Appare-Ranman! touches on gender equality, racism, sexism, xenophobia, toxic masculinity, neurodiversity, PTSD, teamwork, sportspersonship, ethics, and dealing with bad actors. While navigating all this, the main characters increasingly recognize their interdependence and how that’s not only okay, but their strength and advantage.
Mild character development spoilers:
I enjoyed the character development, particularly how the autistic-coded Appare challenges and breaks out of the usual tropes. The show leans on those tropes, but develops and humanizes beyond them. Appare is also ace and aro coded, and, again, develops sufficiently past the tropes to be satisfying.
Appare says “Feed me” while absorbed in his special interests. Oh, how I relate. Like Appare, I need a Cavendish bubble of support as I go about my SpIns. Like Appare, I’ve taken that support for granted. Like Appare, I eventually recognized that.
I want a season 2, one that follows Appare and Jing and their respective teams as they pursue their passions while navigating society. There can be another race, or not. There can be more action fight scenes, or not. I just want to see these characters develop.
I watched the English dub version, BTW. I’m enjoying the writing and acting on most of the anime dubs I watch these days. Contrast with my childhood in the 1970s and 80s when we existed on frugal fare.
With Republicans criminalizing transgender existence and pushing for government-mandated conversion therapy—forcing youth to have the wrong puberty—the chorus to Victoria has been running through my head on this Trans Day of Visibility.
Why are there greater mental health stresses on autistic people from gender-minority groups? To quote from the research paper,
“The increased rates of mental health problems in these minority populations are often a consequence of the stigma and marginalisation attached to living outside mainstream sociocultural norms (Meyer 2003). This stigma can lead to what Meyer (2003) refers to as ‘minority stress’. This stress could come from external adverse events, which among other forms of victimization could include verbal abuse, acts of violence, sexual assault by a known or unknown person, reduced opportunities for employment and medical care, and harassment from persons in positions of authority (Sandfort et al. 2007).”
Protecting queer kids protects also neurodivergent kids-and vice versa. The fight is for inclusion and acceptance-for all operating systems, for all of our different ways of being human. Supporting our kids means supporting all of their possibilities and expressions.
Republicans are killing us. Music can only do so much. What are you doing? Are you emptying the pews of the toxic Christianity fueling this bigotry?
Usually, for adherents of this kind of repressive Christianity, queer people are not supposed to exist, and when their existence cannot be ignored, it poses a problem to be solved, sometimes literally with references to Satan. Given that objections to the legalization of same-sex marriage and the now seriously threatened expansion of transgender visibility and rights are flashpoints in the contemporary right-wing backlash, it is of the utmost importance to amplify the voices of members of the LGBTQ community harmed by conservative Christianity.
it has become clear that right-wing Christians—evangelicals, radical traditionalist Catholics, and Mormons—are authoritarians who will dismantle democracy before they will give up power.
Lines like “With any luck, your group identity will be the least interesting thing about you” from techbro rationalists and other assorted white boy whisperers wrapped in reason bother me for many reasons. This from Tressie McMillan Cottom’s “Thick” captures a big one:
In a discussion of methods and theories and other such things that comprise a significant part of my job, one of the women—we were all women—said assuredly that we have moved on, past black and white. Hence, “black people are over.” I did not feel over and I am most certainly black. But it was said so casually because of the kind of black that I am presumed to be in rooms such as these. There have been many such rooms and I end up in more of them, more frequently, the more I inch up the class ladder. The proclamation makes a mistake of assuming that black people, like me, were only ever a problem and not a people.