Category Archives: manga

The Fujoshi Files 43: Core

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Name: Core (コア)
Alias: N/A
Relationship Status: Single
Origin: Kiddy Girl-and

Information:
Core is a maid in the service of Shadow Worker and the “sister-princess” of G-Society (an organization dedicated to restoring to power to those who can trace their ancestry back to the Earth), Letuchaia. In addition to her regular duty as a maid, Core is also tasked by Letuchaia to spy on the other Shadow Workers of G-Society, using a surveillance camera hidden with her glasses. Core cares deeply not only for Letuchaia but also Letuchaia’s brother Pauki.

Fujoshi Level:
While spying on male Shadow Workers Torch and Shade, Core can be seen getting increasingly excited over their close and personal relationship. Though Core is not a full-blown fujoshi, she definitely carries the spark of one.

Why I Bought a JManga Subscription

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JManga, a 100% legal digital manga distribution site, is an interesting phenomenon. Good intentions mixed with a hodgepodge of titles and a bizarre pricing structure, which I can basically describe as paying the site to give you an allowance, have made it questionable as to whether or not anyone should try it out. Ultimately I decided to subscribe myself (the $10/month deal), and there are two major reasons for my decision.

The first reason is that it is now available in Europe. Up to only a few months ago, JManga as a service was restricted to the US and Canada, and so I wouldn’t have been able to use it anyway. With their roll-out into Europe, however, I wanted to at the very least support that decision. Even if I don’t get terribly many manga on there, I wanted to encourage the idea that regional restrictions for books in digital form is nonsense. Though I know that I’m only one subscriber, I also want other similar services in the future to follow suit.

The second reason is that JManga actually has a feature that I have not seen on any other manga site, legitimate or otherwise. Sure, tons of scanlation sites exist and they provide easy access to thousands of titles, but JManga actually gives you the option to switch back and forth between Japanese and English. One click of a button and the page you’re on changes into the other language. For someone like me who wants to read more manga in Japanese but might have trouble with particularly difficult phrasings or unknown vocabulary, it’s a far simpler solution than constantly running to consult good ol’ Jim Breen. It’s even more convenient than owning the physical books in two languages in certain ways, though the load time between versions can be a bit long, and the interface itself still needs some work.

I’m well aware that this utility really only helps readers with strong (but not perfect) Japanese literacy skills, people who can read a manga in Japanese for the most part, people with a good grasp of kanji, who have a firm enough understanding of the grammatical structure of the language to know what specific part of the sentence in a potentially quite liberal translation corresponds to the original, and who can spot when a joke has been localized for the English version. For beginners, it may be too much of a chore to consult the Japanese versions, and for someone who’s fully fluent or even a native speaker, there’s simply no need to switch to English at all, unless perhaps that person wants to learn English. I happen to fall in that “sweet spot” though, and in that respect I’ve found it quite useful. If you do too, then maybe it’s something worth considering.

By the way, it seems like the most popular manga on JManga are yaoi titles, yuri titles, and Soredemo Machi wa Mawatteiru. Makes sense to me.

Gender IS Performative in “They Were 11!”

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Recently, I finished reading Hagio Moto’s shoujo science fiction classic, They Were 11! Focused around a group of eleven individuals trapped on a spaceship, the manga was adapted into an animated movie, which is probably how most people are familiar with the title. However, in addition to the story covered in the film, They Were 11! also had a sequel titled They Were 11! Continues, as well as a handful of short gag comics. Altogether, the manga creates a more thorough and often lighter view of the world portrayed in the story, especially when factoring in the younger-looking character designs of the manga in comparison to the anime.

The character who catches my attention the most, which I assume is the case for just about everyone else who’s read or seen They Were 11!, is Frol, the sexless love interest of the protagonist. On Frol’s home planet, people remain neither male or female until they reach adulthood, when they must choose what to become. Given that men enjoy more privileges there, Frol wishes to be a male, though looks quite feminine in contrast. At the end of the original story, Frol falls in love with the main character Tada and decides to someday become female so that they can marry.

There’s a famous phrase coined by feminist philosopher Judith Butler, which is that “gender is performative.” In other words, things we associate with a certain gender are not as natural and set in stone as we think, and are instead reinforced constantly by society in such a way that, at all times, we are in a sense acting out our genders. To kind of simplify it down, consider the phrase “be a man” and how it implies a certain set of behavior involving courage and sacrifice. What I find really interesting about Frol’s whole situation is that without a definitive sex, Frol has no natural, biological basis for acting out her (I’ll be using “her” as a pronoun for the sake of convenience) gender. For Frol, gender is, above all else, performative.

In the first story, when Frol still desires to be a man, she consistently goes out of her way to assert her masculinity, mostly in comparison to the somewhat wiry Tada. Frol continually points out that she is taller, her limbs are longer, she knows how to fight better, is tougher, and so on. In the second story and in the Space Street gag comics, however, when Frol has decided that she will become a woman (though it hasn’t actually happened yet), she acts how she thinks a woman should act, being more emotionally open to Tada, behaving like a teenager in love. Because it wasn’t so long ago that Frol was presenting herself as a man, it’s clear that this is all conscious on her part, a point reinforced by the way she deals with her jealousy. In They Were 11! Continues, when Frol sees a bunch of girls flirting with her now-partner Tada, her reaction is to once again become a man herself, and to “beat” Tada at what she perceives to be his own game by becoming a suave guy who gets all of the ladies herself. In the end, Tada did still love her and it was all a misunderstanding, but it’s also clear that Frol’s decision to fight fire with fire is facilitated by her very own sexless existence.

Frol: “I’ve had enough! I won’t become a girl!”

There are somewhat similar characters in anime and manga, notably Ranma from Ranma 1/2 and Sapphire from Princess Knight, but in both cases their sexes are decided by forces beyond their control and they must deal with acting like men when they’re women and vice versa. Frol’s situation is different. For Frol, the only reason why she decided to become a woman and to start behaving “like a woman” was because of her love of Tada. When she felt that this was no longer the case, she had the power to do the very opposite, and when it was resolved she was able to switch right back. In this sense, Frol and the freedom she has to decide her sex and gender on her own terms represent the very fluidity of gender as a concept.

The Fujoshi Files 42: Alexia Cole

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Name: Cole, Alexia (アレクシア・コール)
Alias: Alisa (アリサ）
Relationship Status: Single
Origin: Kiddy Girl-and

Information:
Alexia Cole, better known as Alisa, is a receptionist for the Galactic Trade Organization alongside her friend and colleague Belle. Often spending her free time at work at the Touch & Go Cafe, she gets along with the two maids there, Ascoeur and Q-Feuille, as well as its owner Mi Nourose. Possessing a large bust and a cheerful demeanor, Alisa is in fact the descendant of Liquide Cole, a receptionist for the predecessor of the GTO, and also the daughter of the powerful Cole Zaibatsu.

As a fujoshi, Alisa’s room is adorned with yaoi posters, and on her days off she visits “Say You Cafe: Beyond Loads,” a cafe which doubles as a training ground for male voice actors. Alisa writes BL stories for the purpose of having the voice actors-in-training perform them. Her favorite actor there is “Top.”

Fujoshi Level:
In addition to her custom scripts, Alisa does not keep her love of yaoi entirely restricted to her personal life, storing a giant stash of BL manga behind the reception desk at work.

Otaku All Stars DX We’re All Friends Miraculous Gathering: Genshiken II, Chapter 75

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In Genshiken II, Chapter 75, friends new and old gather together in what may be the largest conglomeration of named otaku characters so far.

It’s time for the school festival at Shiiou University, and with comics done and costumes ready, the Genshiken have set up their own room. In addition to having much of the veterans around (Madarame, Ohno, Kuchiki, Tanaka), old friends from high school come by to reunite with the new generation of Genshiken members. For Yajima, we have her friend Mimasaka, a shy girl who apparently thinks the world of Yajima. For Yoshitake, we get to see her old crew from the History Club. As for Hato, it’s unclear whether or not they’re actually his friends, but Konno and Fuji basically look like a grown-up Pinoko from Black Jack and Mina the bridge bunny from Macross Frontier with her hair trimmed (or perhaps Q-Bee from Vampire Savior with that striped shirt), respectively.

Keiko also appears, and as always doesn’t mince words. She ends up making things doubly dangerous by first asking aloud if Kohsaka and Kasukabe had arrived yet (Madarame didn’t know), and then following it up by asking if Madarame and Hato are dating, unaware of Hato’s true gender, which makes Hato end up feeling even more awkward.

All of that discomfort is nothing compared to the biggest reveal of the chapter, as the mysterious “senpai” from Hato’s past makes an appearance, and it turns out that she looks almost exactly like Hato in his default outfit, long hair and all. Genshiken‘s had some tough cliffhangers in the past, but none are probably as intense as this one.

So, I just have to say, between all the new characters introduced and all of the interesting information and dynamics they bring to the story, there is so much to talk about that I’m not sure I can get around to all of it. I’m not even going to really mention the hilarity of Sue, Yabusaki, and Asada this chapter other than to show this image.

I’m going to kind of work my way backwards and start with Hato’s senpai, Kaminaga. The fact that Hato actually based his entire feminine look on the girl he may have liked back in high school (it’s still unclear what the “trauma” was) is just so mind-blowing that I have no idea where this is going. Together with the fact that he’s a crossdressing BL fan who identifies as straight but who felt strangely down when Madarame mentioned his lack of interest (“It’s physically impossible”), it makes the enigma of Hato’s sexuality all the more complex even just as we began to have a clearer image ofhim. It seems like Kaminaga’s personality is quite different from Hato’s, though, so I’m looking forward to seeing how this all turns out.

As a brief aside, I’ve noticed a trend with trap characters where they often have a nearly identical female equivalent. If it isn’t Hato and Kaminaga, it’s Bridget from Guilty Gear XX, Maria from Maria Holic, and Hideyoshi from Baka and Test each having twin sisters whom they could pass for. I might write a standalone post about this at some point, but I just have to wonder what the exact purpose behind this recurring concept might be.

It totally slipped my mind that Hato and the other freshmen have never met Keiko, but it obviously makes sense. After all, the only time we’ve really seen her in Genshiken II was when she had the man-to-man talk with Madarame, and her dissimilarity with her older brother makes it really easy to not immediately realize her relation to Genshiken, even if they do look alike. Keiko really hammers home the point that all of the interactions this chapter were basically simultaneous reunions and introductions.

Also of note is how Ogiue behaves around Keiko now, which is the subtle sense of fully accustomed nervousness. I like how Keiko refers to Ogiue as “Onee-chan” now, too. Did you know that the first instance of Keiko calling her “sis” came from the extras of the CD release of Genchoken, the Genshiken radio show starring the voice actors of Ogiue (Mizuhashi Kaori aka Madoka Magica‘s Tomoe Mami) and Madarame (Hiyama Nobuyuki aka Gaogaigar’s Guy Shishioh)? It’s true, and also didn’t make sense at the time because in the anime Ogiue and Sasahara weren’t dating yet (a fact which they acknowledge).

As for the other friends and acquaintances who appear in this chapter, one thing I want to point out is that, for Genshiken, the degree to which we learn about the characters’ histories is unprecedented. Think about it: other than Ogiue’s situation (which got its own entire story arc), the most we know about the characters prior to them attending college is that Ohno spent time in the US and made friends with Angela and Sue, Saki once dated some guy, Kohsaka used to have a shaved head, and Madarame was an awkward fellow. But here, we get to see how the relationships that were created back in high school work may have shaped their respective personalities and quirks.

The fact that Mimasaka is even more awkward than Yajima herself kind of puts Yajima’s initial reaction to the ladies of Genshiken into an even clearer perspective. Yajima no doubt did not have a fantastic high school life, but between her and Mimasaka she was the more socially capable one. With Genshiken, however, when she entered a world where the girls were pretty and talented with good personalities, it was probably like when someone with top grades goes to a top school and finds out that as far as geniuses go, they’re pretty typical. In that respect, it also brings to mind the fact that people can have different interpersonal dynamics with different groups of people, like Tenzin in The Legend of Korra, who is both an old and wizened benevolent leader as well as his mother’s son.

I like Mimasaka’s design. I feel like it really captures this sense of cuteness that can only come from being so awkward, and her lack of fashion sense is distinct from the lack of fashion sense that Ogiue had back then. Also, her first appearance this chapter makes it clear that she was the girl from Yajima’s flashback even though we only see her from behind.

Yoshitake meanwhile is clearly the product of being around a couple of extremely like-minded individuals, as Fukuda and Sawatari are quite similar to her. Just from seeing their opening greeting it’s easy to tell how much fun they had in high school, even if, again, the entirety of their lives as teenagers wasn’t particularly fantastic. At the same time, the fact that Yajima certainly isn’t the same but they get along quite well may say something about Yoshitake’s ability to make friends and break ice.

For Hato, well, we don’t really know how Konno and Fuji act around him, but they know he’s an otaku and they sure seem intent on finding him at the festival. Actually, though, I just want to talk more about their character designs. I thought that Asada would be the sole “silly” design in Genshiken, a one-of-a-kind oddity, but I’m strangely glad that isn’t the case. I thought I wouldn’t enjoy having designs this strange, but I find myself feeling just the opposite, especially when it comes to Konno’s hilariously large eyes (which I was tempted to call “peepers” just to emphasize their cartoonishness). Somehow, Kio makes them work.

What’s probably the most interesting part of all this, however, is the fact that they had these close friends in high school in the first place. Again, from what little we know of the previous Genshiken members’ lives, they didn’t appear to retain very many friends from the past. I feel like this might again speak to the generational difference, where even though all of them were nerds in the end who couldn’t find love in their teen years, they still lived in an era where being an otaku doesn’t automatically mean total social reclusion, just maybe partial.

In any case, I actually like the size of the cast now. For one thing, it provides me with more characters for the Fujoshi Files, but more importantly, the world of Genshiken expands further in a really interesting fashion.

The Fujoshi Files 41: Oshiroi Hana

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Name: Oshiroi, Hana (白粉花)
Alias: Muscle Deka (筋肉刑事）
Relationship Status: Single
Origin: Ben-To!

Information:
Oshiroi Hana is a high school student and member of her school’s Half-Price Food Lovers’ Club. Along with fellow club members Satou You and Yarizui Sem, she engages in fiercely violent late night battles in supermarkets around Japan to get bentou for 50% off. Despite her lack of martial prowess, Hana is still able to achieve success through a combination of good timing and a knack for avoiding direct conflict. She is friends with student council president Shiraume Ume, who is in love with Hana. Oshiroi is likely aware of this.

Oshiroi is known online for her BL novel Muscle Deka (“Muscle Cop”), which she populates with characters who are (thinly-veiled) references to fighters in the supermarket half-price food fights. Changing everyone involved into sweaty, beefy musclemen (including the women), her stories tend to involve Satou Saitou being brutally violated by other equally large men.

Fujoshi Level:
In order to garner inspiration for her novel, Hana cuts out and pastes photos of guys’ heads on top of pictures of bodybuilders. This is especially the case with Satou.

Mysterious Girlfriend X is Somewhat Different in Anime Form

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I’m actually a pretty big fan of the manga Mysterious Girlfriend X, so I naturally had to check the anime out. While it followed the manga very closely, I still came away with a somewhat different experience (though not necessarily a bad one), and it has something to do with some of the choices they made in adaptation, as well as the very act of adaptation itself.

Mysterious Girlfriend X is definitely a weird concept that just isn’t for everybody. The story centers around a high school couple, Tsubaki Akira and his girlfriend Urabe Mikoto, and their connection through saliva, specifically the fact that Urabe’s drool seems to have paranormal properties related to empathy. As boyfriend and girlfriend, rather than kissing, they exchange saliva by finger. I’ve seen it argued that the series is solely for people who have a saliva fetish, but I think this is really shortchanging the series and its viewers, because the reasons for following it aren’t as overly specific and narrow as “liking drool.” The appeal is more basic than that, as you have this thrilling and bizarre romance between an established couple who share a bond that seems to go deeper than anyone else’s.

That said, I found the experience of watching the whole saliva exchange to be different between the anime and manga in a way I’m not entirely for. In the manga, the drool is kind of a visual motif, drawn very simply, something that while ever-present is almost just like a rendered symbol. In the anime, however, they go out of their way to make the drool glisten and glow, to give it depth and dimension. The real killer is the sound, because in addition to all the effort they put into it visually, they also tried to make it sound as loud and slimy as possible. Again, drool is definitely a part of the series, but I think a little too much attention is given there.

Another thing that makes the anime quite different is the lack of manga-style paneling. This is kind of unavoidable, as anime is a different medium that works along different rules (unless it went out of its way to mimic the panel-based structure of manga), but Mysterious Girlfriend X has really fantastic page composition and paneling, especially in its smart usage of the contrast between black and white. I even used it in my article about decompression in comics. Take a look at the page above, and you’ll see that even if you took every one of those panels and animated them together, it would simply lack the overall structure of the “columns” created by the characters. When you then add color to the film-like style of the anime, it just makes for a different impression.

There are also a couple of more minor things to note. The first is that the elaborate dream backgrounds, which are fully drawn in the manga, are rendered in CG in the anime. A practical change of course, but one which kind of takes away that impressive bit where you realize someone drew all of that. The second is that the voice actor for Urabe doesn’t sound like I imagined she would, though that’s more on my end than anything else. Her voice actor also seems to be quite new at this, showing something of a similar effect to Omigawa Chiaki in her days as Maka from Soul Eater.

I’m still going to keep watching Mysterious Girlfriend X, of course, and I’m probably going to enjoy it. I just wanted to say something about the subtle changes that are present, and perhaps how this speaks to the things that can occur in adaptation from one medium to another.

My Experience with “Fudanshism”

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As part of the ongoing project that is the Fujoshi Files, I’ve been reading Fudanshism and its sequel Fudanshifull! By Morishige (of Hanaukyo Maid Tai fame/infamy), the story is about a boy named Amata who can only get close to the fujoshi he loves by crossdressing.

Though at first I didn’t particularly enjoy this series, at some point I found myself growing attached to certain characters in particular, to the point that I looked forward to reading about them more. A natural progression, perhaps, but it’s important to note that this change of heart didn’t happen until about volume 4 (out of 7) of the first series. If you’re wondering why I kept reading despite being pretty unimpressed, when it comes to the Fujoshi Files, I try to read as much as is available. But because I “forced” myself to read through, I have to ask myself, how much of it is me genuinely starting to enjoy the series, and how much of it is the effects of otaku Stockholm Syndrome, where you’ve been with a work for so long despite signs that you should have abandoned ship long ago, and even the below-mediocre starts to be impressive?

One of my favorite characters is Toumine Michika, a ditzy (and ritzy) non-otaku girl who talks about moe like Homer Simpson talks about the internet, as if she’d say, “Oh, moe is in anime now, huh?”

When paired with another character, an always-exasperated male otaku named Matsumoto Senri, it makes for enjoyable comedy. It doesn’t hurt either that Toumine isn’t malicious or selfish; she simply likes to have fun, and she acts as a foil for Matsumoto. Though actually, Matsumoto seems to exist for the purpose of having foils, or maybe it’s better to say that he’s the perpetual tsukkomi character. I mention this because my other favorite character in the series is Matsumoto’s younger twin sister, Setsuna.

Unlike Toumine, Setsuna is very much a fujoshi, which alone wouldn’t make her stand out in a series where there are more fujoshi than male characters, but I really dig the fact that Setsuna always has this strangely diabolical look on her face. Her brother knows she’s a fujoshi, and knows the true nature of the gears constantly turning in her head, and it results in this interesting back-and-forth where he calls her “kimouto” (kimoi (disgusting) + imouto (little sister)), and she mockingly refers to him as “onii-chama.”

Then there’s Rittoku Kanae, resident gothic lolita/crossplayer with some particularly complex and interesting body issues when it comes to her large chest. When she first meets “Amane” (the main character in drag), she’s immediately able to tell that he’s really a guy because she knows from personal experience what hiding a developed female figure should look like. However, because Amane epitomizes her ideal image of how a woman should look, Kanae takes a liking to him. An additional twist is that she also has a crush on Amata but doesn’t realize the two are one in the same.

In any case, I find them a lot more interesting than the main characters, who are kind of bland overall. I get the feeling Morishige eventually thought this too, because there’s much more emphasis on them in Fudanshiful!

Thinking it over, I feel like I have very legitimate reasons for enjoying those characters, and that they make the series itself more enjoyable to read to the extent that, while I wouldn’t call myself a fan, I can say that I liked it overall. The odd part is that I wouldn’t really expect anyone to stick with the series as long as I had to get to the point where I changed my mind about it. At the same time, I can’t deny that it did get better, and not just for the characters but also artistically, as Morishige’s ability to convey information visually improves as the manga goes on. My dilemma isn’t so much if I would recommend the series, but more, what does the very act of sticking through with a series do to one as a consumer of entertainment?

The Fujoshi Files 40: Yoshitake Rika

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Name: Yoshitake, Rika (吉武莉華）
Alias: N/A
Relationship Status: Single
Origin: Genshiken: The Society for the Study of Modern Visual Culture II

Information:
Yoshitake Rika is a student at Shiiou University who, despite her youthful looks and demeanor, actually entered college at the age of 20. She initially joined the Society for the Study of Modern Visual Culture (Genshiken) after seeing a particularly appealing drawing of Sengoku Basara characters by Genshiken president Ogiue Chika at the club fair. As a member, she quickly befriended everyone in Genshiken, especially her fellow freshmen, Yajima Mirei and “fudanshi” Hato Kenjirou. Yoshitake has a younger (but taller) sister named Risa who is also an otaku, and has bought doujinshi for Risa, who is typically unable to attend events due to her obligations to her basketball team.

Her sense of fashion, forward personality, and willingness to break a few rules in the name of fun (like convincing her slightly underage friends to drink) belie a person who is more comfortable in social settings that the average fujoshi might not be. At the same time however, Yoshitake has a capacity for expounding endlessly on BL-related topics, which allows her to strike up conversation with her fellow fangirls just as easily as she would non-otaku. Yoshitake’s taste in media is also very diverse, going from classic literature to anime and manga to live-action films.

Fujoshi Level:
Yoshitake is able to combine both the wide breadth and depth of her interests with her fujoshi mindset, and consider the pairing and yaoi potential of a range of works far greater than the average fujoshi. Notably, she believes that the judo novel Sugata Imatarou is excellent in part for the emphasis on sweaty men forging close bonds with one another.

Maybe I Don’t Read Enough Manga

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Given the fact that I dedicate an entire blog to anime and manga, it might be strange for me to think that one of my problems is that I don’t read enough manga. Many burned-out bloggers cite the activity of blogging itself ends up taking a chunk out of their actual enjoyment time with the stuff they love, but that’s not really what I’m feeling here. My posting rate is consistent but light enough for me that, while I do sometimes feel the pressure of thinking of something to say, I don’t treat it as a chore.

Part of it may have to do with the fact that, although I can read Japanese, I do have my limitations and one of them is speed. I just can’t read fast enough. That’s only a part of it, though. Instead, I have this strange sense that I don’t quite have a proper pulse on manga as it currently is, and by extension manga as it has been. When I’m reading a bunch of manga in the same genre or for the same demographic, I get this strange sensation that I’m continuously boxing myself in too much, that I need to keep expanding my horizons. And so I do, I keep reading more, I keep trying new things out, but it’s like I can’t try them fast enough. I want to feel everything manga has to offer, to understand it as well as I possibly can, but somehow it’s just not enough, like I’m losing my connection to it.

What I’m experiencing may be somewhat the opposite of burn-out, though not in the way that you feel when you initially dive head first into a new obsession, where you have to consume every little bit that you can possibly find, good or bad. Rather, it’s this unusual melancholy where instead of feeling like way too much, it feels like not enough.