M Digs Through Jrockyaoi Archives And Pulls Out Interesting Shit Part 1

[stardust_rifle]

The visual kei autism came back with a vengance. I am currently downloading everything posted to the LiveJournal Jrockyaoi comm for preservation purposes, and have decided to do a feature for Three Weeks For Dreamwidth where I pull out interesting quotes and observations and present them for a general audience! This will probably be interesting if you're into fandom trends, fandom history, weeb-adjacent stuff, and RPF/LJ fandom culture, even if you don't know what visual kei is. Comments that make no sense if you aren't a vkei weirdo will be prefaced with (bangya inside baseball), "bangya" being a term for "visual kei fan".*

What is visual kei? If you want to go nuts, here's probably the best English-language history of the movement, but if you're just here for the fandom culture stuff, it's a subfield of Japanese rock and metal music scene primarily characterized by its unique emphasis on visuals, described by Cracked as "the aftermath of an orgy between lolitas, goths, vampires and anime characters where everybody had to hurriedly get dressed in the dark." Bandmen who crossdress regularly are so common in the scene that there's a specific term for it in English-speaking fandom (onnagata). Stagegay is omnipresent and goes insanely hard. It may not have been intended as the Perfect Music Genre For Edgy Fujos, but that is the role it ended up filling.

Follow me below the cut!





On January 31st, 2004, a poor bastard by the name of blckroseunicorn posted this tale of woe:

"I've got a question to ask.... are there any Ken/Yukihiro (from L'Arc~en~ciel) fanfictions out there? I don't mean as the two just being a very small part of the story as I've seen so often but I mean as a main part of the story."

The Eternal Background Ship Syndrome Warriors salute you throughout time and space. Our rallying cry of "please please please please have there be something about our OTP that doesn't sideline them to the background" is a strong and eternal one. Happily, a piece of fanfic was linked, but it's on a Geocities website that the Wayback Machine didn't get to, so sadly, I can't confirm whether or not our Eternal Background Ship Syndrome Warrior's desires were properly fulfilled.

~*~

Also, I can not actually find the damn post right now and it's nearly midnight so I don't want to go looking, but I saw a post in the comm where someone posted a link to a Human Rights Campaign online petition for gay marriage. I think given the state of the world right now, it's really rare that you get the "I stopped being homophobic thanks to slash/yaoi" types nowadays. That era kind of died in the mid 2010s, and honestly, I'm glad it did, but I feel like there's something a bit special about that time period, and I don't know why. Just the idea of fandom and fanfiction having such a positive tangible real-world impact in that way feels really nice to me, I guess.

~*~

*Fun linguistic fact- "bangya" is actually a default female noun, owing to how largely female this fanbase is! It's derived from the English phrase "band gal".

Comments

If nothing else, I'd like to go to a lolita goth vampire anime orgy

[phantasmalpoison]

Read the line about onnagata, started typing 'femboys are in the great tradition of ancient Greek theatre', and then realised there are probably people on 4chan saying this. Or 8kun, or, you know, they're probably all just on twitter now. But fascism aside, glory be to boys who are girls. Absolutely heartbreaking that a search for 'crossdress' in the history of visual kei turned 0 results

My sympathies to blckroseunicorn 💔
Tetsuya is obviously the prettiest, and Hyde is the singer, so it is not remotely surprising if Hyde/Tetsuya are the actual biggest ship (I mean, they are on ao3) and Ken/Yukihiro only get to be pair the spares.

Fun fact, as a teen, I was 'against homophobia', in my own personal fandom shipping boys from bands (and reading porn of band members fucking where there was a fandom for it), pretty openly a girl attracted to girls, incredibly horny and deciding all the different kinks I wanted to try, and also thought sex before marriage and between the same gender were against a God I still believed in! Being a slasher didn't really fix me. #oversharing
Still, I like to think slash could be saving people, even now. And may visual kei give gender to us all.

Re: If nothing else, I'd like to go to a lolita goth vampire anime orgy

[stardust_rifle]

When you said that Hyde/Tetsuya were the biggest ship I was like "okay what" and then I went to check and it does actually seem to be Hyde's biggest ship on Ao3! Honestly did not expect that (haven't been seeing them a lot while doing this archiving), but I'm not big into L'arc stuff so *shrugs*.

That pattern you've noticed seems to be a pretty common one in these band fandoms- you have the main couple, the perpetual background couple, and then the poor sop who gets perpetually left-out. Oddly, a lot of the time, if everyone in the band is roughly equal in attractiveness, it seems to be the drummer who gets left out in the cold (in my opinion it's because they're stuck behind a drum set, so less opportunities for stagegay).

[got_quiet]

I'm very interested in this! I listened to a lot of Visual Kei during its heyday, but was completely ignorant of the fandom and at the time didn't even know that shipping was happening! Dir en Grey's Cage is the only song I ever learned to play on the bass at any level of acceptability.