oyceter: man*ga [mahng' guh] n. Japanese comics. synonym: CRACK (manga is crack)
Oyceter ([personal profile] oyceter) wrote2011-04-07 01:24 pm

Unita Yumi - Bunny Drop, vol. 01-02 (Eng. trans.)

(original title: うさぎドロップ)

Daikichi's grandfather has just died, and at the funeral, his entire family discovers that the strange child in the garden is his grandfather's illegitimate daughter, and no one knows where her mother is. No one wants to take care of Rin (the child), so Daikichi steps up to the plate, despite many misgivings.

The first two volumes are about Daikichi adjusting to having a young child in his life, and I love the manga for how it looks at parenting. Daikichi finds that he has to make quite a few sacrifices, such as going with a lower-paying job with less chances of promotion so he can make it home on time to pick Rin up from day care. I also like him reflecting back on his mother and the difficult choices she had to make, as well as how his father never had to make those same choices. It's not necessarily a feminist work, but I think it takes a real look at the inequities in parenting and how society in Japan (and I think in the US too) is not set up to help single parents and is set up so that parenting is solely the mother's responsibility.

Rin is a cute six-year-old, but she also comes with her fair share of problems, which I didn't feel as though the mangaka trivialized. Daikichi gets frustrated with her, but you always get the sense that he cares for her, and my favorite part of the manga is watching the two of them bond and watching Rin slowly learn to depend on Daikichi for the support she never really got.

So far, the art is charming but a little rough around the edges; I especially felt as though the mangaka was still figuring out how to use screentones. Sometimes the stark black-and-white art works, but more often, it feels empty and unfinished to me.

Cute, and I will keep reading it. I wish there were more stories about single fathers out there. I also like how the series hasn't been demonizing single mothers, from Rin's missing mother to other mothers Daikichi meets along the way.
octopedingenue: (Default)

[personal profile] octopedingenue 2011-04-23 06:24 pm (UTC)(link)
Aishiteruze Baby is another one in this unnamed genre, with a shoujo audience. Romance Papa is manhwa I haven't read, but it's been on my list forever.

a seinen actively comedy example of single young man thrust into childcare
This is very hard to weed out because these are exact genre overlaps with lolicon, which is a genre of AGH AGH AGH when you hit it by accident. The faint vibe of it skeeved me right off the otherwise charming Blood Alone.
Edited 2011-04-23 18:24 (UTC)
lnhammer: the Chinese character for poetry, red on white background (Default)

[personal profile] lnhammer 2011-04-23 06:57 pm (UTC)(link)
I used to use Aishiteruze Baby as my shoujo example for a group of four, but Gakuen Babysitter is even more about the childcare aspects and is actively a comedy and so more comparable. Romance Papa is pleasant, but very much not about the parenting but rather the teenage daughter's romcom school life.

Lolicon is indeed a shoal of jagged rocks lurking in those waters. I'd forgotten about Blood Alone -- I didn't bounce (largely because a) the guy is clearly Not Interested and b) I was able to squint enough to read the old child vampire's acts as symbols of her desire to Grow Up in a way she never can) but it's not exactly my favorite. Many of the others are indeed even more skeevy, leaving one to either age down to Yotsuba or slant drama as Bunny Drop or My Girl.

---L.
lnhammer: pen-and-ink drawing of an annoyed woman dressed as a Heian-era male courtier saying "......"  (argh)

[personal profile] lnhammer 2011-04-24 11:28 pm (UTC)(link)
Urk. Yeah, that's one of those I can't read more than a couple pages of, any more than I can Strawberry Marshmellow. The latter may be on the innocent, for lack of a better term, end of the spectrum, but it's still too skeevy for me. (Dance in the Vampiure Bund? -- Not Touching That.)

---L.
lnhammer: the Chinese character for poetry, red on white background (Default)

[personal profile] lnhammer 2011-04-23 07:06 pm (UTC)(link)
Oh, and another example: Corseltel no Ryujitsushi (to order wildly divergent romajizations of コーセルテルの竜術士), which runs in the all-ages female-focused Comic Zero-Sum, which I suspect means older shoujo/younger josei in practice. It's not suddenly childcare, but the young dragon mage does spend most of his time looking after seven anthropomorphic toddler dragons, who've been sent to him ostensibly to teach but which at that age amounts to in-house childcare. Stories are a mix of comic childhood mishaps and fantasy adventures that come looking for him (because they know where he lives).

---L.