Today’s deck is the Queer Tarot
I’m gonna be perfectly honest: I tend to be wary of media and anything that presents itself as Queer. I’m a Queer myself, mind you, but there’s just a certain… something that tends to make me cautious around it, and this deck actually helped me realize what it is through a positive contrast.
If I had to put it in poorly-thought out words, I guess I’d say it’s that the other media tends to feel like it’s trying too hard? This deck is Gay As Fuck but it feels like the authors have the people they’re trying to be inclusive about in their own lives, there’s a sense less of “oh I don’t have a disabled person in the deck let’s make one” and more “I know someone that has to use a mobility scooter and they’re one of the raddest people I know and I wanna make a rad card with them”.
I don’t know the authors personally mind you, but it’s the impression I got.
I’ve tried like three or four other inclusive decks in the past and they do a thing where they have three versions of The Lovers you can choose from (MxM, FxF, and the traditional MxF), and while I DO appreciate the idea and I really like the concept of a deck where you can finetune the imagery to your liking, I have even more respect for this one drawing a line in the sand and going “Everyone in The Lovers is clearly Gender Non Conforming and that’s that”.
Today’s reading is reflecting that I’ve got a lot of money matters (not necessarily good or bad specifically, mind you) in mind, which… yeah, no shit.
I’m shocked I didn’t wake up with more of a headache. Not complaining, though. I am very low energy today, though.
I had plans to meet up with friends later today, so in the meantime I just kept sorting stuff around. A new bookshelf arrived but I left it for after returning from hanging out.
Eventually the time comes and I go to Banpakukinen Koen where I had a chat over burgers.
I come back and oh hey would you look at that I can finally brag that Jill is voiced by Silence Suzuka.
I saw someone comment that that’s a full circle moment, but the real full circle is Kanae Ito as Dorothy because she basically voiced most characters I ended up writing in our old anime blog back in the day.
Riding that high I built the bookshelf and started filling it with doujinshi. I took the chance also to sort by artist (specifically the ones I know I have a lot of) to see if I fished for dupes.
I believe I’ve mentioned this in the past, but one thing I love is seeing artists evolve, ever since I decided to read Bleach as a teen and noticed how markedly different the art was from the anime.
I think it’s because it feels like that evolution is a story unto itself.
Anyway, I got to thinking about it because there’s plenty of artists I’ve followed… since high school honestly, and I got to buy some of the doujinshi I read back in the day. But I was specifically thinking about Tsumetoro’s Gentleman’s Maid Sophie series.
That one provides a fun case study because there’s plenty others I could bring up like Fullmetal Madness’ Asahi’s evolution, but usually there’s a sense of going from rough starter to pro, Tsumetoro was already squarely a Pro by the time volume 1 of GMS came out, but then you see Volume 10 and feels like a fun reminder that even when you think you’ve plateau’d you’ll always keep improving.
What I find so fascinating about the style evolution is that you get this sense of self-actualization of having an idea of where the artist wants to go and seeing them find their way there.
Nonco’s evolution between their earlier manga and Kanan-sama… or for that matter between their earlier Kancolle gag doujinshi and their latest Blue Archive illustration books are another good example, but that’s a tangent for later.
Speaking of tangents, it’s fun to see how artists change when they’ve had to publish a manga and when they haven’t, there’s this specific kind of polish that you only see in people that’ve had to churn out drawings on an industrial scale, a very specific kind of streamlining.
This is about the time where I realized I’d been standing up still up for three hours thanks to hyperfocus so I went to bed with my legs feeling like dry twigs.