Fukunaga and Trans Issues in Liar Game
Jul. 22nd, 2010 01:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dagas_isaSo, basically I am a huge Liar Game manga fangirl (obvious), and I really would love to point people who want canons featuring trans characters towards it. Fukunaga Yuuji is a recurring and prominent character who is also a transwoman. She is awesome. But I also know that there's a lot of context and language issues that are...skeezy to say the least.
This is pretty much the best I can do: Talk about why I love her character, and then talk about what I think are the most problematic elements in how her trans status is treated in the Japanese and English versions.
(Obviously, this only covers the manga version. In the drama, Fukunaga is a (presumably) cis man)
So, to start with the good:
Fukunaga is awesome. Period. Okay, she suffers from the Worf Effect, but seriously: A competent, competitive, crafty female character with a black belt in karate, a love of money, a strong temper, a strong sense of pride and pragmatism and a very low tolerance for bullshit, who does crush on the main male character, but spends more time having a fairly odd friendship with the main female character,and concentrating on what’s going on around her? Yeah. She’s awesome. She’s also trans.
She’s also a very prominent character. Unlike about 80% of the characters in the manga not named Akiyama or Nao, she makes an impression and her absence is noticed (and her return celebrated). She doesn’t have Akiyama’s brains or Nao’s empathy, but she’s definitely better at taking initiative than either of them. She has a place in the story that doesn’t always revolve around Akiyama or Nao, and it’s not because she’s transgendered.
This is why I'm always really, really tempted to recommend this manga when people ask for a story where a transgendered character is featured prominently but where the story is not actually about being trans and the overall point of the character is not “being trans.”
I just can’t do it without reservations, because there’s just a lot of skeezy bits. About 70-80% of the issues could be solved by either reading the Japanese version or by somehow getting hold of a trans-friendly translation, but that still leaves a couple of issues.
To start, Fukunaga’s first appearance is as a villain, where she uses her ability to pass as both genders to swindle a check from another player, and then to attempt to double cross 21 other people. Okay, so the fangirl wants to say there are mitigating factors, (she chooses to out herself instead of Akiyama outing her, she used other, clever tricks in her attempt to swindle, she really was actively disguising herself as a specific person) the basic plot plays on the “trans people lie about their gender” trope.
So yeah, she remains prominent after this stops being a plot point and she moves beyond the villain, the authorial reason for writing her as a kick-ass trans woman instead of a kick-ass cis woman is problematic.
There’s also a certain annoying misunderstanding/heteronormativity to her character. “Trans” and “gay” are two different things that sometimes overlap, and I really don’t think Kaitani quite gets that. I think the general “you ID as a woman, so of course you like men” question in her “interview” says it. (I’d like to maybe think he was deliberately playing himself up as an ass for that, but I don’t think so). Plus there’s a bit of “she’s like an older sister to Nao, but she’s really a man” and just little gristly bits where it’s implied that she’s thought of as a woman, but then the assumption is “corrected” either by Fukunaga herself (she’d really work better as genderqueer/genderfluid character, but it’s canon that she IDs as a woman) or by other textual cues. *sigh*
And then there’s the current English translation. *another sigh* All the translators have used male pronouns and Mr. (in place of -san) for her almost exclusively, which is kind of forgivable before it’s made canon that she’s transgender and not crossdressing, but the translators still refer to her as male. Then there’s the translator who thought using “The Trap” as Fukunaga’s nickname (more recent arcs have the characters assigned nicknames based on their defining trait) was a good idea.
To make this doubly problematic, I know that a lot of other non-English scans use the “English version” as a base for their translation, rather than the original Japanese, so the problems in the English scanlation are likely bleeding through to say, the Spanish, Portuguese, or Italian versions. How to fix some of the issues could be up to debate, but there’s no mistake that the current versions have a lot of issues.
To conclude: I think there’s something honestly wonderful about Fukunaga’s and how she’s treated as a character, but it’s just surrounded by a lot of skeeze. Mostly I think it comes down of how much one wants to see an awesome trans-character versus how much irritation one can take in order to get it.
Also, unless you really, really want to spend the entirety of the fannish experience face-palming, just...stay away from the forum-based discussion.
This is pretty much the best I can do: Talk about why I love her character, and then talk about what I think are the most problematic elements in how her trans status is treated in the Japanese and English versions.
(Obviously, this only covers the manga version. In the drama, Fukunaga is a (presumably) cis man)
So, to start with the good:
Fukunaga is awesome. Period. Okay, she suffers from the Worf Effect, but seriously: A competent, competitive, crafty female character with a black belt in karate, a love of money, a strong temper, a strong sense of pride and pragmatism and a very low tolerance for bullshit, who does crush on the main male character, but spends more time having a fairly odd friendship with the main female character,and concentrating on what’s going on around her? Yeah. She’s awesome. She’s also trans.
She’s also a very prominent character. Unlike about 80% of the characters in the manga not named Akiyama or Nao, she makes an impression and her absence is noticed (and her return celebrated). She doesn’t have Akiyama’s brains or Nao’s empathy, but she’s definitely better at taking initiative than either of them. She has a place in the story that doesn’t always revolve around Akiyama or Nao, and it’s not because she’s transgendered.
This is why I'm always really, really tempted to recommend this manga when people ask for a story where a transgendered character is featured prominently but where the story is not actually about being trans and the overall point of the character is not “being trans.”
I just can’t do it without reservations, because there’s just a lot of skeezy bits. About 70-80% of the issues could be solved by either reading the Japanese version or by somehow getting hold of a trans-friendly translation, but that still leaves a couple of issues.
To start, Fukunaga’s first appearance is as a villain, where she uses her ability to pass as both genders to swindle a check from another player, and then to attempt to double cross 21 other people. Okay, so the fangirl wants to say there are mitigating factors, (she chooses to out herself instead of Akiyama outing her, she used other, clever tricks in her attempt to swindle, she really was actively disguising herself as a specific person) the basic plot plays on the “trans people lie about their gender” trope.
So yeah, she remains prominent after this stops being a plot point and she moves beyond the villain, the authorial reason for writing her as a kick-ass trans woman instead of a kick-ass cis woman is problematic.
There’s also a certain annoying misunderstanding/heteronormativity to her character. “Trans” and “gay” are two different things that sometimes overlap, and I really don’t think Kaitani quite gets that. I think the general “you ID as a woman, so of course you like men” question in her “interview” says it. (I’d like to maybe think he was deliberately playing himself up as an ass for that, but I don’t think so). Plus there’s a bit of “she’s like an older sister to Nao, but she’s really a man” and just little gristly bits where it’s implied that she’s thought of as a woman, but then the assumption is “corrected” either by Fukunaga herself (she’d really work better as genderqueer/genderfluid character, but it’s canon that she IDs as a woman) or by other textual cues. *sigh*
And then there’s the current English translation. *another sigh* All the translators have used male pronouns and Mr. (in place of -san) for her almost exclusively, which is kind of forgivable before it’s made canon that she’s transgender and not crossdressing, but the translators still refer to her as male. Then there’s the translator who thought using “The Trap” as Fukunaga’s nickname (more recent arcs have the characters assigned nicknames based on their defining trait) was a good idea.
To make this doubly problematic, I know that a lot of other non-English scans use the “English version” as a base for their translation, rather than the original Japanese, so the problems in the English scanlation are likely bleeding through to say, the Spanish, Portuguese, or Italian versions. How to fix some of the issues could be up to debate, but there’s no mistake that the current versions have a lot of issues.
To conclude: I think there’s something honestly wonderful about Fukunaga’s and how she’s treated as a character, but it’s just surrounded by a lot of skeeze. Mostly I think it comes down of how much one wants to see an awesome trans-character versus how much irritation one can take in order to get it.
Also, unless you really, really want to spend the entirety of the fannish experience face-palming, just...stay away from the forum-based discussion.
no subject
Date: 2010-07-22 10:15 pm (UTC)Heh, this advice could work for so many different fandoms.
no subject
Date: 2010-07-23 05:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-25 02:41 am (UTC)