Board Thread:Fun and Games/@comment-24187738-20151214152123/@comment-26496429-20151217203428

If I’m going to talk about what Love Live! means to me, I really have to go back to summer of last year. At that time, I was just on the cusp of really figuring out my gender (as a genderfluid transgender girl). Enter Sailor Moon Crystal. I got caught up in this wonderful story about girly girls who were daring, exciting, interesting, and heroic… and totally fabulous. The phrase that about any feminist media scholar will use with Sailor Moon is “weaponized femininity,” and that was exactly what appealed to me – and exactly what I needed to see at the time. A few months later, I’d moved eight hours away to another state, to attend grad school but really to be closer to my then-girlfriend, whom I’d been watching Crystal with over Skype. By this time, Crystal was over, and we’d made our way through a rewatch of Tamako Market, so we tried out two new shows I’d seen on Tumblr that looked appealingly feminist (and appealingly queer): Yuuki Yuuna and Love Live! Yuuki Yuuna was fun (for lack of a better word), but Love Live! was the one that really grabbed me. There was something about it that just drew me in, not in the way that Crystal did with its plotting and rich characterization, but just… joy. It had such a sense of ebullience in it, embodied best in Honoka’s character. So we went about the task of watching all two seasons (plus the Music START! OVA), all along falling more in love with it. “I like it because it’s basically a show about girls being nice to each other,” my ex said. I couldn’t agree more. Eventually, we both became tremendous school idol trash, both of us playing SIF in both English and Japanese and collecting figures and other merch, and me seeking out the manga and diaries that had been translated. In a way, it became a central part of our relationship. We considered cosplaying Rinpana together, since Hanayo was her waifu and Rin was my general favorite (owing mostly to my headcanoning her as a transgirl like me). One of my most distinct memories of our time together was lying in her bed when I’d come out to see her for a day she was working at her school’s con (normally she came to see me, and that weekend was a difficult one for me because of the heavy constraints on our time together), watching the OVA and then glaring at the TV saying, “What was that?!” We eagerly bought up Love Live! merchandise at a large con we went to, with me trading her the chibi Hanayo figure I got from a blind box for her Honoka, and pointing out a full-size Hanayo figure for her. And then… the single biggest fight we ever had was over whether or not I would take her friend with us to see the Love Live! movie. She left me not quite two months ago, and every day is still a struggle for me. And finally it struck me that my stages of grief over Love Live! mirrored my stages of grief over our relationship surprisingly well. First, the absolute sadness of getting that message saying she was breaking up with me, or leaving the theater after µ’s had vowed they were over. Then, the period of acceptance and even contentedness, thinking things would be okay: thinking after a little time we’d get back together, or that µ’s would keep going, just not in the anime. And then the final blow: learning that she’d started pursuing someone a month into our “break,” despite the intention of the break being for her to be single, or confirmation of the Final Love Live! And with it, something like despair. I’ve known a lot of losses in my life. Truthfully, this breakup is the hardest I’ve ever had to overcome. But in a way, I think Love Live! makes it easier. For a while, I actually had to avoid LL, because it reminded me so much of my ex, but now I’m able to enjoy it again, and it’s become a welcome distraction from my desolation. But moreover, it gives me something to identify with. It showed me all these queer female characters who live generally very happy lives, which was a good reminder that it’s okay for me to be a queer girl, and that I can still be happy this way. It gave me Nozomi, geographically isolated from her family like I am, who nonetheless survives and thrives in spite of her darker moments. And it gives me joy. That Kylie Minogue-like brand of joy that’s so vital to my two favorite characters, Honoka and Rin, and to the franchise as a whole, is infectious. It will never actually fill the void in my heart left by such a painful breakup, or by my mental disorders, or the other things that affect me. But for a moment, it can reach into me and pull me out of it, and let me return to a place where I can be happy. And to me, there’s really nothing more valuable than happiness. (I just accidentally tried to post this reply without being logged in, so I'm sorry if it posts twice!)