Hello, I'm stopping by on one of my unfortunately infrequent visits to these forums to pitch in. I'm a lesbian! And quite happy about it, despite the difficulties it presents in my society. I'm lucky enough not to have met with anything too horrible, besides the (inevitable) unrequited love and the odd unpleasant stereotype, comment, street harassment etc... but I'm sending good thoughts your way,
@Hayden Kurosaki and others who've had bad experiences. I feel like I ought to paste the entire text of "into the world" here as encouragement, but that's a bit too long to be practical.
On a more academic note, I'm also here to make some observations and pose some questions. Not knowing any hard core Kajiura/Kalafina fans in real life, I always kind of unconsciously assumed you'd all be kind of like me: young, female, and maybe gay, but having now attended three Kalafina concerts over the course of about five years, (and having spent a bit more time scuttling around these forums) I can say with certainty that this is NOT the case. I think this is fascinating. Though I wouldn't say I have anything resembling even a "celebrity crush" on any of the Kajiuran entourage, I think it's fair to say that my lesbian identity informs the way I consume her music. I guess this just comes from interpreting lyrics in accordance with my current life situation, but I also have a lot to say about Kalafina's undeniable and unapologetically feminine display of power through song and stage presence. So basically, I'm curious, how do your identities inform your interpretation/enjoyment of Kajiura's music?
Furthermore, (and perhaps this is a discussion for another post... is there a forum for musical/lyrical analysis yet?) We're all aware, I'm sure, that both 私 'watashi' and 僕 'boku' (first person pronouns with gendered implications about the speaker. "Boku" is more masculine, while 'watashi' is technically gender-neutral, though more commonly used by women) are commonly used in all of Kajiura's Japanese-language songs. Similarly, second person pronouns 貴方 'anata' and 君 'kimi' (which have slightly less concrete gendered associations, though 'kimi' is more likely to be used when addressing a woman) are various and appear in most songs. Speaking recently to some of my Japanese friends, I noticed that some of them would make assumptions about the gender of the singers/narrator of the song based only on second person pronouns when I recited lyrics at them. I thought that was interesting, so I whipped out my (preexisting...) spreadsheet of analytical data on Kalafina music and created some new columns for pronouns. I found a lot of interesting data, including that the vast majority of Kalafina songs use 僕/君 or 僕/zero (where zero is a second person implied by grammatical context, but not actually represented by a concrete pronoun) and a good number of songs use 私/貴方 or 私/zero. There are also some songs with no people in them, some songs in Kajiurago, some songs with only one person in them, and some songs with people but no pronouns. Then, there are five songs which combine 私/君 of which two are 'hikarifuru' and 'Magia,' suggesting that this combination is indeed used to indicate that both "I" and "you" are women. There is only one song that combines 僕/貴方 and that is 'Symphonia.'
So anyway, I'm a giant nerd, and I'd like to hear your thoughts on this. I have more data as well if you're interested~!
