Oh, Will Gibson
FOUND EMOTICONS OF THE FIRST TWO DECADES OF THE 21st CENTURY
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Every time that time of the month comes around I get this urge to write about any one of my gazillion traveling female characters dealing with menstruation in particularly inconvenient circumstances. (This is the one hugest obstacle I always faced when dreaming up stories about adventuring heroines and/or reading/watching female!warrior books/media as a kid. LOL. Especially since I have a massive weakness for crossdressing women -- I'm constantly thinking of ways to make it actually *work*, especially since they did exist historically with much success, but most crossdressing fantasy and/or animanga is pretty dumb with the way they handle it.)
The Museum of Menstruation has a bunch of cool info that may or may not be accurate. Horrible site design and no citations whatsoever. (Well, not that citations would for the most part exist, I guess. :P) The person who runs it (a guy, ironically) has a particular theory that a lot of women in fact, didn't use anything during their periods to soak up the fluids. Which... you know, is interesting, but seems really impractical. (also discussed here).
So yeah... this is the kind of weird stuff I think about in my spare time.
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Speaking of crossdressing, I mentioned this in my first post on the series a few weeks ago, but The Ravages of Time features a gender-ambiguous eunuch/assassin (who fills in as one of the legendary four beauties of China, Diao Chan, in the story -- though the series twists the usual story about her quite a bit, and it's only a minor episode).
I'm pretty impressed with the portrayal of the character. (He is a relatively major character -- and I use this pronoun because even though the poor guy endures a lot of gender confusion due to various reasons throughout the course of the story so far he seems to consider himself male, at least. I'm not sure what pronoun is used in the original Chinese. Archaic Chinese utilizes pronouns -- some of which aren't really pronouns actually -- that indicate relationship between speakers, which is not necessarily gender-dependent, though it often is. The more contemporary Chinese pronoun "ta" is gender-neutral when spoken; it can be written either with a "person" radical or a "female" radical, though I think the character with the female radical is a fairly modern invention. It can also be written as an entirely different character when talking about animals/objects. But they're all pronounced the same, which allows for a lot of ambiguity that I'm not sure comes across in translation or in writing.) Though I will admit that I really wanted him to be a girl, because there are so few badass female characters in the story to begin with... (Still not sure yet how I feel about the portrayal of the biologically female characters in this series. Because despite being awesome in various ways, they're still outclassed by the men.) And I think I remember a few scenes that seemed a bit self-contradictory regarding his portrayal (not sure I'm reading them correctly sometimes), but overall it's a surprisingly sensitive take.
The chapter that just came out today was particularly interesting to me, as Xiao Meng (his real name, or iirc possibly nickname since it's kind of a girly name) has been struggling with very ambiguous feelings towards the Zhao Yun character (arguably one of the two main protagonists) throughout the series, and this particular chapter addresses the gender issue in context of his feelings directly, and it's handled pretty well imo. Well, it's interesting, at least. I'm not sure I like how it seems to play out though (the ultimate resolution seems a little cheap), but given how tricky this series has been so far regarding character fates, I'm holding back on my judgment.
- - -
Every time that time of the month comes around I get this urge to write about any one of my gazillion traveling female characters dealing with menstruation in particularly inconvenient circumstances. (This is the one hugest obstacle I always faced when dreaming up stories about adventuring heroines and/or reading/watching female!warrior books/media as a kid. LOL. Especially since I have a massive weakness for crossdressing women -- I'm constantly thinking of ways to make it actually *work*, especially since they did exist historically with much success, but most crossdressing fantasy and/or animanga is pretty dumb with the way they handle it.)
The Museum of Menstruation has a bunch of cool info that may or may not be accurate. Horrible site design and no citations whatsoever. (Well, not that citations would for the most part exist, I guess. :P) The person who runs it (a guy, ironically) has a particular theory that a lot of women in fact, didn't use anything during their periods to soak up the fluids. Which... you know, is interesting, but seems really impractical. (also discussed here).
So yeah... this is the kind of weird stuff I think about in my spare time.
- - -
Speaking of crossdressing, I mentioned this in my first post on the series a few weeks ago, but The Ravages of Time features a gender-ambiguous eunuch/assassin (who fills in as one of the legendary four beauties of China, Diao Chan, in the story -- though the series twists the usual story about her quite a bit, and it's only a minor episode).
I'm pretty impressed with the portrayal of the character. (He is a relatively major character -- and I use this pronoun because even though the poor guy endures a lot of gender confusion due to various reasons throughout the course of the story so far he seems to consider himself male, at least. I'm not sure what pronoun is used in the original Chinese. Archaic Chinese utilizes pronouns -- some of which aren't really pronouns actually -- that indicate relationship between speakers, which is not necessarily gender-dependent, though it often is. The more contemporary Chinese pronoun "ta" is gender-neutral when spoken; it can be written either with a "person" radical or a "female" radical, though I think the character with the female radical is a fairly modern invention. It can also be written as an entirely different character when talking about animals/objects. But they're all pronounced the same, which allows for a lot of ambiguity that I'm not sure comes across in translation or in writing.) Though I will admit that I really wanted him to be a girl, because there are so few badass female characters in the story to begin with... (Still not sure yet how I feel about the portrayal of the biologically female characters in this series. Because despite being awesome in various ways, they're still outclassed by the men.) And I think I remember a few scenes that seemed a bit self-contradictory regarding his portrayal (not sure I'm reading them correctly sometimes), but overall it's a surprisingly sensitive take.
The chapter that just came out today was particularly interesting to me, as Xiao Meng (his real name, or iirc possibly nickname since it's kind of a girly name) has been struggling with very ambiguous feelings towards the Zhao Yun character (arguably one of the two main protagonists) throughout the series, and this particular chapter addresses the gender issue in context of his feelings directly, and it's handled pretty well imo. Well, it's interesting, at least. I'm not sure I like how it seems to play out though (the ultimate resolution seems a little cheap), but given how tricky this series has been so far regarding character fates, I'm holding back on my judgment.