oyceter | Female friendships and/or romances in manga

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Female friendships and/or romances in manga

Joy Kim recently posted on female friendships in shoujo, and I found myself doing a lot of "It's not shoujo, but..." Ergo, another list!

What are good manga series that respect and celebrate female friendships? And because it's so rare to find in manga, good manga series that respect and celebrate female romances as well?

Since Joy's list has the shoujo series, anything but shoujo here!

Here are some of mine:

Azumanga Daioh, by Azuma Kiyohiko - Not only is there a LOT of female friendship in this, there are only two or three male characters I can think of. And out of those, only one is human!

Claymore, by Yagi Norihiro - Like AzuDai, the ratio of female to male characters is heavily weighted toward the women. I love that the series takes all my favorite shounen tropes—being willing to literally give your comrades your arm, "I will get stronger to protect my precious people!," "I must defeat you one-on-one to prove my strength!," and camaraderie in the face of near-impossible odds—and gives almost all the major roles to the women, leaving the few men to be damsels in distress, comic sidekicks, or villains. There is so much depth to all the relationships among women in this series.

Emma, by Mori Kaoru - Although the driving plot is het romance, I love the many secondary female characters, from Mrs. Stowner to Aurelia and Mrs. Meredith's friendship to Emma's friendship with the maids to Eleanor and her sisters to Eleanor and Grace to Grace and Vivian. I particularly appreciate the many age ranges of the female characters.

Gunslinger Girls, by Aida Yu - Possibly controversial, as Aida also did the character designs for a hentai game that I think eroticizes underaged girls. But I very much love the bonding among all the little cyborg girl assassins and how they are each others' only family, makeshift though it may be.

Yotsuba&!, by Azuma Kiyohiko - There's the Ayase sisters and Mom, Ena's friend Miura, and Asagi's friend Torako. And, of course, Yotsuba! I like very much that the friendships are between sisters, mother and daughters, and across quite a few ages as well.

Sadly, I have read next to no yuri. Erica Sakurazawa is a bit hit-or-miss for me, and the Utena manga is nowhere near as awesome as the anime. There was a super-cute (and very NSFW) all-color yuri romance that I think

octopedingenue recced to me, and I know I've seen several mentions of Kashimashi Girl Meets Girl and Maria-sama ga Miteru on my reading list. And, of course, Rose of Versailles, which I also haven't read.

Although I think both Naruto and Bleach have some great female friendships, what I've read of the series constantly underprivileges the female relationships for het romances or for the male friendships and rivalries, which is why I'm leaving them off this list. And though I love Urasawa, he tends to do the "single girl/woman." His female characters are frequently awesome, but they're also almost always the lone woman in a world of men.

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super-cute (and very NSFW) all-color yuri romance

Is it the adorable Maka-Maka (http://www.kittymedia.com/displaytitle.cfm?upc=9781598832938) that you're thinking of? I love love love it, though I was grateful for the "no is foreplay" grounding I already had from other Japanese media.

Yes, that's the one! Oh dear to the sometimes dubious consent, but the girls are so cute!

The all-color yuri series is Maka-Maka, and I love it SO MUCH.

A really fun underrated series is Fujoshi Rumi AKA Mousou Shoujo Otaku Kei: in which the titular socially awkward Yaoi Fangirl Rumi bonds with Evil Hot Girl (and sekrit former socially awkward Yaoi Fangirl!) Matsun over their shared love for all things otaku and/or slashy. They're each other's first real friend and they acknowledge how important that is to them; there's a male love interest for both (and the boys are also TOTALLY ADORABLE), but whenever a "chicks VS dicks" situation arises, Rumi and Matsun pick each other unhesitatingly. Matsun even gives a hilariawesome fangirl speech about how her best friendship with Rumi is True Fated Ultimate Destiny, given the overwhelming odds against her finding another human her age so exactly matched in fandoms, OTPs, obscure Gundam references, and tastes in doujinshi smut. (It's...more touching in context.)

I want to read Kishi Torajirou's other yuri title Mars no Kiss (http://www.mangaupdates.com/series.html?id=22859) in scans/licensed SO BADLY, especially since it appears to be totally riffing off Fuyumi Soryo's shoujo series MARS.

From the straight up anime side- Bubblegum Crisis had pretty awesome relationships amongst the Knight Sabers. Macross (towards the end) had some great moments with Claudia and Lisa.

Not manga, but just a damn good webcomic Gunnerkrigg Court has some really awesome friendships and relationships overall.

Oh, wow, I really want that too now! And more Fujoshi Rumi, you're right about that one too. I think my comic store stopped getting them in after v2, but I see Powells has v3...

I really liked the yuri anime Aoi Hana; I've been meaning to read the manga but haven't. I hope it is just as awesome too, though (& better than the disappointing/offensive Sasameki Koto, for which I can offer an anti-recommendation -- though again I've only seen the anime, but unless I hear from someone that the manga is radically different I won't be reading it!).

Edited 2010-01-31 09:49 (UTC)

So much YES to Claymore and Emma, I adore those two mangas and am over the moon to see them on this list. And I agree about Bleach, I love the manga but I also spend half my time being really angry how the women are overshadowed by the men all the damn time.

I loved the friendship bits in Maka Maka (already cited) and actually felt frustrated when the story kept going to sex scenes instead! Flower of Life has some great female friendship moments - I particularly like the shopping trip with the two popular girls who like clothes and the geeky one who draws manga, and they all end up getting on together, although maybe it is shoujo? Hmm. What's Keiko Tobe's With the Light? That's mainly from the mother's point of view, and has some fascinating bits - the filipino transient workers (all women), who make friends with her autistic son, for example, and all the relationships with the other mothers of both neurotypical and autistic children (I particularly like the outspoken mother who sneaks beer into the school sports day).

I agree with you about Urasawa doing amazing female characters who really need to get together and just hang out sometime :)

Yuri (neither licensed yet, so far as I know; both are ongoing and have sparked anime series):
Sasameki Koto by Takashi Ikeda--an interesting variety of loves and friendships among high school girls.

Sweet Blue Flowers by Takako Shimura--again set in high school--a lot of interesting sounding-out of the boundaries between love and friendship. The male characters weird me out a bit.

Other:
Flower of Life by Fumi Yoshinaga (josei)--licensed, complete in four volumes. Although three boys are the focus, the story detours into the daily lives of others in their classroom and has some really sweet, funny interactions between girls.

I'm a bit sad that I can't think of more (but of course, I *am* excluding shoujo as instructed!).

I think the SK manga is *somewhat* different in that it goes on for longer and involves more character development. Probably, though, what you found offensive/disappointing won't go away (I tear my hair out at the way the story handles Amemiya, and I do get frustrated by some of the things done for laughs at the expense of true human connection). I'm curious what you found particularly problematic, though.

Heh, all of the above were mentioned before I got to them! Thought I'd already scanned all the comments, sorry.

Disappointing: Ushio is totally totally vapid & I can't understand why anyone puts up w/her, or why Sumi is all into her.

Offensive: the way they handle Akemiya's cross-dressing--his little sister is really creepy & mean, & the bit in the anime where creepy men are skeeving on him, & then he plays on that to get them away from Sumi, was the last straw. Oh, wait, the bit where he's in a cafe w/Sumi & opens up a package of coffee creamer & has it splash all over his face suggestively? That might've been the last straw.

Akemiya! (I knew I'd gotten the name wrong) Absolutely, you won't want to read the manga...things get worse from there so far as he's concerned. (I don't remember the coffee creamer thing, but it's quite possible I blocked it out of self-preservation.) It's weird when a sympathetic character is created only to be utterly abused. I suppose one of the reasons I keep reading is the hope that he'll finally get a fair deal.

As for Ushio--though I get your initial reaction to her, somehow she's won me over. I like the backstory that the manga gives (her previous school, the way she and Sumi become closer, etc.).

I never knew that Aida did the Gunslinger Girls designs for a hentai game! ;_;

I know Studio Ghibli movies are not manga; I'm not sure whether they're considered shoujo or not.

I love the Mei/Satsuki sister relationship in My Neighbor Totoro.

Also like the way that Kiki of Kiki's Delivery Service is able to re-find her confidence after finding an older female role model in Ursula.

Read or Die: The TV is basically all about female relationships. [I haven't actually read the manga, only seen the anime, but I think it's based on the manga?]

Yeah, it would be good to have more background to make Ushio more interesting in any way at all!

Thanks for the warning re: the manga, ha. & yeah, for a bit we kept watching the anime in hopes that things would get better regarding him, but then... the coffee creamer... augh.

So, Ooku has less "female friendship" and more "intense loyalty of a female retainer to her female shogun." But I still think it fits the general mood you're looking for (plus, is awesome).

Don't forget Sailormoon! It's mostly about the friendships between the girls more than anything else.

By the same author of Aoi Hana (which I also recommend) is Hourou Musuko, the main characters of which are pre-op M2F and F2M, following them from first realizations in sixth grade onward (currently they're in late middle school), with a variety of friends-and-companions, more of them female than not, more of the straight than not, but all types represented.

I like how the last couple Japanese volumes of Yotsuba&! have been deepening the friendship specifically between Yotsuba and Ena.

My current (though it's about to end) favorite shonen series, Cross Game, grounds two female-female relationships among the central five, including one between sisters and another between neighbors. My second-favorite, Kekkaishi, alas not only has a dearth of female friendships, but may not even be able to pass the Bechdel Test, even after 20-odd volumes, despite having a female mangaka. Hmph.

---L.

Magical Girl successor Princess Tutu continues this with the evil-conquering friendship between Rue and Ahiru, and to a lesser degree with the friendship of Ahiru and her classmates Pique and Lilie (though Lilie may be more of a frenemy...) It may be a standard that Magical Girl series will emphasize female friendship, unless they're fighting over boys (sigh).

The anime and manga have some of the same characters, but otherwise they're nothing alike. I can't remember, but I don't think Nancy even shows up in the manga. I don't think there are any female friendships at all in the manga.

Well, the female kekkaishi talk to their female dog spirits...? No, doesn't count. I do double the rec for Hourou Musuko and triple it for Aoi Hana / Blue Flowers!

Chibi Vampire / Karin is adorable I-can't-believe-it's-not-shoujo romcom shonen about day-walking, blood-injecting vampire Karin Maaka and her male human classmate Usui. Their friendship-to-romance is fatality-level cute, but there's a ton of stuff also with Karin's normal!vampire family, who love her but worry constantly over her non-bloodsucking: particular plot emphasis goes to her mother, her paternal grandmother, and her little sister Anju, the last of whom Karin is very close with. Karin also has a female human best friend who appears regularly and is important to her, though not as much to the plot.

Sugar Sugar Rune, by Moyoco Anno - Insane shoujo manga about two little witch girls, Chocolat and Vanilla, who are best friends, but are forced to compete with one another in a competition to become the next queen. The competition? Which of them can manipulate enough human boys into falling in love with her, without falling in love herself! It's so cynical! While both girls eventually, as you might guess, fall in love with guys, how they cope with being in competition with one another while still being friends is important throughout the series.

Strawberry Shake/Strawberry Shake Sweet, Hayashiya Shizuru - Experienced model and tsundere-stereotype Julia is asked to mentor a new girl to her agency, the impossibly sweet and innocent Ran. She's prepared to hate her, but falls in love at first sight. Wacky hijinks ensue! No, they actually do ensue. This is a pretty straight-up comedy manga, kind of similar to the early volumes of Ouran. Not very deep, but it's cute.

Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou - Very long, beautifully-drawn, largely-plotless series about a robot woman named Alpha who runs a coffee shop, and her relationships with the people who stop in. These including another robot woman, Kokone, who becomes her best friend and falls in love with her without realizing it; "Sensei," an old woman who is the local doctor and may have helped build Alpha (though Alpha doesn't know it); and Makki, a local girl who is initially jealous of Alpha for her popularity.

Battle Angel Alita, by Yukito Kishiro - In which, in between beating up everyone and everything in the world, splattering the intestines the subset which possesses them, a cyborg bounty hunter named Alita makes some unusual friends. The women tend to be less likely to die horribly and provide angst than are the men in her life, but most of them show up late in the series. My favorites are Lou, a dorky, amazingly innocent bureaucrat in a corrupt government who initially thinks Alita is a barbarian, and whom Alita rightly thinks needs protection from her less-pure superiors. Lou has a little Alita doll with tactile feedback - when she pats it on the head, Alita feels it, and is not amused, and Zazie (from the sequel series Last Order), a bodyguard who acts silent and stoic to hide her complete lack of social skills. (At one point she laments, "I don't know how to have a conversation that's not about guns!") Zazie is also the only female black manga character I can think of. (Kishiro's favorite of Alita's female associates is clearly Caerula Sanguis, whose backstory gets a whole volume to itself, but I kind of want to whap her sometimes.)

(I so fail at grammar in that last paragraph.)

Actually, both dog spirits are male. One happens to be gay, as in flaming enough to sound female in Japanese, but still quite male per Word of God. And that one is Yoshimori's, not Tokine.

---L.

Yes! on Sugar Sugar Rune, and YES!! on YKK.

Kare Kano has some problematic aspects, but a major part of the first half is about Yukino gaining actual female friends, and what this means to her.

There's a really sweet single-volume shoujo I read recently, Onna-no-ko wa Yuko! by Kyouko Hikawa, in which the relationships between the three heroines is very much more important than their erractic romantic lives. (Unlicensed, scans complete)

The main relationship of the long shoujo historical fantasy Crystal Dragon is between two women, who travel together across most of the western Roman empire over the course of the series -- as well as places out of it (it starts on the west coast of Ireland).

And one that no one's mentioned yet: Aria (with prequel Aqua), in which the main cast is entirely female, dividing into older and younger trios of close friends. And is gorgeous, using its setting of the canals of a Venice recreated on Mars to excellent effect. Is shounen, just like Yotsuba&!.

---L.

All the iterations of ROD are pretty separate and different. The Read Or Dream manga (IIRC, having not read it in a while) isn't terribly strong on the girl friendship count, unless you count the sisters themselves. The other ones, though, are all p. great for that sort of thing.

Mori Kaoru's stuff generally has great gal friendships; the volume Shirley has more of the same Victorian stuff with different characters, and Otoyomegatari has some nice moments, too.

The manga Burst Angel is all-but-text in having the two main gals Together, and has some decent couple dynamics, at least in a series that's mostly about shooty action and scantily-clad girls.

I'm blanking on any more; if I remember I'll check my collection at home and see if there's anything else awesome.

Oooh, ok! For some reason, I keep mixing this up and thinking it's one of those shounen series with girls with huge boobs. Will def put it on my list now!

OMG MUST FIND THIS NOW.

No worries, more votes and details are always good! ^_^

Definitely second the thought about magical girl series (I think Joy Kim has a note on that in her post too?). I feel like I should know more magical girl series that aren't Sailor Moon!

OMG how do you find all these things? Female!vampire, male!human = hard to find! That sounds adorable.

Definitely second Kare Kano (I think it's listed in Joy Kim's post? All the shoujo series are over there)... If you're up to it, I encourage putting your shoujo series in her comments!

Aria's been on my TBR list for a while now, I need to get around to it.

I'm of two minds whether to suggest starting with Aqua, Aria, or the anime. (I should mention, it's all one manga with a title change when it moved publishers -- much like Saiyuki/Reload.) The thing about the manga is, even by the standards of relaxed-pace slice-of-life series, it's slow. As in, five volumes in, and the last members of the core six characters are still being introduced. Plus it takes Amano a few volumes to get the hang of what she's doing. The anime jumps into the middle and remixes some of the backstory, both by shuffling the order of episodes and by adapting it differently. Plus there's the music and scenery porn (of Venice! on Mars! with spaceships and floaty things in every sky!) But then, the anime, as wonderful as the anime is, it isn't what the manga eventually grows to be. Plus, it's hard to avoid just how annoying the cat is when he's animated, and there's an anime-only character who does useful things structurally but tastes a bit like diabetes when she's on stage.

So, um, take your pick. Half the manga series is in print from Tokyop (2 volumes of Aqua + 5 of Aria, while the third and final season of the anime comes out next month.

---L.

I sort of love that the dog spirit is gay, by the way. Though frankly not enough to have kept up with the series after the first few volumes.

Awwww, that sounds awesome!

(It's...more touching in context.)

See, to me, it already sounds touching out of context! But possibly that is because I have several friendships like this ;).

Someday I will catch up and actually watch Bubblegum Crisis!

I know, it's SO FRUSTRATING! Especially because there are a lot of awesome women and awesome relationships among them (spoiler and Soi Fong, Orihime and Tatsuki, Ichigo's sisters), and they never get any time dedicated to them!

Oh, I had forgotten about the friendship moments in Flower of Life! Either that, or I haven't read up to there yet.

And I did not know that about With the Light. I think I got halfway through v. 1, where it's mostly focused on her relationship with her husband and her child, but I really like knowing there's a lot of other women in there later.

Heh, yes. So far I haven't included Ooku because I'm still a little discomfitted with how much focus is on the shogun's relationship to her harem, but I'm really curious to see where Yoshinaga will go with the female retainers and the shoguns they serve. (Also do not want to say anything for fear of spoilering v. 3.)

Definitely! It's on Joy Kim's list, as she's gathering the shoujo series.

!!! Transgendered people in manga who identify as transgendered (?) ! I have to look that up.

Awesome. Strawberry Shake in particular sounds so cute!

Or at least, being adolescent, trying to work out how they identify. But the main pair do spend time practicing dressing as non-birth gender together (in another township). And while doing so, they made an adult friend who is pre-op M2F who is saving up for the op.

The first four volumes were scanned by Kotonoha and should still be available on their site; when they went hiatus for a while, a group called ? took over, and they've kept current on scans with chapters up to mid-what-will-be-volume 10.

---L.

I want so much more from Bleach than it's been giving me, most of all with Orihime and Tatsuki. I'm so bored with all the focus on the men.

Still cool! I mean, I love the fantasy bodyswapping and stuff like that, but I also like seeing transgendered issues in a more real-life setting as well.

So do I, and this is one of the better works about transgendered adolescence, in any format, I've read.

---L.

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Female friendships and/or romances in manga

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