Baradhi Script

We have it as common courtesy to leave actors who are minors alone in terms of suggestive or sexual content, but what really happens in practice? And what does that indicate about widespread biases?

In mid 2022 when we were awaiting for the release of Kamen Rider Geats, one Twitter user, noting that Na-go was the only female Rider, made a jokey redraw of the Encounter Arc Riders as that one gangbang porn meme and was promptly harassed to all hell once the cast was revealed and we found out Na-go, or rather Neon Kurama, would be played by then 17 years old Yuna Hoshino.

And so, this was the start of me noticing something very very weird, because her castmate, Kazuto Mokudai was only a few months older than she was then, having just turned 18 in late May of that year, but while people were very comfortable being all kinds of sexual regarding freshly adult Mokudai and his character (“Geats should’ve premiered two years earlier so my TL would be full of cow bikini Michinagas”), Yuna and Neon remained rather untouchable for English speaking fandom even post-series. (There are 60 pages of Kamen Rider Geats fanfics on Ao3. There is less than one complete page of Explicit fanfiction in English featuring Neon Kurama as a character at all, even if we count the ones where she is not a participant in the action.)

But what really shocked me was something I actually noticed this year after Kamen Rider Revice entered my brain and refused to come out. So, the date is March 18th, there I go, browsing Twitter, and I see a little art piece by a Japanese artist I follow wishing Wataru Hyuga (Daiji in Revice) a happy 20th birthday, and hold on a fucking minute, he was 17 for like most of Revice????? To be honest, I did have a huge OCD moment because I think he’s really pretty (call me when they put him in a wedding dress again) and the spiders in my brain were saying you’re a bad person, Kira for it, but let us not linger too long on that. Let’s linger on the fandom etiquette disparity I noticed.

Because I am obsessed with Revice and specifically with Daiji and Kagerou because they are Just Like Me For Real-

-I know the fic repertoire for Revice like the back of my hand - the Chinese ones too -, so I can’t help but notice… why were the first several Revice smut fics in English rape fics about the character played by a 17-year old actor?

Similarly, I am also a Yuri warrior and a lesbian and it’s rather salient to me that while Ayaka Imoto was an adult throughout much more of the show than the actor playing the middle brother, we in the Yuri mines are starving for something a little more heavy. I remember all the discourse surrounding HanaSaku as the episodes were coming out and I’m glad that’s mostly in the past, but sadly even as we’ve edged into post-show territory where Sakura is definitely an adult, HanaSaku smut fics just do not exist and if you sexualise Kamen Rider Jeanne you are liable for execution.

Honestly… life’s hard out here as a lesbian who likes tits, okay!!! I have moral OCD and severe trauma from being harassed online. Am I allowed to reblog this gravure scan of Runa Toyoda to my Tumblr or will the Ultraman Trigger discoursers who call Darrgon a super creep because “Yuna just turned 18!!!” call me a super creep? Why is speculating about the Toku to BL pipeline okay but noting that a recently cast actress does gravure is trashy? Why is an Asian woman a permanent child and an Asian man fair game?

The answer is not actually “Misandry is real”, by the way. This is just old school misogyny and racism.

The very same white supremacist patriarchal idea that the Orientalised, racialised Other is not as developed into their gender role as the Western ideal that leads people to emasculate East Asian men and teenagers into perfect fetish objects to do whatever they want with is responsible for people being mad at the idea of shipping a character played by a thirty year old woman with her canonical husband because she looks young (King-Ohger discourse was horrible for me, I literally thought it was making me mald, but it was testosterone! Oops!). While the men are seen as not complete males and thus easy to overpower in a similar fashion to pederasty cultures all over the world, but now not only reserved to the pleasure of only higher ranked men, the women are seen as permanent underdeveloped children that must be protected by their white/Western saviour from evil exploiters - which is a fate similar to that experienced by other women of colour in the white supremacist sexual hierarchy: you might be a woman, but you are unfuckable, unfit to reproduce with Real Important People, and anyone who thinks otherwise has a fetish.

While I say this I want to stress, am I trying to take away your BL or your M/M fanfics or tasteful guy ass fanart? No.

Celebrity culture is what it is or else people wouldn’t be writing Omegaverse of Formula 1 pilots.

It just annoys me very much that we have such double standards on what’s fine and what’s not. That I have to think “Can I write evil and fucked up horror Yuri fanfic or will people have me hanged?”. That I have seen a 19-year old get called out on Twitter for privately drawing NSFW of female characters that could be in the same class as him. That I can’t have a suitfucking poll without people being “Um, this monster possessed a minor once” as if I’m not talking about the suit.

Like, seriously, it’s extremely hard to like women in this fandom. People barely engage with what you do, and if you’re not Wholesome you’re doomed. Though that is a problem with most F/F or women-centred fandoms in a way. People are willing to explore anything with men. With women? Not so much.

A lot of that is steeped in fear of surveillance, I believe. We’ve collectively created environments where “problematic” Yuri is denounced and deemed “fetishising” and “for men”, so people do not feel compelled to add to that count, lest they be deemed a male fetishizer and harassed. While similar criticisms exist for BL as well, they were never quite as ubiquitous or well accepted - the complaints could never make a dent on the sheer amount of it all.

So with this little first Baradhi Post I guess I just want to provoke some thought. Maybe I’ll expand more on some things later? Who knows.