The Magic and Wise Asexual by Floating Catacombs / Anime Blog Tracker

The Magic and Wise Asexual

12 Days of Aniblogging 2019, Day 7Media tropes about LGBT+ identities are just as old as the identities themselves. The unfaithful bisexual, the effeminate gay, the fetishistic trans woman, the bed-dead and severe lesbians. As I’ve been reading through LGBT+ manga this year, I’ve started to see another recurring trope concerning a slightly different orientation. Let’s talk about The Magic and Wise Asexual.The magic and wise asexual is not generally supernatural, but rather, in a similar role to the Magical Negro trope, this is a stock character who appears out of the sidelines during a time of crisis to offer crucial insight to the protagonist. Existentially detached from the other character’s romantic and interpersonal struggles, they are able to cut through the bullshit and tell the other character what they truly need to do to be happy. At best, it’s a good way to introduce asexuality to an audience who may not be familiar with the identity and give extra dimension to already strong characters. At worst, this trope uses identity as a tool to solve plot problems, which isn’t a very healthy way to think about marginalized groups. Now I’ll go into each instance of this trope from the manga I’ve recently read, and how each character is handled.Sasaki-Sensei from Kanojo ni Naritai Kimi to BokuAh, Kanoboku again! I literally just wrote about it a few days ago, but I’m back to explore its depiction of asexuality. Unfortunately, it falls into all the tropes I outlined earlier without properly fleshing out its character in return. One of the main characters visits her teacher in the middle of a meltdown over being misgendered and spurned by a boy she likes. Sensing the need for a pep talk, Sasaki brings up how he, too, has felt hurt because nobody understood or accepted him. He spends a whole chapter detailing how he’s always someone without romantic or sexual interests, and how his friends and family have never quite been able to understand that. He concludes that inherent value comes from yourself, not others around you, and that you have the right to decide how you want to live. While self-worth is crucial, this conversation ultimately falls flat. Sasaki-sensei really only seems to exist to deliver one deep truth talk per character in the series, and his asexuality feels like the means to one of those talks rather than a genuine part of him. Maki from Bloom Into YouMaki is something of an enigma at the start of Bloom into You. What’s he really like behind that shaggy hair and quiet demeanor? Because of spending his childhood with his three sisters, he’s good at talking with girls and picks the student council because of its caretaking roles. While all of this femininity made it easy to headcanon transness onto Maki, but as it turns out this is all setup for Maki’s role as a relationship guide to Yuu and Touko. Maki is fascinated by relationships, he just views them as a spectator sport. When it comes to giving sage relationship advice to Yuu, he’s not just justifying his advice through his asexuality, he’s also using his social intelligence and penchant for observing minute details to inform what he says. His asexuality and feminine attunement don’t make him a pushover, though. During his game of Symbolic Batting Cages with Yuu, he sternly rejects the notion that she might be “just like him”, declaring that he is firm in his lack of orientation but she’s just trying to escape from some complicated feelings. Maki may typically be a reserved and subtle character, but he has enough grounding to rise above the mere trope of wise asexual. Anonymous from Shimanami TasogareAnonymous subverts the trope of the magic and wise asexual by playing into it literally and as hard as possible! If this seems like a contradiction, then it’s exactly what she intended. Anonymous’ ideal self is a person with no past or hardcoded identities. She wants to be totally transparent, but also a mirror. She wants people to project their expectations and desires onto her, helping them find themselves without any active intervention on her part. She’s a magical realist character in an otherwise entirely reality-conforming manga, with frequent shots of her jumping off of buildings and vanishing into the wind. Characters who expect long-winded motivational speeches from her often end up disappointed. Amidst all this intentional mystery and enigma, Anonymous is assured in one thing – her asexuality! The author of Shimanami Tasogare is x-gender and asexual, and I have to assume that some of Anonymous’ backstory and ideals are connected to some of their own. Overall, Anonymous, like the rest of ST, is like no other manga and its sheer uniqueness and willingness to push the “oh yeah asexuals are mysterious and wise and powerful” trope to its natural limits is something to be respected._And that’s it for me! I’m not asexual myself, so my outlook on these characters is more out of archetypical curiosity than any personally deep meaning. But overall, it’s excellent that asexual characters are getting some genuine representation in the recent scores of LGBT+ manga. Even when their representation comes off as flat, it still comes across as genuine and in good faith, which is a step above the representation from manga of decades past.

Floating Catacombs

Dec 20, 2019 • Subscribe

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