A personal history of anime and manga (the gender side)
Fri, Apr. 28th, 2006 04:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
oyceterSo, I posted the bit on me and anime and manga and culture shock some time last year. Then I got distracted by actually watching anime and reading manga.
But someone interviewed me for a paper a few weeks ago on my experiences with anime and manga, and it brought back memories. So, of course, I spew them over the internet!
Please insert the standard disclaimer that these are my personal experiences and my personal history; they're not meant to reflect the status of anime and manga as a whole or anything of the sort. There's also going to be a lot of talk about female spaces and male spaces and what feels female or male to me. This isn't meant to be a pronouncement from high on what makes something female or male. They're definitions very specific to how I feel, and I'm largely using them as labels so I don't have to say, "spaces occupied largely by female people or people portraying themselves as female on the internet" or "what is stereotypically thought of as a female trait even though I disagree and am not a gender essentialist but will simply use this word so I don't have to type out all my qualms every single time."
Anyway.
Back to the beginning...
Before anime and manga, there was The X-Files. I discovered XF not through TV, but through the internet, in the very early days of wandering around. There was this thing called "fanfiction," which I completely didn't understand. But since my general point of view was that the internet should bring me more reading material, I eventually ended up reading Madeleine Partous' Shadows trilogy and wondering what the heck this X-Files thing was.
And that's how I found fandom. So for me, fandom is intimately tied to the internet (how else would someone from Taiwan watching year-old reruns sporadically on a Hong Kong channel find fandom?). And, just as importantly, fandom is tied to being female and it is a female space (again, this is my own experience). The definition of "female" is of course hazy and up-for-grabs; I felt it was female because nearly all the people posting XF fic seemed to be female and since I wandered largely in the Mulder/Scully shipper part of the fandom, much of it was romantic. [insert another disclaimer here on female != romantic in general]
When I first started obsessing over Gundam Wing in junior year of high school, my XF fandom thing was still going, though dying down a little because I think the HK station stopped airing the show, or something. But naturally, my first instinct was to go online and look for GWing fic, for mailing lists, for fan sites. I found them, along with this other thing called "yaoi;" I ended up just reading a lot of yaoi because I wanted fic, damnit.
The Yaoi/Slash Thing, Take #134098245
When some of my RL friends found out that there was this yaoi thing, they didn't particularly like it. Let's just say that there were flame wars and leave it at that. I was a little conflicted; I had known about slash from XF, so it wasn't particularly surprising, and I didn't particularly care about yaoi in GWing, but I also didn't want to go out and tell my friends I read it.
Things also got complicated because my favorite character in GWing was Noin, the female second-in-command to one of the other side's pilots, complete with romantic interest, and I wanted fic, damnit! Alas, there was no fic.
Actually, there was one fic. Maybe two. Note this was before the series was aired in the States. All the other mentions of Noin were in yaoi fic, and generally she was the yenta character or the evil, grabby girlfriend. Insert another disclaimer here on how I am not saying that "All yaoi portrays women as evil!" or "All slash is misogynistic ZOMG!!!" I could very well have just read the few fic that portrayed Noin like that and skipped the others because I decided not to read more, or I might have completely overlooked other stories.
GWing didn't have many strong female characters; most were clear designated love interests for the pilots, and sadly, very few had backbones. The main female character was infamous through fandom for standing on a cliff, yelling, "Heero [protagonist pilot], come kill me!" or for chasing him around from school to school in a pink limo. (I kid you not, this is totally canon.)
There was this odd discrepancy for me -- the GWing fandom as I knew it and experienced it was largely female, but the GWing canon and fic were largely male, with a focus on the very male characters and mechas and giant robots and yaoi.
Shoujo Manga! (You Knew This Was Coming...)
Gundam Wing was my first anime (that I watched as anime and that got me into the fandom); Rurouni Kenshin was my first manga (that I read as manga and that got me into the fandom).
A year after reading Kenshin, the same friend that sicced it on me shoved something called Good Morning Call in my hands and told me I had to read it because it was so cute and adorable. Indeed, it was cute and adorable, particularly the chibi forms of the characters. It was also extremely girly. I was actually somewhat surprised that my friend liked it so much, given that she previously used to scoff at romance novels and etc.
I started reading shoujo a lot, largely on her recs (which is how I discovered Yazawa Ai!). I'd been surreptitiously reading romance novels for a while, enough to know the general genre tropes, and it was interesting seeing how shoujo differed.
I keep comparing shoujo manga to romance novels, but in actuality, a lot of the shoujo I read reminded me more of the teen romances, the ones in series titled "Love Stories." They usually took place in high school and culminated in the big kiss and the decision to date. The school-setting shoujo I read usually took place in middle school or high school; the characters were a little younger.
I tended to read a lot more of the everyday-life/school romance shoujo, largely because I was reading it all with my not-so-great Chinese language skills. I keep saying this, but things like Angel Sanctuary are extremely hard to figure out in Chinese ("Ok... so the angel is mechanical. Maybe. Computer? Oh! Organic! That still makes no sense. Oh, wait, "alexiel" is a name, not an obscure angelic noun!").
I should probably still be comparing this genre of shoujo manga to teen romances, but when I was reading them, I compared them to romance novels, so I'm going to stick with that now. I liked the gender-bending in shoujo manga and the way the relationships could be drawn out in time. I liked being able to see how a relationship developed after the initial decision to date. I liked that the relationship usually wasn't based on lust at first sight.
On the other hand, I didn't like the heroines. They were nice, yes. But after a while, I got sick of the nice heroines who always made bento boxes for their boyfriends to express their affection, who never really took initiative beyond the first declaration of "I like you." Not to say that the gender politics in romance novels is superb, but at least there's the token attempt at the spunky heroine or the angsty heroine. Usually it fails dreadfully, but I missed the gesture.
I am, of course, horrifically over-generalizing. There's Arashi in X, who I adored. She has a sword! She pulls it out of her arm! She is distant and aloof! How could I not adore her?
But usually in the manga I read, this wasn't the case, usually I ended up feeling pent in. There were too many decisions being made for the heroine, too many times she deferred to her boyfriend, too many times she made the choice to sacrifice herself. The ethos of self-sacrifice in manga isn't gender-specific, but it still bugs me to see it so often in romantic relationships.
Yay Incest?
In some of the very first shoujo manga I read (Good Morning Call, Tenshi Nanka Ja Nai, Angel Sanctuary), there was brother-sister incest, or something like it. It was odd. Granted, the only "actual" incest was in AS, but I kept coming across situations in which the heroine's love interest was pining away for his older brother's wife or fiancee. Or something. Incest once removed.
In some of the older shoujo manga I read, there were odd happenings in which the heroine would fall in love with someone who turned out to be the biological father who abandoned her in her youth. Or she would be menaced by her stepfather. Or, in one of the sketchier manga that I randomly picked up in Japan, she would be controlled by her older brother (I remember reading her brother being annoyed by the advent of her period, because it meant he had put her on the pill so they could still have sex. Um, EW?).
I say this not as an illustration of "OMG Japanese manga it corrupts the brain!" but as things that I picked out as interesting. It wasn't in all manga or even anything near that. But there was enough that I started wondering why.
Shoujo and Academia
The first EAS class I took was "Sexuality and Desire in Modern Japan," largely because I was curious about the whole yaoi thing and the whole incest thing. I didn't really come away with any answers, which was a good thing. I did, however, discover that the usual axis of incest in Japanese literature runs along the mother-son line, a long and glorious tradition going back to Genji monogatari. Heh. Things I remember from that class include the notion of amae (usually translated as "co-dependence" but somewhat more complicated, originally coined by Doi Takeo) as set up by feminist Ueno Chizuko, in which she theorized that the power balance of amae was not as unbalanced as Doi speculates. (side note: I think the notion of amae is interesting, but I detest the way it has been made into one of the linchpins of understanding the "Japanese mindset") Most of the class didn't cast much light on shoujo manga, though there was an interesting article on Banana Yoshimoto's novels as the descendents of shoujo manga.
I started looking up shoujo articles sort of in my spare time and sort of not. I decided sophomore year that yaoi in shoujo manga was very likely going to be the topic of my thesis. Then I found basically every single academic article written on manga was on erotic manga targeted at a male audience or the "strange phenomenom" of women reading and writing male-male romantic and sexual relationships (I'm sure this is something that no slasher has ever thought of, OMG RLY). There was the world of yaoi and doujinshi and shounen ai, and then there was the world of tentacle porn and shunga and rorikon (Lolita complex).
I read Schodt's books on manga and was introduced to the gender-bending predecessors of Utena, Ribon no kishi and The Rose of Versaille. I read eighteen different speculations on why Japanese schoolgirls would want to read yaoi and how that meant that obviously the Japanese schoolgirls were afraid of their own sexuality and attempting to rebel against the culture that made them into girls or mothers without letting them enjoy sex. Or how it meant they were afraid of their own bodies. (Obviously, none of these people had ever read about slash). I read articles on how Japanese laws against pornography (no depiction of pubic hair is one of them) promoted rorikon and adult men longing after pre-pubescent girls. I read articles on schoolgirls selling their underwear or their virginity or their bodies for pocket money to buy brand-name purses.
I got very sick of the argument that the desire to read yaoi equated fear of one's own sexuality or body even though at the time, I didn't read yaoi. I also got sick of article upon article detailing the various sordid bits of people's sex lives and the general miasma that Japanese sexuality was screwed up and perverse. I wanted cross-cultural studies, or at the very least, studies that didn't look at sex practices and immediately draw overarching conclusions about the mindset of an entire nation.
Eventually, I ended up writing an entire thesis on this.
Shoujo and College
So while all that was going on academically, socially, I had tried to find fellow anime fans in college. There was, of course, entire culture shock issue and the very different way anime and manga were thought of in America and Taiwan (large hand-waving generalizations aside). Then there was the fact that I seemed to be one of the very few female anime fans I could find. There wasn't a plethora of anime and manga fans back at home, not defined as fans, but there were a good deal of people who read it, and shelves and shelves of shoujo manga. And all my prior experiences with fandom had been largely female. So me in the anime rental store was a rather odd picture. I wasn't always the only girl there, but usually I was. I was definitely the girliest girl there, as defined by the clothes I wore.
Most of the anime fans I found (there were no real manga fans at the time; manga was not big at all) had the standard canon of Akira, Ghost in the Shell, and Ninja Scroll, all of which I eventually watched, none of which I liked. Avoid Ninja Scroll at all costs. The gender politics are unspeakably horrible (a literal vagina dentata, if I recall correctly, and the rape of the kick-ass ninja woman with breasts the size of watermelons). Akira also had a seemingly gratuitous rape scene, and Ghost in the Shell had much gratuitous naked woman.
One of my friends persuaded me to watch some of Tenchi Muyo with him, which was basically one ordinary guy surrounded by six million different female archetypes, all of whom were fighting over him. I assume it's sort of like the reverse image of Fushigi Yuugi?
After my friend who introduced me to manga graduated and went to the same college as me, we started an anime club. We wanted to show things that weren't just the standard mecha and fighting and shounen stuff, but it was very, very difficult to find things that weren't. I wasn't used to a fandom that was largely male; I didn't understand the dynamics and I perpetually felt out of place for being so girly. They were very nice people, but it was different. Eventually, I stopped trying, and my interest in anime and manga started to wane.
Things Keep Changing
I keep talking about the last few years as though they were this giant phenomenon that totally revamped anime and manga, and really, I think they are. I had been watching with growing interest around 2002-2003 when more and more translated manga started appearing. Viz had published X (as X/1999) earlier but the covers and titles were so godawful that I didn't even flip through them. Later on, though, I saw Mars in the stores, and KareKano, things that were popular back at home. More importantly, they were series aimed squarely at girls, with absolutely no token mecha or anything (Escaflowne was about the closest shoujo thing I could really find at the time. Well, that and Marmalade Boy, but at that time, I thought Marmalade Boy was like Tenchi Muyo, which is not true).
There was shoujo! It sold! People read it on the subways, just like in Tokyo!
And then people on LJ started reading it and posting about it, and I felt like I was back in a world I was more familiar with. I am very used to female spaces, obviously. It was also wonderful because the people on LJ tend to talk more about gender issues and things like gender roles and stereotypes, they commented on the different tropes, all things that I didn't really get to talk about before. So cool!
Personal history of anime/manga index
But someone interviewed me for a paper a few weeks ago on my experiences with anime and manga, and it brought back memories. So, of course, I spew them over the internet!
Please insert the standard disclaimer that these are my personal experiences and my personal history; they're not meant to reflect the status of anime and manga as a whole or anything of the sort. There's also going to be a lot of talk about female spaces and male spaces and what feels female or male to me. This isn't meant to be a pronouncement from high on what makes something female or male. They're definitions very specific to how I feel, and I'm largely using them as labels so I don't have to say, "spaces occupied largely by female people or people portraying themselves as female on the internet" or "what is stereotypically thought of as a female trait even though I disagree and am not a gender essentialist but will simply use this word so I don't have to type out all my qualms every single time."
Anyway.
Back to the beginning...
Before anime and manga, there was The X-Files. I discovered XF not through TV, but through the internet, in the very early days of wandering around. There was this thing called "fanfiction," which I completely didn't understand. But since my general point of view was that the internet should bring me more reading material, I eventually ended up reading Madeleine Partous' Shadows trilogy and wondering what the heck this X-Files thing was.
And that's how I found fandom. So for me, fandom is intimately tied to the internet (how else would someone from Taiwan watching year-old reruns sporadically on a Hong Kong channel find fandom?). And, just as importantly, fandom is tied to being female and it is a female space (again, this is my own experience). The definition of "female" is of course hazy and up-for-grabs; I felt it was female because nearly all the people posting XF fic seemed to be female and since I wandered largely in the Mulder/Scully shipper part of the fandom, much of it was romantic. [insert another disclaimer here on female != romantic in general]
When I first started obsessing over Gundam Wing in junior year of high school, my XF fandom thing was still going, though dying down a little because I think the HK station stopped airing the show, or something. But naturally, my first instinct was to go online and look for GWing fic, for mailing lists, for fan sites. I found them, along with this other thing called "yaoi;" I ended up just reading a lot of yaoi because I wanted fic, damnit.
The Yaoi/Slash Thing, Take #134098245
When some of my RL friends found out that there was this yaoi thing, they didn't particularly like it. Let's just say that there were flame wars and leave it at that. I was a little conflicted; I had known about slash from XF, so it wasn't particularly surprising, and I didn't particularly care about yaoi in GWing, but I also didn't want to go out and tell my friends I read it.
Things also got complicated because my favorite character in GWing was Noin, the female second-in-command to one of the other side's pilots, complete with romantic interest, and I wanted fic, damnit! Alas, there was no fic.
Actually, there was one fic. Maybe two. Note this was before the series was aired in the States. All the other mentions of Noin were in yaoi fic, and generally she was the yenta character or the evil, grabby girlfriend. Insert another disclaimer here on how I am not saying that "All yaoi portrays women as evil!" or "All slash is misogynistic ZOMG!!!" I could very well have just read the few fic that portrayed Noin like that and skipped the others because I decided not to read more, or I might have completely overlooked other stories.
GWing didn't have many strong female characters; most were clear designated love interests for the pilots, and sadly, very few had backbones. The main female character was infamous through fandom for standing on a cliff, yelling, "Heero [protagonist pilot], come kill me!" or for chasing him around from school to school in a pink limo. (I kid you not, this is totally canon.)
There was this odd discrepancy for me -- the GWing fandom as I knew it and experienced it was largely female, but the GWing canon and fic were largely male, with a focus on the very male characters and mechas and giant robots and yaoi.
Shoujo Manga! (You Knew This Was Coming...)
Gundam Wing was my first anime (that I watched as anime and that got me into the fandom); Rurouni Kenshin was my first manga (that I read as manga and that got me into the fandom).
A year after reading Kenshin, the same friend that sicced it on me shoved something called Good Morning Call in my hands and told me I had to read it because it was so cute and adorable. Indeed, it was cute and adorable, particularly the chibi forms of the characters. It was also extremely girly. I was actually somewhat surprised that my friend liked it so much, given that she previously used to scoff at romance novels and etc.
I started reading shoujo a lot, largely on her recs (which is how I discovered Yazawa Ai!). I'd been surreptitiously reading romance novels for a while, enough to know the general genre tropes, and it was interesting seeing how shoujo differed.
I keep comparing shoujo manga to romance novels, but in actuality, a lot of the shoujo I read reminded me more of the teen romances, the ones in series titled "Love Stories." They usually took place in high school and culminated in the big kiss and the decision to date. The school-setting shoujo I read usually took place in middle school or high school; the characters were a little younger.
I tended to read a lot more of the everyday-life/school romance shoujo, largely because I was reading it all with my not-so-great Chinese language skills. I keep saying this, but things like Angel Sanctuary are extremely hard to figure out in Chinese ("Ok... so the angel is mechanical. Maybe. Computer? Oh! Organic! That still makes no sense. Oh, wait, "alexiel" is a name, not an obscure angelic noun!").
I should probably still be comparing this genre of shoujo manga to teen romances, but when I was reading them, I compared them to romance novels, so I'm going to stick with that now. I liked the gender-bending in shoujo manga and the way the relationships could be drawn out in time. I liked being able to see how a relationship developed after the initial decision to date. I liked that the relationship usually wasn't based on lust at first sight.
On the other hand, I didn't like the heroines. They were nice, yes. But after a while, I got sick of the nice heroines who always made bento boxes for their boyfriends to express their affection, who never really took initiative beyond the first declaration of "I like you." Not to say that the gender politics in romance novels is superb, but at least there's the token attempt at the spunky heroine or the angsty heroine. Usually it fails dreadfully, but I missed the gesture.
I am, of course, horrifically over-generalizing. There's Arashi in X, who I adored. She has a sword! She pulls it out of her arm! She is distant and aloof! How could I not adore her?
But usually in the manga I read, this wasn't the case, usually I ended up feeling pent in. There were too many decisions being made for the heroine, too many times she deferred to her boyfriend, too many times she made the choice to sacrifice herself. The ethos of self-sacrifice in manga isn't gender-specific, but it still bugs me to see it so often in romantic relationships.
Yay Incest?
In some of the very first shoujo manga I read (Good Morning Call, Tenshi Nanka Ja Nai, Angel Sanctuary), there was brother-sister incest, or something like it. It was odd. Granted, the only "actual" incest was in AS, but I kept coming across situations in which the heroine's love interest was pining away for his older brother's wife or fiancee. Or something. Incest once removed.
In some of the older shoujo manga I read, there were odd happenings in which the heroine would fall in love with someone who turned out to be the biological father who abandoned her in her youth. Or she would be menaced by her stepfather. Or, in one of the sketchier manga that I randomly picked up in Japan, she would be controlled by her older brother (I remember reading her brother being annoyed by the advent of her period, because it meant he had put her on the pill so they could still have sex. Um, EW?).
I say this not as an illustration of "OMG Japanese manga it corrupts the brain!" but as things that I picked out as interesting. It wasn't in all manga or even anything near that. But there was enough that I started wondering why.
Shoujo and Academia
The first EAS class I took was "Sexuality and Desire in Modern Japan," largely because I was curious about the whole yaoi thing and the whole incest thing. I didn't really come away with any answers, which was a good thing. I did, however, discover that the usual axis of incest in Japanese literature runs along the mother-son line, a long and glorious tradition going back to Genji monogatari. Heh. Things I remember from that class include the notion of amae (usually translated as "co-dependence" but somewhat more complicated, originally coined by Doi Takeo) as set up by feminist Ueno Chizuko, in which she theorized that the power balance of amae was not as unbalanced as Doi speculates. (side note: I think the notion of amae is interesting, but I detest the way it has been made into one of the linchpins of understanding the "Japanese mindset") Most of the class didn't cast much light on shoujo manga, though there was an interesting article on Banana Yoshimoto's novels as the descendents of shoujo manga.
I started looking up shoujo articles sort of in my spare time and sort of not. I decided sophomore year that yaoi in shoujo manga was very likely going to be the topic of my thesis. Then I found basically every single academic article written on manga was on erotic manga targeted at a male audience or the "strange phenomenom" of women reading and writing male-male romantic and sexual relationships (I'm sure this is something that no slasher has ever thought of, OMG RLY). There was the world of yaoi and doujinshi and shounen ai, and then there was the world of tentacle porn and shunga and rorikon (Lolita complex).
I read Schodt's books on manga and was introduced to the gender-bending predecessors of Utena, Ribon no kishi and The Rose of Versaille. I read eighteen different speculations on why Japanese schoolgirls would want to read yaoi and how that meant that obviously the Japanese schoolgirls were afraid of their own sexuality and attempting to rebel against the culture that made them into girls or mothers without letting them enjoy sex. Or how it meant they were afraid of their own bodies. (Obviously, none of these people had ever read about slash). I read articles on how Japanese laws against pornography (no depiction of pubic hair is one of them) promoted rorikon and adult men longing after pre-pubescent girls. I read articles on schoolgirls selling their underwear or their virginity or their bodies for pocket money to buy brand-name purses.
I got very sick of the argument that the desire to read yaoi equated fear of one's own sexuality or body even though at the time, I didn't read yaoi. I also got sick of article upon article detailing the various sordid bits of people's sex lives and the general miasma that Japanese sexuality was screwed up and perverse. I wanted cross-cultural studies, or at the very least, studies that didn't look at sex practices and immediately draw overarching conclusions about the mindset of an entire nation.
Eventually, I ended up writing an entire thesis on this.
Shoujo and College
So while all that was going on academically, socially, I had tried to find fellow anime fans in college. There was, of course, entire culture shock issue and the very different way anime and manga were thought of in America and Taiwan (large hand-waving generalizations aside). Then there was the fact that I seemed to be one of the very few female anime fans I could find. There wasn't a plethora of anime and manga fans back at home, not defined as fans, but there were a good deal of people who read it, and shelves and shelves of shoujo manga. And all my prior experiences with fandom had been largely female. So me in the anime rental store was a rather odd picture. I wasn't always the only girl there, but usually I was. I was definitely the girliest girl there, as defined by the clothes I wore.
Most of the anime fans I found (there were no real manga fans at the time; manga was not big at all) had the standard canon of Akira, Ghost in the Shell, and Ninja Scroll, all of which I eventually watched, none of which I liked. Avoid Ninja Scroll at all costs. The gender politics are unspeakably horrible (a literal vagina dentata, if I recall correctly, and the rape of the kick-ass ninja woman with breasts the size of watermelons). Akira also had a seemingly gratuitous rape scene, and Ghost in the Shell had much gratuitous naked woman.
One of my friends persuaded me to watch some of Tenchi Muyo with him, which was basically one ordinary guy surrounded by six million different female archetypes, all of whom were fighting over him. I assume it's sort of like the reverse image of Fushigi Yuugi?
After my friend who introduced me to manga graduated and went to the same college as me, we started an anime club. We wanted to show things that weren't just the standard mecha and fighting and shounen stuff, but it was very, very difficult to find things that weren't. I wasn't used to a fandom that was largely male; I didn't understand the dynamics and I perpetually felt out of place for being so girly. They were very nice people, but it was different. Eventually, I stopped trying, and my interest in anime and manga started to wane.
Things Keep Changing
I keep talking about the last few years as though they were this giant phenomenon that totally revamped anime and manga, and really, I think they are. I had been watching with growing interest around 2002-2003 when more and more translated manga started appearing. Viz had published X (as X/1999) earlier but the covers and titles were so godawful that I didn't even flip through them. Later on, though, I saw Mars in the stores, and KareKano, things that were popular back at home. More importantly, they were series aimed squarely at girls, with absolutely no token mecha or anything (Escaflowne was about the closest shoujo thing I could really find at the time. Well, that and Marmalade Boy, but at that time, I thought Marmalade Boy was like Tenchi Muyo, which is not true).
There was shoujo! It sold! People read it on the subways, just like in Tokyo!
And then people on LJ started reading it and posting about it, and I felt like I was back in a world I was more familiar with. I am very used to female spaces, obviously. It was also wonderful because the people on LJ tend to talk more about gender issues and things like gender roles and stereotypes, they commented on the different tropes, all things that I didn't really get to talk about before. So cool!
Personal history of anime/manga index
(no subject)
Sat, Apr. 29th, 2006 12:08 am (UTC)(no subject)
Mon, May. 1st, 2006 10:54 pm (UTC)I would love to read a book about different people's experiences with anime and manga (or with fandom, for that mattter). Or.. just people on LJ's or something.
(no subject)
Mon, May. 1st, 2006 11:18 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Tue, May. 2nd, 2006 04:30 am (UTC)Oooo, do you have Nana? That's my favorite. It's very different from Saiyuki though.
I'm glad my fic helped! I am, alas, less versed in the realm of anime/manga fic... I read a lot of GWing fic back in the day, but I've only started dabbling in anime/manga fandoms again. Even to the point of writing a little! How odd!
(no subject)
Sat, Apr. 29th, 2006 12:31 am (UTC)However, I started getting into manga and anime just as I joined LJ (which was a couple years after shoujo started hitting the USA, so my anime and manga fandom experience has definitely been a female-oriented one.
Despite the certain types of female archetypes or stereotypes that so many female manga characters fall into, a big part of what made me absolutely fall in love with shoujo was that it was so female-centric: the main characters were girls or women, and there was a huge focus on female fantasies.
That is, in something like, say, Fushigi Yuugi seemed pretty radical to me, because even though, as I later discovered, Miaka is a very common type of anime girl, to me it was revelatory that a long series could be made which was all about a very flawed and ordinary girl getting great powers and having a harem of cool men fawning all over her. In my previous experience with those types of stories, that sort of thing really only happened to men and boys.
(no subject)
Sat, Apr. 29th, 2006 04:38 am (UTC)The only one I watched in a group with an SF club was Golden Boy. And it's so ... so ... so that it really does require a large room full of people, mostly so everyone can heckle the screen and say "Are they really going to..? Yup, they did."
(no subject)
Mon, May. 1st, 2006 10:59 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Mon, May. 1st, 2006 11:20 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Tue, May. 2nd, 2006 04:22 am (UTC)I loved Robotech because of this one random storyline involving an alien assassin pilot falling in love with the guy she's sent to assassinate.
I am so predictable...
(no subject)
Mon, May. 1st, 2006 10:56 pm (UTC)I love shoujo because it is female-centric. Ditto with romance novels and chick lit and even those "women's books" or however they're marketing them now. Ditto with knitting and cooking -- I like doing them because they are traditionally feminine, and I like doing them in a way that makes them not as traditionally feminine (halter tops instead of baby booties, ex.),
(no subject)
Mon, May. 1st, 2006 11:36 pm (UTC)I did warn you Wiscon was going to be very, very white, right? I mean, I think you will have fun anyway, but it's going to be very white. The sad thing is, I suspect it's probably got a slighter higher percentage of fans of color than most sf cons.
(no subject)
Tue, May. 2nd, 2006 04:34 am (UTC)But I figure the female quotient will be higher!
(no subject)
Sat, Apr. 29th, 2006 05:09 am (UTC)I found manga a few years ago through a (female) friend, who has unconventional tastes, so I haven't been much exposed to Escaflowne and much mecha at all. I started with Kenshin, went to Utena, and then to Fruits Basket, Hikaru no Go, a little of Kare no Kano, and a few others. My manga consumption is low because I'm trying to read the @#$@ things in Japanese (but give up and look for scanlations when things are getting intense, like in Fruits Basket!) Most of my new series recommendations nowadays comes from LJ.
The freedom to gender bend (hello Utena, Rose of Versailles) is part of what I find so compelling, and fascinating, about manga. I hadn't thought of LJ as being particularly female space, although I am realizing that this was a lack of awareness on my part, or possibly a taking for granted what many people have lacked. Then again, I worked in science fiction bookstores for five years through my undergrad and grad years, so I just don't notice when I'm one of only a few girls in the room.
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Mon, May. 1st, 2006 11:06 pm (UTC)My reading list nowadays almost solely comes through LJ as well! I figure most people on LJ have a pretty good handle on what they like, so I don't get as much random stuff.
It's odd... I'm so used to female spaces now that anything that isn't really sort of weirds me out. It's always interesting seeing what other people's perspectives are, because I know mine is rather limited.
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Tue, May. 2nd, 2006 04:47 am (UTC)I just don't get out much anymore; going downtown to our local manga place is really hard with a toddler, so LJ really provides an outlet for me. I'm finding that I enjoy most of the manga that people recommend and that I can access, which feels lucky in part and not so much because I can usually tell by reading a person's reviews whether or not I'm likely to share their reading tastes.
I was thinking about the "only girl in the room" situation that I described, and while that has certainly been true at certain points in my life, there have been more women sharing my experience than I think I let on. Granted, it was usually only one or two at a time, but the first science fiction bookstore that I worked in was owned by a woman, and the second was half women and half men. I think we were all used to having been often enough the only girl in the room.
I think I'm trying to say while I have women in my space, and we talk about female things, I still only rarely have access to what could be called "female space." Hmmm. Much to ponder late at night.
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Mon, May. 1st, 2006 02:57 pm (UTC)Thanks for writing this! I really enjoyed it.
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Mon, May. 1st, 2006 11:07 pm (UTC)I would love if this became a meme.
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Wed, May. 3rd, 2006 10:33 pm (UTC)I enjoyed reading your post about manga, especially since I just got into it about a year ago. What was of particular interest to me is when you mentioned the Japanese concept of amae. I followed the link to wiki, but what I was wondering was what the connection was between amae and shoujo manga.
On the other hand, I didn't like the heroines. They were nice, yes. But after a while, I got sick of the nice heroines who always made bento boxes for their boyfriends to express their affection, who never really took initiative beyond the first declaration of "I like you."
Reading this sounded familiar, in that I think I read shoujo manga with such heroines, but my experience of the typical shoujo heroine is someone who's perky, determined (usually on behalf of others, like a love interest), and who tended to be hot tempered and dense. It wasn't until I read more shoujo that I started noticing that the heroines didn't have their own goals, which I found disconcerting. (But, I'm looking at manga through an American perspective and its attendant cultural hang ups, like the stress on individuality. I'm not sure how much culture plays into it.)
My sampling may be biased though, given my manga reading tastes (I like shoujo that's either a little action-oriented, or with crossdressing). That, and I also may be confusing female characters in shoujo with those in shounen, and shoujo manhwa (Korean manga). Speaking of which, since you have a longer history of reading manga, do you see any difference in how female characters are portrayed in shoujo as opposed to shounen series where females are either the protagonist or part of the main cast?
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Thu, May. 4th, 2006 06:27 am (UTC)I think I ended up throwing it in there because I had a lot of fanwanking or whatnot when it came to Noin and Zechs' relationship in GWing -- most of the fandom was saying that it was an unequal relationship, not just because she reported to him in the military, but because he was always asking things of her. And I thought, maybe it's not that unbalanced if she needs to be needed (as I said, I fanwanked a lot).
2. I think your shoujo heroines and mine are largely similar? It's just that I tend to think of the hot tempered-ness and the denseness and the determination for someone else as the sweet girlfriend. I mean, I like that the girls are often clumsy and non-spectacular, but there's always the emphasis that the girl's loving heart is her main draw and her main strength. I don't think it's always gender-specific, given the theme of self sacrifice in a lot of manga I've read, but I do wish that there were more selfish and non-good-hearted-albeit-klutzy heroines out there.
I dunno... it's something about that "deep down inside, she means well" that bugs me. Muhahaha, someday I will get my malicious and damaged shoujo heroine.
3. Hrm, shoujo vs. shounen female characters... I haven't read that much shounen, so this is going to be heavily biased. For the fighting shounen I've read (read: Kenshin), it always seems like there's a feisty girl who can fight, but that she still gets in trouble and needs to be rescued by the superhumanly talented main character.
And then there's the sultry and mysterious woman. Sometimes they're romantic rivals!
I also haven't read any shounen series in which the protagonist is female, so alas, no commentary on that.
But the main feeling I get is that the female characters often don't get the same amount of backstory or angst as the guys do, and when they do, they tend to not do the whole "I want to become stronger to protect those I love!" thing and instead focus more on the "caring for other people" thing. This bugs me.
However, I say this with tons and tons of caveats, because it's based on one series or something -_-;;.
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Thu, May. 4th, 2006 11:23 pm (UTC)Unfortunately, I haven't watched GW. What I have noticed in two shoujo series I'm following is how I sometimes get confused over whether a relationship is meant to be familial (a joke about being father/son, pretending to be brothers, comments about being father/daughter), or if there's low key romantic interest (side comments about wanting to kiss, romantic daydreams and side comments), or if the people are just friends. So at times, I get emotional incest vibes; other times I blink and wonder if I was making it up.
2. Huh, I guess I think of the hot temperedness and denseness as anti-sweet, and more of a drawback to a romantic relationship. Then again, I have weird reactions to romances. There have been romantic pairings that took me by surprise, while it seemed that everyone else saw it coming miles away. For instance, in Star Wars, I thought Leia and Han would kill each other, and never saw Leia/Han coming.
Muhahaha, someday I will get my malicious and damaged shoujo heroine.
If you want a malicious heroine, then have you heard of Skip Beat, a manga about a heroine who follows her idol-wannabe boyfriend to Tokyo to support him, only to vow revenge on her boyfriend when she found out he was just using her? The heroine is hilarious when she's in vengeance mode--she gets little devils, and evil auras. I liked the heroine, but couldn't follow the idol making plotline. But you might like it.
3. I've also noticed that one female archetype in shounen is the feisty martial arts heroine, who still needs to be rescued. (Those types irritate me, because it feels like such a bait and switch.) But there are some heroines who don't actually need to be rescued; unfortunately, they also seem to be subjected to pantyshots and the like. I actually do find heroines who want to get stronger to protect those they love, or maybe it's that they want to become stronger in order to better care for other people. ::ponders::