Let's read: Gender Queer

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So far none of the comic has made be actually feel bad for her apart from this one because its clear she is emotionally stunted, an important part of growing up is coming to terms with the fact that change happens, is natural and 90% of the time is irreversible so chasing the pipedream of turning back the clock is only going to cause more pain.
 
The amount of literature she reads honestly strikes me as indicating that she just reads for the sake of it, without regards for quality or anything. If you'd ask her to analyse, say, a random scene or element of The Lord of the Rings, she probably wouldn't be able to tell you anything past just recounting the events because she just goes through books without ever going deeper into it. Same for fanfictions, i had a sister kinda like this ; they read to get the kind of story they fantasize about and are super invested in but if you'd ask one of them to analyse the story past the surface, it often falls apart and you're left with a "well i wanna see these two characters together so it works for me". Basically junk literature.
Communities around mangas are especially bad for this, where they just read the next big shonen or slop shojo because it's trendy and never bother looking further into it. I have a sister like this, and her love and "passionate" defense for some of the worst slop in existence is quite baffling, especially when she forgets about it in just a year.
You've also got the ones (probably like Maia) who just read to get off to it and don't bother remembering anything else.

I'm not a big reader myself, but i could talk for hours about the books because i'm actually interested in them, from what made them work for me to why specific scenes pretty well. One of the series i quite like is Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, which while it is one of my favorites is most of the time sloppily written, and you only get the occasional spikes in quality that keep you going (like Steel Ball Run). There's genuinely good material, but most of the fans stick around only because of the brand name and end up promoting the worst of the series like it's gospel.
I don't think it's just a book thing though, you see a lot of things like this in popular media, especially with things that attract teenagers or young adults. Don't even get me started on the cosmically misunderstood mess that is Five Nights at Freddy's. God i hate kids sometimes (big corpos always)
 
The amount of literature she reads honestly strikes me as indicating that she just reads for the sake of it, without regards for quality or anything.
This lines up nicely with her lack of reading comprehension she practically revealed early on. It makes it funnier that every time reading/writing fanfiction comes up, the font becomes le-scribal and sometimes sparkly because it's "magical" like we're supposed to be impressed she can read words. She acts so scribacious and loquacious because she otherwise has nothing of value to add to the discussion that's not gay shit. And even then she's extremely vapid in that regard.

The very definition of an NPC, if barely that.
 
She said specifically that it was Plato's Symposium, so I think you're just the high-minded kind of person who doesn't automatically associate ancient Greeks discoursing about Love with ancient Greeks fuckin' underage twinks.
I don't know how you masturbate to Symposium. It's a bunch of speeches about love in the abstract, there are no scenes of men rubbing boys knobs or anything else explict I can remember. Socrates gets hit on by a young man and he turns him down, because Socrates'es (Plato's) position in this is that true love is abstract (platonic) contemplation of beauty and that physical love is an inferior copy.
On a side note; the idea that Plato was into big gay sex is generally overstated. There are scenes of Socrates 'miring the young men doing sports and peeking under their togas in Plato's early dialogues, but in those he largely spreads the views of his teacher Socrates and it is difficult to entangle to what he just reports about Socrates'es character and what he editorializes.
We have reports from other sources that Socrates had gay lovers and some may remember he was condemned to death for "seduction of the youth" or the like...
In Plato's mature writing(Symposium for example) he devalues physical love in general and in his late work,
where he no longer masquerades as Socrates, he calls homosexuality un-natural.

Here is what one character in Symposium says about the origin of the sexes btw, shamelessly stolen from Wikipedia:
Before starting his speech, Aristophanes warns the group that his panegyric to love may be more absurd than funny. His speech gives an explanation of why people in love say they feel "whole" when they have found their love-partner. He begins by explaining that people must understand human nature before they can interpret the origins of love and how it affects their own times. This is, he says because in primal times people had doubled bodies, with faces and limbs turned away from one another. As spherical creatures who wheeled around like clowns doing cartwheels (190a), these original people were very powerful. There were three sexes: male, female, and hermaphrodite; they were said to have descended from the Sun, the Earth and the Moon, respectively. These creatures tried to scale the heights of Olympus and planned to set upon the gods (190b–c). Zeus thought about blasting them with thunderbolts, but, not wanting to deprive himself of their devotions and offerings, so he decided to cripple them by chopping them in half, in effect separating each entity's two bodies.

Ever since that time, people run around saying they are looking for their other half because they are really trying to recover their primal nature. The women who were separated from women run after their own kind—whence lesbians. The men split from other men also run after their own kind and love being embraced by other men (191e). Halves of hermaphroditic wholes are the men and women who engage in heterosexual love.
 
I don't know how you masturbate to Symposium. It's a bunch of speeches about love in the abstract, there are no scenes of men rubbing boys knobs or anything else explicit I can remember.
That's why I was wondering if there was some modern derivative work (other than the reference in Hedwig). It's just a bunch of dudes talking philosophy inside a frame story, although they do mention forms romantic love can take a little bit. Spergs have masturbated to weirder things, so I assumed she was imagining some kind of "meanwhile" in her head, or maybe she was just picturing being diddled in the context of a generic noble-dudes-drinking-and-talking party.

I dunno; people write Ancient Greece fanfiction AUs sometimes, just nowhere near as much as coffee shop AUs. I think the only way to get a real answer on this one is to gin up a "pedophile" witch-hunt against Maia and make her explain, and you'd have to be high up in the Tumblr royalty to get any traction.
 
I said before that this comic needs a rebuttal/reader's guide that brings up how this is a sheltered sperg with no interventions. That reader's guide should superimpose Maia's age in big red numbers, every time the setting changes or there's a major plot point.
This is the only way I would accept a comic like this in children's libraries. Everyone here is a Kiwifarmer, and therefore much more intimately familiar with how badly mental illness + internet can screw a person up. But for normies, and the kids of normies, I really think they just don't know. Austism in particular is often misrepresented or treated as some kind of character "quirk" in popular culture rather than a real impairment that exerts a tangible impact on the victim's ability to function throughout their life. The one good thing about Maia being too obtuse to figure out what she should hide is that it make her a perfect example of how social disorders should never be glossed over or ignored.

If the conservative media outlets had put in the effort to do something like this, they might have made a lot more headway in keeping this rag in the adult section where it goddamn belongs.

The amount of literature she reads honestly strikes me as indicating that she just reads for the sake of it, without regards for quality or anything. If you'd ask her to analyse, say, a random scene or element of The Lord of the Rings, she probably wouldn't be able to tell you anything past just recounting the events because she just goes through books without ever going deeper into it.

Agreed. Again from her tumblr, but it seems that Maia still keeps pretty close track of what she reads, and publishes it monthly (archive). Even accounting for the fact that a lot of these seem to be graphic novels and a few others were audiobooks, that's still a total page count of 4,149. I cut that number in half and multiplied it by 500 (the average number of words per page on most books), and still came out with 1,037,000 as a total.

Either my math is very wrong (which I admit is possible), or Maia is an avatar of literary gluttony.

Also, off topic, but -

It has been a while since my manga phase, but I really liked Motomiya Hiroshi's I'm still Alive, which I've always considered mature in the sense that only an adult could have written it. It's a story centered firmly around the idea that it is never too late to live your life as something better.

While it's not as tight or as deep, A Beast Cries in the Wilderness has art that is just to die for, some of the best animal/human hybrids I've seen, with cool artist notes about some of the decisions behind the final designs.

I confess to never fully making my way through Oyaji, but what I did read was as anti-Maia as you can get. Badass old man dying of cancer decides to reconnect with family through the power of love and violence.

Korean, and a bit more mainstream, but Covertly, Gloriously may also be worth a read.

There's been a lot of talk about manga as a whole throughout the thread, and you implied you preferred stories with some substance behind them, so here's a few of the ones that I can remember.

She acts so scribacious and loquacious because she otherwise has nothing of value to add to the discussion that's not gay shit. And even then she's extremely vapid in that regard.
At some point I think she got it in her head that she wanted to be a smart person, and that this was something you could brute force into being without having to actually, y'know, think.

  • And now we return to Gender Queer, entering the final, long anticipated phase of Maia's glorious love quest.
  • This time, the idea that maybe she should have sex after all is spurred by her fanfiction, of all things. Unable to imagine how boys might kiss - because God knows this girl hasn't red a million and one examples of kissing and quite a bit more - she decides the only possible solution is to have a real life relationship with 3D people.
  • The obstacle of not having a smart phone is overcome with the power of Pheobe, who is more than happy to drive her to the store, get her a phone, and help her install tinder.
  • Maia mentions here she couldn't drive and had no cell phones until she was 21, which does explain why Pheobe was carting her around for dress up time back when Maia was obsessed with that skater dude, but the whole "I will help you install the app and write your profile" is a bit of an eyebrow raiser.
  • That said, my idea of what's normal for close siblings to do might be compromised. The idea of my younger siblings helping me draft a profile designed to get me laid is absolutely weird to me, but maybe in society as a whole it's not so odd?
  • I do, however readily condemn Maia for being an utter hypocrite in her motivations. The last time dating came up, she specifically stated that she didn't want to have a relationship of confused motives where one party was in it for real while all she wanted was "practice."

  • Either Maia is using fanfiction as a fig leaf to do what she really wants (sex) while still pretending to be disinterested in romance, or Maia plans on using other people's affection as a tool to complete her own, fetish-fueled ends, a move that betrays the words of her own past self and sinks her morals even farther into the mud. There is no good option here.
  • Then this page conveniently breaks the flow of the scene with a truly hilarious tidbit of information:
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  • She finds the definition of Autoandrophilia! And she Agrees! Maia is officially, and by her own admission a paraphiliac.
  • I imagine whatever Wikipedia article she read must have left out some important details, such as how autogynophilia (and by extension, autoandrophilia), is a heterosexual person's disease. As I understand it, AAP/AGP both occur when one's desire for the opposite sex becomes mirrored onto the self, leading to sexual arousal concerning anything connected with the subject becoming the opposite sex.
  • In other words, Maia just outed herself as straight, and because she never did the research needed to realize it before publication, she can never, ever take it back.
  • With this in mind, watching Maia pair exclusively with girls off Tinder is a bit depressing. At best, she's setting herself up for failure, and at worst, she's using them even harder, since the big thrill for her would all be related to fulfilling her fantasies, rather than genuinely caring or satisfying her partner.
  • I can give her the faint excuse that she's likely not conscious of any of this, but even still, knowing what I know, it feels exploitive.

  • After a bit more fiddling around with Tinder, Maia ends up meeting someone she calls Candidate Y, who seems to treat alcohol as both a lifestyle and a hobby.
  • Maia squeezes that singular braincell a bit and decides Miss drink-n-drive is not for her, but hits it off big with the so-called "Candidate Z", the manager of a sex shop and one time divorcee.
  • IMO a bit much for someone as inexperienced as Maia, but Maia herself is positively enamored.

  • Bad boundaries Maia strikes again as we are treated to a beach scene where both parties discuss their sexual preferences and limits, and are therefore enlightened with the knowledge that Candidate Z has a half grown bush, and that Maia is 100% down to have sex anyway.
  • It's not exactly socially devastating, but it's yet another example of needlessly personal information getting publicly aired for no Goddamned reason. You could have cut this entire sequence out, and it would change nothing.
  • Gotta hope Maia put in the effort to contact this chick to ask about publishing what she told her in a comic that has, at this point, been translated into multiple countries across the entire world.
  • Which, yeah, no. Unless someone can dig up proof to the otherwise, I 100% believe she just scrawled that shit down without so much as shooting her a text. If she hasn't got the nerves to clearly describe the haircut she wants to a salon artist, then there's no way she could work up the courage to ask an old flame if she could please repeat the stuff she once said about her bush.

  • The relationship goes on for a couple of months, complete with workplace sexting that gets Maia decidedly hot and bothered.
  • I can only imagine how intolerable Maia must've been during this period. She would have been impossible to shut up.

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  • And finally, with no further ado, we reach the infamous dildo sucking scene.
  • Once again I've spoilered it for politeness' sake, but honestly, even that is overselling the sexyness of this scene. Nothing here is arousing. The flesh colored strap ons are down right turnoffs, if only because the color and lack of head beings a pooner's rotdog to mind more than it does a proper dick.
  • I am likewise certain that said flesh tones are the result of either Pheobe or Maia being weird. This Candidate Z person manages a sex shop, she knows what a good strap looks like, and has more than ready access to all of them.
  • Shame on you, Maia, for making sex shop lady look cheap.

  • Dildo logistics aside, Maia finally discovers what she should have realized years before: Reality and fantasy do not, in fact, match up.
  • From the perspective of an outsider (to the cult) and a cynic, I'd say this is just more proof most of Maia's attraction to woman is fueled by her desire to imagine herself as a man, and any time that delusion is broken - such as a lack of sensation in the phallus, so is her interest.
  • See also: Not gay.
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  • Maia seems to ruminate on the disappointment of her sexual experience for days and comes to some frankly baffling conclusions.
  • You don't see yourself as a girl!? You think being seen as a girl harms your sex-life and relationships? Well gee, numbskull, why did you decide to date a lesbian!? Someone who, last I checked, would only ever want to date you because she sees you as A GIRL.
  • This, together with a line from the page before about how Maia feels like orgasms happen to her "not because of my body, but in spite of it", makes it read like she's got some kind of serious disconnect going on between her body and her personal sense of self.
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  • Thus, faced down with the nerve wracking task of properly maintaining a relationship and sunk deep in navel-gazing anxiety, Maia once again reaffirms that dating is not for her, and, with her love quest cast aside for good, gently breaks up with sex shop lady to pursue a greater understanding of the Divine Gender.
 
Maia mentions here she couldn't drive and had no cell phones until she was 21, which does explain why Pheobe was carting her around for dress up time back when Maia was obsessed with that skater dude, but the whole "I will help you install the app and write your profile" is a bit of an eyebrow raiser.
I'm willing to give it a pass since Maia would be completely phone illiterate.
 
I'm willing to give it a pass since Maia would be completely phone illiterate.
Setting up Tinder for Maia and writing her a profile would be a lot like handing your toddler sister a gun to play with, then pausing for a moment and realizing that because of her developmental stage you're going to have to load it for her.
 
Maia’s big revelation that all her problems are because of her gender is really baffling. Even with the whole book supposedly building to this epiphany, it comes out of nowhere and leads me to disagree with her conclusion. It seems like her problems are with her body and sex characteristics, not with how she is perceived as female by her family and these off-panel friends she supposedly has. If anything her hippy-dippy family and accepting nerd friends seem completely fine with however she wants to present herself, act, or who she dates. She seems to have a level of freedom from female gender norms that’s almost unprecedented in human history. Her mom is not badgering her for grandkids, her friends aren’t trying to give her femme makeovers or set her up with guys. Her main problem seems to be that when she has sex, she remembers she has a female body and that makes her think of bad experiences with her first gyno visit, first period etc. Again just body phobias and anxiety, and frankly it’s very female. But somehow the solution is to become “genderqueer”?! To tell her parents they can’t call her “daughter”, that Phoebe can’t say “my sister”, that no one can use the dreaded she/her.

Why? What difference does it make? She still has a female body, and the same issues with it as she ever had. She was already free to be as androgynous as she wanted. What does this change for her except semantics? What is different now except that she’s gonna be language policing everyone around her? She’s still presumably terrified of physical intimacy. She broke up with that lesbian because she had “gender stuff to figure out” but I’d be shocked if in the next chapter she suddenly gets a fulfilling sexual and romantic relationship free of weird agonized navel-gazing.

Speaking of which, I can’t help but notice her big gender epiphany comes when she is alone, trying to think her feelings out in a vacuum instead of talking about this with her friends or family. Maybe if she had tried to discuss it they could have pointed out how nonsensical it all is, how little the solution has to do with the problem. It’s one of the more insidious tenets of the gender cult that only YOU have access to that special gender feeling, so you need to figure all this out alone. There’s always that drive toward total atomization, lest other people have (gasp) differing opinions and don’t push you toward maximum genderfication.
 
I am likewise certain that said flesh tones are the result of either Pheobe or Maia being weird. This Candidate Z person manages a sex shop, she knows what a good strap looks like, and has more than ready access to all of them.

Shame on you, Maia, for making sex shop lady look cheap.
Or maybe the lady really was a cheap-o dyke who didn't want to dirty up some of her best merchandise and went with one that wasn't flying off the shelves.

It just hit me that the sex shop lady has short hair and might've been a bit butch, which probably "helped" Maia a little bit in imagining the two of them were dudes even though it was hitting her right then and there she couldn't feel anything when a TRUE and HONEST male definitely would've. Like somehow for some reason she stopped giving in to her imagination as soon as a real person began touching her and for a moment of clarity, didn't want to "lie" to herself further like that. Self-awareness just comes and goes for this girl whenever it benefits her.

Should've seen this sooner, she is literally these two images personified as she and Raye are two peas in a pod, and I wonder if the two of them have crossed paths at one point. Maia would've definitely tried making allies with weeb pooners if she hasn't by now.
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Good find, but I have a tangential question.

"An uke"--is that how you pronounce "uke," "yoo-ke?"

I've never had cause to say it IRL and for years have been mentally reading "uke" as in "ukulele." Which are also beloved by transmen, so it's like poetry.
When I took martial arts we pronounced uke as “ookee” but that may be wrong. In martial arts it’s the “receiving” partner in partner drills, e.g. the guy you’re going to throw or headlock or whatever. I didn’t realize the yaoishits had co-opted it into a “gender” lol
 
When I took martial arts we pronounced uke as “ookee” but that may be wrong. In martial arts it’s the “receiving” partner in partner drills, e.g. the guy you’re going to throw or headlock or whatever. I didn’t realize the yaoishits had co-opted it into a “gender” lol
This place is so educational; thank you!
 
Good find, but I have a tangential question.

"An uke"--is that how you pronounce "uke," "yoo-ke?"

I've never had cause to say it IRL and for years have been mentally reading "uke" as in "ukulele." Which are also beloved by transmen, so it's like poetry.
Uke is a japanese word so it's oo rather than yoo. Think the word Okay but with an oo at the front rather than the long O.

It's derived from the martial arts term because that's the person who "recieves" the technique and the uke is the bottom.
 
I am actually shocked at the similarities between this book, the author, and Audrey Hale. The personality (autism, childishness), the career paths, the manner of writing and speaking about gender and sexuality…. This is the less psychotic version of the pooner shooter.

The FBI has a psychological profile of Audrey Hale. And the author of Gender Queer fits it to a T.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the manifesto was a dark, more unhinged version of gender queer.
 
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Really missing the old man
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The book shows how modern society is easy on women for doing horrific irrecoverable mistakes. I can't imagine how you'd illustrate the book with a man protagonist who wastes his time jerking off to porn and cuts off his dick as anything sane, while with women we just accept the madness.
Let me put it this way: if this was a comic about a man drawing futa or sissy hypno on the path to transition, the controversy around it would be stronger. Society tends to see the "fandom" shit women do as cutsey and safe, something tweens and teens do while they squee over K-pop group #243534234. Note that we just get "the One Direction boys are ~lusting over each other~ and it's ~destroying their friendship.~" Maia doesn't explain how this happens. Given her state of development, it could be a drama light novel with some smut. but take a lot of fandom out of fandom and the perversion becomes more apparent. Think of Twilight (which is repurposed BDSM fanfiction itself) and the other woman/monster novels. People hate the books because they suck, but they also portray abusive behavior as intrepid and sexy. It's a more subtle kind of perversion.

Men can dress their fetishes up as safe, too, with varying success (the infamous "Oh Joy Sex Toy" cuck comic). Gender Queer got the heat it did because there are very apparent, very visible depictions of children pissing in the yard and men fucking boys. It's one thing to read about a girl leaving her pads on for so long they accumulate "coffee ground" dried blood (🤮), it's another to actually see it. The comic's naïve, innocent style can only hide so much. If it were a man, would the style be different? Probably. There are a couple SJW/tranny art threads where trannies try to mimic how they think girls would draw, or hyperfocus on certain features for that idealized ~so feminine~ look. How that controversy would work mostly depends on the man's connections, but instead of trying to hide the fetishes behind lacking anatomy and detail, they would be dressed up in exaggerated details and over-the-top idealization.

Society is easy on both women and "women" that make horrible decisions. It accepts the madness not just because of excuses or reverse "power dynamics," but because of the way they try to disguise the madness and play it off as innocent or even beneficial. I'm sure people who did their Bible studies can go into detail about Satan's insidiousness, how he tries to get you to do more and more until you're well into his trap. However, these people are clumsy. They're so obsessed with power that they only see the "big levers." They can see Herbert and Gertrude gawking over how horrible the used pad is- they don't expect their granddaughter Emma to get grossed out too. Since they don't understand the machine they're using, or even what the "little levers" do, they often get blindsided with what are, to them, unforeseen consequences.
 
Maia’s big revelation that all her problems are because of her gender is really baffling. Even with the whole book supposedly building to this epiphany, it comes out of nowhere and leads me to disagree with her conclusion. It seems like her problems are with her body and sex characteristics, not with how she is perceived as female by her family and these off-panel friends she supposedly has
Funnily enough, Everything you've said here is directly supported by Maia herself. Check out this old Gender Queer comic, where she's very explicit about what she really hates when she looks in the mirror:


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Puberty, adulthood, having to make big choices and take responsibility on her own. She seems to break down every time she tries. I'm not surprised this one was excluded from the final draft, as it's a bit too blatant with regards to Maia's real mentality and problems. IMO the whole "I'm suffering because other people don't think of me the way I WANT" thing she has going on is just another way to force others into fixing her problems for her while avoiding having to face them herself.



Another Tumblr dump from Maia to kick things off:

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With the real book cover here for reference:

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I have a sneaking suspicion the off-panel person in "understanding" might be her mom.


This on isn't Maia's, but she did go out of her way to endorse it.

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It's okay though, that thing that looks like a curvaceous little boy with his nipples exposed is ackshually a decades old robot, so it's all good,


And now that Rowling has been deemed fully problematic, Maia plans to have all references to Harry Potter excised from all future editions of her work.
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Cutting all the controversial bits out of your life in a desperate, never-ending bid to look good among your peers - How brave and stunning. I have even more faith in the honesty of her so-called memoir.

  • Back in Gender-land, Maia is introduced to the idea of neopronouns through one of her art teachers, a blue haired, bowtie-wearing They/them of the kind that has infested the humanities like a plague.
  • I still remember my own art teacher, well into his seventies when I knew him, painting pretty girls with a brush in one hand and a cigarette in the other. He would listen to Johnny Cash at unreasonable volumes, thought a photo shop was a place to buy framed pictures from, hosted most of his classes in the drained out pit of an underground swimming pool, and gave no damns.
  • He was, far and away, one of the coolest people I have ever known.

  • Seeing his profession inhabited by Tumblr creatures wearing it like some kind of skinsuit causes me physical pain. You would never know there was a time, not too long ago, art teachers could be the kind of people worth looking up to.
  • Maia, however, has a great time playing word police, correcting her classmates while practicing correct pronoun usage over and over again in an effort to hypnotize herself into thinking referring to an obvious woman as "they" is normal and correct.

  • It's 2015, AND PHEOBE HAS DECIDED TO DATE A POONER.
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  • WHO SHE WILL LATER MARRY.

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  • The website I got this from was deleted, but the archive can still be found here.
  • Between the two sisters, Pheobe has consistently seemed to be the better adjusted of the two, but knowing she didn't just touch the tuna-taint, but put a ring on it? She can't be okay.
  • She's prettier than her sister too, Maia isn't hideous (though I have found a couple of other, less flattering pics floating around), but Pheobe deffo won in the looks department.
  • Which makes it even more baffling she went for the brown midget with the crazy eyes and the neckbeard. Between Amila and Maia, I'm beginning to think Pheobe must be either insecure or some kind of attachment towards the maladjusted and the broken. "I can fix them" somehow fused horribly with "all of this is fine, actually."

  • Because all trannies must try to crack the egg at least once, Amila tries to probe Maia as to why she went for nonbinary over trans.
  • If Maia was a bit younger, I think she would have taken the bait, but by this point, her focus has shifted.
  • No longer is Maia content to merely lust after her own male reflection, oh no, she now aspires to be an honest to God creature: Both tit-less and beard-less, yet simultaneously, bedicked.
  • In her own words Maia wants "people to be confused about my gender at all times."
  • Which is to say she wants all the benefits of being female, while simultaneously satisfying her fetish of being a hairless dickboi like the pervert she is.

  • After thinking about it for a few months, Maia opts to delete Tinder, choosing to pull herself out of the dating game for good (again).
  • Frankly, I agree this was a good decision on her part.
  • What this comic book has displayed very consistently is an image of an emotionally insecure and deeply fragile person, one with a tendency for obsession and a lack of good boundaries as a whole.
  • Any relationship with Maia would lead to that relationship revolving exclusively around Maia, I think, her insecurities, and need for a yes man/comfort giver against a world she cannot handle in even at its most mundane.
  • That's not a lover, that's a nanny, and for the sake of all the lesbians who might have otherwise been roped into the role, I'm glad she quit.

  • But oh noes! Maia's fanfiction is still unfinished, whatever shall she do?
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  • Ask her room-mate/buddy to help out, duh.
  • Remind me again why this wasn't the first option?

  • Having finally realized the true freedom of spinsterhood, Maia spends page 179 frolicking through a field of crippling loneliness , rejoicing at all the things she freed herself from.
  • I do wonder what Maia is going to do when her parents die, as near as I can tell, she's still living at home at this point in the comic, and will be all the way up to today. Forget rents and mortgage, what is she going to do when 2/3s of her primary social group is just gone?

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  • Having not considered my previous questions at all, Maia skips out of her loneliness field and into the underwear arc.
  • I can't say I'm a fan of Hippy Mom's choice to give in to Maia's absolute hatred of anything "girly". This is absolutely one of those behavioral problems that gets worse the more you try to indulge it.
  • That she likely thought she was being a good and supportive parent here only makes it sadder.

  • Once Maia's life-ruining period hits, she's forced to ditch the bike shorts in favor of undies capable of holding a pad.
  • She hates it, and it is only with the greatest reluctance that she eventually settles on one particular kind of multi-colored six pack. With all the pinks handed off to Pheobe, Maia is able to just barely make do with the neutral colored pieces.
  • For any gentlemen in the crowd who may be wondering, plain, lace-less black or white is absolutely an option, and they're easy to find. While it's possible her local Walmart only sold ones that were either colored or fancy for some reason, I'm going to chalk up the desire to buy the same brand of the same pack over and over as another check in the autism box. Neither her actions nor her distress at the loss of this one particular set make much sense without it.
  • Also, why not order online? It's 2015, Amazon is selling a bunch of stuff by that point. If Maia was good enough at computers to buy a vibrator, then why not underwear in bulk?

  • Upset at the loss of her precious Hanes Bikini Cut Six Pack, and incapable of solving simple problems on her own, Maia flies to Pheobe in distress, begging for some kind of reprieve.
  • Pheobe is all like "LOL just get some menswear", and guides her over to the aisle, which Maia must have just somehow...never seen?
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  • This is your local, friendly brain squid, here to remind you that the person squeeing over dinosaur and spaceships was 26 years old when this occurred.
  • The immaturity on display here is pretty well expected by this point, but the fact that she could just get something different seems to have never truly crossed her mind, and needed outside guidance to even consider something new says a lot about how serious her problems must really be.
  • In the meantime, Maia is absolutely delighted at her new set of "cute, nerdy briefs", and resolves to wear them exclusively from then on out.

  • Coming up Next - Maia thinks of the children, pronouns return front and center, and someone who disagrees with Maia is finally allowed on panel! We're almost to the end of TPB2, and TPB3 after that should be a mostly downhill slide.
 
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