Let's read: Gender Queer

[Creative Username]

- snip -

That's an overestimation of Maia. Her situation is more of a "Wow, that person in the mirror is actually ME?!?!" at age 36.

 

[Rural Bingo]

skibidi skibidi skibidi skibidi

 

[Kiwisee]

So Maia is a retarded Fujo with poor hygiene and even worse reading comprehension skills.

I don't see the educational value this book would have for children.

 

[Retard of the Month]

The biography of Andy Warhol.

The only thing I've ever seen attributed to that guy was the banana on the cover of Velvet Underground and Nico. Which was a God-awful album.
Maybe the reason why I hated it is because it's actually trannycore, but that doesn't make much sense, what with that album being released in 1967. If I, as a normal ("cisgendered") femboy, thought it aged like shit musically, Lord knows actual trannies would think the same.

Basically, what I'm trying to say is that if she wanted to pretend to be a dude and needed an art book, she should have gone with Alex Grey.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

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.

I'm 99% certain the irl boyfriend arc went like this:
* Nerdy kid who hangs with Maia over animu asks her out.
* Maia says yes without thinking over it.
* Maia gets cold feet because said kid doesn't look like her fujo bait. Boy accepts it without issue.
* Years later, Maia retells the story in a way that makes it all about her gender shit rather than the ugly reality that she judged the boy entirely based on his looks. With a "then everyone clapped" ending.

 

[Spangled Drongo]

What makes this even more absurd is how obvious it is that all this gross shit is both abnormal and symptomatic of a mind that is legit retarded/sick somehow. Maia is so socially inept, and so defensive when confronted with truths she doesn't want to hear, I think she's genuinely fails to grasp how ugly this makes her look.

Almost definitely the sort of girl who's behind her peers in terms of emotional maturity, too engrossed in her imaginary world to get involved in the social scene, and finds it hard to cope with the changes that puberty brings on, and so would rather put it out of sight and mind. This whole thing is nothing but grooming material for those kids, to try and convince them gendershit is the answer to all their woes. Probably dozens of other books like it out there, but for some reason this particular one got all the attention.

 

[Aunt Carol]

Probably dozens of other books like it out there, but for some reason this particular one got all the attention.

'Cause it's a comic book. Reading is hard, and also this one had the strap-on page that made for an inflammatory screenshot.

I agree that this is a common situation, a li'l female sperg confused and upset at having her body outpace her mental/emotional development, but are there other memoirs in a similar vein?

t seems like this isn't the kind of person who usually does write about their childhood--look how bad Maia is at including background, anticipating questions, any kind of insight beyond just relating facts.

 

[7.62x38mmR]

Yo, you still planning to keep going with the reading ?

 

[Retard of the Month]

Yo, you still planning to keep going with the reading ?

I think this is dead.

 

[pork and beans]

I wish it wasnt. I only have 2 watched thresds and this has been one of them for months... sad

 

[Inatrous]

I think this is dead.

Nah, not dead, just IRL + lazy. I've actually got the second section of three half-way written up, a solid 80% of which I sincerely did not remember.

On the surface, it's remarkably dull, but then you put together the implications of this chick being casually into incest and sharing used vibrators with her sib, and it makes you want to scrub your brain out. She leaves a lot of stuff out too, or glancingly mentions what are, in fact, incredibly important details. It was only on the second read through that I realized she had actually gotten into pride parade shit as a young teenager. One of Maia's many comic book sins is a failure to clearly deliniate past and present, so unless you're keeping track of what her hairstyle looks like between one panel and the next, it's easy to miss. I still wonder how much of her behavior is autistic fujoshi nonsense that came naturally VS autistic fusjoshi nonsense that got groomed into her by creeps.

I also waffle between trying to find her stupid RPF fanfiction, and being afraid of what happens if I succeed. After all, how many 100,000+ word One Direction gay wank fics could a 12 month period have possibly -



Oh.

Searching incomplete works only with the same parameters turns up 8 fictions, which is more doable, but after a quick glance through the comic, I don't think Maia explicitly mentioned if she ever finished it or not. Skimming titles, though, my personal money is on this one (It's archive locked, so you'll need an account). It's got about the right start date, end date, word length, and has that weird psudo-historical skin stretched over it that a theater nerd like Maia would probably like. It being orphaned ups my suspicion: Can't have all your new fans finding your cringe grad school fanfiction, amirite?

The next couple months are going to be rough, but I'll see if I can't get off my ass and finished part two like I promised. This woman is in desperate need of a ribbing.

 

[Kari Kamiya]

the implications of this chick being casually into incest and sharing used vibrators with her sib

Jesus Christ how horrifying.

 

[Kari Kamiya]

(actually I don't know about Off Beat and Crescent Moon)

This is coming out of the blue to kinda repeat what we already know about Maia, but it legit cannot be understated that like other pooners/genderspecials her age, she was a huge fujoshi as a teenager. I was reading one of my Tokyopop manga and saw an advertisement for "Off Beat", which rang a bell so I took a quick peek at it. It's one of Tokyopop's OEL manga, and of-fucking-course it's BL, like why wouldn't it be.


Just about every manga listed in the panel of her reading them has a fujoshi fanbase because cute boys or there's canonical gay couples. She wasn't going to come right out and admit to it, though (not about the manga, anyway), but it's so damn obvious she just wanted to see boys kiss. Then she was growing up and on top of her upbringing had questions about her gender identity needed to explore it "safely", and that was by pretending to be a boy because guys have it so much easier, all they have to do is just stick it in something.

Anyhoo I'm still hoping for an update post soon even if it's just beating a dead horse. I'm still half-expecting things to get so much worse and gross, though, something to top her menstrual pads and masturbation charts (of hers and her peers).

(I still don't know why she was into Crescent Moon, though, maybe it does have a gay couple as well.)

 

[Inatrous]

Anyhoo I'm still hoping for an update post soon even if it's just beating a dead horse. I'm still half-expecting things to get so much worse and gross, though, something to top her menstrual pads and masturbation charts (of hers and her peers).

I just finished commenting on a panel where toddler Maia flips her skirt for the entire world. It's meant to show big-Maia's gender feels or something, but she definitely never stops being gross. Part of what's taking so long is I write a full rough draft for each TPB, and TPB #2 is somehow less coherent, more boring, and more nasty all at the same time. I had legitimately forgotten a solid 80% of this section existed.

You are on the money with the fujoshi thing. When you look closely, Gender Queer stops looking like a tell-all or even a biography, and starts looking more like a close up look at how one anxious, mentally ill woman wrapped her fetish like a burrito around her very soul.

Fuck it, I was going to wait until I finished, but it's two thirty AM and I feel like making a bad decision. As an apology for taking so long, here's an edit of one of the panels I hated in particular:

:


Here's the original.


And here's the edit.

Fun fact, Maia's colors aren't actually all that pastel. While I added some shading and a shit ton of black, the actual base colors between the two panels are identical. I always hated color theory, but I'm pretty sure this is related to something called "color relativity", specifically. Basically, it relates to the idea is the appearance or "feel" of a color is heavily influenced by the other colors in its surroundings.

So if you place a bunch of light tans or pale blues together with nothing to contrast against them, they will appear very light, or pastel, even when in reality the shades are quite intense

Slap some ink on that puppy, edit out some of more braindead mistakes (why are you obscuring half the face in a panel where the emotions you're making with it are the central focus AND the point???), and Maia's art becomes, not good, but not total eye cancer, either.

Because this absolutely is eye cancer. This unfinished, scritchy piece of shit. I did this largely because it crossed my mind readers without a any background in art might not realize just how shit. It's like...You know those video games? The ones that for some reason the jurnos won't shut up about and it's all in the news and everyone keeps telling you it's good, but when you actually sit down and give it a look, it's an, overhyped piece of ass? You try to start the tutorial but somehow you noclip halfway into a wall ten minuets after spawn? The framerate is terrible? You can identify all the free assets scattered throughout every scene?

That. The art in Gender Queer is like playing a game like that. Overblown and underbaked, descriptive of no care, talent, or time. I can look at these and take a solid guess that they were made on two, maybe three layers of an art program, with linework averageing about thirty minuets all told.

For those wondering, I would not consider two-three hours spent on penciling the linework weird at all. thirty minuets to an hour for a fully rendered piece implies either great talent or great stupidity, and I think we all know on which side our dearly beloved Maia lies.

• Back to the comic. We're off to a good start with Maia getting involved in theater, because stereotypes are points in this world and our girl wants to win.
• Theater serves as a jumping off point to talk about binding and whine about how it isn't fair men get to take their shirts off and she can't. Not because there's any rules against it, but those awful boobs, bouncing boobily in the breeze, just ruin the pleasure of the sun on her back!
• As per usual, Maia draws her grown ass, adult self as completely flat chested. The little lies and self delusions scattered throughout this work are truly a sight to behold. That she seems to be lying to herself as much as the reader just adds to the absurdity.
• She is so, so lucky she's a millinial and not a zoomer.
• Imagine this bitch getting into Shibhe Gallager through Tic-toc or something. The obsession, the butchery, the public whinging for all to see!
• We could all go and laugh at her in the pooner zoo down at the beauty parlour, and I'd be reading this in between updates on her ongoing titty based disaster.

• Maia ultimately doesn't get too into binding, but only because the ace bandages she was using at the time physically hurt, and implies that dedicated binders would have been better.
• Like all gendies, she also fails to mention that any and all binding methods will turn your boobs into weird granny pancakes over time. There is no escape from the fried egg tit. You either give those those suckers space to breath or you mutalate yourself forever. Pick one.

We then jump to Maia doing work study in the library, which then leads to her encountering these two.




Maia seems to be making fun of herself here? It's pretty clear from how this is framed she *did* eventually realize what these two were up to. The question is how long it took.

• Here we're introduced to Maia's much more extroverted and functional co-worker, Rae, who drags romance, once again, back into the spotlight.
• Honestly, did it ever really leave?
• Maia, weirdly, immidiately thinks of the incredibly straight girl who went off to study anatomy with her friend.
• I'm not sure what to make of this, except that Maia is thick even by the standards of an autist.
• To no one else's surprise, Rae has an entirely different girl in mind, some chick named Autumn.
• Maia's two gay co-workers, who she goes out of her way to inform the audience are her "favorite" coworkers, immidiately start complaining about being forced to listen in on a live hookup session.
• Normally, I'd be on their side, but Maia is so dense, she probably needed to have someone spell it out.
• You know, just as an aside - I feel bad for those two gay guys at the library. Being forced to work next to a pervert who we, the audience, knows for a fact reads almost nothing but gay romance and aggressively imagines herself as the kind of soft boi uwu she probably thinks they're into, too.
• I find it telling that despite being the coworkers she likes best, neither of these guys actually speak directly to Maia, and after this scene, pretty much never ever show up again.
• Now that I'm thinking about it, I wouldn't put it past Maia to decide she and these two homos were buddies in her head, and then utterly fail to articulate the reality she's decided must exist, only to be bitterly disappointed later, once she finally realizes both of them were avoiding her on purpose.

• I swear the art is getting sloppier as time goes on. The anime-esque influence gets more overt, but the actual execution just keeps sliding farther down the drain.
• Fleshmouths are everywhere now, The brunette girl has a random dot on her forehead that looks like someone's pen slipped and no one bothered to correct it, Maia's nose swells to massive porportions, and the poor homo standing to the right in panel three is revealed to have no feet.
• Panel three Maia farts out of the scene in another pose that looks suspicially traced.
• Possibly it's just unusually bad, since the hands, on close inspection, do track with how Rae's are drawn in panel one. And the telling lack of a clear delination between arm, shoulder, and neck is very Maia.
• Yeah, on second glance, I'm willing to chalk this up to an epic perspective flub. Putting herself on another plane of existence instead of the foreground just makes her drawing look especially off.
• One point perspective is not Gender Queer: Confirmed.

• Amazingly, girls who run away from you and angst in a corner are hot or something, because Autumn and Maia chat a bit later, and Autumn tells her she thinks Maia's cute pretty much first thing.
• Sadly, after having dug up an IRL picture, I am forced to admit that Maia is not completely ugly. By virtue of not being a deathfat and mostly symmetrical, I can see people who haven't had her personality rubbed in their faces thinking she'd be an okay lay.
• That said, a guy who flees the scene and cries when I try to hit on them would probably register as a bit of a red flag.
• Thinking of red flags, Maia's thoughts on this include lines like "I bet it would be really easy to make her fall in love with me. " and "But for her it would be real and for me it would just be practicing."
• Maia having thoughts like this is one of the many reasons why I think she's far more self absorbed and prickish IRL than the shy personality she gives off in the comic. She's known this girl, what? A couple of days? And she's already presuming she'll have control of the relationship while simultaniously presuming what she thinks the other girl's thought's on the matter should be.
• The whole idea that real life relationships are something you can practice at all is yet another screaming neon sign that there is something very wrong with Maia, This isn't haha-funny-I-put-aspergers-in-my-bio-to-look-cool of a teenage girl. This is the kind of real-life destructive thinking that leads actual autism sufferers into hurting themselves and those around them.
• You can't practice relationships. Every relationship is a real relationship, sexual or otherwise.
• This is a lesson Maia, in college, has yet to learn.

And I'm calling it there. I'm two and a half hours past my bedtime, and I have work tomorrow. No guarantees about the next update. All spelling mistakes are 100% deliberate and definately not a result of not re-reading my work before posting. Hope you like it.

 

[Kari Kamiya]

I just finished commenting on a panel where toddler Maia flips her skirt for the entire world.

I mean, toddlers flash people all the time, they don't know any better. Still is weird for her to even want to bring it up, though.

That. The art in Gender Queer is like playing a game like that. Overblown and underbaked, descriptive of no care, talent, or time. I can look at these and take a solid guess that they were made on two, maybe three layers of an art program, with linework averageing about thirty minuets all told.

I've noticed there's more effort put into the art when Maia is likely in real-time schlicking to her gender woes, those are the moments that are more interesting for her to draw than the downtimes in between them, even though the end results are still gross and/or boring to look at. I whole-heartedly agree she may have been tracing here and there, though.

Maybe we should do something like the Tumblr redraw thread and grab some panels to do redraws of just to really drive the point home that if she had truly cared, she would've put in more effort.

Maia, weirdly, immidiately thinks of the incredibly straight girl who went off to study anatomy with her friend.

I somehow doubt this interaction (even the following scene of her running out of the lobby looking all "Hazukashiiiiii~!") even truly took place. It reads and flows like a shitty take on a romcom meet-cute you'd see in manga.

Maia's nose swells to massive porportions

It's because she's lying. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

"But for her it would be real and for me it would just be practicing."

Fun fact, in Japan, lesbians are still commonly believed to just be immature women who never "graduated" their girlhood days of "practicing" with their friends. It's similar to how gays there are viewed as "ill" men where the "cure" is being with a woman, but there's a reason lesbians are portrayed in manga as being very "uwu pure" due to the absence of men. It's fetishized, too, just not to the full extent yaoi gets fetishized by women.

The "it's just a phase" that's still around even here in the West makes this all the more hilarious that Maia even in college seemed to be waffling on if she even wants a serious relationship with another woman or not. Do we even know if she's even dating anyone right now, or is she just forever alone at this point?

 

[Inatrous]

Maybe we should do something like the Tumblr redraw thread and grab some panels to do redraws of just to really drive the point home that if she had truly cared, she would've put in more effort.

If people want to do it, it would be fun. Maia is not the worst artist to have ever arted, but her work is so...bland. I have seen works made with nothing but paint and a pair of literal ass cheeks both better executed and leagues more interesting to look at than the nonsense she puts down.

While I'm here and talking about the art again, I want to go ahead and correct myself. The colors in Gender Queer were not done by Maia, but by her sister, Pheobe.

This was a serious goof on my part, as I saw this way early on, but skimmed past it and pretty much forgot. It makes the whole book even worse, because as much as I've shat on them, the colors are the only thing that are even moderately competent. But Mx. Kobabe couldn't even be assed to do that. She literally just shat some god awful linework into an art program and dumped the whole thing on her sister.

Which brings up the very interesting question as to whether or not Pheobe got paid for that little favor. Even if she did a slapdash job, that's still 200+ pages of comic, man, getting shit like that colored ain't cheap.

In fact, I took a quick google, and according to this (admittedly old) survey, 15 - 20 bucks per page is considered low. Gender Queer is about 241 pages total, so at the absolute least, Phoebe should've been paid somewhere between 3,615 and 4,820 Ameribucks for her work.

Call me crazy, but I have a feeling she might not have gotten fair recompense.

I somehow doubt this interaction (even the following scene of her running out of the lobby looking all "Hazukashiiiiii~!") even truly took place. It reads and flows like a shitty take on a romcom meet-cute you'd see in manga.

Point. Maia fleeing at the mere sight of a prospective partner is funny to imagine, though.

When it comes to the question of "how real is it?" I've settled on the answer of "kinda". Some of what she says doesn't make sense, is grossly exaggerated, or just can't be true, but I do get the feeling its all based off real-ish events. I think she really did pray to the Neil Gaiman's Sandman for good dreams, for example, and some of that critique she tries so hard to frame as irrelevant and wrong sounds suspiciously like friends trying to force their way through the fujoshi blockade in the days before she was too far gone.

Do we even know if she's even dating anyone right now, or is she just forever alone at this point?

According to the comic, she ultimately opts for the forever alone lifestyle.

• Last we left off, Maia had tentively decided that even though Autumn would be really easy to use for relationship practice, she's still not really sure that's something she even wants, and thus opts to actually communicate with her would-be partner rather than just ruminating on her own.
• I swear Maia has a good idea once every fifty pages or so, then it's right back to tardville.

• Case in point she actually responds with shock that Autumn, who as far as I can tell as a reader, literally just started speaking to Maia no more than a week???? ago, broke up with her boyfriend expressly so she could get a chance at scissoring with our girl.
• First off, wow, if true, that Autumn chick is nuts.
• If Maia wasn't cracked in the head herself, she probably should've asked if those breakup-worthy diary entries were written before or after she and Maia met.
• Because one of those is significantly more unsettling than the other.
• I hope it was after, but based off Maia's comment about Autumn going on a "year long emotional journey" over her, I don't think that was the case.

• Maia somehow realizes this isn't actually about her, and that Autumn legit doesn't even know who she really is.
• Good for you, Maia, points for maturity. I normally wouldn't give praise for meeting the dead minimum of social acumen and general human decency, but for you, my standards just so happen to be low.
• You should probably also realize that being lusted after for a year by someone who has no idea who you are, but was still willing to wreck their prior relationship to be with you is creepy as all shit, but considering your own predilections, that's probably a bit beyond you.
• This "year long journey" bit is also a hint at how much of the stuff in this comic is summarized or warped. No one ever told Maia how long Autumn had liked her, but somehow she just knows.
• This is a pretty big sin on a story-telling level all on its own. Even in biographies and memiors, if someone knows something they logically shouldn't, then the audience needs to be informed of how they attained that information, lest they be kicked out of their immersion and find themselves confused.
• There was clearly a lot more that Maia and Autumn spoke about, but Maia's only relating the parts she finds relevant to her gender journey, and since this comic was clearly not edited on top of everything else, weird little dangly bits of thoughts and dialogue are scattered around, devoid of the background and context they really need.

• Maia resolves her uncertainty by asking Autumn about what she thinks about relationships.
• Unfortunately to discover that girls want to have sex with their partners, too.
• Like any good lesbian, Maia makes an icky face at the mere idea of touching another girls vaginia, and decides she doesn't want to date after all.
• How someone so obsessed with gay erotica could imagine herself as an asexual lesbian is absolutely laughable. She spends an entire page angsting over all the people whose romantic aspirations she must inevitably turn down, because she's a friendship only kind of girl.
• And on the next page, no shit, jumps right back into telling the reader how important gay sex is to her as a person.
• The doublethink this girl engages in would make George Orwell cry. She took the old joke of "it's not the same if it's in 2D!" And actually decided to embody it as a lifestyle.

• I would like to take this opportunity to judge Maia's taste in fanfic. Just because a hoard of psychos somehow made the Sam/Dean tag massive doesn't mean it's not gross.
• This is your daily reminder that people want children to read this. Gender Queer, the comic where the protagonist is openly into the idea of two brothers fucking.
• Maia is so into gay shit, in fact, she needs her friends to explain themselves when they confess to actually liking lesbian romance instead.
• We are treated to a panel emphasizing how often Maia thinks about cock. She imagines having a cock so much, so often, she will sometimes even hallucinate the sensation of having a cock of her very own.
• She's still convinced she's gay BTW.

• For the first time (that we see), Maia swaps her focus from imaginary pretty boys to IRL pretty boys, specifically becoming obsessed with this one skater guy called Andy Weir.
• So obsessed she decides she wants to be Andy Weir.

• But just for Halloween, so it's cool, right?
• Just ignore the hand sewn costume
• And the full TV marathon
• And the book.
• And the way she specifically describes the experience of wearing Andy Weir as "sexy."
• Nothing to see here friends, Maia's totally just dressing up because she's really into going door to door for candy. This behavior isn't weird or concerning at all.

• Honestly, I did kind of skim over this as minor on my first read through, but after learning a little more about Autogyno/Autoandrophiles and their tendency to dress up and emulate the objects of their desire, this whole sequence became very unpleasant to read,
• She's might not take testosterone or run around with a surgical bologna betweenen her legs, but Maia has the pooner skinwalking spirit down pat.
• I'm beginning to think we all lucked out a little with how Maia only ever seems to glom onto 2D boys and distant celebrities. Can you imagine the idealized, I-have-consumed-everything-you-have-ever-made-and-now-I'm-dressing-just-like-you level of obsession placed on some average Joe? Creepy shit.

 

[Spangled Drongo]

• I would like to take this opportunity to judge Maia's taste in fanfic. Just because a hoard of psychos somehow made the Sam/Dean tag massive doesn't mean it's not gross.

Then there's the Arthur/Merlin fanfiction - I'm pretty sure in the Merlin TV series that had a bit of a Tumblr following (carrying over from Livejournal since it's from around the same era) they're meant to be around sixteen - so women doing their post-grad degrees, in their early to mid twenties, gushing over fanfiction of underage boys. Nasty but also not surprising considering the way most women who get into this gender madness choose to present themselves.

That whole page is just so textbook 2000s/early 2010s nerd-girl culture it hurts, and reminds me of how today's socially awkward young women engrossed in fictional worlds don't stand a chance - wherever a particular book, film, game etc. is being discussed online, there's almost inevitably going to be mention of how so-and-so a character or pairing was someone's "queer awakening", "kinnies" a.k.a. actually identifying as their favourite fictional characters, and of course, plenty of pronouns & lists of labels in bios. Twitter, Tumblr and the other places these types gather are so oversaturated with it right now it's absurd.

 

[Kari Kamiya]

The colors in Gender Queer were not done by Maia, but by her sister, Pheobe.

Oh dear God Maia made her sister stare at and color all that period shit, pee, and gay role-playing. What the fuck, I can't believe she did that, she has no shame in her laziness and narcissism. Actually no, if she was really a narc, she'd have handled it herself. Perhaps during the making of it, her editor (or whoever was supervising this) must've suggested she get a colorist because she must've been fucking up in that area.

This is fucked, and everything about this graphic novel already was to begin with. Even the revelation some chick blew up her three-year relationship to try licking clams with her, which sounds fake and retarded but I could honestly see being the case at this college since Millennials are just that self-absorbed.

Why am I not surprised a self-admitted fujoshi can only think about and talk gay fanfiction? That was why she was so into LiveJournal/Tumblr, after all, you just know every single one of those girls had a blog, and no doubt she got into the Superwholock shit.

I don't know who Andy Weir is, but he sounds like a fruit, which means that of course Maia would LARP as a faggot. She probably still owns that outfit and wears it whenever she thinks bad girly thoughts.

I'm beginning to think we all lucked out a little with how Maia only ever seems to glom onto 2D boys and distant celebrities. Can you imagine the idealized, I-have-consumed-everything-you-have-ever-made-and-now-I'm-dressing-just-like-you level of obsession placed on some average Joe? Creepy shit.

Think she's become a NEET by the time she made this book, so chances are high she hasn't been in the vicinity with a real man in years.

 

[Aunt Carol]

That whole page is just so textbook 2000s/early 2010s nerd-girl culture it hurts

I keep saying this but this is exactly the lesson people need to be taking from this book. Forget the twee illustration of a strapon blowjob in one panel: this is what happens to a woman who doesn't grow out of that phase.

Maia is clearly some kind of sperg, raised hands-off by neglectful hippies, then got stuck in Tumblr fandom mode, right about the time that female fandom turned into a pooning engine.

None of the people who were clutching their pearls on cable TV know enough about female online fandom 10-20 years ago to understand how well this captures a more insidious phenomenon. If Strange Aeons ever TERFs out, maybe she could do the footnoting this book deserves.

I don't know who Andy Weir is, but he sounds like a fruit,

Andy Weir wrote The Martian; Johnny Weir is a gay figure skater who designed some of his own costumes. She's referencing his 2010 Olympic outfit:

He's skinny and boyish and the snarky kind of gay, so he sounds like the real-life version of a Tumblr Sexyman.

 

[Safir]

• Like any good lesbian, Maia makes an icky face at the mere idea of touching another girls vaginia, and decides she doesn't want to date after all.
• How someone so obsessed with gay erotica could imagine herself as an asexual lesbian is absolutely laughable.

Why is any of this surprising or laughable? This is a typical outcome for the female coombrain in the Current Year (2000+) media landscape. Anime girls are slutty cumholes with horror udders. Anime boys are pretty and look like IRL girls more than they look like IRL men. Fiction is intense. IRL is not. Friends are nice. "Friends" (sex partners) to exchange forbidden-love coombrain fanfiction with are even nicer.

The doublethink this girl engages in would make George Orwell cry. She took the old joke of "it's not the same if it's in 2D!" And actually decided to embody it as a lifestyle.

Middle-aged heterosexual women schlick to absurdly passionate and spirited heterosexual romance (written by other women) where they imagine being the female protagonist, then get pumped full of cum doggy-style by their fat balding middle-aged husbands. And that's ok. People's romantic fantasies and their actual (happy, satisfying) family lives are wildly different. My mom was (she's switched to police procedurals and obscure public domain detective stories) a fan of village bicycle romance but has stayed faithful to her husband my dad.

To illustrate the insanity that's happening on the online:

This is a straight woman asking (presumably) other straight women to have asynchronous online sex with her. (Harvey is a male NPC from the videogame Stardew Valley.)

Yaoi coombrains are "lucky" (unlucky) in that two coombrains can both self-insert into one-half of a pair of protagonists, "collaborate on fanfics" (have chatroom sex), then perhaps meet IRL. In meeting IRL, they face the same obstacles troons do, in that they aren't sexually attracted to the partner's body, they just want someone safe to larp with. BUT, unlike troons, because they're both female (see: lesbian bed death, master key, a disregard for women's sexual satisfaction by male coomers), they have a better chance than troons to peacefully cohabitate and be good friends. (Not biohazard Maia, though.)

There is a fantastic meme of strapping fujoshis into chairs showing them IRL gays to make them understand how disgusting their relationship are.

This one. But it's not going to work, because the heterosexual version already worked on these girls and didn't work on the others, thank heaven. If a majority of women could be easily put off sex by the grossness of porn (like I was), we'd die out as a species.