Okay, okay. Wow! The "design a gyaru" chapter was all fun and games. You can also interpret it as him designing his ideal woman. Why on earth would he think to design himself like a butch if he isn't one? He basically said, "If I have some choice, I'd like to not stand out as much." Also, think of it like designing a custom player character in a video game. I myself play female characters time to time and have my archetypical good girl and psycho bitch. Both of which have very feminine qualities of their own.
As for the potential love interest and your interpretation that I'm saying she just "hasn't had the right dick yet," I'm going beyond the surface level presentation in this manga (Let's be real here. This isn't Inside Mari or Bunny Girl Senpai. It's a fun and dumb genderbend story.) and looking at the potentiality of a bisexual awakening rather than a lesbian one. Sorry to burst your bubble. I know your type doesn't like to acknowledge the existence of bis. Better yet. Maybe she's a skillet and it's just what's inside that counts.
On an actual serious note. I think it would be interesting to see a conflict if she finds out that he's actually been a guy for most of his life. Raise the stakes for this manga. It needs something because I'm honestly getting a bit bored outside of looking forward to the next uncensored volume release of those gyaru titties. Which brings me to the next point.
Again, I'm confidently straight. Not questioning. Never even felt the desire to cross-dress. I can sometimes think about things like a genderbend scenario within the lines of fantasy fiction. Most guys have thought at least once, "Huh. What if I was a chick," without getting all existential over their own masculinity. Or, the actual root of this thought process, "What if I was something that I wasn't?" Maybe you're thinking about all this too much within a heterophobic lense, hmm?
I was honestly hoping that you could tell that I was trying to steer the conversion to something more thought provoking and less of an antagonist back and forth. But alas, more name calling and ridiculing my intelligence. Maybe I'm not as much of a literally nerd, but I do write a lot. Kind of a weird flex in regards to such a simple manga though. Regardless, I really don't want this thread to continue to be a back and forth between us, so I won't be responding to your reply if you choose to continue. I'll read it though. I like reading. 😘
There is some overlap, but a world of difference between someone designing a look for them to play at a distance in a videogame and someone designing an appearance to have
as their body but sure, lets set that aside for the moment. Let's also set aside for a moment that this is far from the only example in the story of the protagonist contemplating their own relationship to femininity, which also includes
literally imagining themselves pregnant Which, speaking as someone with a lot of transgirl friends, is a thing that can come up even among transgirls not into guys, but by your own logic applied elsewhere in this discussion, would
clearly mean that Junpei is into Men, or at least Bi, and somehow I don't think that's a reading you're going to defend so adamantly.
Yes, this is an extremely trashy and silly story, unapolagetically so... however if a character is explicitly saying "man dudes have never once done anything for me" it's a bit of a leap to conclude they're secretly into dudes, not impossible, but not supported by text or subtext. Also, nice failure of reading comprehension there mate, I
literally mentioned bisexuality myself before you did, you were the one saying "oh well she's actually straight and this is just her silly woman feefees getting confused because this other character is secretly a guy inside" So get off your high-horse pretending that I was trying Bi erasure when you have been literally attempting to erase
all queerness from the story this whole time.
I would not be opposed to the classic "wait you were a guy before?" reveal, which is a type of story beat that can be used comfortably in genderswap stories, but also in trans-adjacent stories, and would in fact help to elucidate just how gay/straight/bi/other that character is. On this much at least we can agree.
Again you misuse the terminology, I don't care how straight/gay/bi/etc you are, I care about how cis/trans/nonbinary you are, and even then only to prove a point in how limited your lens of critical analysis is, gender exists in more than just clothing, plenty of trans AND cis women dress in a masculine fashion, that doesn't suddenly make them men.
As to the "all dude think about this sort of thing sometime" are you sure about that? Cuz that strikes me as "folk wisdom" i.e. bullshit rather than something you're pulling from polling data on, this kind of dovetails into a broader discussion about how "maybe every human is a little bit genderfluid" as well as the even thornier "you do realize gender is a social construct that is only tangentially informed by biology right? Or are you going to try and show me a gene for liking the colour pink?" but those are more advanced concept that we doooo not have time for here, so I'm just going to set that can of worms aside and say... maybe not all dudes actually feel that? Maybe only some feel that because they aren't quite as Cis as they think, but apply a thought-terminating-cliche to not have to think about it so much because actually facing that and seriously interrogating it would be terrifying... or maybe it is just an idle thought.
Either way, this conversation has indeed drifted quite a bit from its original charter, which is me pointing out your adamant insistence that even obviously queer content is somehow as straight and Cis as can be (I had to pry the bi concession out of you with a crowbar and then you tried to gaslight me into thinking it was your idea, naughty-naughty) is patently absurd. What, you think that queer creators can't also write trashy and silly stories? Literally everyone enjoys making trashy media every now and again.
Or for that matter, that a non-queer creator can't include queer themes either intentionally (One Piece's author literally had a drag queen friend that inspired him to make an anarchist drag queen faction) or indeed,
accidentally. Yes sometimes an author will include themes in a work without fully thinking through what they mean, because the human brain is wild like that, all these bits and pieces of ideas that creatives pick up from their environment, if they're throwing in concepts then sometimes an emergent property arises. for example, Heimlein's novel Starship Troopers basically reinvents Fascism from first principles, Heimlein wouldn't have described himself as a fascist, but because he had certain assumptions and biases, they ended up leading him down that same road.
I don't know what the author of THIS story intends... but whether accidentally or intentionally, it ended up
very queer, time will tell if it ends up Queer-baiting if it goes in the direction you seem to be expecting, or fully queered up if it goes in the direction I'm expecting.
