Give Me Wings: Dance Dance Danseur and the Craft of Gender

The anime Dance Dance Danseur dwells on the angst of conforming to standards of performance--of art, and of gender. Why does its protagonist seek out the pain of classical ballet training?

Culture Kept In Its Coffin: How The Netflix Model Buries Our Media History

Classic anime like Revolutionary Girl Utena could get a new lease on life if released serially in the present day... but Netflix and its many competitors aren't in the business of preserving or selling art. What do we lose when our media history becomes #Content?

Galaxy Brained: Annihilation and Queer Cosmic Horror

Annihilation: The Ending Explained!!!

content warning: body horror, spoilers for Annihilation, cosmic horror, mad ravings, closetedness and detransitioning, homophobia, slurs

Webworks: The Magnus Archives and the Powerful Failure of Diverse Horror

The Magnus Archives made a name for itself as inclusive horror. But when even a schlocky tale of giant spiders takes on resonances with transgender oppression and sexual exploitation, can the show's listeners evade the webs of trauma?

content warning: spoilers for The Magnus Archives, spiders as metaphor, spiders as monster, coercive dynamics (interpersonal, professional, sexual), transmisogyny, uncomfortable bargains with power, content warnings. 

2x2 Girls: Queer Mirroring in She-Ra

She-Ra and the Princesses of Power ended on a high and very gay note, but the show's queerness goes much deeper than the flashy finale. To understand how the show is constructed around its central lesbian relationship, though, we have to be open to learning the techniques it uses to tell their story.

Junetopia

When Andrew Hussie canonized a transgender character in response to a fan finding a Toblerone he hid in a cave, it was more than just a weird stunt. It was a piece of revolutionary performance art, and an affirmation of a new model for fandom.

Just Put "Whatever" Down For Gender: Gonzo, the Muppets, and Queerness

Gonzo The Great: famous muppet, cultural icon, and... queer non-binary performance artist? Join us as we attempt the death defying feat of discussing the queerness of the muppets, and Gonzo as modern artistic genius

Co-Written with Juniper Angel Barber
(Note: This piece looks slightly less awesome on Mobile)

Art from The Muppet Show Comic Book by Roger Langridge.

I Want To Connect (But It's Hard To Understand) Part B

Complex shows like Sarazanmai and Revolutionary Girl Utena use powerful techniques to connect to their audience. But the most powerful tool might be the audience itself and the connections we make to each other.

I Want To Connect (But It's Hard To Understand): Sarazanmai Part A

For an anime all about connections, Sarazanmai, with its musical numbers, kappa mythology, and formal experimentation sure can be obscure. But its unique symbols are an inventive communication tool, one rooted in the unique power of cartooning.

Complicated and Messy: Kingdom Hearts, Plot, and Being A Teen Queer

Kingdom Hearts feels like a wild game of pretend played with every random thing the players had lying around. That's also what my experience of being a queer teenager felt like.

Sense8 and Identity

What if Sense8's production and form was as diverse as its casting? As the show's rapid dance between states of cancelled and not-cancelled continues to bewilder me, I try to parse out the show's interest in difference, and some of its current limitations or failings.

Video Killed The Yurio Star: Why Is Yuri On Ice's Soundtrack So Weak?

The homoerotic skating anime Yuri On Ice places great importance on the choice of music for performance. But can its soundtrack live up to its own implicit standards? And what does that say about the rest of the show's creative direction?

Homestuck, Destiny, and why Social Constructs are Bullshit

==> StIT Reader: Survey The Mayhem

You enter the pub to find that things are EVEN WORSE THAN USUAL. Most notably, there seem to be MANY SAM KEEPERS. This is a terrible development, you think to yourself. And you are correct. One Sam Keeper was already just about all that you could handle. This is ENTIRELY TOO MANY SAM KEEPERS.

The most agitated looking of the Sam Keepers is PONTIFICATING ABOUT SOME BULLSHIT.

==> StIT Reader: Listen to pontification

Sam Keeper: Oh god, who could have possibly predicted that my extremely nebulously defined and possibly totally bullshit powers as the mythic Page of Paper could have caused so many problems? All the jumping I've done recently between various places has just created all these weird, kind of creepy alternate versions of myself, and now the whole blog is stuck under some mountain... I'll never finish my epic quest at this point and grow up to be a Well Adjusted Adult! And I have this whole article to write about how totally perfect and unassailable every aspect of Troll culture is! What the heck am I going to do???

==> StIT Reader: Offer to listen to Keeper's excellent theories about quadrant shipping

Hell no. Keeper made her bed and she can sleep in it. Or more specifically she stole your chair and she can sit in it. Yeah, that metaphor scans, kinda. Anyway it's probably just Keeper's intractable destiny to fuck everything up forever.

Hold on, though, it looks like one of the other Keepers has something to say.

==> Sam Coper: Sort this mess out

Sam Coper: You know Alternian culture is bullshit though right?

Sam Keeper: What the heck? Who are you?

Sam Coper: I'm you, but way, way calmer. Way calmer. Jesus buddy. I'm the you that actually learned to cope with things instead of doing an acrobatic fucking pirouette off the handle every time something goes wrong. And also I figured out that I can make this God Tier outfit have a cool skirt and shit, look at it!

Anyway, for real though, Alternian culture is bullshit, and so is your destiny, and that's... actually kind of a huge theme within the comic.

Sam Keeper: Ok, look, you're gonna have to break this one down for me a bit more.

Sam Coper: With pleasure.

See, Homestuck, among many other things, reveals that lots of stuff we think is natural or an inescapable fact of reality is actually a social and historical construct! And in fact, Homestuck shows that our identities might be a lot more free and fluid than we think.

==> StIT Reader: Try to understand.

Weird Beard: My Goatee, Gender, and Science Fiction

Let’s talk about my beard.

For a while now I’ve wanted to write about my goatee, which I’m sure is riveting subject matter for all of you. I want to work with one particular idea about my goatee, which is that it is a gender signifier… but it isn’t necessarily gendered. Depending on the way you address it, it both is and is not an indicator of maleness, and that has some interesting implications for science fiction.

Really, that’s where this one is going.

The Radical Implausibility of Love

This article is going to start out profoundly superficial, but I hope it will end at a place that is at least superficially profound.

I want to start the article with a discussion of shipping in the Dumbing of Age fandom.

Yeah, see what I mean? Don't worry, you won't need to be familiar with the comic for this article--it's one of those articles that's not exactly about what it's ostensibly about.

Dumbing of Age is a webcomic written by David Willis about a wide range of characters navigating their first year of college. It’s not particularly important for this article, but it’s maybe interesting to note that almost all of these characters came from several other interconnected comics that Willis has been writing since the early days of webcomics. To an extent, Dumbing of Age gives these characters a new lease on life.

The post that got me thinking about this week’s topic was actually a piece of fan art posted on the blog Queering of Age, whose purpose you can probably figure out from the title alone. The art depicts four of the characters on a couch together, cuddling and playing video games. I’ll link to my reblogged version of the post, since tumblr shenanigans have made the original post inaccessible:



You can see, in my reblog, basically an elevator pitch for this article. In summary, this article came about because of three reactions in quick succession that I noted in my response to the post:

First, I felt excited and gratified that a polyamorous ship that I had considered before was getting play in the wider realm of the Internet (or at least that’s the implication I read into the picture).

Then, I checked myself and thought, “No, this is cute, but it’s impossible with these characters. It simply isn’t plausible.”

And that thought was followed by the thought that prompted this article:

“Wait, what’s actually plausible about my own relationships?”

Building and Breaking, In Comics as in BDSM

The seducer of the innocent. Corrupter. A medium driven by affect--the raw, visceral, embodied experience of emotion. A trap to lead the unwary into perversion.

Comics.

It is to this gutter medium, this medium of ill repute, that I dedicated the last eight months of my life, transforming myself into the willing servant of an often capricious master. My thesis was, in large part, about the emotional content of comics--the very content that encouraged cultural critics ranging from Frederic Wertham, infamous comic censor, to Clement Greenberg and his followers, masters of disinterested analysis and the pure aesthetic critique of art, to malign the medium. I analyzed a structure that I dubbed the building and breaking template, a template consisting of a rising narrative arc depicted with a rigid grid of panels that concludes with some break from that grid at the moment of narrative climax.

I did NOT, however, analyze Stjepan Šejić's comic Sunstone. I namedropped it briefly in my conclusion, but I did not analyze it, simply because devoting a whole chapter of my thesis to a comic about two women discovering their love of domination and submission, sadism and masochism, and that other letter pair that I always forget, seemed like a pretty risky prospect. Unfortunately I'm not entirely sure that the time is right for the affective and semiotic analysis of porn comics, at least not in academia.

But this isn't academia. This is Storming the Ivory Tower, where I can do whatever the hell I want up to and including stealing your chair, and this week I want to take a look at Sunstone through the lens of some of my research and explore some of the ways that comics--all comics--get us hot and bothered.

Fitzskimmons Lament Part 2: Satisfaction

Last week I posted my article, part one of this series, to the Marvel subreddit, mostly because I am a little shit and like to tweak the noses of overly fawning fans.

Before the article was predictably downvoted to oblivion I did get one comment useful not so much for its contents, which were predictably terrible, but for the interesting irony that it presented. This redditor simply dismissed my article as "the babblings of a patreon-begger." Interesting. The claim there seems to be that my article can be safely ignored because I'm merely out to grab cash off of Marvel's success.

True!

I'll own up to it proudly! In fact, I'll encourage you all to donate to my Patreon today! I'm absolutely shameless. In fact, it's a little off theme, but is it time to bring back the supervillain suit? I think it is!

I know what I am.

But you know, I'm no more shameless than Marvel and Disney are, and a whole hell of a lot more honest. If I'm a hood at least I'm an honest one, with no illusions about why massively successful franchises frequently turn out to be the subjects for my articles. They're the subjects because when I write about my real loves, like fanfiction of a children's trading card game for example, nobody reads my articles.

These are concessions I MUST make, to a certain extent, if I want to make this blogging thing work for me. Marvel is in no such position. Anything they do seems to turn into a megahit, even if it's, say, Thor 2. Marvel fans will even get a little bit smug about this, proclaiming that DC can't make a movie with a female lead while Marvel can make a movie about a raccoon and a tree in space.

Ay, Marvel fans? You know who else can't make a movie with a female lead?

Marvel Studios.

So let's take this week to talk about the various ways in which Marvel, a studio that seemingly can do anything, continues to do, in a myriad of ways, absolutely nothing to support its queer fans.

Fitzskimmons Lament Part One: Marvel and the Endlessly Straight Path

The Marvel Cinematic Universe is a lot of things. Among them, the MCU is very, very straight. Aggressively straight. Obnoxiously straight, I might even suggest.

It's straight to the point where, after 11 movies and three-and-a-half-sum-total seasons of 45 minute episodes of various tv spin offs from said movies, the lack of any queer representation whatsoever has finally crossed the borderline from "minor stain on an otherwise remarkable record" to "holy shit this is indefensible and appalling."

Marvel and Disney apparently can make a movie about a talking raccoon and his tree friend but can't introduce a single queer character. Or make a movie starring a woman. But that's a rant for another day.

For a while now I've been lamenting the effect that's had on a number of my ships in the MCU--ships being fan parlance for preferred romantic relationships. I tend to gravitate towards queer ships because, well, in our modern media landscape they just don't happen that often in canon, so I have an inclination to stubbornly ship everything queer, which just results in me getting more irate when none of my queer pairings become canon, which just causes me to be more obstinate, until the next thing you know I'm up at three AM reading Draco/Neville/Hermione BDSM fanfic instead of writing Storming the Ivory Tower articles.

In fact that's precisely where I've been for the past eight months!

But no ship has suffered quite as much as Fitzskimmons, the ship that put the "One" and "True" and "The Numeral Three" in OT3, my one true poly triad, the relationship of my dreams. This is a ship that joins the Agents of SHIELD characters Fitz, Simmons, and Skye into a beautiful poly trio.

It will never happen, and I know it will never happen, but by god I can write an entire article lamenting the fact that I'll never see this group get together.

Pictured: more like GAYgents of SHIELD

That's what this article is in the broadest sense: a lament for Fitzskimmons. But I don't want to just sit here and babble about how great they'd be together (even though they would be) or how much more heartwrenching the events of season 2 are in the context of a poly romance between the three characters (though wow can you imagine it?). Ultimately this isn't about the worthiness or unworthiness of one particular ship. It's about the wider way in which the compulsory heterosexuality in an entire serialized and shared fictional universe leads to sub-optimal story decisions and lost opportunities.

It's about how restrictions on the range of possible relationships leads to bad writing.

The Remarkable Queerness of Shinji Ikari

Our hero, Shinji Ikari

The fandom for acclaimed anime Neon Genesis Evangelion has developed some remarkably bizarre attitudes and ideas about the series they love. I'm not talking here about the speculation regarding the actual narrative itself--the questions of "what the hell did I just watch, what happened in the last two episodes, why is there a live action shot of people in a movie theater, was this sort of a Freudian thing..."--which do get pretty bizarre at times, but which are on the whole pretty innocuous. These are ideas that despite their strangeness simply attempt to clarify the basic narrative of the original series, the film that followed, and the heavily altered narrative of the reboot films (of which, out of four total, three have been released. We're still waiting to see whether the fourth one explains what the hell happened in the third one).

No, the really weird ideas that I want to talk about today are the notions that the fandom has adopted that fly in the face of just about everything the text attempts to establish thematically. One of the more obvious examples of this comes from the heavy sexualization of the two teenage female pilots that the fandom--and, frustratingly, the marketing team--participates in, despite the fact that the show goes to great lengths to deconstruct everything from harem anime tropes to the specific character archetypes of those characters to the idea of fanservice in general. The most fanservicey scenes are frequently profoundly uncomfortable, if not outright nightmarishly surreal. According to fan lore, End of Evangelion, the film that acts as the conclusion to the original series, was deliberately dark, brutal, incomprehensible, and full of psychosexual revulsion directed squarely at the protagonist because creator Hideaki Anno was so outraged and disgusted with the Otaku misreading of the film. Whether or not that's true, the fact that the fanbase regards it as plausible should tell you a lot about... well, about the whole Eva phenomenon really.

That's not what I'm here to rant angrily about this week though. No, I want to hone in on another particularly bizarre idea that the fandom has adopted. Specifically, the weird notion that the series protagonist, Shinji Ikari, is straight.

As with a lot of the other more frustrating reactions to the series, it's not just a reproduction of the shitty backwards attitudes that a lot of geeks hold, it reproduces them in such a way that it garbles the actual thematic arc of the series and makes character actions and development alike borderline incomprehensible. It's of particular interest to me, as well, for the way it results in a dismantling of creator efforts to increase representation, forcefully repressing "deviant" sexuality. This is the much canonized practice in fandom culture of erasing what few paltry instances of queer representation exist popular culture. It's the flip side of the coin I discussed a few weeks ago with respect to the possibility of reading queerness into Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell: it's reading queerness out of media.

Before we get to discuss Shinji Ikari's bi- or perhaps pansexuality, though, we need to talk a little about what makes Evangelion tick as a narrative. And that means diving deep into the boggy nightmare of Eva's plot.

Bear with me, folks, I'm going to try to make this as comprehensible as possible.

Janelle Monae: Contemporary Queen of Science Fiction

Science fiction is just an exciting and new way of telling universal stories and it allows the reader to come to the conclusion and draw parallels between the present and the future. I don’t think we enjoy when people remind us, today, this is what’s going on in the world. You know, sometimes we’re so used to hearing that this is what’s happening right now that we become numb to it. So when you take it out of this world, [people] will come to the conclusions themselves.

I think it’s important: whatever way you can get the audience’s attention to listen to your message, a strong message at that, then by any means. I think science fiction does that. --Janelle Monae 

I imagined many moons in the sky lighting the way to freedom. --Cindi Mayweather

My second article ever for Storming the Ivory Tower was about Lady Gaga--specifically about the video for Bad Romance and the implications of its science fiction stylings. It pretty much set the tone, framing narrative/persona, and purpose of the blog, and it also led to a whole string of articles on Gaga over the next few years--what her videos have to say symbolically, narratively, and thematically, and how they fit into wider popular culture.

But I'm bringing it up today not because of any of that nonsense but because of the particular conversation I spun out of it on pop music and science fiction which arguably spanned across these four articles. See, I was partly inspired in my analysis by an article (which I can't find now, unfortunately) that suggested that Gaga was one of the most significant voices in contemporary science fiction. That notion fascinated me because up till that point I had generally seen different media treated as fundamentally segregated from each other--you wouldn't see a list of the best Sci Fi stories of all time including a concept album, a short story, a novel, a live action movie, a TV series, and an anime all listed together. You still wouldn't, I think.

That segregation might go a long way to explaining why rapper and R&B musician Janelle Monae is not known to more fans of speculative fiction. Explains, but not excuses, because Monae should probably be crowned High Queen of the Geeks. How can I justify a statement that hyperbolic when a whole segment of my audience has almost certainly never heard of Monae? Well, just for starters, literally everything she's put out has involved a lengthy story involving this character:

Meet Cindi Mayweather, the Alpha Platinum 9000 android: your new Queen.