(no subject)

[kradeelav]

"I think often about Go Nagai. His early works were hounded by censors, pulled apart and condemned. It wasn’t new, and it wasn’t unique to him in particular, either, though it echoed through the time I was living in, when the internet felt like it was being boxed in by the same “protective” hand. I was a queer teenager, living in a just-built suburb on the edge of an industrial sprawl. My computer allowed me to live anywhere, as I often put it, wedged into a corner, lit by the faint blue glow of the monitor long past midnight. It was there where I downloaded scans of Ashen Victor (nee Haisha), a Yukito Kishiro manga that hasn’t seen a proper translation since VIZ briefly serialized it. I remember the thrill of saving those pages, like I was helping preserve something fragile and important, even if I didn’t know exactly why.

Those late nights led me somewhere. They taught me to look deeper, to keep records, to research not just out of curiosity but out of a sense of duty to self and to others. Now, when I see the same debates resurface on who gets to control culture, who decides what survives, I can’t help but feel I’ve been watching the same play for years, just with new scenery."

- https://retroanimechris.blogspot.com/2025/08/climbing-spiral-staircase-queer.html