Rejecting Shame and Confessions of a Rotten Girl

Content Warnings:
catholic guilt, fujoshi discourse, mentions of bigotry, and sexual themes.

Imagine you're playing Fortnite on the 14th of January in the year of our lord 2025. They've just added three (3) Hatsune Miku skins, along with four songs featuring her as Jam Tracks for their Guitar Hero clone, Fortnite Festival. One of them happens to be SAWTOWNE's M@GICAL☆CURE! LOVE SHOT! (link), an extremely energetic number that also happens to be one of the most difficult songs in the game mode's recent history. Naturally, because true rhythm gamers love songs that go hard, you start following SAWTOWNE's work (if you weren't already, seeing as the song winning the Miku Expo 10th Anniversary song contest effectively put him on the map).

Three days later, Hatsune Miku brandishing a yaoi paddle climbs the top twenty of YouTube Trending Music. The little indie producer that could – having breached containment, achieving the pinnacle of mainstream – dropped an early contender for horniest Miku song of the year, with all eyes on him. Because he could. A bold move, in this political climate.

I imagine in the future Confessions of a Rotten Girl (link) will need no introduction, but seeing as it's fresh out the oven, here's a primer for the uninitiated: at its core, it is a homage to mid-aughts/early-tens fandom culture of the queer variety – more specifically, fujoshis. It's an honest and empathetic take on the prime demographic of Boys Love (henceforth BL), warts and all. But where did fujoshis come from, and why do we care?

The term fujoshi (meaning "rotten woman") was coined on 2ch (a Japanese imageboard, similar to and the predecessor of 4chan) at the turn of the millennium, as a misogynistic term for women who indulge in queer themes, especially BL (then more commonly known as "yaoi", meaning "no climax, no point, no meaning"; I have to assume this was also derogatory, because that sounds like a roundabout way of saying "slop") – such women failed femininity and were thus ineligible for marriage in the eyes of these proto-incels. It didn't take long for said women to embrace the term, because who would want to be a 2channer's ideal wife, anyway?

Hatsune Miku as depicted in Confessions of a Rotten Girl is a fujoshi in all but name. She buys BL (and likely geikomi, seeing as much of the video's suggestive art is very unsubtly drawn by bara artist Hokawazu – this Miku has taste) at FamilyMart. She fantasizes about lewd scenarios between her male teachers and imagines hidden romance between her male classmates. She owns a yaoi paddle – an infamous prop still banned in most anime conventions to this day due to their misuse as an instrument of sexual harassment – with "SINNER" carved upon it. She reads Ao3 and knows what Omegaverse is. She's a certified fujoshi, for better or worse.

She's also deeply insecure about it.

This Miku is heavily implied if not explicitly stated to be a Good Christian Girl who goes to Catholic school – her twintails are tied up via crosses, one of her teachers is a nun, and she frequently prays to God for guidance and forgiveness. Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of Christianity (at least here in the U.S. – maybe Japan is a different story) knows that many denominations and their practitioners were (and still are) deeply homophobic, believing it to be sinful. And indeed, our protagonist frequently refers to herself as a sinner for indulging in explicitly homosexual media. She's implied to be shunned and shamed by her female classmates (the student council who breathe down her neck) for her failure to perform feminine purity, and she's embarrassed at her inability to express a traditional, 100% heterosexual interest in men. Any engagement with sexuality period is bad enough for a woman trying to uphold a Christian ideal – engagement with even depiction of queer sexuality, even if it's not your own, might as well be double-sin. She calls herself rotten not out of ironic self-deprecating humor, but from a place of sincere self-loathing. Hatsune Miku is going to superhell for this one.

In short, she's a sexually repressed pervert. This struggle is the heart and soul of the song, and one that hits a little too close to home for many queer people, fujoshi or otherwise. Let's get real for a minute.

Growing up, I had basically unsupervised Internet access. This was how I discovered Hatsune Miku and vocalsynths in general. The vocalsynth subculture has a thriving queer community within it, so it didn't take long for me to learn that lesbians exist (thanks, magnet by minato). This then led me to seek out anime, especially yuri. I was (still am) a certified himejoshi. My adolescence was largely in the mid-to-late 2010s, and by that time a different wave of fujoshi criticism (different from the bog standard homophobia and different type of misogyny of the 2000s) was emerging: the idea that "bad BL (usually Asian)" was fetishizing gay men, and more generally that straight women (in this discourse, it is implicit that all "bad BL" is created exclusively by "fujoshi", who are implicitly exclusively cishet women) were appropriating queer culture by creating and engaging with it.

So, with that discourse in the back of my mind, I thought engaging with queer media that did not reflect myself was inherently appropriative and fetishistic – and that as a lesbian, I ought to stay in my lane. The only major characters I made were cis women who loved other cis women, and all the romances I wrote were just MadoHomu in different color schemes. It was bland. I did not grow much creatively. By my late teens, I was bored, and I was getting nowhere with these perfect clones of myself. I needed a change of pace. I started reading BL – shockingly, just as not all yuri is written by cishet men, not all BL is written by cishet women. I made some male characters. Some trans ones too, just for the hell of it. My world had expanded, little by little. By reading about people who aren't like me, I felt a little more well-rounded.

What I'm getting at is this: constantly seeing yourself as a potential monster who hurts people just by engaging with their lived experiences isn't actually going to help anyone. This may be shocking for some of you, but it turns out that avoiding interacting with things that depict cultures and identities that aren't your own lest you make a mockery of them with your uneducated privileged brain is not Ethical Media Consumption. It's just being the Woke Steam Game Curator but on the side of woke.

To even begin to push my limits creatively (frankly, this still feels like "beginning"), I had to throw away concepts like fear and shame. I had to dare to be cringe. And if I got something wrong, that's okay. To live is to learn. This is ultimately what Miku resolves to do by the end of the song. In the final prechorus, she imagines what salvation and an "ordinary self" is like – surrounded by flowers and dutiful in worship, but she's not happy. She's bawling her eyes out, the same as she did throughout her repentant moments in the music video. She realizes that conforming to the image she tried and failed to achieve would only make her miserable. If that's how it is, then there's only one reasonable conclusion: maybe the "good girl" life just isn't for her.

So what if it's "sin"? So what if people throw tomatoes and stones at her for it? No matter how you slice it, her love for queer love is part of what makes her, well, her. In the end, Miku chose to be true to herself rather than conform to what people think she's "supposed" to be. If she can't be honest in Heaven, then she'll gladly walk backwards into Hell.

That's not to say she has no more room to grow. She still frames herself as a "sinner", and despite the positive spin it probably isn't the best for her self-image. Her internalized misogyny (seen early on with her irritation towards a woman throwing a wrench in her homoerotic fantasy with even a mild display of affection) isn't something she's visibly moved past. But embracing sexuality and rejecting shame is a crucial step forward. Shame does nothing but stunt you, and Rome wasn't built in a day. We could all learn a thing or two from fujoshi Miku's self-acceptance.

Endnotes

1. This is a bet I'm making largely based on the view disparity between MCLS and SAWTOWNE's prior discography. It's possible I was just out of the loop, of course. ↩
2. At the time of writing, Donald Trump was made president of the United States. Again. Consequently, homophobic and transphobic rhetoric is getting a lot more aggressive. Stay safe out there and be kind to your fellow queer people. We're only human. ↩
3. This concept is a little too broad to go further in-depth in this post, but anecdotally speaking, modern fujoshi discourse often leans into misogynistic (unsurprising, seeing as policing what women can and can not do is a core concept at play), xenophobic ("our wholesome queer media VS their fetishistic BL/yaoi/danmei"), and even transphobic territory. The amount of people I've seen accusing transgender men of being fetishistic cishet women for drawing kinda twink-y guys is ridiculous. Look into what people did to the guy behind the webtoon Boyfriends over one (1) cringy ad for a prime example of all of the above in action. The vast majority of participants weren't even gay men. ↩
4. This gets a little too close to pro/anti discourse for my liking. I am not a "proshipper" (they're annoying, and the "anti-harassment" types are often hypocritical people of the "no true scotsman" variety). I grew out of "antishipping" (the world is too complicated for that to be a reasonable hardline stance after a certain point) years ago. I am an adult with a job. While there is a place for unpacking and analyzing how we interact with fiction (this entire post is mostly that, after all), it's ludicrous to pretend it's even remotely close to activism. If you identify as a proshipper (or you're a rare antishipper over the age of 18), you need to get offline and do some real political organizing. If you're a minor participating in this discourse, you should stop worrying so much about what other people are doing wrong and focus on what you can do for your future self. One day you'll be doing great work out there, just you wait. ↩