(no subject)

[oyceter]

The interests meme:

gakked from Aliera

Pick an interest from my interests page that either 1) you know nothing about but sounds intriguing, or 2) you know something about but can't fathom why yours truly would be interested in it, and request an explanation.

Comments

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Meiji: you mean the Meiji Period?

Shojo manga: I like it too. What are your favorites, and what got you hooked?

[oyceter]

Very much the Meiji period ^_^. I love the Meiji period -- it's got that whole thing with the changing eras, like turn-of-the-century Europe, and I just love the idea of getting the nation modernized in twenty-five years.

I wrote my thesis on shojo manga! My favorite author by far is Yazawa Ai, and my favorite of hers right now is Nana, although I also really like Tenshi Nanka Ja Nai. I was also really into Mars a while back, but thinking back, I think it's a bit overdramatic. I got a friend of mine hooked on Gundam Wing back in high school, and she started reading them when I got into college and hooked me. I think the first one I ever read was Good Morning Call. What are your favs?

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I only recently got into manga (after I'd been watching anime for a while) so I haven't read any of your favorites. In fact Mars and Gundam Wing (is that shojo?!) are the only ones I've even heard of. But now I'm going to look for them. I confess, I _like_ the overdramatic quality of some manga, so that shouldn't bother me.

My favorites so far are Fushigi Yugi and Revolutionary Girl Utena, though I've been enjoying some shonen ai lately. Like I said, I'm a beginner. And I can only read them in English-- I can read hiragana but I don't really speak Japanese, so an entire manga would be beyond my capability.

What was the thesis of your thesis?

It's great to discover a whole new genre. I can't just trip over undiscovered wonderful authors in American fantasy any more, but only wait for my favorites to write something new or a new writer to appear on the scene. I know that scene too well.

[oyceter]

Yeah, I'm not sure if Yazawa Ai's been translated here either =(. I know her Paradise Kiss has, so that should be available, but I've only read book one of that and didn't like it quite as much as her others. But it's worth picking up if you like her drawing style, which is very atypical of shojo and very fun. Mars is translated here too I think. GWing isn't so much shojo ;). It's more that shonen mecha type anime, except it has so many bishonen that it's sort of been hijacked.

I haven't read Fushigi Yuugi! I keep hearing about it but it's so loooong ;).

I actually wrote my thesis on Utena! I started out freshman year thinking it was going to be on shonen ai in shojo (you know, the typical slash question, blah blah), only to find out after a little research that everyone and their mother in that field wrote about that. Plus, after four years of reading things on it, I got a bit tired of their explanations. So what I ended up doing was a critique of the existing scholarship on anime and manga (too little on manga alone), which lead to the realization that much of it was based on anime/manga as a sort of national literature.

I took exception to that -- a lot of the explanations of shonen ai particularly fell in that vein. Ex. there is something wrong or special about Japanese girls that make them like this stuff. So I got to throw in some fandom stuff too ^_^. And in general, people were looking at manga and anime as some sort of foreign thing, and I thought (as a reader and viewer) that that was kind of exclusionary and essentialist to boot. So I had that, and then I went on to do a reading on Utena with a non-national or gendered slant just to show it really wasn't that hard and could be done.

Hee, I can blab on and on about my thesis.

I love finding new genres ^_^. I'm kind of in that stage now with romance, despite having read it forever. The sci-fi/fantasy reading has slacked off quite a bit right now because I feel like I've read so much there already (even though I haven't).