Wandering Son
Apr. 20th, 2011 11:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kathygnomeI don't really write much about trans topics anymore. It's kind of like this part of my life has sort of just become unimportant. Most of my angst today is about weight, appearance, economics, and so on. In most ways i'm just a normal lesbian parent.
But today will be different as someone suggested the anime Wandering Son / Horo Musuko. It's a story, most simply put, about two kids in junior high school. A boy who wants to be a girl and a girl who wants to be a boy. Now, most school anime is romantic junk and most cross-gender stuff is played for giggles. But there are no magical springs here. It's brutally realistic. It's probably something that would be best characterized as "young adult fiction." That genre of serious works about serious issues intended primarily for younger teens. In other words, adult anime for children. It's available currently on crunchyroll.com which you can also stream with your roku or boxee or apple box if you have one.
It is insanely good. It is correspondingly extremely difficult for me to watch. The lead character, Shuici, is someone I identify with very strongly. They favor indoor activities, including cooking, over supposedly masculine activities. Most of their friends are girls, not boys. And so on.
One thing which resonates very deeply is that they are consistently being mistaken for a girl and is easily able to conceal their birth gender, something which creates a strange dichotomy between the joy when it happens and the agony that it is not "real." That for me is one of the most painful things because it was something I went through as a tween. For me, it was as simple as whether or not I blow dried my hair. With a bit of volume, my entire appearance was different. The fact that it seemed so possible to just adopt a different identity made it that much more painful. Enough of my own trangst. What is important here is that this is a production that seems to really "get it."
The art is beautiful. Simple. A bit feminine. (The B/W art of the manga is even more sparse and interesting imho.) The music is matching and thoughtful. It's just a quality production. I can't recommend it enough.
But today will be different as someone suggested the anime Wandering Son / Horo Musuko. It's a story, most simply put, about two kids in junior high school. A boy who wants to be a girl and a girl who wants to be a boy. Now, most school anime is romantic junk and most cross-gender stuff is played for giggles. But there are no magical springs here. It's brutally realistic. It's probably something that would be best characterized as "young adult fiction." That genre of serious works about serious issues intended primarily for younger teens. In other words, adult anime for children. It's available currently on crunchyroll.com which you can also stream with your roku or boxee or apple box if you have one.
It is insanely good. It is correspondingly extremely difficult for me to watch. The lead character, Shuici, is someone I identify with very strongly. They favor indoor activities, including cooking, over supposedly masculine activities. Most of their friends are girls, not boys. And so on.
One thing which resonates very deeply is that they are consistently being mistaken for a girl and is easily able to conceal their birth gender, something which creates a strange dichotomy between the joy when it happens and the agony that it is not "real." That for me is one of the most painful things because it was something I went through as a tween. For me, it was as simple as whether or not I blow dried my hair. With a bit of volume, my entire appearance was different. The fact that it seemed so possible to just adopt a different identity made it that much more painful. Enough of my own trangst. What is important here is that this is a production that seems to really "get it."
The art is beautiful. Simple. A bit feminine. (The B/W art of the manga is even more sparse and interesting imho.) The music is matching and thoughtful. It's just a quality production. I can't recommend it enough.
