(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

[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).