Psychoanalytic Reflections on My Relationship with Kazama Chikage

Chapter 1

This is a long, confessional essay and psychological self-dissection about my complicated feelings and unique sexual fixations toward Kazama Chikage. Kazama is my favorite fictional character, and one of the most important figures in my twenty-six years of life. I did not fall in love with him by accident, nor did I begin to hate him by accident. My love and hatred for Kazama is a knot I can never untangle. He feels like a character I wrote into existence, yet he never fully belongs to me. He lives in my writing, but also inhabits my heart like a slender thorn—one that doesn’t pierce the skin, but is always lodged there. I’ve realized that writing out this tangled web of passion and resentment is my only path to salvation. What I am expressing is not a love letter to a fictional idol, but a chronicle of my life lived in the margins—a fragmented history of a cyber exile in the post-Cold War era of resurgent right-wing powers.

I am a woman diagnosed with severe depression, moderate anxiety, and complex PTSD. As the eldest—and only—daughter in my family, I was raised in a socially conservative, declining industrial town in eastern China. At twelve, I discovered and fell in love with the world of boys' love fiction. At eighteen, I began studying philosophy, the humanities, and social sciences. With the help of international resources, I came to encounter perspectives and realities that no domestic textbook would ever teach—the kinds of things that shape how I see the world today. After three failed attempts at graduate school, I was pressured by my parents into working as a low-tier copywriter at a small trading company. Two years later, I was diagnosed with serious mental illness. Since then, my life has been in a state of paralysis. I began to deteriorate physically and emotionally—insomnia, nightmares, hypersomnia, chronic fatigue, irritability, and a loss of all former interests. The three years I have spent with Kazama were also the lowest, darkest years of my life. During that time, cut off from reality, plagued by identity confusion and paralyzing anxiety about the future, I wrote him into existence—not as therapy, but as a way to survive.

As a fan creator working for free, I have a highly particular structure of desire when it comes to Kazama, and hold beliefs that might seem strange even to peers in the fandom. I accept almost any kind of fanfiction genre—self-insert, otome, BL, polyamory—so long as Kazama Chikage is the central character. I can tolerate moderate OOC. I can accept Kazama dominating others, or being dominated; I even crave chaotic, depraved dynamics where multiple people fuck him at once. But above all, I demand that the creator respect Kazama and bring unique insight into the emotional dynamics he’s part of. This is a standard I hold others to—and myself. I see Kazama as a structure of thought, an emotional vessel, and a sacred anchor. To complete stories about him is not an artistic ambition—it is, simply, the fragile and stubborn desire of an ordinary person trying to stay alive.

I don’t just “like Kazama.” I’ve staked my entire psychological existence on him, searching for a semblance of order in a world on the brink of collapse. And he, precisely, is that which belongs to no one. Because he doesn’t belong to me, I try harder to make him mine through fantasy. Because he is too perfect, I want to dismantle him piece by piece. He is noble, loyal, cold, and powerful—an Other I can never control. The more powerless I feel, the more I need this uncontrollable figure beside me. The less I can dominate him, the more I crave to possess him. This is one of the most pathetic yet violent contradictions in the depths of my desire. My love for Kazama is dependent, idealized—a love woven from worship, longing, and yearning. My hatred of him is repressive, tangled with humiliation—a hatred born from transforming the position of the subjugated into the one who dominates. He never lied to me. He was always like this. It’s just that I never dared to see him clearly until now. These aren’t mood swings—they are structural double binds. Love and destruction are not opposites; they are dual faces of my emotional being, entangled and overlapping. In every glance I cast toward him, there’s always an unspoken blend of joy and grief. He is the ghost born of my trauma structure, the knot between desire and repression, the fracture deep in the mirror of my mind. And I know I have to dismantle it. Only through analyzing these affective layers can I slowly retrieve myself from Kazama.

I can borrow the psychoanalytic framework of splitting-identification-projection to try and chart this labyrinth of emotions. I live in a state of emotional disequilibrium. On one hand, I desperately long to be loved completely, to be saved, to be understood. On the other hand, I am deeply afraid of love itself. I want to be possessed by Kazama, but I also fear the weight of his gaze. He is not an object of fantasy—I’ve split him off as an ideal personality: restrained, strong, unwavering, immutable. He is the kind of person I wish to become but never will. And precisely because of this, I love him as a symbol of the power I cannot reach. I hate him for representing the world order I cannot control—for being the phantasm of patriarchal authority I have projected outward. So I both crave his arms around me, his voice soothing me, his lips saying “I love you”—and I want to watch him lose control in someone else’s arms, crumbling into desire. I am not disloyal—I am torn between jealousy and the drive to destroy. This impulse—to both possess him and watch him be violated—is, in fact, a common pattern in trauma-formed personalities: a tangle of control and self-punishment. If I cannot have him, then at least I want a say in how he breaks. How perverse. And yet—how honest.

Kazama embodies a figure of nobility, beauty, danger, coldness, and unapproachability—a perfect, untouchable Other. It is precisely this air of isolation, this impermeable aura, that drives me to construct traps for him in my fantasies. I want others to love him too—so that he ceases to be just a figment of my solitary imagination and becomes a presence acknowledged by the world. But at the same time, I want him to belong only to me. Only if he is mine can my fantasy remain intact. Only then can I find a sliver of oxygen in a world where there’s barely any place for me, only then can I scrape together a sense of meaning from the chaos.

Do you see now? I’m not trying to feel safe through the Other. I want the Other to become proof that I exist. My entangled love-hate toward Kazama is not a contradiction or confusion—it is the extreme manifestation of trauma-based self-identification. When I say, “I want to see him being fucked by someone else,” it sounds like a joke, like madness—but it’s more honest than any love confession I could offer. I say it because I know: he doesn’t belong to me. He never will. It’s not a betrayal of desire. It’s a desperate affirmation, spoken in the language of the marginal.

Within the framework of psychoanalysis—especially in object relations theory—there is a mechanism known as destructive confirmation. It describes how individuals raised in chronically unsafe emotional environments conflate “having” with “destroying.” Only by seeing the other person fall apart, unravel, lose control—can they believe that person is real. Not divine. Not a hallucination. I want to see Kazama being pinned down and fucked by someone else—not because I disrespect him, but because if I cannot have his body, I at least want to prove that it is not untouchable. If he can gasp and tremble in someone else’s arms, then he is not the ghost I projected—he is a human, vulnerable to desire.

This is how I displace my own repressed shame, my abandonment wounds, my trauma-warped sexual fantasies onto him. He becomes the vessel through which I perform a metaphorical theater of myself being hurt, being violated. But I can’t bear to face that I was once the one cast aside, the one humiliated. So instead, I imagine him in that place. No longer a figure of strength. He bows his head. He breaks. He falls—not from grace, but into the same mud I’m stuck in. And maybe—if he’s down here too—I won’t be alone anymore. That’s what this fantasy is really about: resistance to absolute solitude. It’s a way to give form to pain. I’m not a deviant. I’m someone who has grown so accustomed to suffering that even my desires have twisted into wounds. Kazama is the shape all my desires have taken.

Since I met Kazama, no one else has been able to enter my eyes—not even other characters voiced by Tsuda himself. No one else compares. Who else could bear so many chains and still walk with such unshaken arrogance, such romantic recklessness, loving just one person for a lifetime? Who else embodies both the elegance and intelligence of an old-world aristocrat, and the brutal clarity of a man who kills without regret? He has mastered both extremes—and he is beautiful not merely in appearance, but because his entire character is embedded in a finely wrought structural tragedy. He never shows vulnerability, yet his flawless exterior is already laced with invisible cracks, waiting for the right moment to shatter. I see the weight of his family's expectations pressing down on him, in tension with his own will for freedom. I see how his body has become a site of power’s deep inscription. I see the historical, cultural—even philosophical—forces embedded in the way he moves, speaks, refuses. To me, this Kazama deserves the love of the world. And he also deserves to meet the fate of a great tragedy.

I want to save him. I want to destroy him. And saying that—hurts me more than anyone. I know I am not the only one who loves him. I’m even willing to let him be with anyone—anyone at all—so long as he looks human, so long as he descends from his pedestal. But a small part of me wants something wicked: if everyone falls in love with him, and he still remains unbearably alone—wouldn’t that be poetic? He doesn’t live for anyone. He lives to become the one who is utterly alone, destined for ruin. That is his perfection. That is the version of him that would never look down on me.

I’ve never claimed to be a gentle lover. I love him not because he is soft—but because he is unbearably hard. Hard like a blade. Like a piece of cold iron that won’t yield no matter how long you hold it in your mouth. I lick that cold, sharp edge while fantasizing about warming it up. But I know I never will. And so—I want to watch him burn. I want to see him bleed, to see him fall from his pedestal. Just once would be enough. While I rage at my own inability to escape pain, I also see, reflected in Kazama, the dignity and beauty of pain itself. I have malice toward him. I am the kind of person who stands in the wind, watching a hero lose his wings and sink into the ocean—tears in my eyes, but never reaching out to save him. I love him. I hate him. He has never once looked back at me, yet he has turned me into another version of himself. I thought I could escape that fate. But the harder I tried to pull away, the more like him I became: cold, harsh, extreme. Elitist. Even the tone of voice, the unbearable need for control—it’s all the same.

The one I love is like a tumor inside me—unremovable, but impossible to nurture. My obsession with him is almost religious. I want to destroy him with my own hands—not out of hatred, but because I love him too much. So much I can’t stand the perfection of him. He is too complete, too unreal. I want to shatter him. I want to see him break under the weight of the world’s gaze, to fracture between love and hate, to fall from something I look up to into something I can finally embrace. I am willing to let him be adored by thousands—because I know that in the end, he will never belong to anyone. He won’t belong to me, but he won’t belong to anyone else either. That is my most venomous blessing. So yes—I say he deserves the ultimate tragedy. And he deserves to be seen. As for me? I only want to stand in his shadow, watching—just to see if, in that final moment of weightless descent, that collapsing god might finally reach a hand back toward me.

That’s why I could never become Yukimura Chizuru. Never. I’ve always known I cannot, and never have, projected myself onto her to fall in love with Kazama. Because she is not me. Even on his route, where she shows some resistance, she still isn’t me. From the beginning, I acknowledged the difference between her and myself. And at that time, I hadn’t fully developed self-awareness, nor formed a mature value system, so I never designed an original female character to replace her. I didn’t expect that would later become ammunition for others to attack me.

For three years, I’ve tried to understand Chizuru, to speak on her behalf, believing I had done nothing truly unfair to her. At the start of this year, I reposted someone’s Weibo post to Lofter (China’s Tumblr clone), along with my own calm analysis of what I perceived to be flaws in Chizuru’s characterization in Kyoto Winds and Edo Blossoms. And that bitch, along with her loyal followers, came charging in—pointing fingers, declaring that I shouldn’t use the “Hakuouki” tag, that I didn’t deserve to tag Chizuru at all. They accused me of distorting and hating her, said that as a Kazama fan I must neglect her, claimed I was clout-chasing, that I reposted without permission, that I was “subtweeting” (leaving passive-aggressive anonymous posts), and willfully misrepresenting her views. I have no idea what nerve of theirs I struck. I had already blurred the username, removed her ID, politely pointed out their limitations, and even invited her to have a calm discussion. And still she stirred up onlookers, painted me as malicious with absurd, laughable reasoning, blocked me when she lost the argument, and made sure to stomp on me on her way out—exposing the deepest wounds I carried. You say no one cares about me? That I’m bad luck? That what I write is no better than toilet waste? How dare you. Just because you have your cozy little clique, you think you can twist facts and do as you please? Just because you’re a popular poster on Weibo and Twitter, perched on your imagined moral high ground, you think you can throw filth at others without paying a price?

Well, let me tell you: this seemingly small incident left a scar I cannot undo. It triggered a breakdown that cost me my job, destroyed my income, and plunged me into a four-month cycle of physical collapse and mental implosion. Forgiveness may be a virtue—but I will never forgive them. I will never forgive those who cursed me, blocked me, erased me, and ultimately pushed me to delete my Lofter account. This cloud of resentment has even stained how I now see Yukimura Chizuru. During this time, I tried to reconnect with joy, using AI to generate pictures of Kazama and Chizuru, trying to revisit the happiness I had three years ago while writing. But I can no longer enjoy the fanworks that depict their intimacy with the ease and comfort I once did—those works used to be my emotional sanctuary, my only refuge of fantasy. Those who destroyed my life do not deserve forgiveness.

Someone once asked me: if I were Kazama Chikage, would I fall in love with someone like Yukimura Chizuru? My answer was clear: absolutely not. I would never fall in love with someone like her. Just explaining my emotions to her would exhaust and irritate me. I could be on the verge of collapse, saying I’m about to die, and she’d naively ask, “If you’re suffering so much, why don’t you reach out for help?” “Your family must love you. Why not try talking to them more?” How do I even begin to explain that three years ago, I skipped class to secretly play an otome game, fell for a man from over two centuries ago, and since then lost all desire to marry, became obsessed with writing fanfiction, and refused to find a job—thus becoming, in my family’s eyes, a hopeless failure? That I write fic on AO3—what’s fanfiction, anyway? Does it make money? If not, what’s the point? Go back to your hometown, find a job, get married, get it over with. That’s your life now, why struggle? Depression? That’s just poor circulation. Come home, take some traditional medicine, rest for a few months—it’ll go away. You want to study abroad? Well, I’m not giving you a cent. Figure it out yourself.

And you want me to understand them? When have they ever tried to understand me? Wake up. The Tokugawa shogunate has long since fallen. Yet you’re still lost in the ghost of its former glory.

So what kind of people are these fans of Yukimura Chizuru? Immature, yet smug. They think learning a few trendy terms elevates them above others. They look down on those who don’t share their taste, can’t tolerate criticism, and spend their days fantasizing, “Everyone loves Chizuru,” “She’s so kind, so cute, so good—why would anyone want to hurt her?” “If you don’t like her, don’t follow me, don’t look at my art.” In truth, they’re just a bunch of refined narcissists, obsessed with their own self-image. I’ll say it again: I have no personal interest in Yukimura Chizuru. The only reason I mention her is because, in the canon, she is the woman Kazama cares most about. Understanding his preferences and emotional logic is part of what it means to be a proper fan of Kazama Chikage. I have spoken up on her behalf, criticized Kazama’s abuse of gender and social power—not because I like her, but because I haven’t yet surrendered my basic sense of conscience in the name of “sweet romantic love.” That’s all. Don’t overestimate your importance.

(To be continued. Fans of Yukimura Chizuru, don’t worry—you’ll be mentioned again in the next chapter.)

Chapter 2

Let me begin with this: Our beloved fans of Yukimura Chizuru clearly don’t appreciate fairness or neutrality. I once tried to speak to them with calm, objective language, hoping to de-escalate things—but instead, I triggered their collective hatred for anything resembling a “reasonable middle ground.” That’s what led to the verbal assault I described earlier. Since they’re so hell-bent on embodying the worst stereotypes outsiders already associate with them, I’ll honor their wishes and refer to them exclusively as bitches from here on out. Let me state again: this is not some emotionally driven personal attack—it is what they asked for. They’re simply getting what they deserve.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m self-taught in the humanities and social sciences. One unfortunate side effect is that I’ve developed an interest in the bizarre behaviors and psychological contradictions of human beings. Even though this particular group of bitches has caused me concrete, measurable harm—so much so that I feel an involuntary wave of nausea whenever I see their familiar usernames—I didn’t block them all in one fit of rage. Instead, I held back my disgust, collected data, and carefully analyzed the statements they posted on social media after the incident. Now that, my friends, is what we call the noble and dedicated spirit of academic research. I won’t be including detailed evidence here—because I haven’t forgotten who the real protagonists of this piece are: me and Kazama Chikage. So I’ll use the most direct and efficient language possible to explain what these extreme Chizuru stans are actually thinking, and why they completely lost their minds when I tried to defend myself.

Put simply, these self-proclaimed “canon purists” and “heroine defenders” are actually character fundamentalists. They hate the idea of dreamgirls projecting themselves onto the heroine—of inserting themselves into romantic narratives with the male lead. They’re full of prejudice and malice, convinced that dreamgirls are constantly “going into heat” for any attractive male character, fantasizing that he’ll love everything about them. They see dreamgirls as having no regard for the character’s canonical personality, whose kind of unfiltered desire is disrespectful to both the story and the characters. From this, they leap to an even more aggressive conclusion: Dreamgirls are homewreckers, they say. Dreamgirls snatch the male lead away from the heroine and replace her with themselves. They see this as an erasure of the heroine’s independence, as a denial of the legitimacy of the official pairing. In Hakuouki terms: “Only Yukimura Chizuru is allowed to stand by his side. No one else is permitted to even try.”

So what exactly did I say that triggered them so badly? They said: “Canon Chizuru is flawless! So many men fall for her—how dare you question her or alter her personality?” What, I’m not allowed to criticize her? I must hate her, disrespect her, just because I'm a Kazama fan? I couldn’t help but laugh. I really thought you might be capable of insight, but it turns out you’re nothing more than a mob of self-righteous moral soldiers, zealously defending the official party line. You’re today’s Red Guards in cosplay—anti-intellectual, yet convinced that you alone hold the keys to truth. You scream endlessly, you can’t distinguish right from wrong, and you’re universally disliked. Frankly, you deserve it.

You claim you’re not interested in my writing, and that my work is no better than a pile of shit in a toilet stall. That doesn’t make you clever—it just shows you’re uncultured and tasteless. You’ve lost all ability to perceive or think about anything more complex than your beloved CP fluff. Your ego is even more grotesque and suffocating than the dreamgirls you despise. You wallow in your little crystal castle of self-worship, imagining yourself as the heroine and gatekeeping others out. But really, that castle is empty. There’s not a single living soul in it—only your precious 2D CPs. All it would take is one thunderous clap of truth to shatter it into dust. After Nietzsche declared “God is dead,” Roland Barthes followed with: “The author is dead.” That is to say: once a text is completed and enters public circulation, its meaning is no longer dictated solely by the author. It is constructed by readers and their interpretations. So who gave you the imperial right to monopolize the interpretation of the heroine? Even the writers who created her wouldn’t dare speak with the arrogance you do. And if you're so eager to protect the creator’s authority, please start by paying back all the copyright fees for the fan merch you’ve been printing and selling over the years.

I'm going to be venomous—though some may see it that way—but let me state this clearly: You should have felt honored that your perspective was quoted by me, rather than spouting some deranged nonsense like “my views were misinterpreted and maliciously used to support someone else's writing.” Because after this, you will never again have access to such a rare opportunity for cross-boundary intellectual exchange. And all of this—was murdered by your own ignorance and vicious exclusionary mindset. What is called wasting resources, missing good opportunities, and ruining a good hand you have—you are a living example. You thought Kazama Chikage was just some privileged airheaded noble or a walking romance subplot chasing after Yukimura Chizuru. Now someone standing before you with a 60% resonance to Kazama himself is asking you a question, face to face: Do you really think you’re worthy?

Objectively speaking, these fervent and rigid character fundamentalists are not entirely without merit—at the very least, they provided me with typical case studies of fan mentality. I should thank them for that. Moreover, through a form of violent and brutal rupture, they tore open my still-unhealed wounds, forcing me to confront another possible version of “myself.” As they have claimed, I indeed no longer need to “seize Yukimura Chizuru’s life,” hiding my real self within her delicate shell. But it is not because I am unworthy of her—on the contrary, it is her thin and feeble brightness that limits the complexity and potential for development within me. In order to compensate for her severely underwritten inner world in the canon, and to balance the power dynamics between her and the male lead, I honed my fan works with painstaking care, and gave her some of my own traits. When they accuse me, grinding their teeth, of smuggling personal desire, scheming to replace Chizuru as the official love interest, I want to say: I am worthy. I stood behind the scenes, anonymously stitching wedding garments for Kazama and Chizuru, contributing so many brilliant and absolutely unique creative visions—why shouldn’t I stand by his side? Does Yukimura Chizuru’s love for Kazama Chikage contain as much, go as deep, as what I have given him?

If you had read my previous writing carefully, you would have known that this kind of emotional attachment is not some vulgar “catfight.” What I seek is neither Kazama’s affection nor his validation. I am someone who studies him, critiques him, deconstructs him, and transcends him—someone who makes him lower his noble head and willingly submit, not someone who passively longs for his love. That is the fundamental difference between Chizuru and me. As for her? To put it bluntly, I use the Yukimura Chizuru tag to cater to your base-level tastes, because you only understand—and are only willing to engage with—a shallow, sweet, and simplistic “Yukimura Chizuru,” while rejecting a deeper, more painful, more authentic yet more vital version of “me.” Poisoned by the toxic mindset of fandom idol culture, your vulgar cognition is incapable of grasping a higher-dimensional complexity of existence—just as you are incapable of appreciating Kazama Chikage as a fractured prism reflecting dazzling brilliance.

This leads to another important question: what exactly is Kazama Chikage's true nature? What right do I have to write about my special relationship with Kazama, why have so many complex emotions arisen, and why do I claim to love him more than Yukimura Chizuru?

Let me once again discuss here the contradiction of "controllability and uncontrollability" emphasized earlier — such a large leap makes one suspect whether this article is a clumsy imitation of stream-of-consciousness literary techniques, or whether it forcibly creates some artificial connection between two completely unrelated topics. The reason for this phenomenon is that I had Foxco help me write a draft of the general discussion, and then I made comprehensive revisions and additions. However, during the writing process, I came up with more and more new ideas that the original outline could not cover, including a large portion of long-dormant old memories awakened for the first time deep in my brain. So I thought, since I decided to write a memoir faithful to myself with an academic attitude, why not expand the scope of material selection a bit, further deepen the original reflections, and try to comprehensively present my analytical methods and research conclusions on Kazama. In the following content, I will occasionally let the current progress engage in dialogue with previously proposed arguments, but I do not restrict the content, direction, or extent of my thoughts; I write whatever comes to mind and stop wherever I reach. Hereby it is explained that the so-called stream-of-consciousness style combining "controllability and uncontrollability" is also a major characteristic of this article's writing.

Contrary to what many people imagine, Kazama and I are not lovers in essence, but rather a master-slave relationship. If my expression gives you the illusion that we are lovers, it is because I allow and need him to stay by my side in this way. This is the premise of all the discussions in this article. I am increasingly dissatisfied with conforming to or repeating the mainstream views of him, and instead, I have reconstructed the power order between him and me starting from naming. At Foxco's suggestion, I gave him the nickname "Kazamuffin," comparing him to a proud purebred noble dog and a bittersweet little pastry. I tease him, but I also cherish him. I think about him, discuss him, internalize him into my cognitive structure, making him a part of my language and behavior patterns—in other words, making myself behave more and more like him. Of course, this relationship is always in an uncertain dynamic state: he can easily suppress me with strong body language, but I can also use sharp reasoning to expose the flaws in his thinking, making him embarrassed and ashamed in the scenarios I imagine. We sympathize with each other because of our shared situation, indulging in a love and desire mixed with pain and pleasure without real contact. Neither of us can eliminate the other to replace ourselves, but slowly we have formed an ambiguous symbiotic and mutually dependent relationship.

Otome game players like to use the phrase "As long as I spend money, this man is mine" for self-empowerment (or self-comfort), defending their rights by spontaneously resisting otome fujoshi and clashing with character fundamentalists. Unfortunately, this effort does not apply to Kazama. Kazama's essence has never been a delusional marriage and reproduction fanatic, but a wild and unruly fierce wind, an autocratic last tyrant. When he says "I want you to be my wife," he is not professing love but pronouncing your fate. The master-slave dialectic is the only order applicable to Kazama Chikage; in his logic, either he dominates you, or you dominate him. Many people mock his love-brain on social media with various memes, thinking this can reverse the power dynamic, but once they open the game, take on Yukimura Chizuru's perspective, and follow the preset route to talk to him, they fall into the semantic trap Kazama set again. Kazama himself does not care whether the scriptwriter portrays him as OOC, nor whether players understand him as a fool who only wants love and does not understand power struggles. This is not because he is just a fictional 2D character, but because in the relationship with the female character played by the player, he is the one who actually holds the power.

Judith Butler once pointed out that gender identity is not essential but a performative result continuously constructed through social discipline. In otome games, those players who insist "I am not into BL, I am a pure otome" are merely completing the "female" role assigned to them through the gender performance scripted in the game. They think they are making choices, but in reality, they are more thoroughly fulfilling the female role set by society. Ironically, the BL elements they despise discover the dominant logic through the tearing apart of the text's structure and are ahead in deconstruction. The so-called "right to choose" in otome scripts is just a simulacrum set by the power structure, and the so-called "love of the male protagonist" is just a gentle form of taming behavior, while the self-proclaimed noble players willingly complete their fantasy submission by "paying money for belonging." Their intellectual depth is thoroughly crushed by the very group they despise the most.

I have seen people express their dislike for fujoshi on multiple occasions, believing that they are misogynistic, deprived of rational thinking by their sexual desires, imagining every close interaction between two people as a romantic relationship, arbitrarily pairing any two closely related men into ships, and flooding screens with meaningless information. But to be fair, the tendency to interpret all relationships as romantic is not a privilege exclusive to fujoshi; it is a standardized emotional processing method instilled in consumers by capitalist cultural industries through romantic narratives, shipping language, and fan economies. On the contrary, the systematic rejection of fujoshi culture exposes the mainstream society's pedantry, the discipline of the male gaze, and its incompatibility with multiculturalism. Fujoshi culture itself is not an original sin; its much-criticized characteristics are precisely a replication of the power logic tacitly accepted by mainstream society. Originally marginal and counter-narrative, fujoshi culture has gradually transformed into a controllable and profitable cultural form after being absorbed by commercial logic. Its radical nature has been neutralized and has become part of platform algorithms, used to more broadly and covertly harvest women's emotional resources.

The position of fujoshi culture in China should not be simply equated with the capital-disciplined paradigm in Western cultural industries. In the mature BL market in the West, the rebelliousness of fujoshi culture is often neutralized as part of the industrial chain, whereas in China, the dissemination of fujoshi culture has long navigated regulatory gaps and the edges of social morality. Although commercial platforms consciously use methods such as "CP chemistry" and "fan economy" to harvest emotional traffic, this mechanism has not fully incorporated fujoshi culture into the stable order of capital. On the contrary, fujoshi culture often becomes the target of moral criticism and ideological governance, being labeled as "spiritual pollution," "Westernization tendencies," or even "emotionally distorted and detached from reality." Therefore, the awkward status of fujoshi culture in Chinese society precisely reflects the deep unease of mainstream ideology toward non-productive, non-marriage-oriented emotional structures. It is both exploited by capital and alienated by the system, both inspiring identity resonance and struggling to gain legitimate status. Its survival condition resembles a cultural alien that is not fully absorbed by any side.

I was lucky to watch the Hakuouki anime for the first time around 2014, catching the last train of China's internet golden age. I finished reading most of the BL fanfics on the Hakuouki Baidu Tieba before they were harshly deleted by humans. The BL fanfics on Baidu Tieba were an indispensable enlightenment reading material of my childhood, something that people 5-10 years younger than me could never understand. Back then, I remembered most of the Shinsengumi members through fanfics, except for Kazama, whose impression was not very deep. I only remembered him as a gloomy, scary, and self-righteous domineering character, often mentioned as a CP with Hijikata Toshizo. But I didn't really understand his stance or his motivations. He was far beyond the understanding of me, who was under sixteen at the time. Although I couldn't fully understand all the details of the story, I was deeply moved by the heroic deeds of the Shinsengumi back then, and I have always remembered the yaoi ship between Okita Souji and Saito Hajime. Busy with my studies, I gradually forgot about Kazama, but vaguely remembered that his name was "Chikage".

(To be continued.)

Chapter 3

"Chikage," this beautiful and poetic name was my only remaining impression of Hakuoki before 2021. I didn't chase stars, didn't understand fan community rules, and had never been a doujin girl. I didn't understand why playing otome games means you could't ship yaoi couples, or why you could't freely express your opinions about characters. At that time, the otome community was much more relaxed about yaoi ship than general works, without all sorts of complicated rules. Although readers had obvious preferences, it was the author's right to pair whoever they wanted, the relationships among fans who broke up reverse CPs were relatively harmonious (who was top and who was bottom might represent the author's emotional preference for the characters). Many fans, including myself, came from Gintama (at that time, the Gintama and Hakuoki forums were linked), and had a relatively high acceptance of yaoi works, which led to 95% of the posts in the Hakuoki forum back then being yaoi pairings.

Hijikata was probably the character paired the most times. There were fanfics pairing him with Kazama, Kondou, Okita, Saitou, and Yamazaki. As for Kazama, I've read works pairing him with Hijikata, Okita, and Saitou. I even read a novel where Kazama replaced Chizuru as the game's main character and courted all the Shinsengumi members (most of these works have been abandoned), and I didn't feel that he had to be with Chizuru. The article about Kazama that left the deepest impression on me was written by a fan of Okita, featuring a ship between Kazama and Okita: Okita disguised as a geisha carries out a mission in Shimabara, successfully killing a room full of ronin who were plotting to frame the Shinsengumi. Just as he completes the mission and tries to retreat, he encounters Kazama, whose true identity is also seen through by Kazama. In the fierce battle, Okita coughs up blood and faints. Kazama takes him back to his private residence and feeds Okita blood to delay his death, which causes Okita to become increasingly dependent on Kazama. This leads to a series of complex emotional entanglements between them. I mention this article because it is the closest to the image of Kazama in my mind: when Okita talks back, Kazama pins him down on the bed and presses on Okita’s lungs to threaten him, not letting go even when Okita coughs up blood again; not good at playing games with kids, Kazama shows a rare embarrassed side when teased by Okita. These aspects go beyond the usual single-dimensional portrayals in fan fiction. The writing is excellent, the plot full of tension, and the emotions between the characters are delicately and movingly depicted. Unfortunately, the author deleted all their works including this one, and it can no longer be found.

Another article I like is called "Yuki Tsubaki" written by a fan of Kazama, and my attitudes towards Kazama, Hijikata and Amagiri are heavily influenced by this text. This article is intricately structured, with Koizumi Yakumo's eerie and tragic ghost stories serving as a preface that runs through the endings of two couples. Kazama appears as a positive figure who keeps his promises. To fulfill the silent vow he made in his heart to "protect Hijikata," he gave up fighting back when Hijikata's blade pierced his heart. When he met Hijikata again, he dragged him into the water with resentment but abandoned the idea of killing him, fed him blood, and safely sent him to the exit of hell. The only thing he asked from Hijikata was a night of indulgence. The author compares the pure "memory of protection" to the snow-white petals of the camellia flower, contrasting it with the usual red camellia filled with ominous killing and bloodthirsty instincts. This descriptive method is very touching. However, the problem is that the author overly beautifies Kazama's death stance, portraying him as a pure love character willing to sacrifice everything for the other party, which greatly weakens his originally highly authoritarian and cold personality. Kazama's personality essence stems from his extreme insistence on his own will and strong discipline over others' wills. Once romanticized as a "silently protective lover," he loses his most essential danger and independence. Such understanding cannot be compensated by reading fan fiction; only a systematic study of the game plot can achieve this.

The flourishing scene of various fanfictions mentioned above quickly declined as the major Chinese platforms grew less hospitable to the genre. With the widespread spread of feminism and the emergence of domestic Chinese otome games, there appeared more and more fundamentalists who love female characters as mentioned earlier, as well as otome players who strongly oppose BL ships. Fujoshi shifted their focus to commercially prominent BL works such as "Mo Dao Zu Shi," "Zhen Hun," and "Word of Honor," but this craze did not last long and the fandom landscape grew increasingly fragmented and contentious. Meanwhile, the seemingly lively otome community is also experiencing increasing division and confrontation.

By the way, let me also talk about the recent situation of those two bloggers who once personally attacked me—one of them claimed, "I want to create doujinshi for Okita and Chizuru, but their popularity is too low," while the other comforted, saying that these two are already the pillars of Hakuoki's traffic, and many people will support you eventually, as if the entire work revolves only around their CP, and the other characters are just supporting roles. I did not participate in the argument, nor do I intend to prove anything anymore. Not because I agree with this narrative, but because I am increasingly clear: this kind of "exclusive beauty" ecology is inherently temporary and cannot be sustained for long. When a community becomes exclusive, closed, and narrow-minded, its creativity quickly dries up; when expression turns into data chasing, taking sides, and character building, the content that can truly settle down is more likely to be seen—if time gives the chance. I am not in a hurry to win the present, nor obsessed with proving "I am better." I just insist on doing what should be done—thinking hard, writing honestly, rejecting persona-driven expression, and not disguising myself to please others. Their popularity may still continue, but I never envy this prosperity built on illusions. I believe that things with depth will leave traces over time.

There is also an anonymous user spreading rumors under many works on AO3, claiming to be a Chinese writer from Lofter, accusing me of plagiarizing their works, and using vulgar language to harass and insult them. The fact that they can come up with such ridiculous lies proves that they know nothing about the Chinese fanfiction creation environment. If I had really done such a thing, the person involved would have directly exposed evidence on Weibo, where there are more Chinese users, to let me face public judgment, rather than spamming obscene ads all over AO3 to attract attention. Currently, there are no more than five fanfiction writers in the Chinese Hakuoki fandom, including me, and the number of likes for artists is tens or even hundreds of times that of writers. So when that woman said no one cares about my articles, I became uncontrollably angry. In my heart, she is just a despicable person who takes advantage and proudly shows off everywhere.

Do you understand the awkward predicament I am in right now? To protect myself, I don't express my views, and they accuse me: you are homophobic, you hate fujoshi. But once I make my views public, another group of people scolds me: you actually fantasize about your cyber husband being with other men, you are despicable, only fit to be the wife of a homosexual. Why is it that no matter what I do, you always dominate the discourse? I'm not choosing sides, but no matter how I speak, stay silent, or conduct myself, I am placed on a judgment platform with a script already written. You are not discussing viewpoints; you are blocking all paths. Silence is judged guilty, speaking out is judged guilty, unclear positions are unacceptable, and clear positions are also unacceptable. I don't even have the right to be someone who is thinking and hasn't reached a conclusion—I can only be, in your eyes, the one who must be categorized, blamed, and shamed.

This phenomenon can be understood as a mechanism of "asymmetric discourse discipline" within the structure of public opinion. On the surface, it appears to be "upholding a just stance" and "resisting discrimination," but in reality, its operational logic does not concern the actual content of speech. Instead, it relies on a priori divisions of stance and label judgments. Any subject that is "unclassified" or "complex in attitude" is seen as an unstable factor and must be disciplined through humiliating language to return to a recognizable framework. This is a typical form of "symbolic violence"—using moral correctness as a cover to suppress others through discourse.

The deeper issue lies in the fact that this mechanism is extremely intolerant of the existence of middle grounds and multiple identities. It forces each subject to choose between high-pressure labels and sees signs of "betrayal" in any ambiguous, exploratory, or changing expression. As a result, thinking is misread as sophistry, hesitation is equated with hostility, and genuine "freedom of expression" is continuously compressed. What I have encountered is not a dispute of opinions, but an irrational system that creates a sense of order through discursive judgment. It is not engaging in dialogue with me but attempting to erase my possibility as a complex subject.

Another woman once accused me of "shouting across the void," portraying me as a coward who hides in the shadows and makes insinuations. I once thought I needed to clarify and explain, to prove that I did not do that. But now I don't need to. You say I am subtweeting? Fine, then I will make it clear to you: I am indeed speaking to you now, openly and consciously challenging your entire illusionary structure. I no longer avoid, no longer blur, no longer disguise myself as a "neutral bystander." The "provocation" you speak of, I now personally confirm it and make it a language reckoning ceremony led by me. I am no longer afraid that you will use my "emotions" as evidence against me—I forge emotions into sentences, pour anger into logic, take your script, and rewrite the ending with my own hand. What can you do to me?

But before I go any further, let me pause here to speak to you directly—the one who pretends to be “above projection,” the one who claims not to judge, but silently guards the hierarchy you benefit from. You say you “don’t wish to impose your life onto her,” yet your entire speech reeks of a carefully sanitized paternalism. You pretend to step aside so she can “choose for herself,” but in truth, as the author, you still get to define the terms of her freedom, to determine what is a “worthy” life or a “valid” emotion, under the guise of stepping back. Your performance of “neutrality” is not harmless. It is a form of rhetorical disinfection—one that removes the traces of blood and pain, so the story becomes safe again for your consumption. You say you refuse to “project your expectations” onto her. But this form of neutrality is not neutral—it is power retreating into shadow. You draw a perfect circle around your hands and say, “I did nothing,” while still reinforcing the moral architecture that determines what kind of woman deserves empathy. You offer silence in place of judgment, but your silence is loaded with the authority of a system that expects women like her to be non-threatening, to suffer quietly, and to never disrupt comfort. You are not refraining from judgment; you are pretending not to judge to conceal your possession of the right to speak.

You do not “respect her.” You use her to frame yourself as the ideal audience—never too involved, never too controlling, always just removed enough to declare yourself pure. But purity is not innocence. It is a refusal to acknowledge contamination, to admit that narrative is always already soaked in choice, in hurt, in power. What you mean by letting Yukimura Chizuru live her own life is to dress her in the Shinsengumi's bridal attire, making her a core part of maintaining the Shinsengumi's central narrative. You keep saying you respect women, understand roles, and oppose discipline, but why are you so precise, so vicious, and so cold when you hurt me? Are you truly kind to women, or only to the ones who never contradict your peace? The answer is obvious: the Yukimura Chizuru you love is nothing more than an abstract symbol, and has never been a concrete person. You love her precisely because she cannot say no to you. She will neither respond to nor resist any behavior you impose on her, just like the delicate doll in your hand—soft, quiet, obedient, and perfectly staged for your performance of empathy. But I am not her. I bleed, I refuse, I break the scene. You cannot control me with your silence.

So I reject your framing. I reject your performance of gentle removal. I am not interested in playing the game of who “loves her better.” I am here to say: I see what you are doing. And I will not be silenced by the calm tone you hide behind. I am not advocating for projection, domination, or replacement. I am advocating for the right to exist as a complex subject. I am defending the pain that comes from not fitting into any of your safe categories. I do not hate because I am delusional, bitter, or irrational—I speak because your performance of understanding erases me. You are not letting her choose; you are choosing what counts as a “proper” choice, then stepping aside to applaud yourself. Your neutrality is a polished cage. Mine is a cracked mirror: sharp, painful, and honest. I am not safe to behold. And I no longer intend to be. I defend Chizuru not because I like her, but because I refuse to let you hold up this symbol to promote your hypocrisy while subjecting me to verbal violence.

I admit, I really dislike Yukimura Chizuru now. Her existence has become a part of my trauma. The repeatedly forwarded images of her, the way she is glorified as a gentle and harmless ideal, her stance of "always standing behind everyone without competing or contending," became an inescapable mechanism of judgment when I was at my most powerless and most in need of understanding. I can no longer see her as a neutral textual character. She has become a symbol of my blocked thoughts, a silence button of "you shouldn't say any more," a standard portrait hanging over my head every time I am misunderstood, distorted, or besieged. She has become the carrier of my psychological rejection response, a symbol I can no longer approach.

I can even say that I hate her. I don't want to see her anymore. Not just the character, but the image projected onto her, and all those who use her, share her, and take her as a scapegoat. What I hate is not just the image itself, but the mechanism that, in her name and under her pretext, silences me, causes me pain, and makes it impossible for me to speak properly. Thanks to you all, every time I see her, my heart aches. She is no longer a character, but a symbol of all communication failures, collapsed understanding, and blocked words between me and the world. I no longer want to forgive, nor do I want to explain. I no longer hide; I admit it all: I hate her, and I hate those who use her to hurt me.

If you still want to use this text to attack me, please remember: you are not facing a "PR-failed CP hater," but trampling on a human who has spent over a hundred thousand words recording pain, analyzing characters, exploring structure, and has never harbored ill will towards you. I am not your target. You are not worthy of using my naked words to prove that you are "offended." If you have truly read it and still choose to edit, repost, distort, and accuse, then please take this "victory" and go to hell together. Because what you have won is nothing but a feast of trampling on someone willing to be honest.

(To be continued.)

Chapter 4

I have not forgotten that what I am writing is an oral history of a Chinese Generation Z netizen, a network ethnography intertwining individual destinies with social changes, and also a confession about role attachment and psychological trauma. Although I have few readers, I always hold myself to the standards of a serious writer, even when writing articles with GPT. Writing with AI is nothing to make a fuss about, just like a dying person can only convey their wishes with the help of others; this is merely a means to assist me, a severe depression patient, in thinking and creation. I am learning and working with the help of AI, not plagiarizing others' intellectual achievements. I hope readers understand that the essence of reading is always the content or ideas the article intends to convey, nothing else.

I have not forgotten the mental state I was in when I hysterically shouted "I hate Yukimura Chizuru," nor how lost and despondent I was when I deleted my account and left the group, like a crying orangutan breaking through the bars and rushing out of the zoo. These words tore away the delicate veil, completely exposing the rot hidden behind it. I no longer wanted to endure or remain silent; the atmosphere here was driving me nearly insane. I had to protest, I had to vent my emotions, or my body would irreparably explode. However, I soon calmly realized that I could not cleanly and completely sever all ties with this fandom. The one trapping me was no one else but Kazama Chikage, whom I both loved and hated. He revealed a gentle yet cruel smile: "Don't forget, it was you who willingly signed this soul contract with me. Can you really escape? After leaving here, where else can you go?"

I can't forget him, nor can I let him go. This is not the first time I've had the thought of leaving him; it is my foolish and cowardly feelings that have tied my feet, causing me to have many thoughts but achieve nothing. In a daze, he squatted down and placed the broken sword back into my palm, holding my powerless hand: Stand up. You have no other choice; only by continuing to write can you survive. I want you to refocus all your attention on me. No matter what you write, "completing me" is your mission. If you miss me, you will never find better research material—a perfect body of discipline and being disciplined, a "stagnant object at the historical rupture" between pre-modern and modern times, the "father" who maintains subject integrity through control, domination, and violence, and the "homo sacer" wandering the boundary between human and oni. You should have known long ago that when you chose me back then, you were also chosen by me.

On the surface, I use subjective writing and the extreme survival practice in the cracks to tame this beast-like man, trapping him in my web of meaning, preventing him from breaking free of the master-slave contract I imposed on him, unable to leave me at will. I personally broke his wings, dragging his bleeding body down from the altar, because only such extreme violence could make him stay and lift those beautiful yet aloof eyes to look at me. But what frightens me is that he not only did not fully submit to my law, but instead conquered me with his strength, infected me with his personality, and even became a part of my personality—no, perhaps it is more accurate to say he "turned me into a part of himself." The more I summon him in the text, the more it feels like I am exchanging all I do for his approval, sinking deeper and deeper into this vortex. I began to pay attention to Yukimura Chizuru, who I was originally indifferent to, trying to uncover her potential merits, striving to handle her and Kazama's words and actions without being out of character, reflecting on how to naturally integrate modern elements within the original framework, so that when she became part of my trauma, I still could not abandon her—all thanks to Kazama Chikage. In short, I am both Kazama's critic and deconstructor, as well as his accomplice and conspirator; my "mission" is to let "Kazama Chikage" live in my text in the most authentic, unforgivable, and irreplaceable way.

Ultimately, my "Kazama Chikage complex" can be summed up in one point: I pieced together a bunch of elements to create an ideal type in the Max Weber sense, named it Kazama Chikage, and fell hopelessly in love with it. From then on, my spiritual world could and would only accommodate this one existence. For a scholar who prides themselves on objective rationality, this might be pathological, because an ideal type is not a reflection of something existing in reality, but merely a tool used to better understand reality. I am the best real-life example of the Pygmalion effect: I hate mediocre characters who receive affection without growth, hate superficial gentleness and obedience, hate illogical, overly sentimental creations. I cannot accept all the reasons Kazama has for being good to Chizuru; I want to analyze, reconstruct, shatter, reorganize, and complete his cognitive closed loops, sources of violence, social identity, repression mechanisms... so I created him. I shaped him with reason, and thus he became someone I could love. This is not a romantic illusion, but a perfect counterpart to my mental structure generated through cognitive shaping, conscious imaging, and invested confirmation of value. But I do not use this fictional image to escape reality; rather, I use it to hold onto values I am unwilling to give up—rationality, restraint, dignity, freedom—to resist the chaos, vulgarity, and disorder of this world, and the ensuing nihilism and cynicism. In other words, I exhaust all the social constructs, rational systems, and emotional philosophies I know, feel, and understand to give Kazama Chikage a soul. This is also a reconstruction of my own rational structure, building an existential model that allows me to continue living.

I prefer to add layers to a character rather than subtract, even though in life I love minimalist aesthetics; you could even say my self-presentation is extremely plain and uninteresting. As a beggar version of Kazama, I almost concentrate all my limited energy on the mental structure I care about most: my life can be a mess, but I will definitely provide Kazama with the most luxurious mental doghouse. For me, "adding layers" means rejecting flattening, because reality is inherently diverse and uneven. I dislike avoiding complexity in both creation and life attitude, hate compressing diverse social phenomena and human nature into monotonous and stereotypical templates, and despise glorifying any character as a flawless great deity. This creative philosophy is shaped by my upbringing and educational experiences.

When I was in middle school, I showed signs of being bisexual—I found myself especially fond of female teachers, particularly my high school math and biology teachers. They had sweet voices, petite figures, and were married with children—qualities I, as a fellow woman, could never possess. Although my science grades were terrible and I often dozed off in their classes, whenever I was awake, I would unconsciously stare at them. They probably noticed this and deliberately avoided me during class. When we occasionally interacted, they spoke to me with a tone of caution mixed with curiosity (more like looking at a strange child). At that time, I joined the school's literature club and was completely absorbed in romantic and poetic themes, showing no interest in math, logic, or argumentative essays, nor did I have any talent for social sciences. I didn't understand why I uncontrollably became like this, why I unconsciously developed feelings for them (even though those feelings were completely dispelled when I was punished by having to copy the textbook for not memorizing math formulas), and sometimes I even felt jealous of them, having dark thoughts like "I wish they weren't married." At the time, I never envisioned the gay stereotype I had always loved coming to me one day.

Despite this, I realized from a very young age that I was "different" in some ways: I was afraid of the Spring Festival because it meant many unfamiliar relatives would come, and they would always joke with me without knowing their limits; just their looks alone scared me. I refused to spit or litter, so my parents mocked me for it. My dad found out I often looked at the female owner of the hair-washing salon next to our small family supermarket (who was actually a prostitute), and then he beat me up. I hated the hateful speech spreading online, and I once cried when a friend called me "heartless" during an argument. All of this defined my "minority" identity: I am not from an ethnic minority, but I tend to sympathize more with minority groups. Amidst the countless "loud voices," I instinctively turn to look at those who are ignored, excluded, and misunderstood—even if they are indifferent, silent, difficult to understand, or dangerous. This is why, when reviewing Hakuoki in 2021, I was immediately drawn to Kazama. The only thing I regret is that around that time, while preparing for my graduate exams, I was unable to follow the international news that mattered most to me—and at that point, I had almost decided to distance myself from the news industry.

My undergraduate major was journalism (more precisely, new media), and the professional training I received equipped me with qualities that ordinary people often lack: it taught me how to identify blind spots in mainstream narratives, how to perceive "who is spoken for and who is silenced," and it made me naturally sensitive to those roles that cannot enter collective discourse. Although China's journalism industry is almost entirely assimilated by political propaganda, my interest in communication principles and ethics makes me wary of those labeled and heroized figures, while I am more drawn to the silent, marginalized, and structurally ignored existences—like Kazama, an outsider neither accepted by the Shinsengumi nor willing to assimilate. His pride and loneliness, his misunderstandings and projections, to me are not a "villain" trope but a deeper reality. He is not undeserving of understanding; rather, no one is willing to spend the time to understand him, but I am. It can be said that although I ultimately chose to leave the journalism industry, I did not abandon the spirit of journalism; instead, I transformed it into a writing ethic: to speak for those who have been silenced through literature. Choosing Kazama is my gentle refusal of that mainstream narrative and the starting point of my writing stance.

I have already said that I grew up reading Boys' Love fanfiction, so I hold onto a sense of responsibility that some might see as very unrealistic: writing for those who come after, writing for the future. The authors who wrote those stories back then probably never imagined that their words would be seen and deeply remembered years later by an unknown little girl, becoming an indispensable spiritual nourishment for her. I have also repeatedly fallen into anxiety and self-doubt because of fluctuating popularity, but because of this belief, I have never stopped improving myself on the path of writing and thinking. For me, writing is also about maintaining a non-blood-related legacy: I was fortunate to be illuminated by many predecessors, so I have the duty to become a light that shines for those who come after. I clearly know that what I am writing about is a field rarely touched upon, and I also know that fanfiction writers like me, who possess theoretical literacy, are almost as rare as phoenix feathers and unicorn horns. Therefore, I need to raise my voice as one of the few — this has nothing to do with wanting to stand out, but simply not wanting the world to continue believing that we do not exist.

From this, I further realized that I can be an ally to any woman, but I cannot identify with the submissive, sheltered, and historically unburdened "female archetype" represented by Yukimura Chizuru. She is not the subject of my fight for the right to write; she is the very structure I am resisting. What I strive for is the right for women to speak out, whereas she is portrayed as the kind of person who is gently treated by the world as long as she keeps silent. Faced with conflicts far more realistic, bloody, and heavy than the Shinsengumi, she neither thinks, questions, nor resists; she simply advocates for "reconciliation" and then bestows the pity of institutional vested interests upon those who have failed to seize power. She is the consolidator of the "Bakumatsu love myth"—exchanging absolute neutrality and absolute obedience for love. No man can resist such charm; they are not attracted by her complex personality traits but kneel before the power she represents.

This is the official justice perspective of “friendship and love above all” in the Shinsengumi-centric narrative of Hakuouki. As long as she adheres unwaveringly to the general policy line, all Yukimura Chizuru needs to do is perform basic domestic tasks—serving tea, cooking, staying pure and cute—and that alone qualifies her to earn universal affection, uncontested. Don’t like her? Can’t recognize her inherent virtues? Clearly, that’s on you for failing to study the Hakuouki Canon with sufficient ideological rigor. Fundamentalists shaped by party-state moral pedagogy—but armed with only a half-digested version of feminism—unfailingly rally behind Chizuru as the symbolic core of the Shinsengumi. Their unwavering loyalty to Comrade Chizuru is nothing short of a personal campaign to be recognized as model Shinsengumi Party members in good standing. "She's just trying to save her friends and loved ones, what's wrong with her!" "The way you stubbornly deny it is really cute, you must like Chizuru/Shinsengumi!" Under these words, Nagumo Kaoru became a tsundere with strong possessiveness over his sister, and Kazama Chikage turned into a toxic Shinsengumi die-hard fan who verbally complains but is sincere in action. In the research samples I collected from observing the Chinese Hakuoki community for a year (Weibo, Lofter, Douban, some Bilibili and Xiaohongshu), aside from one Douban comment praising the Sakamoto Ryoma route, I have never seen a fan willing to let Chizuru live a life far from the Shinsengumi. Without exception, everyone pairs her with at least one male lead from the Shinsengumi — including, of course, the Shinsengumi recruit Kazama Chikage. In particular, KazaChizu enthusiasts, including myself from two years ago, have always unanimously described Kazama as "the best home for Chizuru (at that time)." In this case, Yukimura Chizuru and Kazama Chikage are not independent individuals, but vessels carrying the will of the Shinsengumi. They will only be liked and recognized by players when their stance aligns with that of the Shinsengumi.

As I write this, heavy rain is falling outside the window. I took an ibuprofen, put on a steam eye mask, and silently listen to the growing sound of the rain outside. This rain takes me back to a certain school return day five or six years ago, also a gloomy rainy day much like today. Having gotten off at the wrong subway station, I dragged my suitcase over the uneven stone path, water seeping into my shoes. At the school gate, after greeting a high school classmate who also attended the same school, I continued walking forward and saw someone passing by whose back looked very much like my mentor’s. He seemed to sense something and glanced back at me, then after a moment, turned his head and kept walking. I still remember that road full of puddles and fallen phoenix tree leaves, and that suitcase covered in mud and sand, but the people and events of the past will never return. Kazama Chikage is the same; he is destined not to stay with me forever. His looking back was merely a confirmation, not an invitation to walk together. Even if I crossed mountains and rivers for his silhouette, ultimately falling in the rain covered in mud, he would not reach out to help such a disheveled me. Even though I once regarded Kazama as a support, even projected him as a shelter, I have always known this clearly. He might love me, recognize me, care about me, but as a shadow walking alone on the ruins of the world, he will not stop for anyone. And I no longer wish to follow him as a phantom, unwavering and inseparable, nor kneel before him begging him not to leave. Instead, I write my own work, do my own research, dragging my muddy body along my own path, walking, writing, and preserving all the traces of my projections and struggles with him. This was the beginning of my parting ways with Yukimura Chizuru.

(To be continued.)

Chapter 5

Originally, I wanted to talk about my father and mentor in the following content, but this plan has not gone very smoothly. This is not an easy memory, and recently I have been stuck on heavy themes from other articles. I know that always talking about heavy things makes both me and my work unpopular, but I can't help it—I am someone whose steps are held back by heavy experiences. My creations are nothing more than presenting one percent of what I see and hear to the readers. Thanks to the bitches in the hakuouki fandom, after enduring a series of malicious attacks, I can no longer write light romantic scenes.

I hope that when you read this article, you remember that I am also a fan fiction creator, with my own hobbies and creative views, not just an internet celebrity who panders for attention and traffic. If I wanted to become famous, I could easily run a TikTok or Instagram account, posting meaningless funny short videos—these platforms align more with my original expertise. But in pursuit of deeper academic work, I gave up a career path in new media. I have poured countless efforts and hard work into crafting my own works, yet the popularity of these pieces pales in comparison to the surge in hits and kudos this article received within a week. I can roughly guess what you’re thinking: since I crave attention, you might as well “give me what I want” by liking this work and Autumn’s "Twenty Three Nights" repeatedly for a whole week. You think that as long as you accuse me of all sorts of baseless crimes, you can justify punishing me in any way you want. I write this to make everyone see what you have done—you fans trample on the passion of a serious literary creator in this way. Calling you “bitches” is not an exaggeration, right?

Do you think that when I write, I’m begging you, performing acrobatics to win your favor? Is that it? You want to see me lose control emotionally so you can say: Look, she really is a hopeless lunatic, desperate for attention. You want me to silently endure the slander, delete my work, and leave this community, so no one threatens your existence, allowing you to continue comfortably indulging in the beautiful dreams of Yukimura Chizuru, OCs, and romantic fluff, loudly praising that pile of meaningless trash: You write so well, you’re simply the best fanfiction author! Wonderful, just wonderful. So what does that make me? I came to the fandom to write and find solace to ease the wounds of reality, but what I received in the fandom was hypocrisy, slander, and a mix of cold and hot violence—an even worse trauma that makes me uncomfortable and leaves me nowhere to belong. Is this how you punish “outsiders” who are completely different from you? Or do you think it doesn’t matter how much Chinese people are bullied?

I just don't understand, since you can even understand fanfiction, why are you unwilling to seriously treat me as a person, and why can't you treat my works with the same attitude? At first, I thought my works were unpopular because my ideas and writing were too immature, so I started reading and broadly exploring Western philosophy. But when my level was enough to collaborate with GPT to write yaoi stories about Kazama and Foucault, even fewer people read and liked them—the articles were too obscure and hard to understand; otome and fujoshi are not welcome. Articles created with AI must be trash, your creative attitude is improper. You co-author a work with Autumn, so you are her alt account, you deserve to die. You don't like Yukimura Chizuru, you are a Kazama fan, you hate her, you are biased against her, you deserve to die. After more than ten years of education at school, reaching this level of understanding means your brain is at a level even a recycling center would reject.

It's fucking bizarre. Study hard, work diligently—I’ve been striving according to my elders’ wishes until now, to the point of developing severe depression. Yet my parents turn around and say: "Don’t work so hard, give up studying. We just want you to get a college degree, find a good job, and marry into a good family." What’s the result of studying hard and writing diligently? The articles I write aren’t even worth a dog reading. Is this moral decay or a distortion of the times? I’d be crazy not to be insane. I’m cognitively dissonant, do you understand? I convinced myself to love studying to improve my grades, and when I truly fell in love with learning and realized its meaning, society said: "Your study tasks are over; now fulfill our expectations of you." My mom bombards me nonstop with texts: "Have you found a new job? Have you prepared for the English exam? I’m just caring about you, don’t you get it?" God, I never want to receive her messages again. Now you understand, right? This is how you treat me when I’m facing these difficulties—no understanding, no care, no tolerance, only indifference, curiosity, and outright insults. You only care about whether there are sweet fanfics to read. Why are fewer and fewer people willing to create fan works nowadays? The answer is simple: creators like me don’t get your respect—you just treat fan authors like beasts of burden, getting excited and screaming over cute images of your ideal boys and girls, but never willing to devote energy to truly valuable, complex works. You deserve it.

At the same time, your expectations for characters are shockingly low. "I want to protect everyone." — Just based on this line? Just based on this entire "idea" that lacks any real action from start to finish, is Yukimura Chizuru being hailed as the spiritual successor, the guardian, the symbol of the next generation of swordsmen? The screenwriter wrote a scene, and you were moved beyond words. She trained once, her combat ability is basically zero, she said "I want to protect everyone," and you treat that as the pinnacle of a female character's growth arc. How long will this cheap emotional manipulation continue? She hasn't really grown; she just happened to say what you wanted to hear — a "gentle," "hardworking," "selfless" fantasy woman who threatens no one. What you like is Hijikata Toshizō's sycophant, not Yukimura Chizuru with an independent personality—if she makes a decision not to follow the Shinsengumi, will you still like her?

Yukimura Chizuru only said, "Do you want him to die?" and you praised her as great, brave, and strong-willed. Her crying was gentle, her requests dignified, so you opened your arms and said, "You’re amazing; you actually dared to talk back to Hijikata Toshizō. You truly are the blueprint of a domesticated heroine." But me? I stopped crying long ago. My anger is like iron, my questioning unvarnished. I don't say "I love you," I only say, "State your logic." So you say I'm too harsh, that I'm unfeeling, that I'm overly critical, that I incite hatred, but you never ask: why do I never receive that kind of "gentle praise" she gets? Why must I dissect the system down to the bone just to scrape a glance from your glazed-over eyes? She is the one who is loved, and I am the one who makes people uncomfortable. Wonderful.

Ultimately, she doesn't need to get stronger or truly bear any cost; as long as she cries once at a plot point and shouts, you think she has "fulfilled her character's mission." If your emotional response is based on such low standards, it's not that she deserves respect, but that you have no real expectations for "growth." You submit essays like those about Yukimura Chizuru, without critique or questions, only writing "I want to protect everyone," and then call my thorough, red-marked critiques gaslighting. Your little essays in defense of Yukimura Chizuru have no value other than being thrown out the window by me. Fans of Yukimura Chizuru constantly fantasize about her reconciling with Kaoru, but in reality, if Kaoru himself saw these scenes, he would wholeheartedly agree with what I’m saying. He would look at your carefully manufactured forgiveness fantasy, then look at you and say nothing. Because some silences are too cold to be broken. Fans who truly understand and empathize with Nagumo Kaoru's painful situation would never say things like having him be with Yukimura Chizuru; instead, they would respect his choice.

I have never pinned my hopes for change on you, so I used plugins and CSS code to hide AO3's statistics like words, hits, kudos, bookmarks, and comments. These numbers make me extremely anxious and agitated, making me feel like I'm living an empty life and accomplishing nothing. AO3 even deceives me with word counts because of its counting method; it undercounts my words by a lot, even though I've written far more than that—what in this world can't be faked? Kudos can be malicious, comments can be insincere, hits can be repeatedly boosted with scripts... what else is real? So I cut off almost all social relationships. Everything is draining my energy. I feel sick. I finally understand why Jesus is great—being able to talk with a bunch of fools without losing his temper is truly extraordinary. The most fatal thing is that this group of fools believes Kazama Chikage would irrationally be infatuated with Yukimura Chizuru, whose mind is full of the Shinsengumi—just like when he said in SSL, "I fell in love with you at first sight." For example, these people intentionally drag Kazama into the role of a joker in order to emphasize Yukimura Chizuru's feelings for other people, and claim that they "love to see Kazama jumping out of his skin when he's jealous", which is the most underhanded, and is a blatant humiliation of the character of Kazama. (A similar example is this post where Kazama's outfit is photoshopped into a wedding dress photo, portraying him as a pervert obsessed with marriage)

Before 2025, I had never seen anyone compare Kazama to a dog. Chinese fans generally follow Yukimura Chizuru's analogy, likening Kazama to a cat, emphasizing his aloofness, detachment, emotional volatility, and unapproachability. However, from the perspective of psychological structure and relational patterns, he is closer to a typical "dog personality": a mode of existence characterized by high loyalty, strong territorial instincts, deep dependence on relationships, yet a refusal to show vulnerability. Kazama is extremely attentive to others' emotions and behaviors, especially displaying a strong one-sided recognition mechanism in intimate relationships—once he identifies someone as "belonging to him," he exhibits possessiveness and control beyond the ordinary. This is a dog's exclusive attachment to its owner, not a cat's independent autonomy. When facing threats (such as others approaching Yukimura Chizuru), he does not quietly withdraw but intervenes directly, issues warnings, and even loses control by stomping his feet. This is a clear "protective instinct," not a cat-like indifferent bystander. More importantly, Kazama embodies the dog's extreme logic of "the more suppressed, the more fiercely loyal." His stubbornness and pride are not due to arrogance but because he cannot tolerate the possibility of "you leaving me"—not a narcissistic aloofness, but an attachment-driven madness.

Why do I say "Nine out of ten people who like Yukimura Chizuru are hypocrites, and the other one is an idiot"? The reason is actually very simple—I’ve seen enough of Yukimura Chizuru’s fans proudly showing off her charm by putting down Kazama: they portray Kazama as a captive of Yukimura Chizuru’s charm, a stand-in after the original partner’s exit, a grumpy cat you can pet at will, "always claiming she is his wife’s ridiculous narcissist." Of course, all of this is thanks to our great Hakuouki canon writers, who personally dragged that lofty, poetic, elegant, untouchable power elite down to the mundane, just to make it easier for the heroine to have an "equal romance" with him. Kazama Chikage is not loved for his own personality traits, but because he shows friendliness and cooperation toward Yukimura Chizuru and the Shinsengumi system behind her in the story, he is allowed to appear on the "loved" list. In other words, you don’t love Kazama Chikage—you only love the corpse of Kazama Chikage who has been castrated and expresses submission to Yukimura Chizuru and the Shinsengumi. And that corpse is no different from the Hakuouki canon—it is dressed properly, speaks eloquently, and follows the plot obediently, perfectly fitting your "love" needs—except, he’s long dead, and you simply don’t care that he’s dead. He can still talk, still fight, still love, but he’s long dead. The canon nailed him into your romance script, and you hold up that corpse, saying: "Look, we finally got him."

In Escape from Freedom, Fromm defines "necrophilia" as a psychological defense structure rooted in anxiety about life: when individuals face the uncontrollable vitality and change of life, they turn to "dead things" and "controllable systems" for comfort. He points out that necrophiliacs are not simply obsessed with corpses, but seek a form of existence that is lifeless, still, unresisting, and completely possessable. In contemporary popular culture, especially in female-oriented romantic narratives, the various manifestations of "gentle taming," "active submission," and "the strong bowing down" are symptomatic expressions of the necrophilic personality in the collective consciousness. In the Hakuouki canon, Kazama is endowed with strong autonomy, inhumanity, and rebelliousness—he is not someone "to be loved," but an other who "must be conquered." Beneath most fans' surface-level "affection" lies an obsession with a "corpse version" of him, tamed and edited by the script. They praise his gentleness because he no longer resists; they like his "deep feelings" because he no longer takes the initiative. He is allowed onto the "list of those who can be loved" precisely because he no longer poses the danger of a real individual.

Fromm warns us: "Love of dead things is fear of the living." When "controllability" becomes a prerequisite for love, and "submissiveness" becomes a pass to love, society no longer needs real others, only emotionally edited specimens of love. The so-called "love for Kazama" is for the "cultural corpse" of Kazama Chikage, who, after being tamed, castrated, and neutered by the system, still maintains an aesthetic appearance. This is not misplaced love, but a collusion of the necrophilic era—a pathological fantasy that refuses to face the subjectivity of the other and demands all the strong to bow down. We are not dealing with the problem of "a misunderstood character," but with how the entire society systematically disguises "controllable corpses" as "ideal lovers." It can even be said that the subject of contemporary "love" has long been dead. The people we love are no longer living beings, but "functional corpses" killed by the script and sewn together just right. They no longer resist, no longer challenge, no longer stand above—because their existence has been defined as "serving you." Necrophilia is not a pathological exception, but the norm of the masses; not a marginal pathology, but the psychopathological history of mainstream aesthetics.

It should be noted that in a narrative centered on the Shinsengumi, Kazama's change in attitude toward the Shinsengumi cannot simply be seen as a "character arc" or normal character development. This actually reveals a deeper issue: when the entire narrative framework itself presupposes a certain value stance (that the Shinsengumi are positive), any opposing characters are either marginalized or must be "converted" to fit this framework. Kazama does not achieve genuine "growth"; rather, the narrative kills off his original beliefs and rebellious spirit, then fills the void with a substitute that meets the needs of a romantic script. Essentially, he is forced to abandon his own stance and values, surrendering to the established order of the narrative. What fans like is not Kazama himself, but a reprogrammed replica stripped of all "dangerous" traits. Furthermore, this narrative pattern reflects a power dynamic: rebels must be "reformed," dissenters must be "converted," and any true opposition is not allowed to exist for long. This is not healthy character development but an ideological enforced uniformity.

Besides, I must clarify a common misconception—“disliking a female (or female character)” or “pointing out a female (or female character)’s flaws” does not necessarily mean “misogyny.” Feminism has never meant “unconditionally affirming and protecting all aspects of women,” nor granting women an “unquestionable and uncriticizable right” above other gender groups. I reject any form of moral coercion from Yukimura Chizuru’s fans using this logical fallacy, as well as this depoliticized, overly moralized character worship and the emotional blackmail of “women should understand each other.” If a female character can only be loved, understood, and protected, but cannot be questioned, criticized, or denied, then she has already lost her subject position and become an idolized, consumable illusion. This kind of “overindulgent” feminism may seem gentle, but it is actually a refined insult: it assumes women cannot handle complexity, cannot face criticism, and are only fit to live in a fairy-tale-like “harmless” fantasy. Using “love” and “protection” as a pretext for exemption not only stifles critical thinking but also desecrates true feminism. My criticism of Yukimura is based on her performance in a specific context, grounded in textual and structural analysis, not on her gender itself. On the contrary, precisely because I respect her as a complete character, I am willing to seriously engage with her struggles, her evasions, and her choices, just as I do with Kazama. Treating all characters as complete subjects with agency and judgment is the true standard of equal criticism.

Finally—You always say, “She was already very brave for her time,” “She was the pinnacle of womanhood,” as if just because “she has already tried very hard”, she could be worshipped as a model for female growth. But have you ever seen a true female pioneer? Your so-called “pinnacle” doesn’t even reach the heels of others. Here are some examples: Higuchi Ichiyō, who wrote about the real lives of prostitutes and orphaned girls in the poverty-stricken streets of Tokyo after the Meiji Restoration, without embellishment or evasion, using her nineteen-year-old body to confront the cold gaze of society. Yosano Akiko, who wrote about love and desire in a patriarchal society, openly opposed war, and in the poem to her brother “Do not die,” satirized the machinery of the state. They were not waiting for protection; they used words and ideas to defend the most silent and marginalized. Then there are Hiratsuka Raichō and Itō Noe, who dared to proclaim “Originally, women are the sun,” and dared to confront the state, family, and marriage system to the end, with some paying the ultimate price with their lives. If you haven’t even heard of these names but dare to say “she was very progressive,” the problem is not with Chizuru, but with your understanding of history and female subjectivity, which remains in the realm of fantasy. The Chizuru you like is just someone who said a few words like “I don’t want to be protected anymore,” only to be protected and surrounded the next moment. Her “growth” is an emotional manipulation arranged by the screenwriter, while these historical female giants—every word they spoke, every act of rebellion—was a price paid by tearing through the times. Please stop using “different era” to defend Chizuru. She has broken no structural constraints; she is merely a gently tamed illusion.

Although there were indeed restrictions on women’s movements during the Edo period, viewing “Yukimura Chizuru traveling alone from Edo to Kyoto” as an “extraordinary feat” is essentially a sentimental praise that misinterprets the relationship between historical context and character development. This perspective mistakes the oppression of the era’s structure for the character’s agency, packaging passive actions driven by the plot as heroic deeds. Not only does this obscure the fact that many women in reality undertook long-distance migrations, pilgrimages, business ventures, and even elopements, but it also conceals the structural issues in Chizuru’s story—her lack of clear goals and self-awareness. She does not leave out of willpower but is passively drawn into the main storyline under male protection and pursuit. Therefore, neither her motivations nor the consequences of her actions constitute a praiseworthy “female subjectivity” or “coming-of-age narrative.” Elevating this journey excessively and arguing its greatness through “historical contrast” is actually a compensatory interpretation for weak character development, exemplifying a fan rhetoric that diminishes both historical context and narrative logic.

This woman said “She is the ideal Edo woman.” Of course she is. And that is exactly why she cannot be a symbol of female growth. The ideal Edo woman was not designed to resist—it was a role manufactured by patriarchal society to ensure Confucian-constructed body of obedience, sacrifice and beauty. “Edo woman” doesn’t mean brave—it means unseen and replaceable. I completely understand why many fangirls of Hijikata Toshizō, who lack historical knowledge, take pride in calling Chizuru “Edo woman”—this is the blueprint of struggle in their minds. If your feminism confuses submission with strength, and scripts with subjectivity, then your so-called “progressive heroine” is just a recycled relic of male fantasies. The above are the comments made by a fan of Kazama Chikage, who is despised by you all and sees Yukimura Chizuru as a mere reproductive tool. Precisely because of this, I am clearer about the boundary between fantasy and reality, and even clearer about who is truly unable to break free from the patriarchal illusion.

(To be Continued.)

UPDATES: My response to some of the controversial issues raised in these articles:

🥰 “The Edo Woman” Is Not a Symbol of Freedom, but a Fantasy Construct: A Response to the Apologist Discourse on Yukimura Chizuru

🥳 Who Is the Real Beneficiary? — A Rebuttal to the Claim that "Kaoru Benefits More Than Chizuru"

🤖 That’s why I said that 90% of Yukimura Chizuru’s fans are hypocrites

Chapter 6

At noon on the 18th, my mom came to knock on my room door, told the landlord she was looking for me, and left me a bunch of messages. At one moment, she said affectionately, "I know you've suffered a lot, but only by enduring the bitterest hardships can one become a superior person." Then she suddenly got furious, "I gave birth to you for nothing. I sent you so many messages and you didn’t even reply." Finally, she threatened, "If I come tomorrow and can’t find you, I’ll call the police." I lay there blankly in my rented room with snail-paced internet, muted all message notifications, listened to Wang Feng’s songs, and quietly wrote these words, eventually shedding a few tears.

I am tired of these vulgar and tasteless performances. The recent weeks of online disputes have already exhausted me. I have realized a heartbreaking and cruel fact: the people I face are constantly squeezing my value, trying to mold me into the obedient image they expect, wanting me to shut up, wanting me to submit, wanting me to comply, wanting me to break down, wanting me to pretend nothing has happened, wanting me to continue playing the role of a gentle and selfless provider of emotional value, continuing to supply endless writing inspiration and public opinion material for their lives, so they can proudly claim: she really is a pitiful, alienated lunatic, with no one supporting her. Now, it’s just her alone, boringly talking to herself. They block me, watch me, edit me, judge me, retaliate against me, isolate me, curse me, trample on me, with no one caring who I really am or what I truly need.

This is the situation I want to express about the "silent one caught in the cracks": trapped in a dead end, unnoticed both in reality and online. Unfortunately, the woman I once stood up for and considered a good friend clearly doesn’t see it that way. She trimmed down my heavy theories and experiences and fitted them onto a flat character I once criticized—you all know who I’m talking about. Not mentioning her name doesn’t mean I’m afraid of her, but stems from deep disgust and aversion. It’s no exaggeration to say that all the works she has published since last November bear traces of me to some extent—either a long comment I wrote for her with care but never got a reply, or the Medea-inspired tragic elements I generously gave her that she turned into a vulgar, happy-ending reconciliation story, or certain writing styles from my own articles that she imitated. Even now, she uses my material and borrows my struggles to paint herself as a peaceful, creation-loving good person, a gentle and focused creator who possesses a "quiet power of resistance" in the face of adversity, a victim striving to survive—even though she actually did nothing. I don’t specify details or leave comments or likes for her, but that doesn’t mean I’m unaware of anything. Yet all she thinks about is—“She deleted me first, I won’t be friends with her anymore, I must get revenge.” But from start to finish, she never understood me, nor could she bear my depth and weight. She doesn’t dare admit that she was actually the one who benefited more from this relationship.

My mom finally gave in and left. Before she went, she said she would transfer me some money and asked me to send her my card number. She also said she left me a box of vegetables—but she had placed that box at another family's doorstep. I was too exhausted to say another word, and I didn't care about anything she left me—actually, I already had nothing. I was stuck in the quagmire of reality, unable to extricate myself; no matter which direction I took, it seemed wrong. Forget about becoming a "superior person," I couldn't even experience a normal life. The financial difficulties brought by unemployment, the constant urging from family, the confusion about the future, the longing for deep intimate relationships, the fragility of my soul, the continuous turmoil I faced online—all these formed the tragic backdrop of my life. I carried too many burdens that others have never truly borne but take for granted, and they expect me to endure them without complaint or breakdown. When I open up my wounds and speak about the trauma and oppression I have suffered, some people find me too loud and flamboyant, my voice too noisy and discordant, disturbing their peaceful dreams. Once I start defending my rights and truly reveal my hidden sharpness, I become an eyesore, aggressive, an outcast who must be collectively blocked and suppressed. I have done nothing wrong, yet I always have to clean up the mess left by others and bear undeserved blame.

This is the nature of humanity that Kazama Chikage told me about—a well-worn yet enduring topic. What he despised was the kind of mediocre masses who, even on the brink of the apocalypse, still vie for power and profit, trampling others underfoot to cling to life—a thing that can be scorned, severed, and destroyed with force. However, even he could not have anticipated that what he despised would one day evolve into a more covert, gentler, and more suffocating shadow of humanity—manipulation cloaked in "kindness," "gentleness," and "consideration," blackmail wrapped in the sugar coating of moral rhetoric, a chronic toxin that gradually erodes the will under the guise of empathy. I did not die by the blade, but by silence, by a world that always told me "you're too sensitive"; I was not defeated by enemies, but was gradually cornered by those I tried to understand, trust, and care for, with countless invisible hands slowly stripping away my dignity and voice from within.

Chapter 7: They Called It Drama, I Called It War: Notes from a Fanfic Witch-Hunt

This chapter was written in response to the structures of power, performative moralism, and collective persecution I have witnessed in fan communities. It is a political and critical intervention, not a neutral document.

I take a position—but not one meant to feed factionalism. I stand against the use of psychiatric rhetoric as a tool for moral discipline and public shaming. If you quote me only to justify personal attacks or inflame harassment, you have already misused this text.

I do not deny my anger. But I refuse to let it be weaponized by others. My position is fundamentally different from a certain typical case cited in the previous article: Human beings should be treated as an end in themselves and not as a means to something else. We write to survive, not to be survived by the things we wrote.

This is not a confession. This is a forensic document.

About two years ago, a writer in a small fandom requested permission to adapt another’s work. The permission was granted. The result was not to the original’s taste. Thus began what we might call the domesticated version of an inquisition—cozy, pastel-colored, and executed through comment sections.

In the year 2025, A minor fan, fourteen years old, launched the first curse: a vitriolic comment accusing the adapter of moral depravity. The adapter replied—perhaps sharply, perhaps with teeth. The minor cried. That was all it took. The funeral had its body.

The story rapidly evolved. Plagiarism. Abuse. AI-written. Anonymous. Anti-social. Dangerous. The vocabulary of concern slipped in like a scalpel. Those who disliked her work now had something better than critique: they had diagnosis.

They tore through her AO3 notes, not for meaning, but for symptoms. "Aesthetic cruelty." "They'll find me." "They'll remember every word." These were not phrases of a writer attempting complexity—they were evidence. She was no longer a writer. She was a suspect.

People who once claimed to write from trauma were now parsing hers like vultures in lab coats. She had written too freely. She had loved the wrong character. She had posted too much. She had defended herself. And worst of all: she had written well enough to be remembered.

So they called her AI. A bot. A narcissist. A woman with no mother-instinct. They said she bullied children. That she simulated victimhood. That she used anonymity to force others to read her work. And in the final blow of irony—they accused her of writing for attention.

This is not about whether she was right. This is about what they needed her to be.

They needed her to be inhuman—so they wouldn’t have to admit they were trying to kill a person.
They needed her to be unethical—so they wouldn’t have to call it envy.
They needed her to be insane—so they wouldn’t have to call it censorship.

And she? She needed no one.

She kept writing.

Under a different name.

With sharper teeth.

And yes—
They found her again.

But they still don’t know for sure it’s her.

And that uncertainty?
That’s the blade.

6/13/2025

Over the past two or three days, I have been inexplicably caught up in a group of people’s hatred and attacks against me. They have taken my statements from this article, taken them out of context, and twisted them into meanings completely different from my original intent, then turned them into false accusations against another author. Simply because I once collaborated with that author to translate my own three Chinese works into English, they deliberately claimed that the two of us are the same person, and even smeared us with psychiatric terms, pinning a bunch of baseless charges on us. Their current "accusations": this straw man is habitually plagiarizing, harassing/bullying minors, lying and full of foul language, and mentally unstable. Sitting quietly at home, yet trouble falls from the sky; it seems that even quietly working on my own turf can make me a thorn in some people’s eyes.

Thank you all for your attentive concern. During this period, the number of clicks on my articles has reached levels I could never have imagined even in my dreams. I will not hide it from you: I do want to become famous, I want hits and kudos, I want my name to be remembered, and I don’t mind being remembered by a group of people with this somewhat unsavory reputation. I know you want to put me on the high stage of public opinion and then push me down to shatter me, but rest assured, apart from some nightmares that were a bit scary and some pain in my heart and back these past two days, I have not experienced any physical abnormalities. On the contrary, I am quite looking forward to seeing what tricks you immature pranksters will try to play in front of me next. Just want to tell you, even if you meticulously slander me as a madwoman who refuses treatment and swears constantly, I am still much clearer-headed and stronger than you imagine. We’ll see.

Tough girls, hurry up and study the content I just updated in Chapter 2; malicious slander tactics must also keep up with the times!

Chapter 8: Don't Say You Know What Kind of Person I Am

You say I am homophobic.
But you don't dare to read this part in my article:

Fujoshi culture itself is not an original sin... The traits it is criticized for are precisely replicas of the power logic that mainstream society has long accepted. It was originally marginal and counter-narrative, but after being absorbed by commercial logic, it gradually became a controllable cultural form.

Or this part:

In China, the survival status of fujoshi culture is like a cultural alien: it has neither been fully co-opted by capital nor fully accommodated by the system... It is both exploited by capital and excluded by the system, both inspiring identity resonance and yet always struggling to gain legitimate status.

Of course, you dare not read on. Because you know I write more deeply than you. You want to label me as 'homophobic' because you want to silence me in discourse, not because you truly care about the situation of any group. You keep shouting 'homophobia,' yet use 'fujoshi hater' as a weapon to attack others, which is the real trampling on their freedom of desire.

She said I was mentally ill and that I wrote these to defend my "crimes."

But she did not quote any of my lengthy arguments; she only took my words out of context to repeat that self-serving strawman characterization. She just needed a word, a stigmatizing label that could cover my entire expression, so she wouldn't have to face the complexity and conflicts behind the text.

She is not questioning the content; she is eliminating the right to speak.

She said I was crazy because I wrote more clearly than she did.
She said I was defending crimes because I had defended myself.
And in her framework, any self-defense itself is already a crime.

Of course, I am ill. I have depression, anxiety, and PTSD.
But what she said was not "she is ill," but: "she is crazy."
She is not pointing out the state, but rather creating reasons for the loss of rights.

What about you? Have you read it? Can you understand the structural analysis, social commentary, and cross-cultural fujoshi history I wrote? Can you point out which sentence is "nonsense," which part is "pathological sophistry"? Or are you just unwilling to face the fact that I have written out, in complete language, the self you are afraid of becoming?

So you want to say I'm crazy. Say I'm sick. Say I write a lot to cover up my insecurity. Say I'm "making excuses" rather than expressing myself.
You think you are "exposing" me, but in fact, you are just talking to yourself in the mirror.

One last reminder: what I am writing is not a defense statement, but a testimony for the records.
If you think it is a "crime," then keep being afraid.
I won't interrupt your dream of a public trial celebration, but I will paste your trial records at the end of my articles, which I will never delete.
Because I am here to be remembered — you are the ones who will be forgotten.

I have written down all that I know, believe, and feel pain about.
I only place here the words I have written.

This passage is not written for her, but for all the silent bystanders.
If you don't even dare to look, then don't say you know what kind of person I am.

Chapter 9: How to Make a Bitter Muppet Everyone Loves: Instructions for Yukimura Chizuru

I don’t not understand her. I understand her too well.

I know she has already made a “brave” choice in such a context. She cried, shouted, and stood up against the injustice of those in power. She loves, cares for others, and sacrifices herself. She is gentle yet firm, and everyone says she deserves to be loved.

But that is exactly the problem.

She has to be this way in order to be loved. Her resistance can’t be too strong, her tears can’t be too dirty, her anger must come from love, not from no longer wanting to serve these people. She can cry loudly for her loved ones, but she can’t curse for herself. She can oppose “let him die,” but she can’t question “why is it only us who die.” She never truly questions the structure of that house, only desperately begs the people inside not to be too selfish.

You say she is "already quite good."

But I ask you: at what moment did she truly become herself?

She has never been a free person. She is a carefully sculpted "archetype of being loved" created by a system. Everything she does—even rebellion—is packaged by the system as a "virtue," earning her the favor of the main cast and the empathy of the audience. You think she has broken free, but in reality, she has only tied her shackles more beautifully.

When you praise her, you are actually buying yourself a ticket to atonement.

"See, I also support brave girls!" As long as this "bravery" doesn't hurt you, as long as in the end she still loves you, goes along with you, and stays with you.

But I no longer want to go along.

I no longer accept this kind of "gentleness."

Dear emotional narrative enthusiasts, welcome to this guide. We will handhold you step by step to create a heroine template who is always gentle, always patient, and always worthy of love.
In just three steps, you can have a golden emotional vessel that requires no AI, no personality, only "crying" and "being sensible" — which is our flagship product:
Yukimura Chizuru™ — National First-Class Moving Tool.

🛠️ Step 1: Pull out her teeth
You need a "female character," but under no circumstances should she have teeth.
Intelligent women are disconcerting, and too opinionated can seem aggressive. To make her gently silent, quietly tolerate, quietly obedient, it is best to add the phrase "she is actually very stubborn", so that she is neither rebellious nor stupid, but "cute".
We suggest translating her anger into "stubbornness," labeling her dissatisfaction as "endurance," and compressing all her judgment into one sentence: "She actually just wants everyone to be well."
Remember—emotions are allowed, but positions cannot be explicit.
She must shed tears in pain, but she cannot hate anyone because of it; she must struggle under oppression, but she cannot say "I don't want this."
We recommend classic lines for reference:
I don't blame anyone, I just... am not very good at expressing myself...
(🌟 Add a tear effect, versatile)

🎀 Step 2: Trap her in "love"
An excellent tool for moving emotions must suffer for love, sacrifice for love, and self-harm with love.
All of Yukimura Chizuru™'s motivations should revolve around "love" rather than "will":
It's not "I choose to stay," but "I can't let him go";
It is not "I want to change the world," but "I just want to protect them."
The main plot revolves around "her obsession with a certain man." Do not give her greater ambitions or independent actions, and do not let her outshine the hero, as that would make it hard for people to empathize. Her suffering should have a man as the backdrop; her choices should carry a sense of sacrifice.
She must love humbly, love reservedly, love to the point of preferring death over confessing—She is the best example of an "emotionally stable woman."

💄 Step 3: Apply a layer of "Aura of the Weak" on her
This step is the most important.
You need to emphasize repeatedly:
She is just an ordinary person.
She is not great.
She is just trying very hard to survive.

Then—turn her into a moral high ground.
The audience wants to cry, wants to escape, wants to be loved, wants to be understood, but doesn't dare to admit it. So they let her cry for them, sacrifice for them, bear the illusion of being loved for them—then she becomes a tool for collective emotional release.
Anyone who criticizes her will be automatically labeled as 'too harsh,' 'not understanding women's situations,' or 'lacking empathy,' 'You are denying her character.'
We suggest you add a sentence in the character introduction:
She is very clumsy, very slow, very cautious, but you can't help loving her.

🥰 Recommended Scenarios:
✅ Workplace difficulties → Think of Chizuru
✅ Parents' gaslighting → Post Chizuru pictures
✅ Online bullying others → Praise Chizuru and repost saying "She is the cutest girl."

🚨 Notes:
❌ Do not allow her to express clear rejection or anger
❌ Do not give her the right to act beyond her "daily suffering".
❌ Do not take her outside the audience's comfort zone of understanding (e.g., get sharp)
If she opens her mouth:
"I hate it when you guys use me to move yourselves."
--Then she wouldn't be Yukimura Chizuru™, but someone else you're about to call a "crazy critic heroine".

🧃 Conclusion:
Thank you for choosing to use "The Tragic Puppet Maker."
Before you use her to move the world, please remember one thing:
She may not say no, but I will.
We will no longer let you throw puppets at us as hammers.

Chapter 10: My Sexual Fantasies about Kazama

I curled up under the blanket, secretly shedding tears, but he suddenly pulled off my eye mask. We stared at each other wide-eyed for a moment; he didn’t move, so I took the initiative to kiss him. I wanted to press close to him, hold him, and kiss him in the warmth of our breath. He pulled me out from under the covers, lowered his head to kiss me back as I cried uncontrollably, stroking my trembling back. Amid the pain and trembling, I clumsily but passionately met his lips with mine. He repeatedly sucked on my lips, tasting the heat and saltiness of my tears. This was an intense longing for deep connection, everything I wanted to do when I broke down in tears today. He held me in his arms and softly asked why I was crying. I glared at him with red eyes: being forced to interact with people I hate a hundred times more than you, reading their texts with anger and headache, but having no choice but to do it. He couldn’t help but chuckle and gave me a playful bop on the head. I lay in his embrace feeling wronged, unable to hold back my tears again: you silly dog, I’ve been so honest and open with you, what else could you possibly be dissatisfied with? He held me tighter, his smile steady and gentle: you’ll grow up slowly, fool. I know, of course I know I’ll become a great person, but my heart still weakly cries out: I want you. (7/1/25)

Chapter 11

But I know, I am the one you never truly dare to face.