memoirs of a geisha by arthur golden has been my most recent book and it's been a good read, though very much not a lighthearted fun one. i'm about halfway through and should get back to it. as a westerner writing stories about historical japan i thought reading another westerner's story about historical japan would be good inspiration, even if memoirs of a geisha is a few hundred years past where i write ryu.

akane-banashi, my girlfriend's not here today, and yotaka futatabi are my main ongoing manga reads now that chainsaw man's wrapped up. i should get back to ranma and young ladies don't play fighting games, too...

for web fiction i've been slowly catching up on norainumonogatari, an ongoing chainsaw man AU fanfic by my friend artdevil. if it's any endorsement to that story's quality, i'm not much of a fanfic guy but i am absolutely enraptured by every chapter i read. i am also reading long live the immortal by my boyfriend siwonwrites, which has been a similarly-fantastic korean action/fantasy that's been a joy to both read and edit.

historical records suggest that homosexuality was, while often socially frowned on, not especially ostracized for much of japanese history (japan has never had any sodomy law outside of an iirc eight-year period) until the meiji era. i think my alt-history edo period setting is mostly similar, where it's not illegal or subjected to religious objections but will probably still receive some raised eyebrows. though i do think i write characters as a bit more tolerant than would be realistically expected, it's a tone thing; with how much lesbian sex i write, i can't have homophobia come up in every conversation or i'll get bogged down in misery.

this is why there was no "huhhh i'm attracted to a girl??" from kuu or fuu in Wallflower; you don't see much of that in, say, lighthearted yuri manga and i wanted to reflect that here to keep the tone light (or you could interpret it as ryu being so effortlessly ruggedly handsome then like yeah, why wouldn't she have straight bitches drooling over her). i'll leave it to you, dear reader, to decide if kuu's plans to marry ryu are exaggerated delusions or a genuine, legally-achievable goal.

i don't think trans identity is exactly normalized in the setting, though even that i think i've been writing with more tolerance than would realistically exist; ryu so much as openly wearing men's clothes like she does would probably get her a lot more strange looks than i've been writing (to say nothing of how simply being a woman means she probably wouldn't legally be able to travel without a man accompanying her or the simple fact that she's a samurai from a matriarchal clan, but we're alt-history'ing that). if i ever get to the nitty gritty of magic and onmyodo in the setting i definitely think there would be things like magical HRT, but it's probably illegal or at least not something widely accepted from a societal standpoint.