Prof. Rachel Thorn 🍉🇺🇦🏳️⚧️🏳️My daughter just asked me how to say 厨二病 (中二病) in English. Looking through various translations, the one that strikes me as least awful is "teen angst," but it fails to capture the narcissism, pretentiousness, and sense of superiority of chūnibyō. "Main Character Syndrome" captures that aspect, but fails to identify the specific age bracket where this most commonly occurs, which is to say early teens. Please knock my socks off with an awesome translation. #Japanese #日本語 #厨二病 #中二病
Peluche Cero@RachelThornSub Protagonist Insufferable Teen Character Syndrome??
@peluchecero
Haha. Not the most elegant translation, though it does manage to convey the meaning through sheer determination. 😉
Haha. Not the most elegant translation, though it does manage to convey the meaning through sheer determination. 😉
elilla&, famigerada travesti@RachelThornSub I can't think of a translation proper, but I'd note that in most contexts where we'd decry something as chūnibyō-ppoi, in English we'd simple say it's "cringe". that's of course semantically wider—many attitudes can make one cringe, that particular mix of pretentiousness and emo-ness in chūnibyō being only one of them.
"cringe" and "chūnibyō" both are frequently weaponised to bully weirdo kids who dare try to stand for themselves.
cringe has the bidirectionality of kowai; the person behaving arrogantly has the quality of being cringe, and the painful feeling they're causing in me is also called the feeling of cringe. it somehow feels important for the slang to not mark that by derivational suffixes like "scary" vs. "scared".
"cringe", adj. has had such a remarkable rise in the 2000s that I can't even remember what we used to call people before it
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=cringe&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3
Octavia Con Amore 
Succubard's Library@elilla @RachelThornSub the point that both words are weaponised is important 
especially in Japan where any slight social deviance is reacted to, this shirt of language is the hammer society teaches people to use to nail each other flush with society 
and chūnibyō is such a elegant word because it points us to the age: the 2nd year of secondary school when kids are 14 or 15, trying to figure out what's and how they want to exist in this world, what feels right for them, how they want to express themselves, etc 
and right when that sort of bullying is ramping up in both prevalence and effectiveness 
@OctaviaConAmore @elilla Yet there are plenty of Japanese who will say with a smile that they were chūnibyō. It's like "otaku." Is it a slur or a badge of pride?
@RachelThornSub @OctaviaConAmore all slurs can be reclaimed, and often are; that doesn't mean it hurts less when they're used as slurs.
@elilla @OctaviaConAmore It's true! Particularly when you're a teen!
@elilla @RachelThornSub probably easiest to understand using examples close to home for the three of us e.g. tranny and futanari
I use futanari to describe myself, and I know Elilla has "futa" on her profile, but I wouldn't dare use either for anyone I wasn't pretty darn familiar with even if they use it to describe themselves
and while I actually have an entirely positive impression of the word futanari due to myriad factors, if tranny was used at me by a stranger, or an acquaintance who had negative repoirt(spelling?) with me, that'd definitely be a negative experience 
@OctaviaConAmore @elilla I'm an old trans woman who would never use the word futanari for herself and would be shocked if anyone ever called me that, but as for "tranny," we're the same. I can call myself that, and a close trans woman friend could call me that, but if anyoen else did, a fight would ensue. Chūnibyō probably falls in the same category. It can be used as a term of endearment or self-deprecation, but coming from a stranger who didn't identify as a former chūnibyō....
@RachelThornSub @OctaviaConAmore
I have a very specific thing in mind when I identify as a futanari: I am a sex-positive, promiscuous, femme trans woman top with a penis. seldomly I have seen any representation of what I am outside of porn. meanwhile futa porn gets pretty close to what my life is like—the joy of it, the intensity of desire. in Latin America people get it when I identify as a lesbian travesti, but Europeans are bound to misunderstand the Latina travesti as a gender identity.
futa porn has varied in definition; from its original use of the term as a fetish for "hermaphrodites" in the sense of women with both penises and vaginas, to women with penises but no testicles or vagina, to women with penises and testicles (at which point it's basically a porn byword for no-op trans woman). this makes of me a type #2 futanari. it's an imprecise word, but there are no other words to describe a trans woman who has genital dysphoria about testicles but not about penis. I would move into type #1 futanari too if I could get a surgeon to do penile-preserving vulvovaginoplasty, like I would love to; but that's such a tall order in this political climate that it has remained a dream.
@elilla @RachelThornSub pretty much the same for me on everything except Latina travesti part Japanese being a mother tongue probably helped take some of the edge off of it, too 
Japanese being a mother tongue probably helped take some of the edge off of it, too 
Jenny (public node) 
@OctaviaConAmore @elilla This is interesting to me, as I understand "futanari" to explicitly refer to a woman with both sets of genitals; I know that the adult content creator Nuparts uses the term to refer to herself, but I thought that was am explicit reference to her having a phallus-preserving vaginoplasty. Meanwhile if I could scrape together the cash for my PPV, I would never try to reclaim the term because I don't want the implicit sexualization that comes with identifying as a porn category. (Never mind that I already do so by identifying as altersex; if I must fight that battle I'm only doing it once.)
@RachelThornSub
@RachelThornSub
@SymTrkl @OctaviaConAmore @RachelThornSub
if anything I would say the most common type of futanari in current futa manga/pixiv is type #3, with both penis and testicles but not a vagina. (followed by what in the Anglo world they call a "full-package futanari" which has all 3, which I forgot to add in my typology.)
purely in the interests of science, I headed to a 'booru site, typed in "futanari", and counted how many results I got for each genital configuration on the first (newest) page:
P: 2 (=my type)
PV: 2 (=classical futanari)
PVT: 1 (=full-package)
PT: 10 (="modern" futanari)
V (??): 1 (why is this tagged futanari?)
Ambiguous PVT or PT (visible PT, potentially a hidden V): 6
Fully ambiguous (we only see a woman topping or some of her penis, other genital details unclear): 10
this is in my experience typical of contemporary futa porn; the defining trait these days is the penis, plus a few tropes like the nonconsensuality of desire (futanaris being biologically sex-crazed, for example, or a cis woman sprouting a penis which comes with irresistible lust). futanaris are often tops and dominant, but not necessarily. if the futanari is a top she will typically have an oversized penis, ejaculate litres and be highly fertile (in spite of the absence of testicles, if it's a P or PV type). futanaris are often the result of genderbending (from either direction); but a otokonoko/femboy doing crossdressing alone does not count as a futanari.
@SymTrkl @OctaviaConAmore @RachelThornSub
of course, in my case my identity as a futanari is less about the fact I don't have testicles, and more that I use the term *because* it's a sexualised term from erotic fantasies of dickgirls. it's a way to resist the desexualisation of queer discussions and foreground how much hypersexuality / fraysexuality / cruising is an integral and necessary part of my queerness, and a historical battle of my ancestors.
but secondarily I also happen to identify as a "classic" futanari too, in the sense that my ideal genital configuration and the one I would feel most comfortable with would be PV. I just can't afford the surgery. but I know many other trans women or enbies who identify as futas, and I would never gatekeep the term on genital configuration (well I would never gatekeep an identity on any criteria, but most of all the feelings people have about their genitals).
@elilla It seems that things have changed since I was more heavily into futa hentai manga. 
Or maybe I have a skewed perception because I tended to seek out stuff with my preferred configuration, for reasons that are now obvious.
I feel you on reclaiming the slur, but to me reclaiming a slur is more of an act of reciprocal violence, owning their harm and turning it back on them. Also, part of realizing that I'm ace has involved examining when I'm okay being sexualized. There's several people in the fedi trans community that I've completely cut ties with for treating me as a sex object, and I think that informs why I'm uncomfy with people identifying me as something I see as an explicit porn category.
@OctaviaConAmore @RachelThornSub
Scarlet Phoenix Collective@elilla How do you pronounce "futanari? My screen reader's butchering the damn word. :(
aloe@elilla Thank you. :)
Medea Vanamonde 🏳️⚧️@elilla @RachelThornSub @OctaviaConAmore
One of my mutuals has Pen and Vag, but i’ve not seen them online for a while
@RachelThornSub I would like to hijack the discussion on chūnibyō to point that Ado is back in 2026 with a fresh take on Ussewa that's rawer and more cathartic than ever https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujyJRxAKpVE
re: chūnibyō as social pressure, the particular mix of femininity and aggression in the chorus of "ussewa" interests me greatly; and it didn't go unremarked in the reactions, cf. this linguistic discussion on profanity in Japanese
@elilla I'm only 45 minutes in, but I agree with everything he's saying. But I will say that it is maybe unfair to use subs/dubs as the data, since these are produced by big media companies, and 1) those companies don't want to offend their customers, plus 2) the translators are underpaid, overworked, and under pressure to be as succinct as possible. The translators know these translations are wrong, but there's not much they can do about it. A better comparison would be literary translations.
mrange@RachelThornSub teen edgelord delulu?
@range_marten @RachelThornSub it's not really edgy (though it includes it), it's more just acting "cool" in a sort of comical or fictional way that a person in the middle of junior high school would find cool
but it's also part of self-exploration, too it's that awkward time of life where we're all changing rapidly and we're trying things on to see what fits and really feels like ourselves 
@OctaviaConAmore @range_marten This is where reasonable people (including native speakers) can differ on what they think chūnibyō means. "Goth" is a word that leaps to mind for me. When I think chūnibyō, I think of a kid who thinks the "Cool kids" are actually losers, while the misunderstood chūnibyō kid is a deep thinker who is more mature than classmates. (I say this is someone who was at least chūnibyō adjacent, and possibly full-blown chūnibyō, as a teen.)
@OctaviaConAmore @range_marten In most cases, if the person described as chūnibyō is actually a teen, I would say that "teen edgelord delulu" could actually work, assuming the original work is set after 2014-ish.
Alex, the Hearth Fire@WizardOfDocs @OctaviaConAmore @range_marten You know, I think in some contexts that might be perfect!
Loy Hena@RachelThornSub
How about "main character teen syndrome" ?
How about "main character teen syndrome" ?
@loyhena I don't know if a native English listener/reader would understand what that referred to. I think they might assume it's some syndrome they just haven't heard of.
@RachelThornSub
I would argue a new concept need a new name !
I would argue a new concept need a new name !
zombiecide 馬雄@RachelThornSub obvs I don't have any awesome English translation, and this is one of the words I'd prefer to have a footnote about, because culturally, it doesn't exist in the same way here