Let's read: Gender Queer

[Amber the Hedgehog]

She is 110% not a lesbian. I've been slinging around the word autoandrophile, which is something Maia herself will flat out admit to being here in a bit, but the funny thing about it is autoandrophilia, like it's counterpart, autogynophilia, is a straight person's disease. It describes a state where someone's natural inclination for the opposite sex gets twisted in on itself, so you become sexually attracted to your own mirror image as a male/female instead.

While not super common some teengirls "play" romance with other females before they are ready for the real thing. You know lesbian until graduation? They often don't realize that's what they are doing because it's more about exploring the idea of adult relationships than anything truly sexual. These girls tend to be late bloomers or otherwise immature and anxious. They notice other girls are finding boyfriends and having fun with couple stuff. They also want that but are kinda terrified too because it's all so unfamiliar and how you even approach men? So they act out this stuff with people they feel comfortable and easy to approach, other girls. When they actually mature and boys stop being scary, girls just stop having anything intresting to offer and they go straight.

I think Maia falls under this. All girls she expressed intrest in are masculine and she sees gay relationships with rose colored glasses. Normies are clearly something she doesn't get but admires and she feels very insecure about this. I think she wanted to be lesbian because it's so cool and different in good way but her real attraction was towards men still shined trough.

 

[Kari Kamiya]

Did Maia actually live in some kind of poverty or something? Outside of being an autistic retard whose parents can't be arsed to hose off, if she has had no regular access to running water throughout most of her life, then why didn't she mention something like that? She probably didn't grow up that poor, but I've known kids who had horrendous hygiene in school because they were just barely scraping by financially. Their impoverished lifestyle would catch up to them upon puberty, and the kids become self-conscious about something that is outside of their control.

But those kids who're tired of feeling embarrassed about it make sure to use the gym showers when they're alone. Did she just not use the school showers because "muh gender dysphoria"? In fact, did she stop practicing hygiene because "muh gender dysphoria"? There's no way her body was that screwed up from hormones so as to affect her hygiene.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

Rather than be required reading for schoolchildren, it should be required reading for any chilld psychologist so they'd understand trannies are several layers of mental issues being bunched together into a single "I'm uncomfortable with my body" issue that doesn't mean shit, and usually only makes the matters worse because people react badly to the magical solution not working.

Like we have here self neglect, self harm, body image issue, learning difficulty, difficulty communicating with her peers and obsession with bodily fluids. Plus high chance she had helicopter parents who decided to just ignore her issues.

 

[Aunt Carol]

Did Maia actually live in some kind of poverty or something?

It seemed more like the parents were well-meaning hippies living a bit out of town, but I don't think she ever explained what changed/why they were out there in the first place. There were a lot of things that really needed a little more explanation. I'm used to autobiographical comics being more introspective, y'know? But then again, this one was focused on her life through the retroactive lens of gender plus she's a sperg.

Rather than be required reading for schoolchildren, it should be required reading for any child psychologist so they'd understand trannies are several layers of mental issues being bunched together

I said something similar earlier. It's frustrating that pundits are clutching pearls about the art, which is as sexy as a Your Changing Body pamphlet, showing a couple of brief sex acts, when the book itself is just a glaring example of Autism Presents Differently in Women. Unfortunately, the kind of person who writes insightfully about childhood development and parenting is also the kind of person who's swallowed the trans bait--or who is sensibly afraid about being blacklisted if they publish heresy.

From Gender Queer: A Memoir, the horse's mouth:
View attachment 3052820
Author got accidentally owned so hard that she couldn't even esprit de l'escalier and just drew pages of tossing, turning and asking for help on the Internet. Really.

Source in this thread:

More people need to read that comic book, Genderqueer. Pundits are performatively freaking out that there's a pastel-colored fellatio scene, but actually reading the whole thing would be illuminating. It's a lady on the spectrum, raised by hippies, deciding that since she's Not Like Other Girls then she must be something new and different and very very special.

No, lady, you had a hard time socializing, you needed your teachers to tell you to watch your hygiene, and you had your sexual awakening writing fanfiction while in grad school. Take all that energy you're using to obsess on your perceived gender, and use it on horses or web design or Voltron instead.

The book is a perfect example of the "transgenderism did to autists what crack did to the ghetto" meme. There's even a segment where she draws her grandma/aunt saying "I love you but how is this different from internalized misogyny?" And the author, the one drawing this years later, can't come up with an answer and admits it.

 

[Inatrous]

While not super common some teengirls "play" romance with other females before they are ready for the real thing. You know lesbian until graduation? They often don't realize that's what they are doing because it's more about exploring the idea of adult relationships than anything truly sexual.

Another fair point. I never knew anyone who did this, so it slipped my mind as a possibility. I maintain that Maia's penis-having fantasies fucks with her brain, though.

Rather than be required reading for schoolchildren, it should be required reading for any chilld psychologist so they'd understand trannies are several layers of mental issues being bunched together into a single "I'm uncomfortable with my body" issue that doesn't mean shit, and usually only makes the matters worse because people react badly to the magical solution not working.

Like we have here self neglect, self harm, body image issue, learning difficulty, difficulty communicating with her peers and obsession with bodily fluids. Plus high chance she had helicopter parents who decided to just ignore her issues.

The fact that most of the people reading this either don't or won't see this drives me insane. I actually became aware of book for the first time because some of my liberal family members were going on and on about how it was a great way to convert introduce my more normal relatives to the gendered cause.

This chick is a trainwreck, and I can only hope one day, people wake up enough to feel guilty about celebrating the crash.

There were a lot of things that really needed a little more explanation. I'm used to autobiographical comics being more introspective, y'know? But then again, this one was focused on her life through the retroactive lens of gender plus she's a sperg.

Hard agree, some of the stuff she skips over or briefly mentions, like getting pulled from eighth grade, attract my attention much more than her 80th monologue on female leg hair. But going into detail about what her problems really are would require real self reflection and humility, both of which she seems to lack.

(Part 4)

• Maia is still lusting after her older punk classmate and being creepy about it.
• Rather than actually talk to her, she has opted to eavesdrop on her to glean information.
• This is how she learns punk chick is into Bowie, which of course leads Maia to get into Bowie too, because imitation is the sincerest form of flattery...right?
• It turns out that Maia does sincerely like David Bowie, which would be cute if not for the circumstances that lead her to get into it, or the fact that she immediately pulls it back into her overall fixation on gender, claiming Bowie was the first musician she had ever known to put "queer" references in a song.
• I'm not hugely into Bowie, so it's hard for me to say if she's just projecting here or not.
• What I do know is that this implies Maia has either never heard of The Village People, or was too dense to notice their entire band was one big gay joke.

• I hate anime side mouth. And more pertinently, I hate artists who use anime side mouth. Unless you are a Japanese animator expiring as you are worked to death to meet a deadline, you should be actively banned from describing yourself as a creative, just for the crime of using this technique.
• More seriously, side mouth is a hallmark of artists, and in particular, weaboos, who mindlessly copy the things they like without any regards to looks, circumstances, or style. It reveals a fundamentally amateur grasp of anatomy and design, and looks ugly as sin on top of that.
• While I'm on a minor art rant, what is it with Maia and yellow/blue toned color pallets? It's the only combo she seems to use.

• This is where we first learn Maia is growing up into something a little worse than a Fujoshi.
• Fun fact: Females are significantly less likely than males to develop a fetish. No one's exactly sure why, at least so far as I know, but something about that extra X helps prevent paraphilias from popping up as often or being as severe.
• I bring this up because I honestly think that if Maia was a real man, she'd have A) Gone full troon, and B) Would have been writing this from jail. Low IQ sperg + sex addiction + no sense of social boundaries is an ugly combo, and Maia seems to almost go out of her way to feed her fetish in a way that's frankly unpleasant to watch.

• More TMI, Maia's autoandrophilia continues to bloom.
• If you'll bear with me as a small aside, I just recently finished an article that feels pertinent here.
• Conditioning of sexual interests in humans is difficult to see, virtually impossible to test, and probably exactly how it happens: A comment on Hsu and Bailey. Is about, well, exactly what it says on the tin. It mostly argues that while humans are very complicated, there's a strong argument to be made that Pavlovian associations play a big human sexual development.
• One of the final paragraphs in particular is worth a quote:

"A kiss can be loving, sensual, or hateful, depending on the condition. Different feelings associated with lip stimulation are determined by external context, which in turn activates pathways with associated structures that render a feeling or emotional response that can also be tagged at a consious, cognitive level, and usually compared to a memory of similar situations. Thus, practicing a sensual kiss in front of the bathroom mirror likely does not induce sexual arousal, whereas the same kiss during a first date does.

Now add fur. Wearing fur, feeling fur, and imagining oneself as a furry animal may well link important erectile tissues and erogenous zones of the body at once. And if these induce potent sexual arousal and result in sexual reward, then from a pavlovian perspective fur becomes enacted as a preferred cue. This is reminiscent of male rats that have had their first multi-ejaculatory experiences wearing a rodent tethering jacket."

• Maia likes men. She spent a lot of time imagining the sensation of men, being a man, and having sex as a man, and she did it right on top of her first years of sexual awakening and puberty.
• This is practically a step-by-step guide on how to make yourself into a pervert. Her idealized male self and her desire for a husbando just got glued together in her brain.
• If she weren't such a horrible person, I might have even pitied her for it.

• Back to the comic, Maia and her sister talk sex, and Maia gets grossed out trying to lick some vaginal slime.
• She doesn't do it, but the fact that she made me watch while she considered it pisses me off.
• We learn that Maia tracks her masturbation frequency, and, more disturbingly, tracks other people's, too.
• While this is hardly the weirdest or most fucked up thing she's done, something about the masturbation chart leaves me unsettled.
• I just get this image of this strange, smelly cunt, listening with rapt attention to a conversation, meticulously collecting every teenage innuendo and sex reference like they're some kind of serious data point. It's such a cartoonishly autistic thing to do, if Maia wasn't such a fruitcake already, I almost wouldn't have believed it.
• She will keep this masturbation graph all the way into collage, by the way.
• Maia suggests her interest in androgynous people is a sign of her super special gender, and not a generic young woman's fondness for pretty boys and twinks.

• The symbology used throughout this comic is so basic it almost comes across as if Maia is pulling from some kind of dictionary.
• This panel is also notable for being one of the few examples of Maia putting in actual effort, and it still sucks. The blue is too bright, the linework is still sketchy (and still a weird color, the brown works fine on the yellow side, but the blue? Awful.) and the execution is still middle-grade basic.
• By 2003, Maia has discovered the transgenders.
• Really, the amount of sex and gender shit this chick is getting into, way before it was mainstream, and at such a young age, is genuinely impressive. Maybe it's because she was a hippie child living near San Francisco? She would have been right next to where all those alternative lifestylists and subcultures were starting to really gain steam.

 

[Kari Kamiya]

• I hate anime side mouth. And more pertinently, I hate artists who use anime side mouth. Unless you are a Japanese animator expiring as you are worked to death to meet a deadline, you should be actively banned from describing yourself as a creative, just for the crime of using this technique.
• More seriously, side mouth is a hallmark of artists, and in particular, weaboos, who mindlessly copy the things they like without any regards to looks, circumstances, or style. It reveals a fundamentally amateur grasp of anatomy and design, and looks ugly as sin on top of that.

You can tell she never actually studied what she's looking at, because anime side mouth doesn't actually look like that, it looks like this:

You can still see the outline of the lips, always. Amateur artists don't recognize this from a cursory glance, this is something that has to be learned through studying anatomy.

Maia likes men. She spent a lot of time imagining the sensation of men, being a man, and having sex as a man, and she did it right on top of her first years of sexual awakening and puberty.

This is what happens when your literal first exposure to sex is through BL manga (and from before the Internet where you can look up hentai scans). Fake, which was very popular when Tokyopop localized it, has a sex scene in the final volume, though you don't see penetration or anything, but if you ever look it up, you'll see how similar it is to how Maia portrays it here. All localized BL manga from the 2000s were softcore and romanticized.

• We learn that Maia tracks her masturbation frequency, and, more disturbingly, tracks other people's, too.
• While this is hardly the weirdest or most fucked up thing she's done, something about the masturbation chart leaves me unsettled.

What the absolute fuck.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

Fun fact: Females are significantly less likely than males to develop a fetish. No one's exactly sure why, at least so far as I know, but something about that extra X helps prevent paraphilias from popping up as often or being as severe.

I kinda wonder about it. Men are way more focused on their fetishes, but female oriented romance can have extremely disturbing shit in it as well, and the question if women will even argue it's their fetish or not. For example, Twilight has both vampires and werewolves fetishes and has a ton of a female following.

 

[Monolith]

So there's why 'people' keep trying to force this book into public schools.

 

[Inatrous]

I kinda wonder about it. Men are way more focused on their fetishes, but female oriented romance can have extremely disturbing shit in it as well, and the question if women will even argue it's their fetish or not. For example, Twilight has both vampires and werewolves fetishes and has a ton of a female following.

I want to say I am in no way trying to suggest that females can't be fucked up or evil, though I do think the creepy stuff you see in dark romance is something slightly different.

The emotional aspects of being wanted, or obsessed over, and the idea of being so wonderful even evil, dangerous people can't help but love you (in their own twisted, sexy way, of course) is what seems to take primacy there. I haven't read twilight, but my general understanding is that it's much the same--the focus is on the feelings between Bella and two classic romantic stereotypes; mister edgy loner and protective strongman, just with a supernatural paint job slapped on for pizazz.

I guess my understanding is that paraphilias tend to be more physically oriented? It doesn't feel like say, a foot fetish, where something not normally associated with sex gets twisted up in the coom. They're both fucked up, but in ways that feel just different enough that I'm reluctant to write them off as essentially the same.

(Part 5)

• Ninth grade, Maia is so proud of her reading prowess that she starts keeping a list of "books", a pretty generous term, considering she shows a pile that includes a number of Manga and comics. I recognize Inu Yasha, CLAMP, and the Sandman series.
• Neil Gaiman's Sandman is, notably, another work that contains some early gender shit. There's an entire arc with a tranny in it, and a reoccurring character that's effectively nonbinary.
• Is this stuff getting recommended to her by her gay club buddies? She's weirdly good at collecting these.
• Tolkien is also in the pile there, but color me doubtful that Maia understood a word. I'd be less surprised to learn she just cracked open the book, vividly hallucinated a romance between Sam and Frodo for a bit, and called it good.
• She manages to read 68 titles over 82 days, counting comics, and is so pleased with her super-cool and not autistic list keeping hobby, that she decides she's going to continue writing down all the things she reads in neat little rows forever.
• After making this commitment, she immediately goes to the library to look for even more gay books.
• Who was it that said gender was to autists as crack was to the hood? Because I'm really feeling it here.
• Anyways, Maia gets all tingly from reading the sex scenes in some more YA Yaoi type of stuff, as if we needed more conformation that she's a perv.
• A while ago, I wondered if Maia had any real sex education, and it turns out she did. It just came a little later than when she probably needed it.
• Sex ed happen four times in seventh, ninth, tenth, and eleventh grade, respectively.
• Maia claims these sex ed classes were what convinced her "that kind" of sex sounded too risky and unappealing to rouse her interest.
• She really did convince herself homosex was a wonderful, magical experience totally divorced from the dirty, grubby reality of straight sex from an early age, didn't she.

• Maia decides she can no longer stand the intolerable femininity of long hair, and needs that shit cut off, pronto.

• Unfortunately, she's still too emotionally insecure to flat out state what she wants, so instead of reading her mind the way she's supposed to, the hairdresser gives her exactly what she asks for instead: A nice bob that's a little boyish but not immature, something I could easily see a business woman wearing to a meeting around that time.
• Maia hates it, and immediately runs to her mom for a redo.
• She ends with something that looks like a modified pixie-cut. Maia is so happy with the end result, she rubs her hand against her hair while wishing she could cut off her boobs the same way. So healthy!
• Maia swears off professional hairdressers entirely after this, and recruits her sister to help keep herself groomed.
• She takes this same sister along on bra shopping sprees, because Maia is the kind of person who needs emotional support for that. She also serves as the voice of reason whenever Maia tries to buy bras so tight they cause her pain.
• Reminder that this is Maia's younger sister. Pheobe is behind Maia by nearly two and a half years, but the way these pages are presented, it almost looks as if she's serving the role of a much older sibling, or even a third parent as she tries to help her sister out.
• I hope this is another misrepresentation on Maia's part, because being such a spazotronic super sperg that your younger sibling feels the need to take on a mature role to help support you is really sad.
• 
• I'm not exactly sure what to make of this one. On one hand, Pheobe is enabling Maia's delusions, on the other, she's 13. A kid who was raised by the same hippy parents Maia was. "How to comfort a crazy person" is so outside her wheelhouse you it may as place it in another nation entirely.
• And maybe I'm stretching here, but it does seem like Pheobe said this on purpose. She's younger, but reads as much more socially astute.

...And I'm going to end this one here. I'm trying to split these into mostly-even sections, but came up short this time. I'll finish the last of this TPB tomorrow, and then probably take a break from daily posts. I need to add to the buffer I use to write these and also spend a little while thinking about something that isn't Maia Kobabe.

Maybe with a good strong glass of bleach on top of that. Some cleaning fluid to the brain would set me up just right, I think, to get started on TPB #2.

 

[TheAmbiguousLurker]

Really, there's no better argument against Tranny Talking Points than the stories their own community creates. It's always about taking every little moment in their lives, the good and the bad, and forcing a connection to gender because apparently their personality is so shallow that there's no other source passion or distaste to draw from.

 

[Aunt Carol]

• Sex ed happen four times in seventh, ninth, tenth, and eleventh grade, respectively.
• Maia claims these sex ed classes were what convinced her "that kind" of sex sounded too risky and unappealing to rouse her interest.
• She really did convince herself homosex was a wonderful, magical experience totally divorced from the dirty, grubby reality of straight sex from an early age, didn't she.

Going back to Maia's recounting of her masturbation process: rubbing on something is a completely normal thing to do, especially in the "just figuring this out" stage. If you lurk any kind of "ask" thread about masturbation stories, there are women and men talking about how they used to fold up a pillow or hump on the corner of a mattress.

I get that her 'tism makes her body less able to filter out yaoi toxicity, but the only weird part is that she did this until a relatively late age.


This book... at first I was thinking that it'd be good to have a "rebuttal" article for normies, but now I'm thinking that it's a shame nobody can explain Maia's experiences to her. Not in a condescending way; she just seems like she needs things explicitly explained.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

The emotional aspects of being wanted, or obsessed over, and the idea of being so wonderful even evil, dangerous people can't help but love you (in their own twisted, sexy way, of course) is what seems to take primacy there. I haven't read twilight, but my general understanding is that it's much the same--the focus is on the feelings between Bella and two classic romantic stereotypes; mister edgy loner and protective strongman, just with a supernatural paint job slapped on for pizazz.

It kinda falls under rape fetish, which is disturbingly common for privileged women, yet is pretty much a social taboo to admit.

• She really did convince herself homosex was a wonderful, magical experience totally divorced from the dirty, grubby reality of straight sex from an early age, didn't she.

There is a fantastic meme of strapping fujoshis into chairs showing them IRL gays to make them understand how disgusting their relationship are. Maybe if Maia had it she would just be a regular lesbo autist. I wonder if in 20 years we'll have siblings of trannies have interviews like siblings of autists nowadays.

It's kinda funny how Maia's mental decline is not even red flags but a nuclear siren going off 24/7 and her parents ignoring it completely, a decade later and they'd probably have straight up become enablers. Helicopter parenting is the blight of boomers and Gen Xers with how it fucks over children by making them become educated by media.

 

[Inatrous]

Really, there's no better argument against Tranny Talking Points than the stories their own community creates. It's always about taking every little moment in their lives, the good and the bad, and forcing a connection to gender because apparently their personality is so shallow that there's no other source passion or distaste to draw from.

It's a shame more people don't pay attention to their works, and those who do prefer to use them for political talking points rather than actually thinking about what they read. Stuff like Gender Queer and MANHUNT are really clear windows into the kinds of mental illness that lurks beneath the rainbow, if only they'd care to see.

This book... at first I was thinking that it'd be good to have a "rebuttal" article for normies, but now I'm thinking that it's a shame nobody can explain Maia's experiences to her. Not in a condescending way; she just seems like she needs things explicitly explained.

She is somewhat pitiable. It doesn't take a lot of looking to notice that Maia has some very real issues, and drifted into the gender shit in part because it offered an explanation she liked so much more than the reality at least a few of the people in her life must have tried to tell her.

The sad thing is, by this point, getting her to sit down and listen would probably wreck everything she's managed to build up so far. Her social circle, her sense of self, and even her job revolves around gender. The only people who want to publish her work seem do so because because she's LGBTQXYZ. She quite simply lacks the skills needed to compete in the commercial art market without some kind of gimmick to prop her up.

(Part 6)

• By the age of 16 or so, Maia gets into theater generally and Oscar Wild in particular.
• True to form, she picks biographies on him based on which book looks gayest.
• I'm not even joking. Her sole criteria is just "which one looks gayest."
• Judging by the way she presents this, she seems to be under the sincere impression that judging a book based off how hard she can flick off to it is funny and cool.
• In a shocking twist, we learn that Maia not only has at least one male friend, but said male is, somehow, sexually attracted to her.
• So sexually attracted, he actually asked her out once before. Maia turned him down the first time, but in a bout of stress and pity, she agrees to go on a date.
• But then--

• We know very little about this male friend, aside from the fact that he's maybe somewhat pushy (Maia has demonstrated time and time again she's not great at explaining herself and will avoid direct discussion of things she doesn't like, though, so bro might've just failed to read her mind the same way the hairdresser did.)
• The real question is what toxic overload of teenage hormones made a real male seriously want to date the absolute headcase otherwise known as Maia Kobabe. My God man, you live near San Francisco, pickings can't be that slim.
• Anyway, Maia continues to wig out, not so much over the unexpected finish line in her love quest, as how the one helping her achieve it dared to utter the phrase "girlfriend."
• Maia might've thought that it was fine to just go on some kind of...platonic semi-romantic one night pity date, but again, she never actually said that out loud. Without that context, it's not at all unreasonable for the other party to assume one date=more dates=girlfriend.

• Hundreds of thousands of pages of romance-centric works consumed, and Maia legitimately thought "going on a date" and "being a couple" were two different things.
• The fact that the word girlfriend seems to be such a big trigger for this makes me wonder if she would've said yes if unknown male friend had the wits to suggest they go on a "partnership outing" or something instead, he might've gotten his crazy girl lay after all.
• Maia calls him back and cancels the date, sickened over the very act of uttering the phrase "girlfriend" out loud, and spends the rest of the page stewing over how she would never want to become such a terrible thing.
• You know, every now and then I wonder if it's the autism alone driving all this self hatred, or if she has something else going on that leads her to reject what she is with such incredible verve.
• Later on--I think the next day?--Maia is still upset about the phone call, ranting with to yet another ill defined and nameless buddy about how much she loathes the burden of being female and the way it saddles her with such unbearable expectations. Such as buying underwear. Or Shaving her armpits. Or liking boys. Or acting girly. Social expectations like that are just so overwhelming.
• Ill-defined friend serves her narrative purpose by listening politely and reassuring Maia that she is the least girly-girl she has ever met. Why, even if she dolled herself up in a dress and everything, no one would ever find Maia to be even a little feminine, no sir, not ever.
• Maia cries, sniffs, and then everything is resolved in a very non-effeminate and most genderless hug.

• This page says so much.
• First off, Maia fesses up to having prayed to a comic book character at least once, which is hilarious. Secondly, her idea of a good dream sure as hell looks like more autoandrophilia nonsense.
• Just like how AGPs fetishize things most females would rather avoid, I have a funny feeling your average real man would not enjoy a dream where he was stuck with some massive, painful boner. Sounds a bit like the male-only version of those "I have no pants, but must go outside" genre of uncomfortable nightmares.
• Maia seems to think it was a pretty good deal, though.
• I wonder if that's the only time she ever tried to communicate with fictional characters IRL, or if Maia keeps a shrine to the Endless somewhere that's maybe a little more serious than your ordinary fan homage.
• After this we get a pastel bullet point list covering her "highschool-coming out journey", which is mostly just a hard to read re-hash of things we've already seen.
• Maia tells her parents she's probably not straight towards the end of her high school career. Unfortunately, her chance to have a big emotional coming out seen is foiled by the fact that her parents are hippies. Maia can boink whoever she wants,so far as they're concerned, just so long as she's happy.
• With no emotional peak to finish off her highschool arc, Maia is reduced to bragging about how she was the only girl who wore pants for her graduation uniform and how much she likes her haircut, instead.

• I've never been a fan of these "character sheet" style introductions, in 99% of cases, there just an excuse to cram in whatever irrelevant information the author can't be assed to convey in a naturalistic way.
• It is kind of interesting to learn that Maia evidently had very little exposure to the computers until this point, so much so that she went into collage without a good handle on how to use a keyboard.
• Which is to say that all the crazy gender shit Maia has gotten into so far is 100% homegrown.
• If she really was that bad during a childhood deprived of internet, imagine how badly she would've turned out as a zoomer in the modern day. Tick-tock alone would've eaten this chick alive.
• She enters collage with high hopes and secret thoughts of meeting someone she could spend the rest of her life with, only for things to slowly turn glum as she settles in.
• Pretty typical collage experience, IMO.

 

[Aunt Carol]

Her social circle, her sense of self, and even her job revolves around gender. The only people who want to publish her work seem do so because because she's LGBTQXYZ. She quite simply lacks the skills needed to compete in the commercial art market without some kind of gimmick to prop her up.

There's always MLM fandom commissions on Twitter, I guess. I wonder if she can draw furries.

• It is kind of interesting to learn that Maia evidently had very little exposure to the computers until this point, so much so that she went into college without a good handle on how to use a keyboard.
• Which is to say that all the crazy gender shit Maia has gotten into so far is 100% homegrown.
• If she really was that bad during a childhood deprived of internet, imagine how badly she would've turned out as a zoomer in the modern day. Tick-tock alone would've eaten this chick alive.

This is a good point, and one I didn't pick up on when I read the comic. I guess I kind of assumed you couldn't be born in 1989 and be an offline fujo, and that she wasn't drawing herself reading scanlations because it didn't come across visually or it complicated the narrative or something.

She's like one of those mice they breed to be extra susceptible to cancer, for ease of testing chemo drugs. I wonder if her parents living out in the country with an outdoor washing machine was part of them trying to give the kids an "authentic" upbringing, away from the lure of technology. Pour one out for the parents, I guess.

psst: collEge

 

[raspberry mocha]

Weird how whenever this book draws the ire of conservatives it's about that one scene. The book as a whole is actually more appalling and worth a real rebuttal from people seeking to ban it from libraries and schools.

 

[Kari Kamiya]

Maia legit fetishizes gays, and yet she's clearly never hung out or known real gay men in her life. She probably tried and was shunned from them early on for being creepy and gross. The lack of self-awareness throughout is astonishing as is the lack of coherent comprehension, no way this ever went through an editing process, she was just pushed on through to publication because of nepotism, or some rich higher up had an agenda to fulfill and went for the first "qweer" they could find.

 

[Aunt Carol]

The lack of self-awareness throughout is astonishing

She really could just read interviews with the volunteers/staffers on AO3. There are plenty of genderspecials over there, but their fandom stories have some familiar beats. The unusual thing about Maia is just that she's a late bloomer; she's hitting fujo stages years behind the average yaoi girl.

 

[Anonitolia]

She really could just read interviews with the volunteers/staffers on AO3. There are plenty of genderspecials over there, but their fandom stories have some familiar beats. The unusual thing about Maia is just that she's a late bloomer; she's hitting fujo stages years behind the average yaoi girl.

Her specialty is being slow.

 

[Kari Kamiya]

she's hitting fujo stages years behind the average yaoi girl.

Did she, really? Becoming a fujo in high school sounded about right for the time, as Tokyopop in its heyday had quite a bit of any fujo's first yaois.

 

[Aunt Carol]

Did she, really? Becoming a fujo in high school sounded about right for the time, as Tokyopop in its heyday had quite a bit of any fujo's first yaois.

Maybe it just lasted longer. I remember she said she was having sexual awakenings writing fanfic in grad school.

She does just seem slow. She's having emotional developments years late, so she's dealing with them at a different time from her peers, with an older person's language ability and self-importance.

It's like if you had a coworker your age come to work and say ,"Holy shit you guys, did you know that there are boy cats and girl dogs? I always thought..."

(Or "omg guys I just realized: you all have your own internal monologues and aren't just waiting to say pre-recorded lines after I finish talking. this is going to change everything.")