I’m gonna go ahead and say it but despite Airi being like the most beloathed character for obvious reasons, the reveal that she’s a lesbian makes her one of the most tragic and sympathetic ‘villains’ i’ve ever seen. Like this is an extremely good piece of queer character writing and i’m so impressed with this story for it. Consider how sad ‘i’m going to a world where i can find my happiness’ is in this context, where her vision of that is a world where she’s straight and men aren’t ’real men’. Consider how sad it is that she thinks of her love for her friend as predatory and dirty, recognises the obsession with interfering in her life as toxic, and the reveal that even in her new ‘perfect’ world she did the exact same thing. The internalised homophobia is so intense here and it (narratively) rules. Lesbians are raised, like every woman, to believe that the greatest happiness they can find in life is to be with a man. It’s not uncommon for wlw to lose track of the line between jealousy and attraction for other women, and for lesbians to fixate on fictional men purely because of their unreality and distance from real men. This can create really complicated feelings in (especially younger) women, and I can only imagine what the trauma of seeing her first love and friend could do after that. Especially internalising the comments from those around you that implied it was your fault because you were a predator. So, that said, is it actually all that crazy Airi was so high on copium she couldn’t realise this was a ‘real’ world? When admitting that would also mean admitting she wasn’t straight and therefore ‘capable of finding happiness’? I’m not saying she deserves to be forgiven; this obviously goes hand in hand with a need to control everything around her to feel like she’s not powerless, and men are (obviously) people too you can’t just treat them like pigs because you loathe their presence around women, but this is still extremely sympathetic to me, and tracks across her whole story.
U ATE. too many manga readers hate well written women… bunnytoof
aye… Airi would be treated very differently by readers if she were a man IMO. There’d be a lot more sympathy, a lot more willingness to empathise. But because she’s a woman her complexity is treated as nothing but a threat, and because she’s a lesbian her motives are predatory instead of lovesick…
I’m gonna go ahead and say it but despite Airi being like the most beloathed character for obvious reasons, the reveal that she’s a lesbian makes her one of the most tragic and sympathetic ‘villains’ i’ve ever seen. Like this is an extremely good piece of queer character writing and i’m so impressed with this story for it.
Consider how sad ‘i’m going to a world where i can find my happiness’ is in this context, where her vision of that is a world where she’s straight and men aren’t ’real men’.
Consider how sad it is that she thinks of her love for her friend as predatory and dirty, recognises the obsession with interfering in her life as toxic, and the reveal that even in her new ‘perfect’ world she did the exact same thing. The internalised homophobia is so intense here and it (narratively) rules.
Lesbians are raised, like every woman, to believe that the greatest happiness they can find in life is to be with a man. It’s not uncommon for wlw to lose track of the line between jealousy and attraction for other women, and for lesbians to fixate on fictional men purely because of their unreality and distance from real men. This can create really complicated feelings in (especially younger) women, and I can only imagine what the trauma of seeing her first love and friend could do after that. Especially internalising the comments from those around you that implied it was your fault because you were a predator.
So, that said, is it actually all that crazy Airi was so high on copium she couldn’t realise this was a ‘real’ world? When admitting that would also mean admitting she wasn’t straight and therefore ‘capable of finding happiness’?
I’m not saying she deserves to be forgiven; this obviously goes hand in hand with a need to control everything around her to feel like she’s not powerless, and men are (obviously) people too you can’t just treat them like pigs because you loathe their presence around women, but this is still extremely sympathetic to me, and tracks across her whole story.
U ATE. too many manga readers hate well written women…
aye… Airi would be treated very differently by readers if she were a man IMO. There’d be a lot more sympathy, a lot more willingness to empathise. But because she’s a woman her complexity is treated as nothing but a threat, and because she’s a lesbian her motives are predatory instead of lovesick…