Nooooooo, my baby!

I just discovered that another victim of the recent TV Tropes Pedo-n-Porn purge is one of my own creations: the main page on Hen, Hiroya Oku's legendarily bad "yuri" manga.

To which I say: Hey you inconsiderate fucknugget mods, I put a lot of time and effort and love into cataloguing all the hilariously mishandled tropes contained within that godawful masterpiece, and I do not appreciate you vaporizing all my hard work! I even did my best to keep my snarking as mild and deadpan as possible so as not to violate the site's Don't Criticize Anything Because We're All Delicate Flowers policy. I know that Hen is a) obscure and b) terrible so no one but me is going to mourn the page's deletion, but dammit some things are worth troping because they're complete crap!

Although I'm pretty sure I know exactly what triggered the page's deletion — it was the scene where SPOILER AND TRIGGER WARNING FOR BRAIN-BLEACH-NECESSITATING REVERSE-PEDO RAPE CREEPINESS where the heroine gets raped by an 11-year-old boy. Yeah, that happens. Though it's less "pedo fanservice" and more "the writer is tripping balls."

Luckily I also discovered that some kind soul rescued the page from oblivion and archived it. And by "some kind soul," I mean the apparently resurrected Encyclopedia Dramatica. Never thought I'd be feeling grateful towards ED of all people.

Bandwagon, awaaaaay!

So the other day, nenena posted about this new-ish shonen manga called Shingeki no Kyojin aka Attack on Titan that recently got licensed, and she was especially focusing on all the gender-related stuff that this series does really well.

And I was like, "Hmm, ladies. Ladies and shonen."

>.>

<.<

Oh come on, you guys know me by now. The best way to grab my undivided attention is to put the words "shonen" and "awesome ladies" in close proximity. It was basically inevitable that I was going to read this thing.

Anyway, I wanted to record my first impressions of this manga for posterity. I flipped through the most recent two chapters (34-35 I think) and two things jumped out at me:

Thing 1: A badass ninja-looking chick with dual-weilded swords flipping out and fighting a giant building-size woman who is naked in a non-fanservicey way.

Thing 2: Some bishie-looking dude with glasses interrogating another guy by dangling him over the edge of the city walls and basically going "I'm tired of your bullshit, either tell us what you know or learn to fly."

Oh wait, except that bishie-looking dude is actually a woman.

I only found this out by going to the character's tag on Pixiv and being like "Wait, why is everyone drawing this character genderflipped? ... OH WAIT"

You know why I couldn't figure this out from the manga itself? Because a) the military outfits worn by the main characters are unisex and are loose-fitting enough that boobs are not easily visible, b) this character's facial features aren't drawn with any kind of feminine coding like doe eyes, prominent eyelashes, or accentuated lips — her face just looks like a regular person's face, and c) her personality (in that scene at least) comes across as your typical shonen dude — direct, tough, favoring force over diplomacy, and not taking crap from people.

Okay, Attack on Titan: YOU GOT ME. You pushed all the right buttons. I'm yours. <3