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Kanno Aya - Otomen, vol. 01-04 (Chi. trans.)
I swear, I will write up year-in-review posts. Soon. And post pictures. Soon. Really! (Er, assuming that people are interested, of course.)
"Otomen" is a play on the Japanese word for "maiden" ("otome") plus the English word "men," and it's used by the mangaka to describe guys who are heterosexual and cisgendered, yet have shoujo hearts. I.e. they have a great love of stereotypically feminine things, like sparklies, stuffed animals, anything cute, shoujo manga, and cooking. Masamune Asuka is an otomen, though he's tried to develop a manly man reputation by being great at kendo and being taciturn at school, largely because his mother was traumatized by his father leaving them to get sex-change operation and plead with him to never be like his father.
Asuka's got a huge crush on cute girl Miyakozuka Ryou, and in the process of getting to know her, he somehow ends up friends with annoying playboy Tachibana Juuta, who's secretly the mangaka of Asuka's favorite shoujo manga series and has based the manga characters on Asuka and Ryou. Only with the genders of the two swapped!
I of course love all the gender-bending in this manga. I wish there were more of it, actually—too much of the manga relies on Asuka's fighting prowess along with his skill in the kitchen and with a needle, as though the mangaka's trying to note that you can be interested in "girly" things as long as you're a manly man as well. On the other hand, I like that the mangaka doesn't denigrate girliness, as so often happens in English-language works I read. It's also a huge plus that although Ryou is very cute on the outside, she can't cook or sew like many shoujo manga heroines, but rather than being a klutz who inspires people's instinct to protect, she's grown up with her very gruff father and loves shounen manga, movies about fighting and friendship, and is good at several kinds of martial arts.
The minus about Ryou is that there isn't nearly enough of her; a lot of the volumes are about Asuka with a great deal of Tachibana on the side. I'm sure that Asuka and Tachibana would be slashed together all the time if there were a fandom for this, and I'm rather grumpy that there are so few female characters. Still, the mangaka does remember that Ryou is there from time to time—Ryou's in a lot of the manga, but since the plot requires her to act oblivious to Asuka's feelings in a shoujo hero type of way, she doesn't do that much—and Ryou gets to do awesome things, like be a knight in shining armor to Asuka's princess.
In conclusion: cute and fluffy, but I keep wanting the manga to go further in its explorations of gender and false gender binaries than it actually does. Still, once it starts coming out in the US, I will probably keep up with it out of hope for more Ryou.
"Otomen" is a play on the Japanese word for "maiden" ("otome") plus the English word "men," and it's used by the mangaka to describe guys who are heterosexual and cisgendered, yet have shoujo hearts. I.e. they have a great love of stereotypically feminine things, like sparklies, stuffed animals, anything cute, shoujo manga, and cooking. Masamune Asuka is an otomen, though he's tried to develop a manly man reputation by being great at kendo and being taciturn at school, largely because his mother was traumatized by his father leaving them to get sex-change operation and plead with him to never be like his father.
Asuka's got a huge crush on cute girl Miyakozuka Ryou, and in the process of getting to know her, he somehow ends up friends with annoying playboy Tachibana Juuta, who's secretly the mangaka of Asuka's favorite shoujo manga series and has based the manga characters on Asuka and Ryou. Only with the genders of the two swapped!
I of course love all the gender-bending in this manga. I wish there were more of it, actually—too much of the manga relies on Asuka's fighting prowess along with his skill in the kitchen and with a needle, as though the mangaka's trying to note that you can be interested in "girly" things as long as you're a manly man as well. On the other hand, I like that the mangaka doesn't denigrate girliness, as so often happens in English-language works I read. It's also a huge plus that although Ryou is very cute on the outside, she can't cook or sew like many shoujo manga heroines, but rather than being a klutz who inspires people's instinct to protect, she's grown up with her very gruff father and loves shounen manga, movies about fighting and friendship, and is good at several kinds of martial arts.
The minus about Ryou is that there isn't nearly enough of her; a lot of the volumes are about Asuka with a great deal of Tachibana on the side. I'm sure that Asuka and Tachibana would be slashed together all the time if there were a fandom for this, and I'm rather grumpy that there are so few female characters. Still, the mangaka does remember that Ryou is there from time to time—Ryou's in a lot of the manga, but since the plot requires her to act oblivious to Asuka's feelings in a shoujo hero type of way, she doesn't do that much—and Ryou gets to do awesome things, like be a knight in shining armor to Asuka's princess.
In conclusion: cute and fluffy, but I keep wanting the manga to go further in its explorations of gender and false gender binaries than it actually does. Still, once it starts coming out in the US, I will probably keep up with it out of hope for more Ryou.
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Oh, also, I forgot to mention that one of my problems with the manga is that it reminds me a great deal of Ihara Saikaku and the rhetoric in Edo Japan about how onnagata are better at being women than actual women and the way it elevates the traditionally feminine (good) by eliminating actual women (BAD!). I do not think it is nearly as bad as that, but I really wish there were more women to counter that trope, aside from Ryou, who is totally made of awesome when we get more of her.
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Yeeeeeeeaahhh I definitely see your point on that. I've basically left Western comics for shoujo; y'all are not allowed to suggest that what shoujo needs is more of a manly touch. I mean, for just that reason I should find Asuka obnoxious for being good at both his manly stuff and the stuff he's "too good a man" to be good at. But overall his earnestness and awkward Total Fail at being a man's man all the time endear him to me, as well as his not freaking out at Ryou's impropriety at not being girly. Because then I would have to kick him in the face and run off into the sunset with Ryou, who there definitely needs to be more of and whom I would happily read with the series rewritten with her as the protagonist.
Have you read Fujoshi Rumi? It's not in the same vein, more like Genshiken, and in the two volumes so far there are some headdesky gender stereotypes and so many anime injokes you can't breathe. But there stuff I love about female friendships formed through geek-bonding, and bits of "screw you, girls can have kinks too," and oh geeze, I need to scan where the non-geek-boy tells the otaku-girl why he likes her. I think I want that bit read at my WEDDING, man.
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But overall his earnestness and awkward Total Fail at being a man's man all the time endear him to me, as well as his not freaking out at Ryou's impropriety at not being girly.
Me too! Every time I get nearly fed up by the insistence on his manliness along with his girliness, the mangaka remembers that Ryou needs stuff to do, and she proceeds to beat people up or ride in on a white horse or tell her dad that he's awesome for teaching her n kinds of martial arts, and I forgive the manga again!
I have not read Fujoshi Rumi! I will keep an eye out for it!
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---L.
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... hopefully the paneling is clear enough to help out, though I'm not sure if it is.
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(Hmph. It's in English in Singapore up to volume 4 already. Curse Chuang Yi and their ability to efficiently snap up good stuff faster than Americans. They've had Fruits Basket complete for over a year now.)
---L.
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(That's the series I keep meaning to tachiyomi just because I am so boggled by the subject + Shojo Beat juxtaposition. Not that I'm arguing!)
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Blank Slate was also previewed in Shojo Beat, with a sidebar saying at length "NO REALLY THIS IS SHOUJO WE SWEAR, LOOK AT THE FLOWERS!"
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PS look for RYO's grand pa in the future, I enjoyed the episode.
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And yeah, it really is a very typical shoujo if not for the gender-bending, but that's sort of why I like the idea of it.