seems that there was a presence of women at all, THUS mahou shoujo stuff couldn’t be torn from the hands of men before that time. Now, can we say that mahou shoujo HAS been torn from the hands of men? I think it SHOULD be, but has it…

You mission anime peeps SHOULD YOU CHOOSE TO ACCEPT IT:

I’m looking for mahou shoujo anime/manga that has been created by women for women. Sailor Moon for example, counts and is already on the list.

Things I won’t accept, manga adaptations of series not created by women, like Pretty Cure manga, since that whole series of series is created by men. Yes, men appropriated the whole mahou shoujo genre for themselves :P
Of course must be shoujo/josei.

What I am researching is that men have taken over a genre that was by women for women and forced girls to “think pink”. Why is are all the MCs of new mahou shoujo pink? Because men wanted it that way and are corrupting things for girls. Why are they all cute and the whole strength of bonds and even romance gone? Men. Why do the stories seem banal? Men.

Current List:
Sailor Moon
Wedding Peach (Seems to be created by a man, drawn by a woman.. tentative on the list)

EDIT:
Tokyo Mew Mew
Cardcaptor Sakura
Kamikaze Kaitou Jeane
Mermaid Melody
Princess Tutu
Akazukin Chacha
Sugar Sugar Rune
Magic Knight Rayearth (Doubles as a giant robot anime?)

michaonthemoon:

yaoibutts:

I love how potato in French is pomme de terre, which pretty much means “earth apple.”

like what stupid frenchman saw this:

and said “zis petite légume looks like a, how you say, APPLE! hmmm… but it grows in ze earth… HON HON HON! MAIS OUI! C’EST UNE POMME DE TERRE!”

j’adore comment ananas se dit pineapple en anglais, ce qui veut littéralement dire “pomme de pin”, genre quel type anglais a vu ça:

et s’est dit : “ow cette étrange big fruit ressemble à une, how do you say, POMME! hmmm… mais plutôt une pomme qui pousse dans les pins… HU HU HU! OH YES, IT’S A PINEAPPLE!”

(z’avez vu, on peut le faire aussi… hon hon hon!)

(via drpepperslonelyheartsclubband)

jhameia:

I don’t think i’ve said this on here, but even if I have, I’ll say it again:

I want to put a moratorium on straight white cis dude media production for the next ten, fifteen years. 

No new books from straight white cis dudes for the next ten years. Maaaaaybe one or two novels from vetted authors. No new movies from and about straight white cis dudes for the next ten years. I’d rather put up with white women dreck than white men’s rubbish. No new ~art~ except commissioned graphic design or something like that. 

Stop, straight white cis dudes. Just stop making things. Stop letting straight white cis dudes make things because all they do just make make terrible things that continually demonstrate how self-centered and delusional they are about the state of the world in ways that insult practically everybody on the planet, including themselves. 

(via drpepperslonelyheartsclubband)

fucknovideogames:

I can’t translate it (though I wish someone would), but game writer/designer Taro Yoko (Nier, Drakengard) has been writing in defense of gay marriage on twitter and talking about problematic representations of minority groups on the Japanese equivalent of ask.fm. Don’t necessarily agree with all he’s saying, I think he ignores context and the harm caused by prejudice, and I don’t necessarily like the way he deals with sexuality, which, with the exception of Emil, is to heavily dramatize the point and have it drive the character to despair. But he’s talking over issues and making worlds that include folks outside the heteronormative, so yay. 

There’s an interview in Grimoire Nier where the interviewer brings up a literally arcane explanation of why Emil is attracted to other men and Yoko’s exasperated response, “No, Emil is gay!”, makes me smile :3

Also:

Yoko: How would you define “unusual”, is the question. If we look around, we can definitely see homosexuals, few in number they may be. I’m not trying to say “Don’t discriminate” or anything like that, just “People like that exist. It’s simply the way the world works.” They’re labeled with “normal”, “unusual” and compared quite often, but the difference between people with certain sexual preferences lies purely in number. Some are quite abundant, some are not, but we’re all in the same world. I never intended for them to appear as special.

I think he’s affecting that Ivory-tower naivety - it’s not a fucking coincidence that lgbt characters appear in games about outsiders - and the numbers don’t matter half as much as what society’s made of them (women being over half the goddamn population hasn’t stopped sexism), but he’s thought about the issue and it’s good to recognize that. 

I hadn’t heard about this and this is pretty cool! I actually didn’t even realize Emil was gay. I need to pay more attention.

NieR definitely has ISSUES with how it represents some things, but it’s cool to hear this.

It might have been translated out of the US version, OR it was only in the PS3-Japan version which had different relationships and a whole different art direction.

fuckingrapeculture:

literaryreference:

You know how it is, right, ladies? You know a guy for a while. You hang out with him. You do fun things with him—play video games, watch movies, go hiking, go to concerts. You invite him to your parties. You listen to his problems. You do all this because you think he wants to be your friend.

But then, then comes the fateful moment where you find out that all this time, he’s only seen you as a potential girlfriend. And then if you turn him down, he may never speak to you again. This has happened to me time after time: I hit it off with a guy, and, for all that I’ve been burned in the past, I start to think that this one might actually care about me as a person. And then he asks me on a date.

I tell him how much I enjoy his company, how much I value his friendship. I tell him that I really want to be his friend and to continue hanging out with him and talking about our favorite books or exploring new restaurants or making fun of avant-garde theatre productions. But he rejects me. He doesn’t answer my calls or e-mails; if we’d been making plans to do something before this fateful incident, these plans mysteriously fail to materialize. (This is why I never did get around to seeing the Hunger Games movie. Not to name any names, but thanks a lot, Tom.) Later, when I run into him at social events, our conversations are awkward and lukewarm. This is because the moment we met, he put me in the girlfriend-zone, and now he can’t see me as friend material.

I must say that I find this really unfair. I mean, I’m a nice girl. I have a lot to offer as a friend, like not being a douchebag and stuff. But males just don’t want to be friends with nice girls like me. They can’t help it, I guess; it’s just how they’re wired, biologically. Evolution conditioned our male hominid ancestors to seek nice girls as mates and form friendship bonds only with the other dudes that they hunted mammoths with. It’s true—I know this because I studied hominids in my fifth-grade science class.

So what’s the answer? Should I take up mammoth-hunting in an attempt to appeal to the friendship centers of men’s primal lizardbrains? Should I keep making guy “friends” and then prevent them from making a move on me by subtly undermining their self-confidence? Should I just give up on those manipulative, game-playing, two-faced bastards once and for all? I don’t know. I mean, I’d really like to have a true friendship with a guy someday, but it’s so hard to trust and respect them when they never say what they mean—and you never know when you might be relegated to the girlfriend-zone.

<3

(via wretchedoftheearth)

gradientlair:

Yesterday I posted a photograph of Beyoncé on Ms. Magazine with some probing questions that I have for the article, which included this text:

I will be interested in seeing if the article reveals the nuances of her perspectives (such as ones revealed in her documentary), whether they challenge or affirm patriarchy at times (as she, like many women do both) or will the article solely hold her to an unreachable standard where she has to be bell hooks to be feminist while Lena Dunham, not Gloria Steinem appears to be the bar of White feminism. Again, nonfamous womanists and feminists should not be overly THIRSTY for celebrities to validate feminism. At the same time, I am interested in reading more of Bey’s perspectives on self-esteem, empowerment, confidence, inclusion, sexuality, LGBTQ, friendships and romance/marriage, for example. (I am DEFINITELY not interested her (or anyone) being labeled “unfeminist,” as I wrote about before. That word, specifically, is problematic.)

Silly me; I originally thought the article was an interview. Apparently, it is not. Since yesterday, I learned that: 1) The article is behind a paywall and not accessible to poor women or anyone without a subscription. 2) The Facebook thread for the article is disgusting, as expected. Many of the comments have the typical misogynoir and respectability politics that people seem to have confused for feminism. 3) The thread itself ends with a question, which part of it reads “Has Beyoncé ‘earned’ her feminist credentials?” Credentials and feminism should NEVER be used in the same sentence. This reeks of the merge of White supremacy, “legitimacy” and education.

In my post on Storify today, Is Beyoncé Going To Be Critiqued By White Feminists Ad Perpetuum?, I shared some Twitter conversation on the topic and raised six points as to why this critique, in general, seems never-ending and is non-productive, three of which include:

1) White women want to control and police feminism, which is actually quite White supremacist and patriarchal. It seems that theist, cisgender, heterosexual, thin, middle class, White women in the West think that feminism is their plaything and country club. It isn’t. Even White women without some of these privileges still stand firm against Beyoncé in a way that they would not do to any White woman, feminist or not, celebrity or not. They still view Black women as “allies” to their feminism, not actual women or feminists.

2) Feminism tends to have an element of inaccessibility by class and education, which definitely connects to race. By class, of course, Beyoncé doesn’t have this issue. She can access whatever she wants in any space. She has a platform. However, many of those with literacy/formal education privilege do not want Beyoncé to be considered feminist because she is not an academic. Black women have to be bell hooks to be considered feminist, but the bar (which should not even exist for any women) for White feminists is Lena Dunham? Beyoncé has no college education and she was home-schooled for a lot of her education as well. She is not the picture of a “scholar.” But neither was Sojourner Truth. Neither were Black blues singers or Black women who worked as domestics. Many still were the faces of resistance for Black women.

3) Some women, both White and Black, view Black women’s sexuality as automatically deviant, even if that woman is heterosexual, with heterosexual privilege. White heterosexuality is deemed the “norm” of heterosexuality. Heterosexual Black women are still deemed sexually deviant, even if they have the privilege that lesbian, bisexual, queer and trans* Black women do not. Thus, Beyoncé being sexual with her art, despite being in a highly heteronormative, presumably monogamous, heterosexual marriage and being a mother is not “enough” to deem her “respectable.” The problem is respectability politics are constructs of patriarchy, NOT feminism. Then there is the concept of sexuality within art itself. When is it “too sexual?” The fact that Miley Cyrus in a White body is not deemed “dirty” for twerking, yet Black women and our bodies automatically make the dance “dirty” reveals this race-specific misogyny, or misogynoir.

The fact that Jenna Jameson (a White woman deemed “mainstream” now) is a porn star in a patriarchal society and receives less criticism for her sexuality than Beyoncé speaks to the racism involved in the perception of sexuality. Beyoncé has been blamed for everything from teen sexuality and poor health to sex trafficking, and people think this criticism is normal and logical. This reveals how deep racism and sexism runs in our society, as it pertains to Black women, specifically.

A Black woman does not have to pass a certain “bar” of entry that White women hold before she is “acceptable” to feminism and this suggestion is most certainly racist, especially since White women are automatically assumed to be feminist. Even White women who openly hated feminism, such as Margaret Thatcher, has had the label “feminist” placed upon her post-mortem. White women can be considered feminist even when clearly operating in ways that reinforce imperialist White supremacist capitalist hetero-patriarchy, like Thatcher did (examine her damn record, one that is as patriarchal and imperialist as any White male leader), yet Beyoncé is consistently attacked for not meeting some arbitrary standard as White women stand GUARD over feminism?

I’ve also noticed that some Black women and other women of colour do not want Beyoncé associated with feminism in any way, and unfortunately, their reasoning seems to be tied into respectability politics. They think choosing the “positive” side of patriarchal binaries is what feminism is about, such as being a “good” role model and exemplifying “perfect” womanhood, as dictated by theism and patriarchy. This is also a mistake. Even so, it seems that the largest voices against Beyoncé amidst feminist spaces are White women’s voices—probably because there are so many of them and because their voices are amplified due to White privilege. When most of them dissent, it hits a major blog or newspaper. When most Black women dissent it’s via tweets or personal blogs. The access points differ in scope. Even when a Black woman or another woman of colour writes about Beyoncé for a major publication, ironically (or not so) her views seem to match White feminists’ views against Beyoncé. Perhaps this is what it takes to be published.

Critique is important. No one is above it. But this perpetual critique of Beyoncé is no longer productive critique. (I am not sure that it ever was.) This critique is creating arbitrary standards that Black feminists have to meet that White feminists do not. This is racist antagonism towards Black women if they are loved, are considered beautiful and are successful. This is respectability politics and misogynoir masquerading as feminism. This is intellectual elitism. This is double standards—ones where Beyoncé’s experience with capitalism is evil but Sheryl Sandberg’s is good, where Beyoncé’s sexuality is deviant and Lena Dunham’s is empowering, where Beyoncé being married and a mother is just her succumbing to patriarchy but for White women, it’s deemed a powerful choice, especially if coupled with a career.

If White women view Black women as inferior and White feminists view Black feminists as inferior at worst or as “allies,” “sidekicks” or just Black women to “save” not actual feminists, at best, the problem is theirs, not Beyoncé’s or Black women’s at all.

White women need to stop guarding the invisible gate to feminism. It’s not a country club. That was never the point. Leave the gates and hierarchies for patriarchy.

(via drpepperslonelyheartsclubband)