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komoryriku · 4 years

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Queering KH: Part 2

How to Queer this Anime Game? By me, an American nerd lol

Pictured: Dream. Drop. Distance. Sequel. 8)))

What is Queering

I’m so excited to talk about this okay this is literally the only fun thing I get to do as an English major anymore lmao.

“Queering a text” is the academic term for taking a given text and extracting the queer subtext of it, or applying a queer reading to it. It is taking a piece of literature, film, or art and reading into it for the gay coding. It is an especially important tool for reading old literature written during periods of extreme homosexual oppression, wherein the author would be forced to hide hints of homosexuality under layers and layers of superficial text.

Pictured: Sora and Riku battling Ursula as she means to wreck their ship, mirroring the disaster that Sora’s friends Eric and Ariel (lovers) faced at sea.

As a post-structuralist, I am also here to inform you that every text is made up of intertextual influence. This means whether the JK Rowlings of the world intended it or not, their characters may well be queer coded because of the unconscious influence of homoerotic customs in our culture that have permeated the text. It’s why people speculated that Newt Scamander was gay, because he showed little interest in Tina and preferred to focus on his beasts, which is not normative for a male protagonist in straight media. People likewise considered that Merida from Pixar’s Brave might be gay, because she had no interest in dating men and wanted to live a wild lifestyle traditionally associated with masuculinity, things that are pretty in line with lesbian coding. And let me tell you, lgbt claimed Queen Elsa IMMEDIATELY for very good reason. Pretty much everything about her journey, purposefully or not, makes for an strikingly overt gay metaphor. Let it Go is a coming out song for a woman suffocating under normativity all her life, deal with it.

Same, Elsa.

Oh whoops I accidentally pasted this picture of Riku here.

Keep Cultural Distinctions in Mind

Something else important I want to point out is that different cultures are- different lol. They are going to vary. What is queer coding here is not necessarily queer coding in Japan. A man presenting femininely in American media would certainly get him coded as gay. A bishonen in an anime though? Not so much. Men bathing together in Japan is common practice so that would mean nothing gay over there. In America however, you have things like this vine.

In which 2 dudes are chilling as far away as possible from each other in a hot tub to prove they are not gay lol.

So when I say the male members of Organization XIII bathe together, it means literally nothing in a Japanese context.

But let me tell you this: homosexual mlm tend to enjoy bathing with other dudes. Sexual attraction is sexual attraction no matter where you go. So how would you queer code a Japanese character as gay in a hot tub context?

By American logic, if the straight thing to do is sit 5 feet apart in a hot tub, then the inverse, the gay thing to do, would be 2 men sitting very close together in a hot tub. So if I were to code 2 American male characters as gay in a hot tub context, that is what I would do. But if I really wanted to hammer it home, I would ALSO have them blushing so there is no straight explanation for their closeness.

And for a Japanese character, for whom bathing with men might well mean nothing, I’d definitely have them physically blush, so that you know it does NOT just “mean nothing” to him...

Oh look at that. Amano went out of her way to draw Roxas blushing at the concept of bathing with men. So when I say “the members of Orginization XIII bathe together”, you know that means something to Roxas, cuz the coding tells us so. There are indeed certain ways you can depict a shonen being either interested in or at least affected by that idea. You just have to mind those codes telling you what the character really feels, especially when they can’t really say it.

Speaking of blushes, Amano uses them a lot.

They’re a pretty effective tool for hiding gay coding into your characters cuz an anime character might blush for any number of reasons, from being flustered by their crush,

to being flustered because they don’t have a crush.

If you’ve ever translated Japanese media, (I haven’t, but I have friends who do), you know that Japanese is very vague which means you need the whole context to properly understand a scene. It’s a similar situation with queer coding. Consider this scene of Roxas blushing.

If Roxas felt positively about the insinuation that he and Xion are holding hands, how might one code this? Well, if he’s feeling really excited about it in a positive way, you might draw him smiling or expressing flattery on his blushing face. However, Roxas reacts negatively, with a frown on his blushing face. This insinuates he does not like this idea at all, especially since he also shuts it down right away in his dialogue.

But you might say “Well how do we know he isn’t just shy?” to which I say- well we can’t know. That’s the whole point of queer coding in literature. It is to say a character is queer but without actually saying it, to give plausible deniability for safety. It is to suggest a character is queer but without any confirmation. It does not mean that the character isn’t queer, however. It just means it cannot be confirmed by the text alone. However, a bold text that is very determined to have hidden queer characters without any straight explanations, will provide coding that has very little or no straight explanation.

Back to the Roxas and Xion dialogue^. This scene alone cannot confirm or deny anything. As I explained however, the suggestion that Roxas is not straight IS there. Considering the whole context, also, this scene is another piece of “evidence” to add to the pile of suggestions that Roxas isn’t straight. This coupled with the bathing panel, and this panel of him admiring Axel, his male mentor, with deep flattery during his first day of adventuring, all exist.

Roxas does not express negative sentiments in his blushing at men, nor does he say anything dismissive to them. When he blushes at Xion’s comment, however, it is with a negative reaction. Consider also that if the author wanted Roxas to appear straight, she would present them in ways that allude to straightness and NOT in ways that allude to queerness. Roxas would not do suggestively queer things like blush in flattery at Axel calling him special and then dismiss Xion’s suggestion that they are holding hands if he were simply coded as straight. Queering a text sometimes requires a lot of critical thought like this. This is because again, these things are hidden, and sometimes hidden really well so that unsuspecting straight people will not even consider the queer suggestions. This is one of the advantages Nomura has in his favor with Kingdom Hearts: by making it so convoluted, the gay text can be forward, strong, and blatant but remain undetected by straight powers. This keeps the series safe from oppressive scrutiny. Characters like Namine and Xion can exist as literal illustrations of compulsory-heterosexuality. And people will still think Sora and Riku are straight.

Even if I don’t know all the queer codes Japanese culture might specifically have, (and I do not, I do not live in Japan nor have any semblance of what that is like beyond what my friends who have lived there can tell me, and what I can research while sitting in my pajamas in Kentucky lol), there are certain things that are rather universal. Blushing, physical contact, lingering gazes, etc etc. Attraction is attraction and certain body language and other physical symbols will translate and will travel. So that’s the majority of what I will have to focus on.

But I do want you to know that rainbows are still gay in Japan.

Finally I also want to express that cultural intermingling is a thing. We do not live in bubbles, especially with the internet. Our cultures affect each other ALL the time. Although Kingdom Hearts is primarily a Japanese series, it is consciously tailored to appeal to both America and Japan. This is by design given the idea was to marry a Japanese hit like Final Fantasy with an American phenomenon like Disney’s media. This is why they take special care in minding the English translations and dubbing of the KH games (when they are able to do so, mistakes are still very often made and i hate it cuz they’re usually heterosexual-agenda-pushing “mistakes” =~=). The games are so intimately tied to both the Japanese and American cultures they are derived from which is part of why accurate translations are so important. And given what they would mean for queer audiences, what they represent for queer people makes accurate translations even MORE important. Some things get quite lost in translation, and some things are grossly added in translation. We will discuss that down the line...

A brief aside that I implore you to ignore:

On the subject of Roxas not being straight, I have heard of one really fun queer motif in Japanese media which is ”ryoutoutsukai (両刀使い)”, “the two sword fencer”: the dual wielding bisexual. Now- I do not necessarily think this is a means of coding Roxas as bisexual, and beyond that, from what I’ve heard in my research on bisexuality in Japan, certain age groups don’t even believe in bisexuality there. However, a love of more than one gender exists no matter who is willing to acknowledge it or not, and this motif is there. And Promisekeeper and Oblivion do rather fit the bill of representing homosexuality (Oblivion/Soriku) and heteronormativity (Promisekeeper/Sora and his childhood friend Kairi). So- while i don’t think it means anything, this fun idea is there~ I will say, however, that as far as I can tell, Nomura and his staff know exactly what they’re doing with their queer coding and are well connected to it in both cultures. So I mean- if any anime team would know bisexuality exists and how to code it, I firmly believe the KH team would, so. There is some food for thought for you~

Get ready for part 3, I hope you like TWEWY~ B)

#kingdom hearts #kh #soriku #sora kh #roxas #riku kh

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mysticdragon3md3 · 4 years

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Trying to make sense of my OTP record from “badass pairs” to “moronsexual for this himbo”. lol

I was tagging a previous Tumblr post "#sassy akira is best akira". I don't necessarily believe that. I just like sassy Akira. I don't know if he's the best version of Akira, but "[version] [character] is best [character]" is a common meme, and I wanted to use that shorthand as a tag.

Sometimes I worry that "sassy Akira" wouldn't love Ryuji. After all, my first big OTP was Zel/Lina, wherein I often cited that I preferred how their equally sharp minds played off and seamlessly complimented each other. In contrast to Lina/Gourry which was moronsexuality. Since then, I've always personally preferred couples who were equals. Like IchiRuki, which was my next big OTP obsession after Zel/Lina. I even preferred couples like in FAKE by Sanami Matoh, who were of equal height and age. In contrast to most BL manga which often had troublesome age differences and went to great lengths to highly contrast the couple's character designs, in height, color schemes, hard vs soft lines, "masculine" vs "feminine", etc. And I know that contrasting character designs for couples or any pair of characters who are often in the same composition together, is recommended design, but in BL it was starting to be unequal in extreme ways that I couldn't support with my romantic values. And of course, I'm not going to read/watch a romance story that doesn't appeal to my personal ideals about romance. So if I'm not into himbos, then why am I staunchly, jealously biased towards AkiRyu/Pegoryu, and not say, ShuAke?

I was going to write about how tastes change. "I used to be totally into the gutsy tomboys, but by the time of Code Geass, I had bewilderingly passed over the super cool Kallen for dead-inside Universal Mother Goddess archetypes like C.C.".

But when I look back at my recorded OTP cycle, I've always liked himbos. I just wouldn't admit they were himbos, because I didn't think they were stupid. They were often oblivious to some social norms and overtly silly, but I remember getting mad when people would call Sanada Yukimura dumb. And I'd rant about "how dare people demean such rare and pure earnestness! It takes great emotional strength---True Strength to be so emotionally honest! That’s wisdom!" But even before my DateSana obsession, I was into USUK, and US was _definitely_ stupid. That was part of his charm! Hetalia was a comedy show, after all. Maybe that's why it was easier for me to admit he was a dumb git. Also, it was cute fanon whenever England teasingly called him a "git". ^.^ Looking back made me realize that an affinity for himbos and moronsexuality wasn't really against my ideals and my AkiRyu obsession isn't even a sign of my tastes changing. I've always loved the really earnest, sincere, silly, loud, emotionally-honest, pure-hearted Shonen Protagonist type. Where their instances of “stupidity” became just signs of their pure innocence (at least in their ideals/values). I guess Gourry Gabriev just didn't really quite breach that threshold for me, but Ryuji Sakamoto did.

So AkiRyu doesn't contradict my previous ideals and personal tastes. Akechi just doesn't meet my requirement for OTP fodder. I mean, even IchiRuki and Zel/Lina, though equals and both sharp and tough, were individually compassionate people on top of their impressive cleverness. Vanilla Persona 5 introduced/portrayed Akechi as an unnecessarily malicious bully, and that is one of my highest pet peeves. So of course, it doesn't matter if he can mentally spar with Akira and be his rival in battle. I won't ship anyone with a jerk. That's not my pastime, let alone a ship that I'd want to obsess over.

The thing I like about the idea of "sassy Akira" choosing himbo Ryuji, is that as seemingly uncatchable, unphasable as Joker may seem, flipping and dodging entrapments with all the agility and confidence in the world, we've seen that's just his mask, his Jungian persona. Akira was really hurt by his false arrest and no one believing in him. He was ready to give in to the world, maybe even start believing he was wrong to help that woman (until Arsene questioned him about it during his Awakening). The best story that I personally want to see (or the story that I need right now) is when that broken Disillusionment meets the Shonen Protagonist type, who still persists in believing in good, in justice and people, and foolishly continues to risk being kind and emotionally vulnerable, and all those things that the cynical, seemingly mature character has been scared off from risking again, like a frightened child, that they won't admit they’ve become. Because, at least in my headcanon, my fanon's version of Akira doesn't need a sparring partner; he needs renewed hope in the world. Ryuji would never be insincere, abandon Akira, be unsupportive, play mind games, or casually entrap anyone in daily life (I'm not talking about spying on the new track advisor, but everyday interactions that more clever people turn into endless mind games and playful teasing entrapments). And then on top of that, he's also so positive and enthusiastic about pretty much everything. Heck, even when he's negative about stuff, he's usually expressing the same emotion Akira is having in reaction to a situation, but is afraid to outwardly express; but Ryuji has no fear. Yet, he'll turn around from barking guard dog, to instantly cuddly puppy. He's a good boy. ;u; And then on top of *that*, Ryuji _proactively_ tries to protect people, constantly and regardless of how the world has hurt him. I mean, he's a himbo, but goddamn, what a catch. *o*

I shouldn't have to convince myself to stop feeling guilty over whatever OTP I'm having fun with. But it sure is nice to re-live all the good reasons through the analysis. ^-^

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