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Behind the cut is a response to the very interesting reviews and discussion thread on the new Banana Fish anime at Anime Feminist.
"Banana Fish: A Defense of Ash and Eiji's Relationship as Non-Sexual"
I am so happy to have found these reviews and this discussion thread. I love—and miss—this kind of engagement with fandom. The degree to which reading these perspectives keys up my emotions also shows me how invested I am in the relationship between Ash and Eiji.
Like many in this conversation, I am invested, in a large part, because I care about representation, because I don’t want to see aspects of human experience erased, silenced, or distorted to create an oversimplified portrait of acceptable norms. I completely agree that BF participates in this erasure and distortion (especially with race and homosexuality), but I also love it because it represents my experience in a way very few, if any, other works do. With that backdrop I will argue that it does a disservice to human diversity to read Ash and Eiji as necessarily gay—or to argue they necessarily should/would have been written as gay but for the 1980s. Their relationship is doing something else.
( Light Spoilers for minor textual details )
"Banana Fish: A Defense of Ash and Eiji's Relationship as Non-Sexual"
I am so happy to have found these reviews and this discussion thread. I love—and miss—this kind of engagement with fandom. The degree to which reading these perspectives keys up my emotions also shows me how invested I am in the relationship between Ash and Eiji.
Like many in this conversation, I am invested, in a large part, because I care about representation, because I don’t want to see aspects of human experience erased, silenced, or distorted to create an oversimplified portrait of acceptable norms. I completely agree that BF participates in this erasure and distortion (especially with race and homosexuality), but I also love it because it represents my experience in a way very few, if any, other works do. With that backdrop I will argue that it does a disservice to human diversity to read Ash and Eiji as necessarily gay—or to argue they necessarily should/would have been written as gay but for the 1980s. Their relationship is doing something else.
( Light Spoilers for minor textual details )
