#20 Are You Still Watching? An anime love poem ❤️🔥
Get in the mood for Valentine's Day with a poem from Liz F. Hawk, and love & sex features from our back issues. Plus: save the date for our launch party!
Save The Date: Issue 9 Launch Party
March 14 ◦ Tammy’s Wine Bar (1662 Queen St W, Toronto) ◦ 7:00pm
Join us for an evening of readings and games to celebrate the launch of Issue 9: Hometown! Mark your calendars and stay tuned for more details 😈
“Translation Notes”
by Liz F. Hawk
Your sempai’s1, 2 notebook – full of smut that she wrote based on the fansub3
because the official translation isn’t accurate
Borrowed yaoi4
Where bishounen5 kiss kawaii6 boys
who look like the girls
you want to kiss
Inline A/N7
about who tops
Keikaku means plan8
Because lingo means in-group
Subtitles hard-coded9 to show we don’t need dubs
Subtitles hard-coded to match each character’s color
Subtitles hard-coded to sing like karaoke
Subtitles hard-coded to
explain honorifics1
explain the red string10
Notes:
1Honorifics - Japanese uses a variety of name suffixes to express respect and information about relationships between people. The omission of suffixes implies a high degree of intimacy or close friendship. People will debate until they are blue in the face about whether translations should keep honorifics to preserve the nuances they add or omit them to improve the flow of the text in English. This is a patently ridiculous debate whose answer is so obvious that there’s no need to include it here.
2Sempai - A Japanese honorific meaning “senior.” It is used often by students referring to those who are in a higher grade than them, but is also used by coworkers to refer to someone who has been at a company longer. Maybe if you’re lucky, sempai will notice you before they graduate.
3Fansub - Unofficial, fan-made subtitled translations. In the days before simulcast anime releases, fansubs would often be released long before an official sub or dub was available. For some shows, the work of passionate fansubbers remains the only way to watch in English. Because fansubs are often more literal in their translation than professional translations that have been edited to have a more natural cadence to the dialog, some fans feel they’re more “accurate” (which sometimes just means there’s more swearing).
4Yaoi - Boy x boy, don’t like don’t read! Explicit works of male/male romance. The term is an abbreviation from a dismissive Japanese phrase about male/male relationships meaning “No lows, no highs, no point.” While yaoi only saw moderate, short-lived use as a descriptor for the genre in Japan itself, the term caught on rather strongly in the U.S. From events like Yaoicon and independent English language comic publishers like Yaoi Press to “I ❤ Yaoi” shirts at Hot Topic (A/N: I definitely had one of these) and wooden paddles with the word yaoi on them, yaoi had a whole generation of fans saying “Wowee!” about two dudes bumping uglies.
5Bishounen - Japanese for “beautiful boy.” Another term used broadly in American anime fandom to describe any sort of attractive dude in anime that has limited to no actual use in Japan. Classic bishie characteristics include luscious locks and TEH ANGST, white hair and villainy optional. From Final Fantasy VII’s Sephiroth to the titular character of Rurouni Kenshin, there’s a bishounen for everybody.
6Kawaii - Japanese for “cute.”
7A/N - A common fanfic abbreviation for “author’s note.” Author’s notes usually precede the text of the story, containing warnings about content, disclaimers about ownership of the original canon, or general thoughts and feelings that were on the author’s mind when they posted the fic, but sometimes might crop up unexpectedly in the middle of a story. (A/N: This is also a great spot to give a shout-out to all your lovely commenters, since fanfiction.net is ebil and refuses to let us reply to each other!!!!)
8Keikaku means plan - A notorious and much mocked/parodied translation note from the original fansub of Death Note. The main character is subtitled as saying, “All according to keikaku*” with text at the top of the screen reading “*T/N: Keikaku means plan.”
9Subtitles hard-coded - As coding for video files improved, fansubs could come in hard-coded or soft-coded. Hard-coded subtitles are permanently added to the video, whereas soft-coded subs can be turned on or off. Nowadays most subs are soft-coded, but in the mid-2000s almost all subs were hard-coded, and it was common for fansubs to color code, use different fonts, or otherwise fancify their subtitles (especially for opening and ending themes) from the standard “ugly” yellow with black outline that was standard for many professional subtitles at the time.
10The red string of fate - Hold up your pinkie. Maybe you can’t see it, but wrapped around that finger is a crimson string stretching out across the world, tying you to the person who’s meant for you. It’s a comforting thought, isn’t it? Even if it feels like you’re the only girl (or maybe-not-a-girl) who has ever felt that way about a friend they spent countless hours with, telling stories about Axel and Roxas’ doomed romance that spun out like a metaphor screaming “I love you, I love you” to a girl who didn’t love you back, there is someone out there waiting on the other end of that string whose heart is screaming the same damn thing. That string might stretch or tangle, but it will never break.
Liz F. Hawk subsists on a steady diet of anime, short fiction, and raw pasta to support a life of queer healthcare advocacy.
my crushes burn hot and then die
On desire and control in To Live and Die in L.A.
by Cassandra May
It’s snowing outside, but I can feel the heat rising off the concrete, smog coats the air, the palms stand stark still, a cicada’s buzz fills my ear. A close-up of Willem Dafoe and his brutalist bone structure, wide lips, brow knotted, cheekbones I want to curl up and sleep inside. Dressed in all black, he takes a Zippo to the edge of a painting, then: a burning; flames engulf the portrait of a woman with fiery red hair. Immediately, we’re plunged into the fire that threatens to engulf its master.
~
I crush a lot. I mean a lot. Various vapid, burning frenzies fill my mind. Seconds, hours, days, weeks, months, years — my mind’s conjured passion waxing and waning with my moods, the seasons, my relationship status.
~
William Friedkin’s 1985 neo-noir thriller, To Live and Die in L.A., brims with sensual amorality set to a pulsing, synthetic soundtrack. Secret Service Agent Jimmy Hart (Michael Greene) is days away from retirement but sees out one last attempt to catch an elusive counterfeit artist, Rick Masters (Dafoe). The chase is devoid of reason, it’s intense, feverish, pure adrenaline. It’s the feeling that threatens to burst from your chest when you drive the wrong way down the highway. Hart is killed and after discovering his body in a dumpster, Hart’s partner and best friend, Richard Chance (William Petersen), vows to catch Masters and doesn’t give a shit how he does it. His soon-to-be new partner, John Vukovich (John Pankow), bears witness. In the cycle of revenge and the pursuit of justice that propels perp and cop towards each other, we see A Crush in action.
❤️🔥 Read the rest here →
Feeling Loving? Zachary Vito recommends Le Week-End (2013) on our Film Recommendation Generator:
Watching Le-Weekend feels like this:
After being lost for the better part of an hour, you rush in from your bitter winters walk into a warm and sophisticated hotel. The place you didn’t book, but wanted so badly to. You relax. You soften. A bowl of soup is brought to you. You go to take your first bite and find on your spoon, sitting atop the cooked carrots, a glittering shard of glass.
It also feels like this:
A glass of red wine at the end of your day. Your favourite record playing. Some gentle rain pattering on the window. You’re so excited for your partner to come home. They pull open the door and tell you that they’ve been fired. This is complicated because you spontaneously decided to quit your job today.
It feels like this:
You wake up in bed. The day is grey. It’s a Wednesday. You have been retired for 7 years, married to your partner sleeping next to you for 44. You wonder what leaving would feel like. What packing a small bag, dropping your cellphone in the toilet and slipping out the front door before they wake up would actually feel like. You do it. Holy shit, you’re actually out the front door. And then you laugh. You laugh so much. You go back inside, crawl into bed and hold your partner for a long time.
Zachary Vito is a screenwriter based in Toronto.
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