The Long Foretold Hannigram Yuri

CUUUUUUUTE AAAAAAHHHHHH

🌻🍂 Askeladd & Thorfinn 🍂🌻

Hello

Hello lol

Regret

Thorfinn doesn't wanna be there but I do

🦉x🐻+🐱

The Wrong Turn

Guess who's back here? I had a bumpy ride but I made it eventually.

alpha askeladd x omega bjorn

Why Vinland Saga is so Impactful to Me

I know that the thing that makes me feel so connected to Vinland Saga is Askeladd and Thorfinn's relationship. Something about it is one of the most impactful things to me, but Ive been trying to think of what it is so I can capture it again in new art.

I think what it might be is something about hating someone you love/loving someone you hate. Something about how we don't get to choose who we hate or who we love and the great unfairness of it all

Like if I hate my father, I hate someone I love. I don't get a choice of just hating him. No matter what I want, he will be a deeply important part of my life, even if he died and disappeared forever (I don't hate my dad, it's more complicated than that. I love him but feel hurt by him. This is just for example purposes).

Like Thorfinn does not get a choice; the man he hates and wanted to kill is forever a very important part of his life. Because Askeladd raised him, Askeladd is permanently important. There is nothing that lets us move on 100% from these permanently important people. No matter what we want, they will keep affecting us. There's something hard-hitting about this unfairness.

I think Askeladd and Thorfinn's relationship impacts me the most because it's one of the purest examples of getting no choice in how we feel about someone: An enemy who has done horrible things to you becoming like a father to you. It also captures the extreme unfairness of this situation by having Askeladd be taken away from Thorfinn in a way that was completely out of his control. He didn't even get to end Askeladd on his own terms. Someone else took away his reason for living, the person who he defined his life by, even though he hated this person.

It's just very oof to love someone you hate.

Yep this is me like "God what do I have to do besides practicing."

Sometimes shit is just hard folks. We gotta be okay with making bad art for the sake of improvement. Everyone starts off bad at art and has to practice to improve.

Are Fujos Male Centered?

Posting this to share my thoughts on some discourse I saw on Twitter.

The practice of only shipping men is male-centered in a way, obviously, but I want to clarify some things about my position beyond this obvious statement. I don't think being a fujoshi is any kind of moral or feminist failing.

It makes sense that we, in a sexist world, are more interested in male characters on average. This is one factor in why someone would prefer MLM media. But equally impactful and inseparable is the fact that a sexist world leads writers to write women worse than they write men, on average. Someone with truly no bias favoring men would still like male characters more often than female characters because the male characters are most often written better. For a person to have a roughly equal amount of male and female favorite characters, they have to purposefully seek out media with good female leads or lower their standards for what makes a good female character.

There's a million reasons why fujoshis or people in general prefer male characters, and none of them are moral failings. Fujos aren't very secretive about centering men in media preferences. It would be silly to say shipping mostly or only men isn't a male-centered practice in at least one sense. Like no shit. But does that mean fujos center men in every aspect of life? Noooooo. It does not, at all! Does it make them "bad feminists"? No. Most of the world is taught to favor men. Decentering men is a purposeful effort, not a state most people grow into naturally.

Now, to talk about myself. Most of my ships are MLM. These are the main reasons:

I live in a sexist world and absorbed subconscious preferences from that.

There are more good male relationships in stories than there are good female+male or female+female relationships.

I'm a little bit damaged by sexism in a way where I feel more comfortable enjoying romances with no women involved. When I see a woman on screen, there's this dread that lingers in the back of my mind because I'm waiting for her to be treated shittily by the narrative or for her to prove to be just another two-dimensional female character.

If the story subverts my expectations, the dread goes away, but the dread exists for a reason: often women characters are treated or written in the ways I dread to see. Thank god for all media that subverts my expectation for shallow female characters. Media with well-written female characters did so much to heal my relationship with myself; being born with the body of a woman, having this body my whole life, and experiencing the gendered upbringing that comes with it.

I've made a huge effort to decenter men over the years, and I think I've done a damn good job. I don't think I can completely erase all the effects of sexist conditioning from my brain, but I deal with internalized misogyny when it crops up, and that's enough. I deeply love women now, and things associated with women. It took a long, long time to get to this point.

Everyone, let's stop faulting people for shit like being male-centered. No shit people are male-centered, we live in male-centric masculinity land. So if someone actually cares about women's issues and treating women fairly, good enough. I don't call myself a fujo—I like yuri and sometimes straight ships—but I don't think it would be a moral failing on my part if I only liked MLM ships.

Most of my OTPs are MLM. That is a symptom of living in a sexist world. It's a wonderful mix of internalized misogyny (maybe. I've rooted a lot of that out) and the fact that there are fewer cool relationship dynamics written involving women than those written involving male friends. This does not at all indicate a failure on my part.

Moral of the story:

Getting through this world as a woman or as a person perceived as a woman is confusing as fuck and hard to navigate. Let's accept this reality and not be shitty to each other because of it.