elucidatedlucy | Recent Entries

Written for ShuAke Week - Day 6: Wound Tending

Content Warnings: Minor injury

Tags: Akechi Goro/Kurusu Akira, Violence, Transfeminine Akechi Goro, Nonbinary Kurusu Akira

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Current Mood: bouncy

Written for ShuAke Week - Day 2: Bad End

Content Warnings: Major Character Death

Tags: Akechi Goro/Kurusu Akira, Violence, Transfeminine Akechi Goro, Nonbinary Kurusu Akira

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Written for ShuAke Week - Day 3 (I mistook "secret dating" for just "secrets" so shhhh this is technically out of bounds forgive me)

No Content Warnings

Tags: Akechi Goro/Kurusu Akira, Transfeminine Akechi Goro, Nonbinary Kurusu Akira

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Current Mood: cheerful

Written for ShuAke Week 2026 - Day 1: Accomplice AU!

Content Warnings: Unintentional misgendering

Tags: Akechi Goro/Kurusu Akira, Akechi Goro & The Phantom Thieves of Heart, Transfeminine Akechi Goro, Nonbinary Kurusu Akira

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Written for Shuake Week 2026 day 4 with the prompt of identity.

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Dear Writer Letter 2022

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Dear reader letter.
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Here is a compliment sandwich about Kingdom Hearts 3.

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My parents were big Marvel fans. From when I was born in the early 90s, to the name I was given, to the names my sibling was given, it reflected throughout their lives. My room was filled with hundreds of issues of comics in long white boxes, special plastic coatings to protect them. Marvel was what they grew up with. For my dad, a kid who born in the 50s, Spider-Man was everything.

I didn't grow up reading comics. I grew up hearing about comics. I grew up on the cartoons and the poorly thought out movies of the late 90s and early 2000s. My heroes were Kitty Pride and Nightcrawler after the cartoons. I didn't know about the context. But my parents would tell me all about it, to avoid damage to the collectibles in my room. So despite only having cartoons and movies, I learned about Gwen Stacy.

My parents liked Gwen Stacy more than Mary Jane Watson. Not that MJ was bad, in their eyes. But I liked her more, too. I liked the blond college student with a genius to match Peter's better than the red-head that I only ever saw being saved in the movies. I liked the idea of the scientific genius who was going to school for herself. I liked the image I created of her in my head at 10 years old - a smart-ass who wanted to help people so much she pulled herself thin. I don't know how true that is. I never read the comics. My parents lost all the copies they'd collected. Wikipedia tells me that she was smart and the daughter of a police chief and little else, considered so boring by her creators that they wanted to kill her off.

Ten years old, I grow up with the image of the woman I've created and look up to as a woman who always dies.

It's not that much different from my own reality, awkwardly non-binary but always looking up to women who are battered and destroyed. It is a familiar hurt over the years. People argue the worth of her death - her fridging. It's a sign of its times, the first of its kind, so rare and monumental to comics. No one imagined they could ever be so serious. Because only the death of a woman can show how serious something is. Because someone has to be sacrificed before your medium could be considered more than childish.

I am a teenager and I do not accept Gwen Stacy's death. But I live with it, much as her own clones do, repeated frozen in a time before her demise by people obsessed with her image and not her interiority.

I am 19 when the Garfield Spiderman movie comes out. This time - I get to see Gwen Stacy. It's rare for her to be acknowledged. After all, how does an average children's cartoon include a woman who exists solely to die? It's easy to have the quick death of an older family member. Harder to see the snap of a college student's neck. They can't just show young girls what they think of them so easily. It would be too easy to fight against. Too easy to demand better. It's exciting, in a way. It feels like a smidgeon of justice to have her live to the end of a movie.

I'm 21 when the sequel comes out.

Decades have passed since it was originally decreed that Gwen Stacy is the one who died. Gwen Stacy is the one who does not survive. Gwen Stacy is the first love, pure, unreachable, lost. I wait for them to subvert it. I expect them to break the chain.

Gwen Stacy dies again. Full of promise and a future, she dies, and yet again casts my own future bleak, myself a promising failure on the verge of death. It's not good enough that women deserve better. It's not enough that it was a shitty writing decision. They fit to the bill of only the worst elements of Spider-Man and kill my interest in their vision.

I don't read comics. Maybe that's my own fault. Because of that, I miss a new one that comes out. Until this year.

Miles Morales, I know. I know of the messy writing of his comics that disappointed people, but I believed in his potential. And then Spider-verse comes and proves all of it in two wonderful hours. It shows the person Spider-Man can be, full of personality and love and coming from his own neighborhood, a black-latino kid with everything to prove and his own fight to win. But it did more than that right.

Gwen Stacy is a smart drummer with a background in dance and a dead best friend. She's also a Spider-Woman. Here she is. After decades of death. After dying in every goddamn Peter's universe. Being the background of misery to someone else's love-life. Gwen Stacy is alive and the hero of her own story and I break down crying. She's not only the hero of her own story. She deals with the image of a thousand Peters who lived and a thousand Gwens who died, after having to see her own Peter die. She sees the Peters who lived and thrived because they got bitten instead, leaving Gwen as the one who could not be saved. These Peters who will never know she feels it was her fault they died in her own universe, how they were jealous and sad that they couldn't be the hero.

Couldn't be Special like her.

It's fucked up that even when Gwen lives, she gets to see the pieces of how her own death was apparently required for another person's happiness and success. Even as he mourned her loss.

But isn't that our narrative too? The people who grew up with stories of the girl so smart and nice, she couldn't be allowed to live. The girl who had to harden herself to the world to deal with her own grief. Growing up with the knowledge that the people we want to be can't be. And yet - here we have Miles, insisting that she has a place in his universe and every other too. Saying she can be friends with him - that it's not her fault - that she has a place in this world, and so does he.

We grow up being told we can't be the hero. It's nice to have something that tells us we can make those narratives for each other against the world.

This piece focuses on sexual abuse (both real and fictionalized), incest and pedophilia, and how the framing in fiction can change depending on viewpoint. Please proceed with care. It features a detailed summary of Haruko Ichikawa's short story "Star Lover," which utilizes scanlations for its information. I apologize ahead of time. I do not currently have a copy of the book or original scans of the japanese text to review myself.

Land of the Lustrous is a beautiful piece of trans-humanist fiction that delves into the struggle of change, the doors of trauma in making the attempt, and the truth of the world around its characters. What has always stood out to me most, from the moment I began to watch and read the series, was its depiction of immortality.

I spoke with a friend about it, as we would watch. He disliked it and I loved it. When we talked about what we liked in immortality, he would speak of the wisdom and terrible age – the disconnect from being human. After so long, it is not easy or possible to remain the person you once were. For him, Land of the Lustrous had characters too childish to speak to the truth of what immortality was meant to be. They were flawed, impatient, even childish after hundreds and thousands of years.

To me, that was the best example one could give of the curse of immortality. It isn’t living forever. It was the fact that you could never grow up – that these gems had been shaped into a particular image by their protector that they were not allowed to change from without destroying some aspect of what he had created.

“If you’re shaped to be one thing all your life,” I found myself saying, “You’re not given the option to be an adult or a child.”

I realized I had a personal investment in the series’ depiction of immortality. The two of us acknowledged the sensation of being too old in a body that didn’t carry the same age as what we felt, but we responded in different ways. For him, it was a matter of being too mature for too long. For me, it was a matter of never being given the chance to gain any maturity, trapped in the image my abuser had created for me.

It was only when I acknowledged my experiences as abuse that I began to realize they had or were affecting me. Before that, they were relationships. Romantic. Familial. Sexual. In that same way, Phos’ changes are what open the door to admitting their own trauma – to realizing the problem with how Adamant seems to see them.

I had my first boyfriend at around 13 years old. I don’t remember the date closely. He was a family friend. Because of that, he knew I wasn’t on good terms with my family. When I was scared to go home, scared to stay there, he offered me a moment of protection. He was fun. We’d play video games together. Talk about anime. I’d never had any friends I could do that with before. He was always affectionate. And he would joke, about the two of us. Together.

One day, I confessed to him, and asked if I could kiss his cheek.

We would date for the next four years. He would propose to me.

In some ways, he saved me from my family.

Some abusers see themselves as saviours. Necessary to the life of their victim. It’s simple when it’s a child. It is easy when the victim isn’t even human.

They could be a gem.

They could be a plant.

In 2009, Haruko Ichikawa published two volumes of one shots. Each one stood as an individual chapter, all unrelated. The stories are best described as centered around the relationships between humans and non-humans.

Volume 1 begins with a one shot called “Star Lover.”

The premise is strange. A boy is staying with his uncle as his mother travels abroad. He meets someone his uncle refers to as his daughter. However, this young girl is not quite human – neither is the boy. His uncle informs him the girl is what grew from his severed finger, a few years back. That they’re both human constructs made from plant cells and his proof goes all the way to video documentation.

However, the story is not preoccupied with the scientific theory behind making fully sapient creatures from the cells of plants. It lingers on a boy who looks at a girl who grew from his own hand, and thinks, ‘She used to be a part of me.’

Her name is Tsutsuji.

She’s mature. She wakes up early to take care of her slacker father. When the boy points out how different the two of them are, she says, “Maybe it’s how I grew up.”

The three of them go to the park, to play, and have fun. Tsutsuji talks about growing up with her father. She talks about how nice it is to spend gentle days together with someone who could be called her brother. To be a family, to be given mulled wine for the two of them to drink together in the winter.

Mulled wine, she says, “tastes like the stars burning.”

The boy thinks over Tsutsuji, someone who grew from his finger, doing all these things.

“They were all once my finger,” he says.

“They were mine.”

Tsutsuji goes upstairs, and in a conversation with an unknown figure, says they have to be quiet.

The three of them go to the beach.

The two of them are not allowed to touch the ocean due to their bodies. But they can look, and appreciate. When her shoe breaks, Tsutsuji gives up on looking for seashells. No matter how they may heal, the two of them are still delicate. It’s just two of them in the world.

Tsutsuji wants to be like a sister to him. She speaks of roles that they have to play – she talks about choosing them. And with the boy, Tsutsuji wants a normal nice brother who will always play with her.

The boy refuses because “he wants to be one with her” again.

She pretends she did not hear him and runs back to her father.

Tsutsuji throws her broken shoes at her father. When he asks what’s wrong, she says, “Nothing.”

She’s upset. She falls on her father. Tsutsuji wants nothing more than to be a family. For things to be normal. And she takes the blame upon herself. She decides she has to be honest to him. She has no time to “feel homesick over his body.” Not when she is her father’s daughter, and his mother, and his lover.

Tsutsuji can say many things, as young as she is. As happy as her days are, they are filled with a worry that will not be fully verbalized.

With the misery the boy’s words bring her. With the ambivalent way her father treats the boy’s entreaty. With the truth to a relationship never explicitly shown.

Grooming is a poisonous thing.

I dated a man for the first time around 13 years old.

He had babysat me since I was 10.

We would have sex when I was 14.

He’d tell me how nice it was that I still had such a flat chest at 15.

The marriage proposal comes at 16.

I would break up with him at 17.

He would stalk me until 20.

At 18, it was a joke that I’d been dating a pedophile for a large chunk of my young life.

At 20, I started to realize otherwise.

Tsutsuji decides to help the boy. As her father sits at the table, casually eating breakfast, she goes outside. Tsutsuji doesn’t want to hurt the boy. She doesn’t want to disappoint her father. Not when she is essentially what the boy gave to his uncle years ago, to love him alone.

She does the only thing she can think to please him.

Her father is waiting behind her to catch her when she faints from cutting off her own arm.

The boy calls his uncle a pedophile, but goes no further. Because he’s a narcissist. Because he has dehumanized a living young girl just as much as his uncle has.

His uncle mentions that pruning is sometimes necessary.

A month passes. The boy says he can’t take care of the arm she cut off. He plans to ask Tsutsuji to raise it till it’s a person, though he knows she will joke and say no. But she will probably never truly say no to him. She’s a part of him.

He comes home to a child who looks more like a toddler, and exactly like Tsutsuji.

Tsutsuji’s wound got infected.

Enough to cover most of her body, apparently.

She doesn’t remember the boy. She doesn’t remember seeing the ocean, or the beach. She doesn’t remember how he would play violin for her and her father.

Tsutsuji has fallen back in time.

Her father figure and her brother figure pay it no heed. She’ll grow up again soon. Things will return to what they once were.

And as it is a story from the perspective of Tsutsuji’s abusers, it is calm as it is quietly, terribly evil.

Tsutsuji is a character with her own feelings and thoughts. But she is also a child who has been taught she is not human. She is a child who has been taught that this is her life together with her father. She is a child with a father who depends on her as though she was his own mother.

As a child who has been groomed from the moment she gained awareness, she is not able to recognize predatory behavior. Even the boy’s behavior, speaking of being unable to act as her brother, causes her more distress because she knows she cannot make him happy.

Even when the boy calls his uncle a pedophile, he is too caught up in his own wants to help Tsutsuji. She isn’t her own person. She’s his. She is a detached part of himself, and he wants that. He cannot stop his uncle, because it would mean disrupting their easy life. It doesn’t interfere with his life. There is no reason to stop.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. It's a popular saying. "Beauty doesn't exist on its own. It is created by its beholders." By that logic, the beholder is exhibiting a form of power over what they find beautiful. The eye of the beholder is the fuel behind Helen of Troy. It is what criminalizes her for the sin of what others see her to be. Those with the power will speak of the power of the beheld. A power that is granted.

The eye of the abuser works in the same way. They can view a situation in whatever way most benefits them. Though the boy entering Tsutsuji's life had the choice, he ultimately becomes another abuser in her life, however inadvertently. His uncle only views Tsutsuji's pain in the way that normalizes his own behavior. He does not have to accept culpability for his actions. Not when Tsutsuji reverts to a toddler under his hands.

My abusers got away with this for years.

No matter how often I could joke about such matters.

"Star Lover" is tragic. It's a short horror story. It breaks my heart. In that way, I love it. Rarely do I see depictions of sexual abuse in the very moments that they are happening. To see this experience framed as though a time capsule, a closed pool centered around Tsutsuji's self-destructive decisions, is awful. It shows this without any of the voyeurism I expect from most authors. More than anything, it is almost singularly focused on Tsutsuji's choices, and how the abused are rarely given the interiority that takes their pain seriously by those who abuse them.

Some stories about abuse are about how evil it is.

But others can be like this. Stories about abuse can be about what happened, and the days we accepted our world for what it was. We can acknowledge the evils of abusers. Fiction can allow us the window into how insidious it can be.

Recently, I watched Darker than Black.

I had heard it was a show that had an honest depiction of qualities of sociopathy – even holding a main character with the traits. However, it also sounded almost cringingly edgy. Here are super-human assassins, all of whom fight unceasingly for shady organizations, and here is are the government officials who try to catch them. Throw in dead-eyed women who exist in silence, called Dolls, and it starts to seem like something to pass over.

As it turns out, Darker than Black is very aware of what it is.

With the first two episodes, it cements itself as a “next Tuesday” humanistic story with tinges of a sci-fi that, for a rare moment, is not obsessed with beating off about its world building. Featuring a Chinese main character who encounters well-meant compliments that are shown for the microaggressions they are, featuring women whose interiority is the point of the episode, featuring a range of age and experience that is all affected by the fact that 10 years ago, the world changed and not at all – Darker than Black has a lot to say, but is not very interested in the “Whys” of a science-fantasy wall that makes entire regions of the world disappear.

That focus is its greatest strength.

Scientists throw around phrases that sound like foreign islands. Police name off star systems to disclose superhuman Contractors. But the common person – the people most episodes are about – they don’t have the same words. They don’t know the hidden mysteries of the world. The answers of the Hell’s Gate, the one that is blocked off by a massive wall that bisects Tokyo, are unavailable to the average citizen. Let alone the poor resident, or the undercover agent who is only told enough to survive. In this way, Darker than Black gives tell to what kind of viewer is watching, and the reality of our situations.

Rather than discussing science, or the theories behind why Contractors came to be, the main character talks to a scientist while star-gazing about the fake sky above them. The most the scientist can say is it’s there “Just Because.” There’s no scientific basis for this tragedy and instead, he takes it for what it means to himself. The two of them continue to stare at the sky, because it is an echo of dreams the two of them once had. In the show’s eyes, that’s enough.

In another episode, two contractors spend more time talking about the past, before becoming Contractors. Never the why, never the how. They discuss what mattered before the new sky came, rather than the target they are chasing down. A doll regaining lost memories does not explain why or how she became a doll. Only that she has found something here, something that lets her make the honest choice in what she wants to do. There is no language to explain themselves. Contractors and Dolls only have what words and stereotypes the world has given them. The show, in its own way, is the experience of using questions to find answers that people have not been allowed to have.

This element of the show is striking, but with that honesty in mind, it also displays my favorite quality of the show. That is, the importance of kindness in tragedy.

Tragedy is a genre that inundates the abused and traumatized. It is what most major characters in Darker than Black are heading toward. Or it would be, if not for an in-series awareness of what people like this go through just for the sake of survival.

Tragedy in media has a flawed history. For every empathetic and intelligent depiction, there are a hundred more far more interested in the spectacle of human suffering. Kindness in tragedy is not the narrative of a suicide victim that makes others realize the beauty of life. It is not a terminally ill patient who alights on the shoulders of cynical youth to teach them the flaws of their ways. It is not the person filled with righteous anger and murderous vengeance at the expense of a rape victim, yet again allowed no interiority. It is not the white savior inspired by the injustices of a land they have never been to. It is not the story of a starving worker donating their last dollar to charity. It is not the narrative of the worker who stays in the midst of the fire to keep doing their job. It is not the tale of a person giving up safety for the sake of survival.

Kindness in tragedy is when, even if some tragedies are inevitable, the people involved still try. When an investigator two decades past his prime still does everything in his power to aid a young girl who died years ago. When a young woman beset with the harsh reality of her own trauma and adulthood still wants to open the door for a girl like her. When a girl dealing with the mysterious and suspect deaths of her entire family chooses to believe in magic rather than chasing down an impossible truth to her death. When people have destroyed their lives and died, but come together in their way to give each other a life beyond their assigned fate.

Darker than Black means that people die. That friendships perish and loved ones leave you, betray you. It means the world will not change, so people change themselves. It means that even when the main character knows a woman he is guiding is no longer herself, even when she does not realize what has happened to her, he still helps her as though she is alive. It means that a young girl does not give up on a classmate who has given into how the world expects her to be. It stands for the child who loses one family, and despite the terrible circumstances that lead them to meet, finds a new one in her personal tragedy. It is the man who knows he should not be capable of dreaming, but keeps looking to false stars anyway. It is the sibling who fights because he refuses to accept the monster society has painted his Contractor sister to be.

Kindness in tragedy is the fact that, even if the world says otherwise, individual people are capable of seeing each other as human beings. The hardest part is that there is no easy option. The kindest part is that you can choose more than the binary options, the us-versus-them mentality that plagues institutional society.

The most revolutionary idea in Darker than Black is that people are never just one thing. It’s simple. But the execution is never easy. There is no button that can be pressed to fix the world, no wish that can help everyone. At the end of the day, at the end of mad scientists and corrupt officials, is only the fact that regular people have to change – that they have to acknowledge their evil and their good.

Tokyo is split into two. Who cares how the wall was built or what exactly Hell’s Gate is. What does it matter the materials of the wall or the rational explanations of scientists to explain something that is about much more than equations and elemental composition. To the characters, it is the reflection of their own personal struggle. The constant reflection of Tokyo’s false skyline against a wall is the cast’s lost opportunity to understand what lies on the other side. In the wall, the gate, and the breakdown of both, viewers can only find the reflection of what the cast comes to decide about the people they have chosen to be.

ROUND 1, AUs, FIGHT

Miki/Miyahara barista AU - 511 words
Ballroom girls We Know The Devil AU - 2408 words
ManaTe in Space Diplomats - 1025 words
Teppu RGU au - 2391 words
Ballroom RGU au - 761 words
Chinatsu/Shizuku and dancing together - 523 words
Manami (With a Gun) - 452 words

ROUND 2

Manami & Miyahara, swimming - 514 words
ManaTe weatherworking thunder - 588 words
ManaTe weatherworking, heavy rain - 728 words

ROUND 3

manate but so soft redrom im just too soft. how am i so soft . im crying - 1178 words

Third year on the SASO wagon as per it goes

This year, I am dying for a chance to write Ballroom e Youkoso and Teppuu, so if you are someone not on team Miki/Miyahara and looking to bait, please, I will do just about anything - especially for the girls.

Characters I like

YWPD - Manami, Miyahara, Miki, Aya, Onoda, [grits my teeth] teshima. I also like trying to write for less popular characters and Almost Any Manami Relationship.
Ballroom - all the girls. all of them. But especially Chinatsu and especially chinatsu relationships.
Teppuu - Ringi, Natsuo, Yuzuko, Karin, and I'd try for others.

I will gladly jump on any -

Chinatsu / or & anyone. I mean it. (Ballroom)
Akira & Mako (Ballroom)
Ringi & Yuzuko (Teppuu)
Ringi/Natsuo (Teppuu)
Miyahara, Miki, and Aya, in any order and combination (YWPD)
Manami & Miyahara
Sansaka
ManaTe (this isnt even baiting, this is just throwing me a bone if you prompt anything for my ride and die otp)
Weird NozoNico or HonoEli (where'd that lovelive come from weird)
Any character focused prompts, especially for Chinatsu, Manami, Miyahara, Miki, or Ringi.

I like blues, melodrama, night, body horror, hatemance, absurd space odysseys, monsters and witches, big AUs and small scenes, character focused concepts, and big interior works. I'm all about gender and mental illness and trauma. I Hashtag Love Blood. I am big into suicide and suicide themes. I'm BIG into RGU and Princess Tutu AUs.

I am not into one-sided hate/rivalry, I am /not/ into rivalry that involves one person always hurting/beating the other, and when it comes to murder, I kind of need both parties to die if it's gonna be good. I cannot do terminal illness or hospital-related death.

Heyas and thank you for taking the time to read my letter! ( Read more... )

A twine based short story about not being made for the job you landed as a teen.

~3.5k words, no branching paths. Do keep in mind content warnings, due to being about actively triggering material.

I decided to delete my other posts and compile all my fills in one post since it's not too many.

Blanket permission to remix anything here. Anything not posted to AO3 is unedited but that's okay.

BR1:

Teshima and Mitani have an uncomfortable time - 1k words
Teshima loses to Koga - 1.7k words - edited ao3 - 2.1k words
Remember when it turned out Teshima was in an idol group and i was fucking Furious - Art Fill
Teshima sings a vengeful song at Manami! Or is this just my image of Macross in a fic - 2.6k words - edited ao3 - 3.5k words
Remember VAMPIRE MANATE - 1.2k words
REMEMBER WHEN MIKI AND MIYAHARA MET AT THE INTERHIGH - 480 words

BR2:

In which Teshima is a cyberpunk thief and Onoda is incredibly biased - 2.5k words AO3 crosspost - 3k words

BR3:

Ringi & Yuzuko - May the best one win! (1.5k - crosspost 1.5 k)
sansaka - Please. Please take it back. (4.5k, Fuck Me And My Entire Life) - AO3 crosspost - 5.6k words
manate - Manami's Enviable Leg Collection (an art, in which i still hate drawing teshima)

BR4: remember when i said i wasnt finishing anything in the two week period, i lied

yuuto and ashikiba travel through phones (1.5k)

BR5: hahaha guesswhat its time for

sansaka in eyes of death hospital times. ever seen kara no kyoukai? - 2.5k (crosspost - 4.6k words)
manate PETULANT DOLPHIN MEETS DYING JACKASS - 3.1k (ao3 crosspost 3.4k)
miyahara visits the underworld - 600 words (crosspost - 1k words)
manate. teshima's a fallen star and i hate myself. - 8k words (crosspost - 11.3k words)
miyahara and her undead charge - 550 words

BR6: i dont know what im doing

re: chimako that sarah drew - 500 words (crosspost - 900 words)
re: hogwarts elihono by wei - 729 words
re: manami and toudou in some circumstance by wes - 1200 words (crosspost - 1.4k words)
re: time traveling ayamiki and imashin by ps - 1000 words (crosspost - 1.7k words)
re: the world ending with manate, originally by christa - 2200 words

It's difficult (for me) to talk about Ballroom E Youkoso.

The ballroom dancesport focused manga has been written & drawn by Takeuchi Tomo since 2011 (her first serialized manga), and it's one that has quickly found a place in my heart - despite both itself and my typical frustrations for the genre. On one hand, it is absolutely refreshing to see a sport manga with an actively balanced cast in terms of gender, wherein there are always complicated dynamics going on between the young men and women present within competitions. On the other hand, an unfortunate trapping of the genre tends to be that if they do include any women, then sexism & misogyny become near-inescapable additions.

As a short introduction of the manga itself - it follows Fujita Tatara, a 3rd year in junior high with no particular interests or dreams for the future. One day, while putting off forms for high school yet again, he sees that a classmate of his - Hanaoka Shizuku - has also been putting off high school registration. As he walks home, an encounter with bullies leads to him being rescued by the owner of a local dance studio - and against all odds, to find that Shizuku herself dances here.

She is not so welcoming or aimless as he assumed she was when he saw her in the school's office.

[larger]

From there, it moves along the lines one most expects of the genre - Tatara finds a drive and dream in trying to succeed in ballroom dancesport, and moves along the trials & tribulations demanded of that world. What ultimately makes it stand out as its own story in the genre is rooted in -

Being about competitive ballroom dancing, obviously, complete with excitingly kinetic art to supplement its tone
Being about what is a two-person team, tight and focused on particular relationships
The complicated dynamic that forms main partnership, an intense rivalry between a young man and a young woman who are both talented, but in almost opposite ways for what they are both wanted to be in the dance world.

I say, "I want to sell people on this manga." But I almost feel bad trying to do that. I honestly don't want to convince people to read something that might make them uncomfortable or frustrated. I don't want people to feel like they need to read stressful media, when from what I see of the sport animanga fandom tends to want a chance to chill out with fun & dramatic works, wherein they have the potential to add or remove conflict as they see fit. I think the flaws of this manga can be more trouble than they're worth, for people who just want a break.

So, if nothing else, I'll say this - if you want a sport manga that treats women's issues in the sport world with decent respect, do read Teppuu. Teppuu, while written & drawn by a man, does have a wide diversity in women's body types, is a cast of almost entirely women, and even its "fanservice" isn't anything particularly bad. Ballroom teases such issues, but doesn't sit on them or give them much levity, the fanservice is much more blantantly obvious, it coddles the men in its cast, but - if you can overlook it like me, for the sake of liking series about dance, or the women, or the cast at large, then maybe you'll find something here, too.

( I'll chat it up more here at the cut. )

i should say, first, that this is quite a ramble and incredibly melodramatic, as well as self-indulgent, as I just started going on about manate (as i do) while discussing my favorite fic I wrote this year. this is honestly a really navel-gazing mess but i wrote this up a few weeks ago and kept adding to it when i was bored over the weeks, until it was this. so i should really just post it now.

( Read more... )

mostly for aozo to know what fills i've posted. also since i dont really care about people knowing what i post as long as it isnt directly noted on most of the posts lmao. just dont want to ... call attention to myself or my existence ... The usuaaaaal ( Read more... )

a compilation of allmy fills from saso 2015.
( Read more... )

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dabblingdilettante/Gale

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dabblingdilettante/Gale

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SASO 2015 fills

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