The Extraordinary Ordinary
I came to be obsessed with Delicious in Dungeon and all other works by Ryko Kui this year. The plots and characters grow and evolve from smaller interconnected clusters of contradictions. Things are dynamic, messy, absurd and alive - just like life itself. One of the main characters Laios created Ultimate Strongest Monster in his notes of the Dungeon Gourmet Guide, which is in essence a product of playful spirit and imagination of a child, powered by a repurposed desire to have agency over his life and to connect with others.
The initial images of sex workers in my head were not more realistic than some mythical creatures in a child’s doodle. They were the projection of Ultimate Romantic/Sexual Being, and the Ultimate Jaded/Degenerate Being at the same time, which reflected the polarised views in the Madonna–whore complex embedded in the norms. The complexity of femininity gets chopped up and sorted into two piles of the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’.
When my life first started having more interface with sex workers, I was struck by how normal and ordinary they seem. It looks ridiculous when I write it down in words, but that reaction of mine suggested that I did once put them into a category of ‘non humans’, or at least ‘humans that are not like us’. I knew little about the reality of sex work growing up, apart from the fact that it seems an inappropriate topic in almost all day to day social situations, so my mind associated it with things that are ‘bad’, ‘cannot be talked about’. That slight uneasiness of how my observations contradicted my preconceptions became a thread that slowly pulled me down the rabbit hole.
In Attack on Titan the Eldians in Marley were conditioned to believe that they carry the sins that come with the power of being able to transform into Titans. One of the only ways of redemption is to submit and devote themselves to the nation and become Marleyan warriors. The Eldians on Paradis island are referred to as ‘Devils of Paradis‘. But when Reiner, Annie, and Bertolt finally carried their mission through to other side of the wall they saw the reality: the ‘devils’ are just like them. A big part of their value system was built on a lie.
That is pretty much how I felt after starting to explore the world of sex work. Many things we have been told turn out to be nonsense, but I could also see where the nonsense came from. It is part of the reality that use to be shaded on my mental map of the world. I'm glad I had the courage to take those steps forward. The other side of the rabbit hole isn’t a wonderland — it’s just more ordinary lives. But in a way, that ordinariness is, in itself, quite extraordinary.
