Avatar

문을 하나 만들자 너의 맘 속에다

@visualtaehyun

Bella ☆ '95 ☆ multifandom blog
Avatar

I mean, treating yaoi as the opposite of yuri just doesn't make sense mathematically: boys are not the inverse of girls. The actual opposite of yuri would somehow have to involve fewer than zero girls, and that's not an easy thing to characterise.

Avatar

It has been proposed in the notes that shonen anime, Hideo Kojima games, and police procedurals where all the women die by the end satisfy the criterion of having fewer than zero girls in various ways.

Identifying the common thread of these proposals, we may thus conclude that the opposite of yuri is Supernatural.

Avatar

("Doesn't that just put us back at square one with respect to positing that yaoi is the opposite of yuri" well, no, because Supernatural is also, for unrelated reasons, the opposite of yaoi.)

I think something I love about Moonlight Chicken is that you get three different generations of LGBTQ characters sharing the same space and you can see, through the subtleties of their interactions and their outlooks, the events and perspectives that have shaped them and how much (and how little) the world has changed.

You have Jim, nearing 40 and clearly shaped by countless people (including his loved ones) not welcoming who he is and who he loves and who believed, to a certain extent, that it was "normal" for people to think that way, who accepts himself but still has difficulty with what it means to be gay in the wider world.

Then you have Wen, 10 years younger and proud and open and comfortable with who he is and his place in the world. He knows all the lingo, he seems like a little bit of an activist (if his taste in decor is to be believed) and he's used to having discussions around sexuality and social norms.

Finally, Li Ming, even younger still and so comfortable in himself that he doesn't particularly feel the need to explore or explain his sexuality and his attraction to Heart, he just embraces it as another part of what makes him him and leaves the nail biting and the questions to other people.

They literally show us the transition from "being LGBTQ is something I must live with" to "being LGBTQ is something I must fight for" to, finally "being LGBTQ is one of the many bits that is me" without ever saying it out loud.

It's genuinely such a beautiful piece of commentary and, in my eyes, it makes the show even more meaningful and beautiful.