Follow Your Passion: A Seamless Tumblr Journey
I wasn't aware of this up until now, thank you for sharing this
okay you know what? i’m gonna say it.
i appreciate akimi yoshida’s work as a writer and i love banana fish. that being said, i think some of the shit she’s pulled is absolutely deplorable and i won’t stand for it.
for starters, she’s sent out this awful message that trauma survivors are always going to be confined to their past, which we’ve seen being conveyed through her reasoning behind ash’s death. for those of you who don’t know what i’m talking about, she’s basically said that there was no chance that ash could have had happiness, mainly because of everything he’s been through. (fuck that, by the way. if you’re a trauma survivor, know that there is happiness in store for you, regardless of anyone else’s opinions.)
secondly, we have the bury your gay trope, as many people have already pointed out. that’s just deeply homophobic. i don’t think i need to go into detail with this one, we all know how banana fish ends.
she also villainized her main protagonist, claiming that he was nothing but a “murderer,” and going by the eye-for-an-eye ideology. she said that if he killed, he deserved to be killed in return.
next. she paired up a 30-something-year-old with a 20-something-year-old. now you might think that’s okay, but it’s not. why? because said 30 y/o knew said 20 y/o when the latter was a child. is it still okay? yeah, didn’t think so.
yoshida also used substantially racist caricatures similar to the anti-black portrayals of black people in the media.
then we have the absolutely horrifying spectacle that is the official art of blanca x ash. the main theme of banana fish is the effects of pedophillia and child sex trafficking, and how appalling the whole concept is. we’ve seen throughout the storyline how big of an impact it has had on the main protagonist. despite this, yoshida published art that depicted blanca (a full-grown, adult male) and ash (a child, at the time) being intimate. there have been no official comments made as to what exactly was going on in said art, but fans have speculated that it could be symbolic. we won’t go into detail of that right now, but i think we can all agree that this whole situation is extraordinarily self-contradictory.
i think yoshida is a good writer and i love this incredible story she’s given us, with all these amazing, complex characters. however, i do not agree with any of her reasoning and quite frankly, i think it’s disgusting.
feel free to add on if you have any more points