Goyavoyage's den

Facing Otherside Picnic's pro-Israel elements

As the title suggests, this very long post contains discussions of the Israeli-Palestinian war throughout the decades, and mentions of the Palestinian genocide (which has been ongoing for two years until a very recent and dubious ceasefire, at the time of posting).
This same post also quotes an upsetting novel excerpt that contains the casual dehumanization of Palestinian people and unabashed mention of weaponry used to kill them.

The short version is that Otherside Picnic, a novel series I otherwise love (read: have been obsessed about) and have posted about semi-regularly, contains in one of its early volumes (written in 2017) a short, one-time but infuriating part blatantly supporting Israel in its war against Palestine. It is something I have seen mentioned online very scarcely, and only when directly looking for it, and that stood out so violently to me on a recent reread notably due to the ongoing news - but also due to the colonialist history behind the establishment of the State of Israel, as I will detail below - that I feel like I need to address it here at length.
I want to provide detailed historical context, think back on the series as a whole with all my mixed feelings, study how the author's position on the topic evolved with the years, and discuss what to do as a reader.

The long version is what follows.

Introduction

If you are not a reader of Otherside Picnic, but if the perspective of a lesbian eldritch horror book series catches your attention; or if you are generally interested in the topic of dealing with harmful elements in an otherwise fascinating work of fiction as a fan or as part of a fandom; or if you are looking for a brief history of the Israeli-Palestinian war and resources regarding Palestine, you may want to read on.

That being said, you can also read this shorter version of the same post, focused on the historical and factual resources on Palestine, where I have cut out everything Otherside Picnic. It makes for a less daunting post, and a much more important read.
I interwove it all when I was writing this post to provide context to my media analysis, but the part on Palestine is obviously by far the more important topic of the two, and I do not want to drown it into me getting upset about one of my special interests. So you can also read just that. But if you do want to read me analyzing stuff and getting angry and hurt and struggling with what has been one of my favorite reads, and considering what can be done, you can keep reading.

And if you are a reader invested in Otherside Picnic, this post is probably going to elicit some difficult emotions, just as it does with me. Please take care of yourself - you can always take a break and your time to process.
Please consider reading the whole post, though, when you feel ready for it. I think this is an important read for readers of the series, even if it is very long, apologies for that.

I should start by providing some short context about both who I am and what Otherside Picnic is about, in case you land on this article more than on the rest of my blog.

Self-introduction

I am a lesbian interested in queer representations in fictions, and notably lesbian representations that one way or another break classic girl-meet-girl romance tropes. I am French, which is mostly to say that I read most of my news in French - and as such can probably quote fewer news sources than I would have hoped to back up elements of this English post, though I will try my best.
I am also bad with social media and any kind of fast-paced messaging, and fandom spaces are difficult to me for a variety of reasons including tremendous social anxiety these days, which is why this is a blog post.

I am by no means a historian of the Israeli-Palestinian war, but I have done my best to gather all the resources I could here during the past few months of writing this. It is probable that I will say clumsy things still, and I welcome any correction.
Aside from that, Otherside Picnic is one of my special interests, though my knowledge of the source text is restricted, notably due to a growing but still limited knowledge of Japanese.

In the following, I want to convey at the same time why this series matters to me, why its excerpt quoted here is atrocious, how the author's posture seems to have progressed a little after some long years, and what more can be done in this situation in my opinion. All this, while screaming about Palestine liberation (and why that is important); and also from the cognitive dissonance of loving a work of fiction very much and finding something extremely hurtful in it on a reread.

Introducing Otherside Picnic

Otherside Picnic (Urasekai Pikunikku) is an ongoing Japanese novel series written by author Iori Miyazawa since 2017, with currently 9 volumes released in English and 10 in Japanese. It is lesbian fiction, inscribed in the larger yuri genre of Japanese media, though it also breaks that mold in several ways.
It is often classified as sci-fi, but this label may be misleading: a more proper description may be at the crossroads between horror and urban fantasy, with elements reminiscent of eldritch horror, the 1972 Russian sci-fi novel Roadside Picnic of which it references the title, and collaborative writing projects like The SCP Foundation and The Backrooms.

Otherside Picnic has been made into a manga (ongoing since 2018) and a one-season 2021 anime adaptation. The manga version, if clearly lagging behind the novel version and sometimes slightly abridged, is very true to the original. The anime version is much messier and quite honestly of lesser quality, and it only adapts the early volumes of the series. Though I will primarily deal with the novels, I will at some point mention those adaptations again with regards to how they handle the incriminated excerpt.

Otherside Picnic is about two female college students, Sorawo and Toriko, who find some access to a world parallel to our own, called the Otherside, and who slowly explore it. That Otherside is an uncanny place full of grassy plains, of ruined buildings, and of horrific creatures mostly based on Japanese ghost stories. This is actually a positive thing to protagonist Sorawo, who is very much into ghost stories and very much not into people. Deuteragonist Toriko, meanwhile, has been exploring this other world to find back her mentor Satsuki who introduced her to the Otherside, and who vanished there a few months ago.
Sorawo and Toriko meet for the first time while venturing into the Otherside and nearly dying, and from that point onward keep exploring that world together and growing closer.

The Otherside Picnic novels are subdivided into big chapters called Files, with usually 3-4 Files per volume. Most Files follow a similar structure: Sorawo and Toriko either decide to enter the Otherside once again, each for her own reasons, or somehow they stumble into it accidentally. Over there, they face and defeat a monster who obeys some sort of dreamlike logic; and they come back unscathed(?), their bond strengthened by that near-death experience.

The first few Files are more episodic, and admittedly weaker than what the rest of the series shapes up to. They are almost never outright bad, but they do feel at times like some disjoint pretexts to feature the author's favorite ghost stories and random elements to his liking, rather arbitrarily - with only few elements of unified logic or rules that would make the Otherside something at least somewhat understandable, in its strange way.

This slowly changes around the end of volume 2/beginning of volume 3, notably because most of the recurring supporting characters are actually introduced during these Files (Files 7 to 11). This is also because the series gradually sharpens its focus on some of its most fascinating elements: the mystery of the missing mentor Satsuki; the heavy backstories of the two leads Sorawo and Toriko; and actually addressing their relationship.

Some elements on why I care about Otherside Picnic

The series, entirely written from the point of view of Sorawo, starts with extremely lesbian-coded elements that are all unaddressed, in a way that plays into the yuri genre: clearly, Sorawo has a thing(?) for Toriko, and Toriko had a thing for her missing mentor, but the series is happily teasing that heavy subtext. It will probably never be an actual topic, or never in a very grounded way.
Until it is.

Little by little, volume after volume, other characters talk about lesbianism, and the novels introduce various extremely real stakes of lesbian identities in the narrative. It slowly dawns upon the reader that the initially unaddressed sapphic overtones actually come from narrator Sorawo's general troubles with relationships and romance. Both the narrative and the characters confront Sorawo's disinrerest in this more and more directly as she grows, notably as she gets closer to Toriko all the while.

This slow turn that the series takes is absolutely fascinating to me. Without spoiling stuff, recent volumes have reached a level of nuance and lucidity in talking about romance narratives and relationships that I have simply never seen in any other lesbian or romance fiction. It has made me write lots and lots of amazed words, and part of me still wants to write so much about it.

All this is coupled with a subtle shift in the way the horror aspect of the series operates as it grows, which makes it click much, much more than in the early Files.
As Sorawo and Toriko get more and more enmeshed with the Otherside, that world, though it is unclear how much it is a sentient entity, starts targetting them with monsters that use their past traumas to make them react. Indeed, it is very quickly apparent that the two protagonists have been traumatized, despite both of them downplaying what happened to them. And the Otherside makes these topics burst into the open, which forces the leads to actually confront that. And all this is extremely well handled.
Seeing the leads heal from all this through mutual support and queer love, and help each other fight literal representations of their fears, has something immensely cathartic to it.

... But I am getting sidetracked. We need to talk about what hurts.

To do so, we need to rewind to Files 3 and 5.

Files 3 and 5, gun use and the military

In File 3, Sorawo and Toriko are accidentally transported to a part of the Otherside where a group of soldiers - specifically, of US Marines - have been trapped for weeks, their armaments uneffective against the reality-bending horrors of the other world. The soldiers are on edge and menacing toward the two girl leads, with the exception of the unit's lieutenant and major - this will matter later - who welcome them to their makeshift camp despite their situation.
They don't know that Sorawo and Toriko's bodies have been altered by the Otherside, which allows them to actually fight the creatures roaming there. The protagonists purposefully hide that piece of information from fear of getting treated as monsters and shot.

The camp does get attacked by Otherside monsters, though, which forces Sorawo and Toriko to reveal their body modifications and ability to defeat the threat. As the Marines panic seeing them like this, our leads consequently run away from the camp and get back to the real world, leaving the soldiers surprised, angry and relieved at the same time. And stranded again.

File 3 has military elements that I am not really comfortable with, but it still spends most of its focus on horror, with a fair share of weird ghost stories but also great things like pareidolia and the inclusion of the urban legend Kisaragi Station, of which I've been delighted to find other occasional occurrences in various Japanese media since then.

File 5 is another story. It is a direct followup to File 3: Sorawo and Toriko have decided to come back to the Otherside specifically to save the US soldiers stranded there. And aside from the reversal twist of having two girl college students save a battalion of soldiers, it has an extremely heavy focus on firearms and tanks as the group escapes, that goes to show Miyazawa's obvious fascination for war weaponry, and that makes me really uneasy even before we dig into the more politically atrocious elements.

To be honest, the author's love for weaponry is not breaking news even by that early point of the story. Toriko, the deuteragonist, handles guns from the very first File, is extremely knowledgeable about firearms, and we learn in File 4 that one of her parents has a military background. The second File also features a man who has been desperately searching the Otherside to find his wife and who is armed with a rifle that Toriko ends up reusing. More generally, the whole use of guns by the two protagonists to defeat some of the horrors they face is very quickly background radiation to the series. Overall, it is quite clear from the very first volume (Files 1 to 4) that Miyazawa himself has kind of an interest in firearms in general, and it particularly shows in some Files (and illustrations).

And yet despite its adjacency to it, Otherside Picnic doesn't fall fully into the "girls with guns" subgenre of manga/light novel/anime: its main focus remains horror and lesbian romance(?) throughout. The author has a fair amount of other stuff to be infodumping about, too, be it Japanese ghost stories, the nature of reality and cognitive phenomena, elements of anthropology, or the complexity of human relationships - all this with delightful banter, which are much more to my taste and help diluting the firearms aspect.
But it clearly does feature gun use regularly, be it through the protagonists and sometimes more extensively through other characters throughout the novel series.

In later volumes, a lot of these more prominent featurings of firearms are directly or indirectly related to an SCP-like organization that researches the Otherside. If firearms knowledge is one of the, well, quirks of the series I appreciate less overall, I must say that it fits rather well within the urban horror vibes that an eldritch-horror-containment shady secret organization may evoke. This makes it more... digestible, and somehow more thematically integrated that way.

But this isn't the case in the early Files, before the series truly finds its footing. And most notably, File 5, by featuring intensive military weaponry just for the love of it, veers hard into military sci-fi without criticism; worse, with a clear affection for soldier-related stuff in a way that is more prominent here than in any other part of the series. This makes it, to me, the weakest File of the entire series; and the excerpt to come, which additionally links it to Israel, puts it squarely as winner of the worst File award.

File 5's incriminated excerpt

So. File 5's excerpt.
It happens as Sorawo and Toriko have found the soldiers again, and indicated to the lieutenant that they would be able to guide the battalion through the Otherside to a exit, notably by avoiding reality-bending zones the soldiers call bear traps. With this, the soldiers pack up camp and prepare to board two literal tanks (or, well, infantry fighting vehicles. They are not strictly speaking tanks. I will occasionally say tank in the rest of this post though.).
In what follows, Sorawo is the narrator throughout, as always in the series.

In the middle of all that, I could see two bizarrely-shaped vehicles that stood out from the rest. They both had rough and angular bodies sitting on fat octagonal pillars. They had a lot of peepholes, and I could see something like an armored viewing platform on the top of them, too. There were a number of soldiers doing welding work on top of the vehicles, producing a lot of noise and sparks.
What was this? I looked at Toriko, but she shook her head to say she didn’t know. In the middle of all that noisy welding, the lieutenant spoke. “The Israeli forces have an Armored Personnel Carrier called the Nagmachon. It’s a vehicle made strictly for the purpose of going into the Palestinian Territories and fighting personnel. The unique feature of it is they removed the turret from a tank, and instead installed a sealed combat room called the Doghouse. They can look out through the windows, and point their guns in all directions. It’s a hedgehog-like vehicle, specialized for killing humans.”
There were disgusting weapons like that...? Not noticing I was a little put off by this, the lieutenant continued his explanation.
“We brought an explosion-resistant vehicle called an MRAP to the Otherside, but the threats to us here weren’t explosives or terrorists with anti-tank weapons. The bear traps are like IEDs [Improvised Explosive Devices], in that they’re a threat that exists on the road, but... If anything, I see our situation as akin to IDF [Israeli Defense Forces] soldiers on reconnaissance or a mission, or maintaining security in the Palestinian Territories. That’s why we made them. Our own Nagmachon Doghouse.”
He sounded like he was bragging about a toy.
“This one with an arm on the front of the body is the Gorgon. It’s based on a Buffalo mine-sweeping vehicle. The armored school bus behind it is the Owlbear, based on an RG-33L armored vehicle. They both have a Doghouse based on a modified OGPK turret kit, allowing attack in all directions. We know it’s all over if we step in a bear trap, but these were made to be our last hope. With you here, they can do their job. I’m really glad.”
“Th-They sure are amazing, huh.”
I just barely managed to get that much out. I didn’t have a lot of practice at keeping a conversation going while a man bragged, so I had no idea how I was supposed to respond here.
“Wow.” That one word was all Toriko said. It still made the lieutenant smile, and he looked up at the monster of armor and gun turrets with pride.
“Please wait here a moment. Everyone will gather around quickly.”
With the welding done, the soldiers came down from on top of the vehicle. The lieutenant gave some quick orders, and then two stood sentry while the rest rushed off.
“...Don’t you think we could have complimented him a bit more?”
“If he’s satisfied, I’d say it’s fine. Could you pass me [your gun], Sorawo?”

This makes me extremely angry rereading it, because it is an infodump that contains blatant pro-Israel propaganda and dehumanization, which is never really challenged by any character or the narrative in the rest of the File (or series). In the rest of this post, I detail how much this is a problem on so many levels.

For the readers who may be less familiar with this, though, let us get geopolitical and historical elements straight, before we dig more into how this excerpt conveys them.

On Zionism, the State of Israel and the war in Palestine

To understand all this better, we notably need to talk about Zionism and the establishment of the State of Israel.
(note: this particular section makes heavy use of links to what I believe are relevant Wikipedia articles. The other sections are much more diverse in their reference sources.)

Zionism is originally a late 19th century movement thinking that the best way to solve the pogroms and antisemitism going on then in Europe and Russia would be through the establishment of a dedicated Jewish state, in the form of a colony in whatever country the movement could find was most suitable - and ideally where they could gather support from European powers that would have colonized the place already. A lot of countries were proposed to that effect, notably Argentina in the Zionist pamphlet Der Judenstaat by Zionism's spiritual father Theodore Herzl; but also a part of Kenya, which was a British colony at the time. In the early 20th century, efforts began being concerted toward the region of Palestine, which was then part of the Ottoman empire.

This choice was, ultimately, in part justified using the religious connection between Judaism and the geographical region of Palestine, which overlaps with the historical Land of Israel (not to confuse with the current nation that is the State of Israel!). Still, the decision at the time was mostly made because it ended up becoming the most practical option politically speaking, after numerous tractations with the British empire considering various other regions of the world they had colonized.
This ancient connection to the Land of Israel is still leveraged today to justify the existence of the State of Israel. I will talk a bit later about how seeing a place as important in your ancestry could understandably make you move out there, but should not make you colonize it at the expense of its current inhabitants.

In any case, that idea of a colonial Jewish ethnostate slowly gained traction with European countries in the 1910s, and it was explicitly about displacing the populations already living there to make way for such a project. With the end of World War I the Ottoman empire fell, and despite their initial promise to recognize the independence of the populations there, Britain and France had a secret agreement to partition the land between them, which led to Palestine being under Britain mandate as Mandatory Palestine. This aligned with Britain's Balfour declaration, voicing its support to the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine; and all this led to an influx of Jewish settlements in Palestine.

During the next three decades, tensions would keep rising between the settlers, the British government, and Palestinian people. The rise of Nazism then World War II's Holocaust also caused a significant change in this, and the Zionist colonialist venture of settling in Palestine (by displacing Palestinians) gained significant traction in the 1930s and 1940s - many displaced Jewish people and Holocaust survivors obviously just wanting a place to be safe. Still, it is also worth mentioning that before 1939, Nazi Germany also supported this wave of emigration, both out of obvious antisemitism, but also with the economical interest of selling German goods (boycotted in other parts of the world) to British-ruled Palestine.
This led to a massive increase of settlements in Palestine, with Jewish insurgencies for independency despite Britain's attempt to control the immigration, and revolts from Palestinians. In 1947, the United Nations intervened to terminate the British mandate and partition the land into two states. This plan was judged unfair by Palestinian representatives, but then forcefully upheld by Jewish settlers, who declared the establishment of the State of Israel.

From this followed a civil war, and the Nakba of 1948: the ethnic cleansing of half of the Palestinian population to establish Israel by force. Today, there is still a large denial that these atrocities ever took place.
The two remaining territories of the Palestinian region, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, were mostly annexed respectively by Jordan and Egypt during the war.

I am not the best suited to cover the decades of war that followed, and you may be interested in the next section of resources for details. But I need to mention several additional key historical events still:

As an aside to pure historical recounting, I need to stress out that this general right deprivation of Palestinians has been dire for decades to a level I struggle to express.

Israel has built a literal wall in the 2000s in parts of the West Bank and its border, a wall that still holds today; and arbitrary deprivations of land and displacements still happen regularly in the West Bank. The Gaza strip has had all of its borders militarily controlled by Israel, is a complete enclave geographically and politically, and has been regularly called an open-air prison.
Israel also denies Palestinians the right of return: Palestinians displaced during the Nakba and the Naksa, or their descendants, are forbidden to return to where they lived before the displacement.

Additionally, almost 20% of the current citizens in the State of Israel descend from Palestinians who stayed (and survived) during the Nakba and the Six-Day War, but a lot of them have also been forcefully displaced within that territory. They have much less rights than Jewish citizens in most legal contexts, and expressing sympathy toward Palestine is violently repressed.

To finish this historical overview and reach recent history, I need to mention how political turmoil in 2007 led to separate governances of the West Bank and the Gaza strip between two groups. The West Bank became governed by the political party Fatah (through the Palestinian Authority), and Gaza was taken over by the Islamist political and military organization of Hamas.
The armed conflict between Israel and Hamas in particular - and the whole century of war before that - led to several one-year wars in the Gaza strip, strewn with violations of international law on both sides, during the past almost twenty years. This also led to the October 7th 2023 murderous attacks by the Hamas of Israeli civilians. This in turn was used by Israel as a justification to retaliate to the point of perpetrating the ongoing (until recent ceasefire) genocide against the Palestinian people in the Gaza strip.

Actual resources

I have mostly linked Wikipedia articles throughought the previous historical exposition, because even if they are not always perfect, they are often very documented. I find them useful for deep dives - see for instance here - and they may be the most accessible starting point to provide. However, I cannot encourage you enough to read from other sources. Here are a few I recommend:

For specific events and concepts, I would also vividly recommend:

Some more on anti-Zionism

With all this said, and even before addressing the ongoing horror of the genocide in Palestine, which I will be doing more later in this post, I can amplify what I said in a much shorter blog post in June: the State of Israel should not exist.

However, at this point in history, this does not mean the populations currently living there should be displaced. Displacing people is wrong.
Unlawful and atrocious dispossessions and displacements of Palestinians during the last century have to be addressed, repaired, compensated in the best way possible. Still, this should be within a common judicial framework to all the people involved. It makes no sense to try and solve this by forcefully displacing other people in turn.

Overall, the reasoning of "who deserves this land more" is by itself a trap. It is tempting for anti-Zionists, because being indigenous to a place is important, and should absolutely give you rights to participate in shaping the land you live in. But this should not turn into "deserving more"; this should not happen at the expense of other people.
That exact line of thought is often used by Zionists under the idea that Jewish people, as descendants of the ones who had to flee the ancient Land of Israel, deserve to live in its current geographical place more than others.

The thing is, all people should be able to live where they want to live. Ideally, countries should accomodate to welcome immigrants and refugees; and they should acknowledge previous forced displacements that would make individuals wanting to go back to what was once their home.

I do not say that this is easy to achieve. I just want to stress out that none of this should happen through settlements, through dispossessions, through violence - through the arbitrary and unilateral decision from some outside power.
And Israel, with its settler history, with its forced displacements, with its ever-increasing settlements in the West Bank, with its refusal of the Palestinian right to return, with the secondary citizenship and internal displacements of its Palestinian citizens, contradicts every single one of the above ideals.

This, sadly, makes sense. If the present genocide and generally particularly deadly and atrocious situation in Palestine is somewhat tied to the current far-right-leaning government of Israel, its general inegalitarian, ethnonationalist national project isn't, and the near-entirety of the Israeli political spectrum supports it: it is a guiding principle of the State of Israel itself. It is, after all, inextricable from its foundational Zionist core: maintaining a ethnical majority, and keeping that majority a priviledged group compared to other citizens.
A 2018 Israeli law is starkly stating this: "The realization of the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is exclusive to the Jewish People".

This self-determination is vastly distinct from the one that so many of us advocate for Palestine - the right for people living in a land to have a say in how they should live, and where to live in it.
The "self-determination" the State of Israel mentions is explicitly exclusive, at the expense of others, both inside and outside the state. It is achieved through the removal, partial or total, of a right to determination, agency and most forms of freedom for other people. Dehumanization and racism are unavoidable consequences of this.

And so, we should be anti-Zionists; that is, we should work toward ending this concept of a colonialist, inegalitarian, warmongering ethnostate.

To be more nuanced, if Israel's history stems in good part from colonialism and extremist right-wing movements, I understand how some also stems from generational trauma - from a deep-seated belief in the impossibility to live in heterogeneous cultures without antisemitism.
But I do not believe that.

I believe in fighting systemic oppressions, and that the best way to do that is not to barricade a community into a heavily armed homogeneous state at the cost of the people living wherever that state is established (and being racist against non-dominant ethnicities within the state itself, to boot). I'll repeat myself because this is important: integration of refugees in existing countries instead of building a separate state, and interactions of mixing cultures instead of colonization and erasure, are desirable and possible outcomes, even if they feel like some impossible utopia in the current political situation.

I really recommend Shel Raphen's 2022 post about the horrors of Zionism, which was a huge inspiration in writing this section, and a big spark to my own anti-Zionist stance more generally - I feel like she phrases all that really well. It is a bit of a tangent, but recent posts of hers on how to survive and to keep functioning in a brutally unethical world, notably but not only as a genocide is happening, like this one and that one, have also been tremendously helpful to me in these trying times.

There is a lot more that could be said here, notably about the genocide of Palestinian people since late 2023; but I am going to postpone addressing this, because I need to return to Otherside Picnic, of which the above excerpt was published in 2017.

A first forray into why File 5's excerpt is atrocious

So. I encourage you to reread the above excerpt in the light of everything I just mentioned.

To summarize, it has a US lieutenant speaking favorably and extensively about two heavily armored vehicles based on a model of the Israeli military, and being absolutely explicit about their original purpose: "going into the Palestinian Territories and fighting personnel", and "specialized for killing humans". The casualness with which that is said is upsetting, but at least our protagonist does have some gut reaction to it: "There were disgusting weapons like that...?", and later qualifying them of "monster of armor and gun turrets". These are, though they are never spoken, oppostions coming from the protagonist to the concept of these killing machines.

Still, the lieutenant doesn't just drops unsettling facts on the origin of their tanks; he has an actively pro-Israel stance when he declares: "I see our situation as akin to IDF soldiers on reconnaissance or a mission, or maintaining security in the Palestinian Territories". This direct parallel between Palestine and the Otherside is absolutely disgusting, and, contrary to the brutality of his praise of the tanks itself, it is never acknowledged or challenged by any of the protagonists, or the narrative itself. And that part in particular - and how it is phrased - is a really, really big problem.

With that line, the character directly compares the Otherside and occupied Palestine. The brunt of the comparison is admittedly on the reality-warping "bear traps" scattered across the Otherside, and actual landmines and improvised explosve devices (IEDs) present in Palestine due to the war. But the sentence (and the events from the rest of the File) also carries very clearly the more general idea that the Otherside and Palestine would be dangerous in the same way: because they are hostile territories where some danger roams, either monster or human, against which heavy artillery is necessary - and better, against which it serves a good cause, to "maintain security".

The phrasing itself is obviously highly biased in favor of Israel, and saying of a colonial state that it "maintains security" in territories it invaded and occupies militarily - something illegal under international law, see for instance here, here and here if you are not too tired of Wikipedia articles - is downright terrifying as far as political stances go. But it is also a profoundly dehumanizing speech, as it compares Palestinians to actual monsters roaming the Otherside, against which tanks can "do their job"... which isn't just protecting, but very obviously opening fire and killing. Most strikingly, this actually happens in the rest of the File: the troops and the two leads board these tanks (well, infantry fighting vehicles) and maneuver them across the Otherside until they reach an exit, and are attacked along the way by various Otherside entities on which said tanks (and the soldiers) open fire, literally calling them "the enemy".

To backtrack a little bit and add to the atrocious and reality-grounded, the two tanks here are said to be partly based on the Nagmachon. This is indeed a real war vehicle used by the Israeli Defense Forces, mostly during the Second Intifada... and also apparently Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 2006, Wikipedia tells me. The thing is, there is some underlying rhetoric behind the lieutenant's monologue that they use those vehicles to kill humans, but that it is "justified" because they are the military and/or terrorists. Without even diving into which circumstances justify killing people, considering the very high civilians death counts of both the Second Intifada and the invasion of Lebanon, it is abundantly clear that these Nagmachons have been used to kill civilians too.

Yes, this makes sense intradiegetically...

Of course, all these omissions and the pro-war and pro-Israel stances check out, when considering the character that says them, from an intradiegetic (inside the narrative) point of view. He is a US Marines lieutenant, and the US have had a long-standing partnership with Israel, notably economically and militarily. This... reeks, geopolitically speaking; but it makes sense for a US soldier to say those things.

Through gritted teeth, I must also admit how it makes sense intradiagetically for Sorawo and Toriko to not even react to his pro-Israel position.
After all, Toriko doesn't seem critical of firearms or the military much in the first place, considering her education and her Canadian mother in the military; and her absence of reaction in regards to the mention of Palestine specifically may also be corroborated by (once again) a long-standing Canada-Israel diplomatic relationship.
As for Sorawo, her narration makes more apparent how wary and not exactly at ease she is with killing machines. Still, she seems willing to compliment a man "bragging about a toy" if it doesn't get her shot. And since she doesn't react at all to the specific Israeli propaganda part, she probably has no prior notion about Israel and Palestine.

But these are intradiegetic reasons. The quoted excerpt makes it rather clear that the protagonists don't argue - don't even think about arguing, or internally doubt these dehumanizing words - first and foremost because Miyazawa himself sees no problem in that speech on that regard (we'll get back to that). The above is me trying to justify that inside the story; but really, the problem lies in what the story itself does, and conveys.

... but it is horrible extradiegetically

To analyze the extradiegetic side of this story beat better, we need to talk more about how File 5 ends, and how the characters and narrative reflect upon it - or not - afterward.

It starts like this: Sorawo and Toriko find the soldiers from File 3 back, despite their reservations considering that they almost got shot then. This time, they want to save those soldiers: Toriko out of kindness of not letting other humans stay in the hellish Otherside; and Sorawo mostly because she's tagging along, enjoying an opportunity to clear what she sees as her playground from people who are not Toriko.
Still, at the end of their rescue, even Sorawo is pretty invested. She has been terrified of potential casualties among the soldiers she was tasked to save, and she ends up crying in relief in Toriko's arms once they are done and she is sure everything went well.

The fact is, the entire narrative paints the File as a tense and heroic act of kindness, which it is in some way, but without ever putting into perspective any other message that the rescuing mission might be sending. The emotions the readers are supposed to feel toward the soldiers are pity then relief in seeing them saved; with only the leads' diffuse wariness when interacting with armed people tense enough as to maybe kill them, as a backdrop. Most notably, that Israel praise and Palestine dehumanization is not made to elicit additional emotions - say, of grudge and hate - toward the people that the protagonists are saving.
And that's a problem, because such a mention in passing is not neutral. It cannot be.

First, including weapons used by a colonialist and racist (and these days, genocidal and mostly far-right-leaning, we'll come back to that) state in your narrative, while being very clear about what they are usually used for and without any criticism of that, is certainly... a choice. Having these weapons be actually helpful in that narrative, while explicitly drawing a parallel with their original purpose, is even more shocking. The File has our leads and the soldiers effectively riding the two killing vehicles toward an exit, and throughout its entire second half, it basks in this military-oriented rescue operation glow as if nothing was wrong with its framing.

And second, seeing the leads stick to helping those soldiers no questions asked after hearing a killing-oriented, dehumanizing speech about Palestinians, is also extremely worrying. Because in doing so, the narrative supports that very much voiced pro-Israel stance. Without any counterpoint, it is painted as factual truth, when it is in fact heavily biased.

The lieutenant throughout the story

It all gets even worse when you consider how the character of the lieutenant, who says those words, is treated by the story.
Throughout these two Files, Sorawo and Toriko experience a mostly tense atmosphere of distrust and aggressivity coming from the soldiers. They are, effectively, at risk of getting shot at the first misstep. However, among the three soldiers who are named within these Files, exactly two of them act kinder toward our leads: lieutenant Drake and, to a less present extent, major Barker. And they are described as kinder by Sorawo, our narrator.

And yes, the lieutenant is that lieutenant.
His descriptive elements include tidbits made to induce inoffensiveness like "the lieutenant said in a soft tone" and "the lieutenant’s curly locks and melancholy eyes gave him a distinctive impression. He seemed like a quiet person." in File 3. He is the one stopping the other soldiers from shooting the protagonists when they first meet; he is visibly more worried and caring than others toward them; and he is the one who tries to warn them of the danger of an Otherside entity at the end of File 3. He is overall the only one to consistently smile at Sorawo and Toriko, and the most supportive presence of all the soldiers.
He is, for all purposes, presented in the narration as the one sympathetic and reasonable person in the entire battalion.

... And he has that dehumanizing monologue in the middle, with no impact on his framing by the narrative at all.

This absence of impact is also blatant in subsequent Files. In Files 6, 8 and 9, the events of File 5 are mentioned again with nothing more than the idea of "rescuing the U.S. forces", the feat of escorting survivors without casualties, and how Sorawo worked hard at it despite not being interested in other people. Because that is what the narrative wants to convey. The pro-Israel message is not supposed to be a topic: it's prejudice coming from Miyazawa, pure and simple.

I have a whole ball of thoughts to unspool about how this informs a wider colonialist reading of Otherside Picnic as a novel series, which I'm going to dive into later in this post.
Before doing that, however, I want to mention the manga and anime adaptations: how both had opportunities to course-correct that initial horrendous excerpt when they happened a few years later, and how none of them did.

The manga adaptation

First, the manga adaptation.

There is not that much to say here, except this: the manga started publication in 2018, and reached that same part from File 5 we've been talking about in chapter 27 - in volume 5, published in December 2020 in Japanese (with the chapter pre-published in magazine earlier that year, as far as I can tell). And despite the three years elapsed since Miyazawa wrote that dehumanizing part for the first time... well, the manga contains the exact same thing.

Heck, the Nagmachon-inspired vehicle is featured right on the cover of the volume!!! I'm doing everything I can not to lose my temper here...
made with @nex3's grid generator

Well, ok, the phrasing is a bit different here in the English edition of the manga, because the translators of the original light novel and the manga are different people. There is also one additional bit of inner monologue to the last page as you can see, with Sorawo explicitly saying "Well, I didn't understand any of that, including the names.". I took a quick glance to the original to double check this, and she does say "まあ…　車の名前とか全然分からなかったしな", which I would translate to "Well, I didn't understand at all the names of the vehicles and such". So I suppose there is at least some evidence that intradiegetically, Sorawo just didn't follow most of the monologue.

But still. This doesn't excuse this pro-Israel infodump from an extradiegetic point of view, because it stands uncriticized and uncountered by anything in the narrative. And despite slight differences in translation, we do find the same things about it: weapons specialized for killing humans in Palestine, juxtaposed with a direct Otherside/Palestine comparison and the mention of scouting and "peace-keeping" missions. And, yikes.
This is honestly the worst kind of faithful adaptation. Rewriting the narrative of that File may have been a lot to ask, but cutting out that monologue at some point or adding some extra notes should've been considered. But no. It was written again, and printed again, with no extra thought given to what it conveyed, what it meant.

The English translations were published in early 2020 for the light novel version, and mid-2023 for the manga version. And we'll get back to how I think this should not be acceptable to translate and print without any kind of note added to put that one hateful monologue into perspective, all the more these days with the genocide in Palestine ongoing until recently... but in any case, I can confirm through my copy bought this Spring that even these days, you will get that English version with no additional context. It's just there.

The anime adaptation

Now, about the anime adaptation. It was released in early 2021, and... well, it's a bit of a mess.

It doesn't include the monologue I have been so vindictive about, per se. It just made the odd decision of shuffling the order of some Files, and of alloting two episodes each to Files 3 and 5, when all the other adapted Files had only one... and to turn these two Files into the mid-season and end-of-season climaxes of the series. To me, this heavily contributes to making the anime less engaging than the source material, as it puts an even bigger emphasis on these soldier-centered adventures that I always found pretty uncomfortable, instead of moving toward later Files when the series starts really kicking off.
But that's kinda besides the point. At least the casual dehumanizing speech isn't in there, I suppose... But honestly, considering the anime's uncritical emphasis of those exact Files, I presume it was cut mostly because such an infodump didn't work as well in an anime version.

And, well. If the anime itself has nothing on that front directly, there are still some telling signs in a Blu-ray audio drama extra that was released as companion piece to the anime adaptation. The linked video and excerpt below is translated by hurpdurpburps (who also translated a lot of extra Otherside Picnic content here, some I still have to read), and can be inserted somewhere after File 7. It is written by Miyazawa, fits in the canon, and has the two protagonists evoke with tritagonist Kozakura various elements of the past few Files. Regarding the events of File 5, it frames the situation exactly as I mentioned before:

Sorawo: [The soldiers] are nothing but a nuisance to me. I didn't want so many of them hanging around in the Otherside.
Kozakura: Didn't they save you once?
Sorawo: Did they actually?
Toriko: Hmm... The first time we were running away along the train tracks, they shot the thing chasing us, didn't they?
Sorawo: Ahhh... But they didn't exactly do that with us in mind.
Toriko: That's true. If we hadn't noticed them and stayed down, we would've gotten shot there and then as well.
Sorawo: After that, they were arguing about whether to shoot us or not. If their commander [the lieutenant] hadn't stopped them, the both of us would've both died right on the spot.
Kozakura: Was it really that dangerous?
Toriko: Things definitely got pretty antsy, but I could see where they were coming from.
Sorawo: I'm not the kind of person who's nive enough to stay friendly with someone who tried to kill me.
Kozakura: But not everyone tried to do that, right?
Sorawo: There were a few people who kept a cool head, but it was just two people out of dozens of them.
Toriko: Do you remember their names?
Sorawo: Drake(-san) and... Barker(-san).
Toriko: Good job! I thought you'd forgotten them!
Sorawo: I only remember those two though. Everyone else looked at at us like we were monsters. I was on edge the entire time wondering when they'd shoot us.

This Blu-ray extra was commercialized in May 2021 with the Blu-ray version of the anime. And... you know, it's just more additional elements that present that lieutenant under a positive light. There's no reflection, no realization, nothing.
I know that an adaptation - and a spin-off extra from that - doesn't necessarily have much leeway to bend a narrative. But what I mostly want to tell with this additional bit of trivia is how, four years after the original publication of File 5, active praise toward a character spewing a highly biased and bigoted infodump was still being made and released by the author. The absolute minimum would be to not do that.

A summary so far, and arguments against the idea that "it is just one page"

I feel the anger building up inside me, so I will sum up.
Technically, I have admittedly been seething because of one monologue, on one page, in one File in a eight-year-old series of around thirty Files now. This was written before what I, and most fans, consider the Files where Otherside Picnic really gets the ball rolling with its narrative. Long-time readers will probably remember much more the climax of volume 4 in terms of facing grief and trauma; or the recent volumes 7 and 8, which move forward two major plot threads in what I genuinely believe is overall masterful writing.

But with all this? This early part is still horrendous.

It is horrendous because there hasn't been any acknowledgement of it, ever, by the author. There were, as pointed out before, multiple occasions for that, even in small ways. There still are. We'll come back to that later, to what can be done - but in short: the series is not over, and Miyazawa can still take a step toward addressing this.
But so far, I haven't seen any. Presumably, Miyazawa considers that monologue as an innocuous one-time infodump in what the File wants to tell; except it is not innocuous. Even as a one-page thing, it is propaganda, casually talking about killing Palestinians and presenting it as "maintaining peace" from the perspective of a racist ethnostate... and all this emanates from a character that is never painted in a negative light by the narrative, and who is even contrasted in good with the rest of his group. It happens within a File that is, again and again, being remembered fondly and heroically by the story.

It is also horrendous because it is not just one page, when we consider its ramifications. It deeply dehumanizes Palestinians in a comparison with Otherside monsters that is implicitly maintained throughout the entire File. As an extra, it also sheds an uncomfortable light on colonialist preconceptions behind the whole narrative of the Otherside. I will dive into this more in a specific part because this is an entire thing, but there are more things to say on that front.

And finally, even if we put aside the wider colonialist reading for now and focus on the anti-Palestinian message itself, this excerpt is horrendous because it goes unnoticed. After reading, what will remain in most readers' minds will be the narrative highs of the rest of the story; and this insidious part casually talking of Israel "defending itself" and indirectly comparing Palestinians to monsters will just sit there quietly in the back of our brains. It will go to feed a larger, very much prevalent view favorable to Israel.
This monologue is part of a larger propaganda. It is both a product of it, and a channel for it.

And, you know, we'll talk more about this soon, but the sheer violence of this monologue may go less unnoticed these days. I hope it does.
But this is overall a real phenomenon, as far as my own experience with the Otherside Picnic fandom goes: in the four years I have spent reading reviews and recommendations and analyses of the series under one form or other, I have never seen a mention of its pro-Israel speech anywhere before looking explicitly for people talking about that.

Scattered mentions across the Internet, and the privilege of not noticing

So, without further ado, here are all the people I have found talking about it, when digging into this.

And so, for the few people who saw this excerpt for what it is, how many have we been who never did? Because these are the only reaction posts I have found on this topic. I also didn't find anything in Japanese, from what I could search.

And, you know, maybe part of finding only these few posts is on me. I am mostly an accountless lurker, both for social anxiety reasons and because I don't like social media much, and so maybe there is somewhere a big tumblr post or heated Discord conversation about that, that I missed when trying to find other mentions of this topic on the Internet.
But still. This isn't much at all, for the gravity of it. And crucially, such criticism is absent of every single review of the series I have read by myself, be it on specialized feminist/yuri blogs and websites, or on more general platforms like Goodreads and the likes. And I think it reveals how much that issue really remained, and remains, unnoticed on a large community scale. And that's a big problem.

I include myself in this, of course.
I have recommended Otherside Picnic several times here on this blog - heck, recommending and writing stuff about that exact series (and more generally on yuri media) is one of the reasons I've made a blog! - and I never mentioned this before. Because I never saw it.
And as frustrating and angering as it is, it makes sense. I think I didn't have any notion on Israel and Palestine back in 2021 when I first read volume 2 of the light novels - to be honest, I didn't even know what "IED" or "IDF" stood for, and didn't research it - and so I mostly took out from it how I disliked these soldier-centered stories.

It makes sense on a community scale, too. Ignoring a century-long conflict in Palestine, its historical reasons, its sheer existence, is a big fucking privilege that a lot of us have been having. And it comes from having been immersed in cultures and/or societies predominantly supportive of Israel's colonialist and warmongering endeavour.
It is shocking, in restrospect. It should be. Seriously, rereading that part of Otherside Picnic recently and suddenly seeing the extent of the horrible implications of what I had previously vaguely labelled and remembered as "that one uncomfortable tank-related infodump" in my mind was... well, it was a huge slap to the face.

This is not a call to self-flagellate over missing this. Of course, I wish I had noticed earlier. I wish people had told me earlier. But it is a good thing to notice in any case, and it is a good thing for the ways we view fictions we love to change. It is a good thing to be more conscious of all the atrocious little things our favorite stories may contain, and the bloodstained systemic structures of opression they may have legitimized inside our minds without us ever noticing until now.

What I mean is this: it is crucial, I believe, to be transparent on this, to discard the privileged comfort of denial, and to fight back with everything we can against those systems.

And so, I think it is time we talked about the state of the war in Palestine until the recent fragile ceasefire.

Palestine, until recently

I'll be direct: it is disingenuous to call it a war. For the past two years, it has been a genocide of the Palestinian people.

There have been countless debates on whether this is a fitting term legally speaking, and official representatives of many countries have been extremely reluctant to use it - because acknowledging it would immediately require to take all measures to prevent it or make it cease, according to the Genocide Convention. Still, slowly, amidst this reticent public scene, the International Court of Justice has been recognizing Israel's apartheid, warning against a "risk of genocide" and urging Israel in doing everything in its power to stop it. The International Criminal Court has also issued arrest warrants for Israel's Prime Minister and Former Minister of Defense (see here for an analysis in French on the limitations of international law in being actually coercive about all this - heck, the French government didn't respect that warrant recently when Nethanyahu crossed France's airspace, and-- aaaaah).

But let us be clear: this is a genocide.
It has been recognized as such by a growing number of organizations, like NGOs Amnesty International or Doctors Without Borders, along with a United Nations Special Rapporteur (see also here or here for less verbose versions in English or French), numerous genocide studies scholars and associations (notably recently, the International Association of Genocide Scholars), and several Israeli nonprofit organizations documenting violation of human rights in occupied Palestine. If you can do so, I really encourage you to read some of these links to gain a better sense of scale of what is happening, if you never really did before.

This notably encompasses a stated, effective and repeated intent of eradication of Palestinian people, manifested through many public declarations - among others the dehumanizing descriptions of Palestinian people as "human animals" or that "there are no innocent civilians" in Gaza. This also encompasses the facts that Israel has been mass-killing Palestinians, destroying as much as possible the buildings and infrastructures in the Gaza Strip (here is a cartography of Israel's destruction of the Gaza Strip by research group Forensic Architecture), orchestrating a particularly deadly and long-running famine along with traps to killed starved people, blockading humanitarian aid or weaponizing it through the Israeli-controlled "Gaza Humanitarian Foundation", forcing displacements, purposefully bombing hospitals and schools and journalists - and pressuring media and countries into looking away.

Israel's attempt at deflecting international blame has used a variety of forms.
One of them, soon after the Hamas-led massacre, has been hinging on the misuse of Holocaust memory - from both Israeli and other countries' officials - to designate all Palestinian people as intrisically dangerous and complicit of the Hamas' war crimes until proven otherwise. This skews the very notion of Palestinian victim and purposefully condemns other, legal and necessary acts of resistance and survival to more than 75 years of illegal settler-colonial violence. This tactic distracts from the core idea that Israel's colonization should not be happening in the first place.

An adjacent strategy deployed by Israel has been the use of anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia to paint itself as a "defensor of the civilized world", a position strengthened by its Western perception as the "one democracy in the Middle East". This has been going for decades, and it is obviously part of a wider Western, colonialist categorization of people into more or less advanced civilizations and the framing of enemies as "barbarians". This demonization of both Islam and Arab origin (real or perceived) is still growing and, at least from France, horribly tangible.

Intertwined with all this, Israel has been using the idea of fighting terrorism to justify most of its attacks, framing them as "preventive defense", as "necessary", even to explain away decisions as dire as bombing cities, unilaterally breaking ceasefires (and making "exceptions" to the current one, too), and invading other countries. This simplified vision of "fighting terrorism" hides notably how Israel itself has participated in empowering Hamas to weaken the Palestinian Authority and undermine peace agreements, and its extremely violent intent to fulfill its ethnonationalist project. Even without that broader historical context, how to fight paramilitary groups who use violence against civilians is an incredibly difficult topic, but no matter what it should never justify mass-killing civilians in turn.

But maybe the longest-standing tool for Israel to minimize international criticism has been the sheer Palestinian erasure of Zionism using in its infancy slogans like "a land without people for people without a land". The movement has been leveraging historical and religious attachments into a reasoning of "rightful ownership" to legitimize a bloodstained colonialist venture at the expense of existing populations. Even these days, the central Zionist myth that Israel is the safe place for Jewish people in the world - and that this is in any way "natural" instead of fabricated by colonial powers - still infuses many a public opinion. A dreadful corollary is that any criticism against it is considered antisemitism.

In the past two years, this same instrumentalization of antisemitism has been used more than ever to shut down any public stance against Israel's genocide in Palestine. It has been a deliberate tactic to frame this as a religious conflict, and to shut down discussions on how a heavily weaponized racist ethnostate is an extremely worrisome prospect in itself. It has contributed to erasing the history behind the colonization of Palestine, arguing ties to Jewish communities Israel claims to represent - and doesn't.
This has also given a false "non-antisemitic" veneer to people and parties defending Israel, and has covered up pernicious manifestations of actual antisemitism; notably targeting Jewish people who do not support Israel's genocidal endeavor.

To counter this discourse, I heavily recommend reading from Jewish magazines and collectives, including Jewish Israeli people and organizations, defending Palestine and challenging the idea that criticizing Israel would be antisemitic.

And for a more general opposition to Israel's propaganda, I would of course recommend first and foremost reading or hearing testimonies and literature from Palestinian people.

Now, I should talk about the main means of action for Palestine today: donating, protesting and being vocal about this. But I feel like this call to action should end this post, so I will postpone a more visible paragraph about this once I have finished examining Otherside Picnic.

There are three elements to address about it yet:

Scale models of tanks, and how Miyazawa's posture has evolved over the years

When I first experienced that atrocious reread of Otherside Picnic's second volume in late April, my immediate reaction after searching for mentions of it online was to check the author's Bluesky account - just in case I could find some kind of announcement, apology, or any element officially acknowledging his horrible past posture that I would have missed.

Not only did I not find such a thing, but I also got hit with how much Miyazawa loved miniature models of all sorts, and particularly... tanks. It is plenty clear, if you check his socials, even without being able to read Japanese.
This checked out, of course - once again, his love for weaponry shines through in the series, and I kinda knew about his passion for miniature painting already. Still, it didn't bode well at all in the present case.

This bad feeling became reality when I found amidst his May 2025 reposts a post by a brand of miniature tanks, Hobby Dengeki, selling a variety of scale models... including an Israeli one (even if the latter was not directly advertised by Miyazawa).
Though I cannot hide my great discomfort toward tanks as a concept, I do not want to disparage miniature painting - even of mini-tanks, per se. But the idea of a brand commercializing models of Israeli tanks in 2025 felt so gross that this repost by Miyazawa fueled my anger for months.

This was originally most of what I wanted to say in this section: some words on how an obsession for miniature models of weapons can be a very efficient and pervasive pipeline toward being fed - and propagating - propaganda about them, glorifying the context of their use. I have no direct evidence that this is what happened with the Nagmachon back in 2017, but the sheer fact that this advertisement by Hobby Dengeki simply exists today still illustrates my point, I think.
(As an aside, I recently searched for tweets from Miyazawa mentioning the Nagmachon explicitly, and there are a couple, notably mentioning that it has risen among his favorite land weapons, in 2011; then, in mid-2017, complaining that there are so few decent videos of it online, probably to write the second volume of Otherside Picnic that released in October of the same year. This, as we saw, was not innocuous: it resulted in straight-up Israeli propaganda and praise in the infamous File 5.)

With all this, I consequently spent the entire summer partly grieving Otherside Picnic and being enraged toward his author. But in early September, I decided to re-check his social media accounts more thoroughly just in case... and have actually found several recent posts of his opposing Israel and mentioning donations to Gaza. And despite everything, my relief in the past two months has been palpable.
At least he's got some kind of change of mind on Palestine recently. The horror and shock from the second volume is still here, and we'll get back to that; but this is something, at least.

Since then, I have done a deep dive into his Bluesky and Twitter (see here for a version accessible to the general public that I used for my in-depth search) accounts to get a better grasp on the timeline of this change of mind; here is what I have found.

First, a thorough search of his Twitter account - less updated these days - with the keywords "Israel", "Palestine", and "Gaza" (the latter yielded nothing), armed with my limited but existing capacity to read some Japanese and Google translate, has provided, among the most noticeable, the following (links in Japanese):

There are a few other tweets of his mentioning Israel that I'm not sure I would be able to translate without risking misunderstanding them fundamentally. If you do read Japanese, the above keyword searches may provide you greater insight about that, and I welcome additions on that topic.
In any case, I do feel like these almost fifteen-year-old tweets are overall horribly telling about a long-standing background pro-Israel stance of the author. And despite the 2015 one, it is clear that Miyazawa still held onto all this in 2017.

There is nothing post-2018 with those same keywords to be found on his Twitter account, and he doesn't seem to have reacted to the beginning of the Palestinian genocide in late 2023 anywhere. However, it is clear that he has been in contact for years with tweets and people who retransmitted news with a clear-cut defense of Palestine.

In February and March 2025 at last, there is finally a match of those same keywords on Miyazawa's Bluesky account (that he started using in late 2023/early 2024). He mentions explicitly that he made a donation for the Japanese Red Cross for Gaza, and that he opposes Israel. He made another very recent donation and reposted a call to help Gaza in September 2025, too.

And, well. There is something horrible in how it required one year and a half of genocide for him to visibly change his position online - and also that digging into his old tweets would expose such shocking ones! But helping now, spreading the word now, and visibly advocating for Gaza, beats not helping (or propagating pro-Israel propaganda any further, for that matter), as enraging as that slow change is.

The most recent news are Miyazawa's Bluesky posts from late October. He details his relief in hearing that prominent model makers didn't feel like making tanks after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, or that they would stop making Israeli tanks altogether. He then posts in turn that he will not make any more model of a modern Russian weapon, and that he won't ever build an Israeli model again.

Part of me is enraged, of course, that such uncritical making of scale models of tanks happened in the first place, and wants to scream "fucking finally!!", if you allow me.
But part of me also considers this massive, because it publicly addresses a cognitive dissonance in Miyazawa himself, whose opposition to Israel manifests at last not only vocally (though that is tremendously important) but is also reflected in how it affects a visibly important part of his (literal) craft. This, if anything else, gives me a tiny bit of hope for what he writes in the future.

But all these recent posts are no direct apology for Miyazawa's old tweets and position. More importantly, they are no excuse for what continues to be featured in and propagated through Otherside Picnic - and its aggravated impact since late 2023.

Otherside Picnic's content needs to be addressed as soon as possible

Just to be clear: this literary topic I am going on a tangent about, because I am still obsessed about it, matters so much less than donating and being vocal about Palestine; and you may want to skip to the last section of this post. I mean, Otherside Picnic is ridiculously niche aside from a specific demographic of yuri enthusiasts.
But on its own scale, it still matters. You should not sell something that contains such blatant, active pro-Israel propaganda without any mention inside or outside the narrative to counter it.

The worst thing about this is that this same propaganda is still unchanged and propagated to this day both in physical and online copies, as far as I can tell, in English at least. All the English versions I have tried to acquire recently to try and disprove that fact have been in vain, and most notably, not a single ebook version has been updated to counter that same horrible excerpt (at the day of posting).
And we need to see this changed and addressed, because it is genuinely harmful. It is all the more in the current context of genocide, but it always should have been.

I do not want to see a quick "this was written in 2017" extra note to the volume, that would try and sever this propaganda from the genocide, as if the historical context of 2017 was enough to excuse writing this. The excerpt's words have become particularly unbearable in recent years, but they were already unacceptable in 2017 - or at least, they should have been. And this is a crucial fact: a sincere reflection on this excerpt needs to not just be a stance against the current genocide perpetrated by Israel, but also to provide a deeper understanding that it is baked into the very concept of Zionism and the colonialist project behind the State of Israel. It needs to be made clear that a defense of Israel has always been unacceptable, even if it has become worse and worse and worse.

In a section below, we get into more details about what can be done about this.
Until then, I feel the urge to continue my tangent. I need to talk about how a sincere reflection on this topic should also make the author and the reader think back on the colonialist features of the story as a whole.

note: The following three sections are overall skippable in the grand scheme of this essay. If you want to reach the important stuff, you can go directly to the section What should still be done.

The broader exploitative horror of Otherside Picnic

As I said before, the mere fact that this comparison between the Otherside and occupied Palestine even exists somewhere in the narrative is a big old red flag, which sheds a blinding light on how Otherside Picnic occasionally borrows from colonialist elements. Indeed, in some ways the Otherside feeds into this big colonialist myth of an untamed land, inoccupied except by "monsters", with a focus on the thrill of discovery and surviving at the expense of that unreasonable and aggressive "other".
Otherside Picnic is in good part about two people slowly terraforming for their private use a territory that isn't theirs (building roads, shelters, stairs); immediately considering it their playground (as Sorawo literally says multiple times, see also the part on video games later in this section); and at least at first hunting its dwellers, notably for money.

Now, this is an imperfect and excessive consideration on several points, of course. Sorawo and Toriko are just two people (and they plan for this to stay that way); what they collect is not exactly resources, and more a bunch of weird cursed artifacts; and their building work is little more than stairs to replace an existing ladder and signaling a safe route that avoids reality-bending spots. It all differs widely from any kind of large-scale exploitation of land and resources one usually pictures in colonialism; and there is no sense of propagating some sort of political and cultural control.
Still, the core idea - surviving (more or less stranded) in a "wilderness", with framing the kill of the entities living there as heroic (because they are intrisically dangerous and/or for survival of some sort) - is not far removed from the genre of the Robinsonade... and though the genre itself can obviously be versatile in its message, its core has deep colonialist undertones. The sheer idea that the Otherside is obviously theirs to enjoy speaks volumes about the protagonists' mindset. If not directly colonialist, it is at least clearly exploitative.

Another notable counterargument to the general colonialist reading is this: the monsters of the Otherside are not actual sentient denizens of the place. They are deeply nonsensical phenomena, nonsentient ghost story motifs that function by invading human cognition, and nothing more. And this is a valid point, per se. Some of this reasoning is overthinking the "tribute to ghost stories" aspect of Otherside Picnic, and we'll get back to that.
But still, this trick of "intrisically dangerous" enemy entities that attack you as soon as you come near, the idea of monsters that can be killed without remorse, always feeds a little into the idea that some beings are harmful by essence and are better off dead. This is always an iffy narrative, and it can quickly snowball (or be explicitly weaponized) into a ton of problematic messages and metaphors if the fiction is not careful, because of its proximity with rhetorics against real-life oppressed groups (humans or animals, for that matter).
(Otherside Picnic's direct comparison with Palestine may honestly take the cake in how blatantly dehumanizing such a narrative can become, though. It stinks so much.)

If you allow me this tangent, this is also a mindset often found in video games (notably RPGs or platformers): the one of killable monsters or enemies, without a second thought. Often they simply repop, anyway, or are temporarily KO, or explode into tiny magic particles. Some video games take it to heart and question this very idea, but with a lot of titles there is an implicit contract that you will kill some enemies on your way, because at the end of the day this is just what playing entails - for better or for worse when you read deeply into the ethical meaning of it.
I am going on this particular tangent because Otherside Picnic explicitly has Sorawo drawing a comparison to video games at some point. And, you know, it's on point. It makes sense to see her approach the Otherside somewhat like her own big sandbox game with monsters inside; and at the same time it obviously informs how her vision of the place - and more broadly the author's story - inherits the same underlying, often unquestioned biases.

More precisely, Sorawo repeatedly draws a comparison to Minecraft. It is a funny element on several aspects, to have her acknowledge directly how in another life without the Otherside, she probably would have maintained her own Minecraft server instead. There is indeed a thrill in exploring and doing your own DIY survival projects in an unknown world that Otherside Picnic captures very well, and having even the main character being self-conscious about this comparison is a fun and reality-grounded thing.
The problem is, Minecraft is also a colonialist fantasy. There are a few blog posts, articles and videos exploring this idea some more, be it around the treatment of villager NPCs as a commodity, the colonialist roots and environmental impact behind the concept of mining (of which any commentary is obviously absent from the game), or the overall notion of appropriating a land - a big sandbox made and remodeled to the player's whim - among others.

This is not to say that Minecraft is wholly inherently bad, or that sandboxes are, or that video games with monsters are. Heck, I have been replaying old Pokémon games recently and I gnash my teeth at the deep speciecism with which Pokémons are treated; and I play still.
What I want to say is that we need to be critical. It is most often not the actual intent of those games to convey oppressions, but they still do, because those are deep-rooted systems, ingrained in core ideas like killing monsters and exploring and terraforming lands. And sometimes, you'll play despite it all, and you'll still have fun despite your cognitive dissonance, if you manage to squint through it; but it still feels fundamental to be aware of those mechanisms at play; to question the messages a fiction can convey through its choices, below its intention.

And this holds for literature too, of course; and here, it holds for Otherside Picnic in its own way.

Subverted horror and embracing your own othering

Of course, it would be disingenuous not to also acknowledge the influence on this novel series of both the 70s Russian novel Roadside Picnic, that I failed to mention more before in this essay (and that I have yet to read), and of Japanese ghost stories.
The first element notably informs Otherside Picnic's idea of a strange, creepy land full of incomprehensible artifacts and dangers (though Roadside Picnic's, called the Zones, are parts of Earth changed by long-gone aliens and thus don't have that colonial concept of a wild "playground"). The second element informs how Otherside Picnic borrows creepypasta and scary monsters as a tribute to ghost stories; and part of the treatment of those monsters is due to them being simply that: tributes to horror stories, and ways to give you a good scare.
A good chunk of Otherside Picnic is simply gluing those two things together with lesbians.

But in the way its story is structured, in its real-life references, and somewhere in its protagonists' mindset, Otherside Picnic still has colonialist traits. The othering of its monsters literally weaponized into the dehumanization of Palestinian people is its least deniable and most blatant manifestation.
This also makes me think of how the eldritch horror genre can more generally be a mirror for a deep-seated fear of the other - think Lovecraft's profoundly racist body of work - and how it manifests here in that one example.

But then, it makes me want to see eldritch horror and exploration/survival adventure fictions aware of those biases and pitfalls, and steering clear of them, or subverting them. I want to see stories of exploring and venturing into unknown lands without claiming those lands as yours, without violence as your main interface with the beings living there. I want to read scary stories without the hurtful sanist vision of "madness".
I want to see horror as a tool for the protagonists to understand and embrace their own othering instead.

And the thing is - I realize half in awe as I am writing this how true it is - Otherside Picnic often does that, later on. As the series grows, the Otherside becomes less this bizarre place that they go explore for fun, money or rescuing people, and much more a mirror for the protagonists' PTSD, dissociative disorders and unique perception of the world; and a tool to dive into their non-normative functioning and relationship. In one of the story's climaxes, it highlights an unspeakable joy found in shared queerness and to some extent madness: the euphoria of understanding each other outside of common social frameworks.

This evolution of the series is also reflected very concretely in the story's content: from File 13 onward, the two protagonists kill extremely few Otherside entities, and only one of them (in File 20) is not a direct or indirect manifestation of their personal or interpersonal traumas and fears (of which the death is therefore much more symbolic).
Actually, they kill very few monsters in the first place after that point - those being limited to Files 15, 20, 23 and 29 if I'm not mistaken. This is to be compared with the sizeable amount of them killed before File 13 that are unrelated to their backstories (with Files 11-12 being some sort of exception involving people transformed by the Otherside).

All this is to say that this change is noticeable... and it denotes a shift in the way the Otherside works as the series grows - and in its narrative function. It is less of a terra incognita, and more of an echo of the protagonists' estrangement from society, along with a direct catalyst for them to acknowledge their problems and talk things out.
This allows the narrative to unpack fascinating reflections on a lot of topics, including recovering from trauma, romance, amatonormativity and queer marginalization.

Yet despite all this, it bears repeating the obvious: meaningful new grounds in queer representation should not come at the cost of turning a blind eye to the dehumanization of Palestinian people.

Bases for hope

Before going into how a correction of that hurtful excerpt should be done, I want to insist on one thing: I do believe change is achievable within Otherside Picnic. I think fighting for that is not vain.
My hope is based in good part on Miyazawa's reaction to a variety of topics.

The first hopeful sign is obviously his clear public change of position, and him supporting and donating to Gaza these days. Even if it has been a very long time coming, and even if it clashes with his current absence of reflection on Otherside Picnic's pro-Israel element - more on that cognitive dissonance later - this is a first step toward a realization of how hurtful that excerpt was. Without it, I admit that I would have been much less confident about any kind of change at all, and would have advised you to drop the series altogether; but this is something, and it makes me believe that reaching out to him could make a difference.

My second basis for hope, albeit much more diffuse, is built on a lot of sociology and anthropology elements prevalent in volumes 6 to 8 of the novel series. Volume 8 in particular has some mentions of how cultural anthropology studies can be hugely biased; on how easy it is to view others through one's own standards as if they were the absolute truth. It even explicitly mentions the (colonialist) mindset of European cultures seeing themselves as "advanced" compared to more "primitive" ones, with other civilizations expected to "progress" until they reach a similar cultural "advancement" - in an extremely linear, dominant view of what culture and civilization mean.
This mindset, as we mentioned before, still permeates a lot of dehumanizing rhetorics everywhere. Seeing it tackled here is meaningful; even if it mostly serves in the narrative a smaller-scale reflection on amatonormativity and on how society pigeonholes the acceptable shapes relationships can have. This is the kind of awareness I want an author to have.
But, yeah, it just hurts all the more to see that same awareness being completely absent from that volume 2 excerpt's mention of Palestine.

My last element for hope is related to some recent handling of outside-the-narrative commentary. For context, volume 8 of the novels features several characters discussing CSA (and subsequent traumatic amnesia) as a possible cause of trauma, in an extremely grounded and coherent scene - which notably includes a direct mention of a book title on the topic, that one of the characters has been reading.
Sorawo is rather detached from the conversation as the point-of-view protagonist; but Miyazawa himself comes back to commenting the scene at the end of the volume. He mentions that the book quoted is a real book, provides actual resources, and handles the topic with care, so that he outweighs his character's curt reaction to it. Here is a direct quote from him without spoilers, for good measure.

I considered whether it was acceptable to use this book, which was written in order to help real-life victims, as a prop in a fictional story. It was inevitable that the possibility that there had been sexual abuse would occur to [character A] when [they] tried to think seriously about [character B's past], and it was only natural that, acting on that premise, [character A] would then make an attempt to learn about it.
I felt like avoiding mentioning the title of the work, or switching it for a fictional one would be much worse, and therefore had it appear under its actual title. [...]
Because Sorawo, our viewpoint protagonist character, is cynical and detached, [...], there are times when I am forced to write about serious issues as if they're "someone else's problem.". However, that is not my intention as an author, and I do try to avoid the portrayal of them in my work from coming off that way.

Reading this part for the first time, after a particularly stellar volume to boot, felt incredibly important, and it made me trust Miyazawa a lot. The entire last paragraph of the quote here is the kind of clear-cut distinction between character behavior and authorial position that I'd want to see in many fictions... and rereading it now makes volume 2 sting even more in comparison.
Honestly, what else is there to say, aside from the fact that I wish volume 2 had been handled with such care?

This is, of course, wishful thinking: it would have required for the author to have an anti-Zionist stance back then, when everything from the characters to the narrative to his posts at the time make it blatant that his opinion aligned with his lieutenant character's. But then, I believe this still can - and should - be done for volume 2 today.

What should still be done

This is the part about the concrete means of action regarding Otherside Picnic, before moving to a wider part about helping Gaza and Palestine.

As I said before, this pro-Israel excerpt from novel volume 2/manga volume 5 needs to be given a counterpoint. This means editing it - not to cut out the original monologue and sweep it under the rug, but instead to acknowledge it and add notes to it, to put it into perspective and to call it out for what it was: dehumanizing propaganda.
A reedition has to provide the reader resources and possible actions about the barely halted genocide; and also about anti-Zionism, and how this should not have been acceptable even in 2017. The author needs to take a stance against Israel, to apologize for what was printed and realize that it is legitimately shocking, and to act meaningfully in a way that tries to compensate the harm this part is guilty of. A meta-commentary condemning Israel, providing pro-Palestinian historical perspectives and current ways to help, would go a long way in superseding the characters' opinions (or lack thereof), in repairing what that this excerpt is insidiously spreading, and in making a change.

Obviously, it would also be significant to have the character think back on this inside the story. Having a small part where the protagonists are exposed to elements around the history of Palestine, and therefore reconsider their relationship to that Marines rescue operation, would not actually feel much more out of place than all this being directly mentioned in early Files in the first place. Sure, it would ground Otherside Picnic's story to some extent; but then, numerous mentions across the books (of specific video games, sociologists' names, concepts like LLM...) already ground the series in the 2020s.

Still, an intradiegetic mention is secondary to having a meta-commentary directly addressing the excerpt within the same volume. A reedition where the author challenges his own past position must remain the primary source to defusing pro-Israel propaganda. Spinning the ongoing narrative in a direction that also addresses it would simply feel even more consistent (and satisfying) as course-correcting.

We need to fight for this change as readers. This means reaching out to Miyazawa and the publishers - and to make them understand that the incriminated excerpt's content is atrocious not only because of the current political events (even if that's true), but because of the violent colonialist history behind the creation of the State of Israel itself.

This is quite probably where Miyazawa's cognitive dissonance in supporting Gaza but not editing his older writing comes from: from the widespread idea that "this started on October 7th" (when really; it didn't). From the prevalent vision of the State of Israel as sprouting righteously from the historical and religiously significant Land of Israel (when it was an opportunistic colonialist project based on forced displacements). From its branding as a safe place representative of Jewish people, and its overall pinkwashing and rainbow-washing (when it is a heavily armed ethnostate with a built-in apartheid regime that only represents itself).
All these surface considerations seem to justify the existence of the State of Israel, if not its current genocide. They all are widespread misinformations that fall apart on further historical scrutiny, and they should be actively challenged.
At the very, very least, both the author and publishers should take a step back and realize the dehumanization this narrative participates in.

So, concretely, if you are a reader of the series, **this is what I believe you can do regarding *Otherside Picnic*** (and I am also going to do everything I can from that):

Regarding the idea of contacting the author, I would advise you to do so directly, through DMs or so, if you have the opportunity.
A wave of public anger and callout can definitely be efficient in achieving change, and boycotts work, notably regarding Palestine! But they function much better on companies and highly-publicized authors, and Otherside Picnic is quite probably too niche for that.
I also really believe that Miyazawa can be receptive to this, for all the reasons I mention above. I think we can genuinely convince him that this is harmful and awful, and that he cannot let it be printed as is, and call-ins are much better to achieving this than call-outs. The goal is not to get Otherside Picnic cancelled; it's to get its author to reflect on it and change.

This is not to say we shouldn't be publicly angry or disappointed, though. I feel immensely betrayed, even if retroactively; and if you've ever been invested in Otherside Picnic for its better parts, you have every right to be furious too! Heck, this post is half special interest, half a long scream.
But I think this public anger should be spent explicitly advocating for Palestine one way or another - here, through raising awareness among fans or potential readers, and getting them to protest and/or donate against the recent genocide, and convincing them of the importance of a more general anti-Zionist stance.

Clinging and grieving

Despite all the hurt, I still feel myself clinging to this series in many ways, and I understand so well why many other fans would too.

This is not to downplay this horrible part, or to make it excusable in the slightest; but as a reader so invested in Otherside Picnic during the past four years, and currently at volume 9, in some ways volume 2 necessarily feels "distant". It is "long ago" both inside and outside the narrative - and that would hold for any series. The characters and story have grown a lot since, and so has the author - he has clearly come some sort of way from his shocking 2011 pro-Israel tweets, as evidenced by his recent public support for Gaza.

I just wish he would take a look back to what he once wrote and be shocked in turn, and update this part for the better. In its own way, rediscovering this deeply hurtful content eight years after its release, when being intensely invested in the series and so trustful from its recent developements, sure is... an experience.

(That trust has also been damaged recently in other ways. An offhanded mention of Harry Potter by some secondary character in volume 9, released in 2024 in Japanese and 2025 in English, has doused some of it. Please stop referencing Rowling, considering her actively anti-trans hate campaign. In recent years it's just never innocuous. I'm tired. Anyway.)

The ever-difficult part in letting go is, I believe Otherside Picnic is outstanding in many ways.
Its existence as genre fiction yuri makes it a rarity in the first place, but its blend of lesbian and horror elements works particularly spendidly in recent volumes, as it subverts the yuri and romance tropes it seemed to set up in its early stages. It addresses head-on many elements of lesbian identities and relationships, and it also has blatantly aroace-leaning conversations intertwined with this, in ways that feel strikingly grounded.

The eldritch horror component plays a key role in this: it helps the characters and the story reclaim the othering that society at large exerts over queer relationships by forcing them into a box - a phenomenon the author also addresses under his VTuber persona in a 2020 video called The Fluid Relationship and its Enemy.
It just hurts all the more to see this same othering used in such a dehumanizing way in early Files. This early instance makes me obviously more wary of both the series and the author in the future, and makes me on the fence about dropping the series altogether if it receives no reedition of this part.

Before seeing his recent pro-Gaza tweets, I have been angry all summer, mentally preparing myself to the atrocious kind of situation that is "what if the author of something you love dearly turns out to be a horrible person?". How do you deal with the situation when an author's bigoted views inevitably seep into works of their you esteemed? How do you let go of a fiction without letting go of what it brought you - without severing a whole part of yourself out of shame of having ever liked that fiction in the first place? Grieving something you loved is always a difficult task.

It feels particularly hard here, because writing this post a year after reading volume 8 still highlights how deep an impact that volume had on me. It feels hard because Otherside Picnic is the work that launched me into the yuri genre, and Sorawo is one of the characters in fiction I have clicked with the most in my life.
It is also difficult because Miyazawa's recent volumes and support to Gaza are definitely (even if slowly and belatedly) a welcome step in the right direction. He seems to be learning better, and that is cause for hope.

At the same time, it all feels insufficient, because Otherside Picnic is currently keeping a harmful mention that simply cannot be left as is. I want to act toward changing that, until either change is achieved, or I complete the grieving process that this post kind of is.

Grief is still a task I prepare myself to; and until then, I cling to hope. I understand other fans who would too.

In the meantime, it is absolutely vital to not shrug off these currently still printed harmful elements; so I probably won't platform Otherside Picnic again unless things change on that front, and focus on recommending other fictions instead. I can only encourage you to do the same until at least some extra word is printed, if not a full anti-Zionist stance.

(I do want to finish two partially drafted essays about the series, though: one on volume 9, and one drawing comparisons to the visual novel Heaven Will Be Mine. I might get around to writing them in full one of these days as exceptions to this non-platforming; but I will try to leave it at that, and to keep the remainder of my enthusiasm for the series offline and for myself.)

If you are a fan of Otherside Picnic, I hope this post makes you rethink your relationship with it a little.
I do not mean by that that you should scrub yourself clean of that fiction entirely: a lot of that behavior is a reflex stemming from shame and anger, and the weight of being publicly perceived as liking something "problematic". I do not think this is desirable.
But I hope this made you aware of how bleak a one-page mention can be, and how it can have larger colonialist roots. I hope it gets you to warn others about it, and to be intransigent with this, no matter how good the series is or becomes on other topics.

This is not to guilt-trip you for enjoying the series still for its better parts. I understand: I am the same. But this is to spur you to action: to support Palestine, and read more about it, and be vocal about it, and protest, and donate.
And to fight for meaningful queer representation that doesn't support Israel.

A conclusion on Otherside Picnic

Otherside Picnic is a great story of actual lesbian characters slowly coming out below the initial yuri coding. It is a story of recovering from trauma and queer abusive relationships through healthier queer love; of challenging amatonormativity and narratives imposed upon you from the outside, and charting uniquely new relationships; of what redemption can look like when you have caused harm, and addressing the guilt that comes with it; all of this topped with some genuinely excellent banter and specific idiosyncratic humor driven by a one-of-a-kind protagonist... at the cost of a horrible, unaddressed pro-Israel mention amidst some overall rocky first two volumes - an atrocious thing that all these great elements do not make less sickening.

At my best, I feel grateful in so, so many ways that this series exists. At my worst, I'm filled with so much anger that this specific part got to be printed unquestioningly, and missed in so many reviews, and simply that this was then Miyazawa's view. The fact that it was written eight years ago does not make it excusable, as I hope this essay has convinced you of by now. And even if Miyazawa has recently changed his tune on social media by clearly showing support for Gaza, this part remains printed as is to this day, which is even more of a problem.
I believe it should be challenged as soon as possible, through a meta-commentary printed in reeditions that would condemn the genocide in Gaza, and that would ideally also be firmly anti-Zionist; and notably with the author acknowledging and apologizing for how dehumanizing his writing was even in 2017.

I hope this change can be achieved by actually reaching out to the author and publishers, more than by protesting against Otherside Picnic as a whole. Maybe I am too naive or idealistic; but there is still room for course-correcting, and I hope it gets to happen.

Until then, I will be touching grass and taking a step back. This has not sobered me from my obsession for this series entirely, or from analyzing all of its recent good things; but I consider this, even as a one-page mention, a pretty major caveat, and a deeply shocking political statement that fills me with anger.
I will use this anger to fight back. To ask for change in the series, first, even if it feels evidently small compared to everything going on with the world right now - because it is still printing a piece of Israelian propaganda amidst its otherwise enthralling queer horror.
But also, to fight for change in the world. And here, notably, by trying to help Palestine still, and to educate myself and others more.

Palestine today, and how to help

The situation has been shifting recently with the ceasefire declared on October 10th, 2025. The genocide and orchestrated famine have somewhat stopped, and this is by itself a relief beyond words.

Still, to say that this ceasefire is fragile is an understatement. There have been repeated airstrikes on Gaza even since its declaration, and the situation remains atrocious between rubbles, gang wars and a tight Israeli control over humanitarian aid. The previous ceasefire in March was unilaterally broken by Israel, and recently its supremacist minister of national security has called to resume "full-scale hostilities", which is to say the genocide. It's just... it's horribly bleak.

On top of that, the deal itself behind the ceasefire is full of holes. It draws a horizon with the barest mention of Palestinian autodetermination, purposefully pushing away the actual important political questions behind transitory status and many-step operations in ways not dissimilar to the Oslo Accords. It is also crucially devoid of any kind of justice against the crimes committed by the State of Israel, its army and its representatives.
(see for instance here for a French analysis of the recent deal that I found really great, if any French speaker stumbles upon this and has read this far)

None of this is surprising: that deal is directed mostly by people with terrifying autocratic tendencies, and has been initiated by fucking Trump; and a lot of what he announced publicly sounds - expectedly - like neocolonialism for Palestine. This, for several reasons: first, his intention to turn the region into a "Riviera of the Middle East", which is as much a capitalist and colonialist venture as it sounds, quite possibly through forced displacements; second, the deal seemingly leading to a (transitory?) protectorate administration of Gaza from the outside by a "Peace Board", notably including the US, and very much notably excluding any Palestinian body.
This outside administration may also sever even more Gaza and the West Bank, as the latter isn't part of the negociations. Notably, Israeli settlements and apartheid and violence in the West Bank - more than a thousand dead in the past two years, reported the UN recently - continue unaddressed.

Most crucially, as said before, none of the deal mentions any kind of sanction toward Israel, and this impunity is revolting. This can only lead to a surface-level peace if it doesn't acknowledge the genocide leading to 10% of Gaza killed, and more than 80% of the people killed being civilians; and if it doesn't unpack all the history before that, tracing back to the Nakba of 1948 and before, of the fundamentally racist and dehumanizing ethnostate project of Zionism, crystallized in Israel.
Treating Gaza as a threat in the entirety of a process that sweeps under the rug the horrors it went through is horrible beyond words. (See for instance to that extent the precise wording of the "peace plan" outline, which I think is awfully telling about this.)

Even the claim that this deal is "peace" is an insidious shield against criticism. In reality, all of it - from its brittle ceasefire to its absence of recognition of Palestine, from its absence of justice toward Israel to its neocolonialist tendencies - is extremely worrying at best.

I am hoping for a future for Palestine, but its present is mostly in ruins, extremely literally. The fact that the deal barely mentions vague conditions for self-determination, and never talks about any US acknowledgement of a state of Palestine neither now or in the foreseeable future, or about any process of reconstruction, purposefully doesn't provide any roadmap for a free Palestine.

For a more detailed analysis and list of the alarming problems with the deal as it currently looks like, I strongly recommend reading this United Nations article highlighting the heavy concerns of a sizeable amount of UN experts.

And though I repeat myself, I also must add: the very idea of a two-state solution is fundamentally flawed. Israel cannot be a democracy with its baked-in ethnically differentiated treatment, nor can it coexist peacefully with neighboring countries when its base premise is that it should own a land for historical and religious reasons at the expense of the people living (or having lived) there.

So. What can we do, with so many governments blatantly uncritical of Israel, and absurdly lax toward it in part because of their own colonial history?

The answers are the same as ever. You may have seen there elsewhere on social media, but they bear repeating.

  1. Donate. This keeps helping, even as the genocide has stopped. Community projects I have heard of the most and donated to myself include Gaza Soup Kitchen and the various branches of the Sameer Project. The Butterfly Effect Project also holds a list of numerous individual verified donation campaigns of the past two years, if that is more your thing. You can also, to some extent and notably for their Gaza-based actions, donate to NGOs like Doctors Without Borders, Reporters Without Borders, country-based branches of the International Red Cross/Red Crescent, Unicef, etc.
  2. Boycott. See here the call to boycott by the Palestinian-led movement BDS ("Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions") and here the guide to boycotting. This matters even when the Israel army is not actively commiting genocide anymore.
  3. Protest. If you are able to obtain information on protest marches for Palestine or against Israel near you, stay informed and participate. People should keep protesting to criticize a deal that sees Israel walk scot-free from everything it committed, both in the past 75 years and in the past 2 years specifically.
  4. Educate yourself and others. Maybe some of the numerous links I included here can help you learn a bit about anti-Zionism or Palestine, or provide elements to strengthen your position and convince other people to help too. Anime Feminist gathered two solid resources lists in mid-2021 and late 2023, if it also helps.
  5. Stay informed. Find newspapers in your language that stand for Palestine and are critical of colonialism and Zionism. In English, I have also heard a lot of good things of +972 Magazine, which is independant and nonprofit and run by Palestinian and Israeli journalists. The UN office for humanitarian affairs also has a weekly news coverage of the region.

For another approach, I also need to highlight some more the online Free Palestine Library, and most notably its section on essential Palestine texts. At some point after writing all this, I will probably try to read parts of either Edward Said's The Question of Palestine (1979) (or at least the details of this fascinating Wikipedia summary of one of its essays) or Rashid Khalidi's The Hundred Years' War on Palestine (2020), that I've seen mentioned numerous times.
I can also mention movies like the dark comedy Divine Intervention (2002), the documentary Naila and the Uprising (2017) or the more recent documentary No Other Land (2024). I have watched none of them aside from excerpts of the last one, and would advise to be careful because the obviously dire topics they tackle can be difficult to stomach, but I have heard good things of them all.

I would also advise you to stay informed on the other conflicts led by Israel, among others its bombing of Iran back in June, which is atrocious no matter the current criminal and authoritarian regime Iranian people live under; and its current repeated violations of ceasefire in Lebanon with numerous airstrikes, allegedly targetting members of the Islamic paramilitary group of Hezbollah, but resulting in many civilian casualties. This is not the first time Israel has attacked or invaded part of Lebanon, either; and it has to stop.

At last, if anything, I urge you not to think the current (and terribly fragile) ceasefire is enough to sweep under the rug everything that happened. I keep hoping with everything I have that this ceasefire in Gaza will hold, but it is looking dire, and the situation in the West Bank too. And until Israel isn't held accountable - from all the crimes and genocide in Gaza to all the deaths in the West Bank to the apartheid to the detainment and torture of the Global Sumud Flotilla to the fucking blockade of Gaza itself and the illegal occupation of Palestine - we shouldn't rest.

Finally, under the global rise of authoritarianism of these current times, I also urge you to take care of yourselves. Please, do not overexhaust yourself in trying to help and get crushed under everything that should be done. Do according to what you can do.
But please, please, do what you can.

This post has taken me so much time to write because it has been, in some ways, a big process of grief, and a similarly big process of educating myself. Thank you for having read it this far, or for having scrolled through it at least. I hope some of it is able to provide you resources on the situation in Palestine, or angry analytical elements on one of my special interests.

I might be posting a smaller, condensed version at some point, to allow people to get the gist of this without having to read 20k words of deep dive. And as said before, you can also read only the parts on anti-Zionism in their dedicated separate post, if they are your primary focus.

For now, I'm going to edit my reviews, send a few emails to publishers when I find the right words, donate some more, and rest. Rest is good.
Thank you for reading.

#essay #horrifying real world stuff #otherside picnic #palestine resources #yuri