I recently re-read Kare Kano, for the 4th time in my life — all 21 vol­umes of it.

I remem­bered the plot­line. I remem­bered the char­ac­ters. Yet I couldn’t help but feel mes­mer­ized once more. It shocked me that every time I read this beloved series, I encoun­tered a dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence, felt a dif­fer­ent emo­tion bloom.

It wasn’t story incon­sis­tency. It was a change in the appre­ci­a­tion and under­stand­ing of life.

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It’s unfair to clas­sify Hourou Musuko as merely a gen­der­ben­der. Where the aver­age merely uses gen­der iden­tity as a plot device, Hourou Musuko addresses it seri­ously, real­is­ti­cally, as a coming-of-age topic; and that made all the dif­fer­ence — enough to enter its upcom­ing adap­ta­tion as the Win­ter 2011 Noit­a­m­ina slot anime~

[CH65 fan-art, by KL]

Writ­ten by Shimura Takako (Aoi Hana), Hourou Musuko fol­lows the story of Nitori Shuichi, a fem­i­nine boy with a seri­ous case of con­fused gen­der iden­tity. Yet as he meets other friends, includ­ing ‘Takatsuki-kun’, a boy­ish girl who wishes she was born a man, Yuki, a gor­geous post-surgery trans-woman, and Makoto, a boy who is con­fused between tran­sex­u­al­ism and homo­sex­u­al­ity, Shuichi’s desires of want­ing to become a girl slowly blos­soms, all at the same time as he under­goes puberty, falls in ado­les­cent love, and watches hor­rif­i­cally as his own body mature into that of a man. Read the rest of this entry »

As Mis­aki finally begins to break down the door to Usui’s prob­lems in Kai­chou wa Maid-sama (manga), I’m reminded yet again of just how ridicu­lous pre­dictable and com­mon this trope is; yet despite the uno­rig­i­nal­ity, this tried and true for­mula still deliv­ers much enjoy­ment for me~

The setup has got to be one of the most over­done within Shoujo manga: the self­less and car­ing hero­ine, either by nature or becomes that way from friendship/love, meets the ideal guy, whose stoic per­son­al­ity always serves as the front to a dark and trou­bling family/childhood back­ground. After build­ing up the rela­tion­ship through sev­eral arcs (usu­ally help­ing sup­port char­ac­ters), the girl must directly con­front the guy’s fam­ily prob­lem in order to heal his past scars and firmly estab­lish their happy future~ Read the rest of this entry »

A story of war between a poor girl and the upper class

The damsel in dis­tress is an overused lit­er­ary cliche. It annoys a lot of peo­ple, espe­cially in the shoujo genre, where a heroine’s need to be pro­tected by the ‘stronger male’ draws all kind of venom from read­ers. Stamp­ing it as gen­der stereo­typ­ing, read­ers look toward the other side of the fence, putting the spot­light on the inde­pen­dent and badass hero­ines of shounen/seinen as ‘true strength’. There is some valid­ity to that, but I’m far from agreement.

The ban­ner for my Strength Arcana card high­lights my beliefs quite well: “Per­fec­tion is a State of Mind.” Read the rest of this entry »

The shoujo com­edy genre is mostly known for its flow­ers, sparkles, and sug­ary bub­bles, so for the longest time I couldn’t under­stand the use of orga­nized crime as a premise within shoujo com­edy (shoujo smut is a dif­fer­ent story). Out­side the whole ‘bad boy’ image, what’s so great about get­ting deeply involved with a pack of uncouth and rough-looking thugs, espe­cially given the social stigma and the pos­si­bil­ity of get­ting involved in their gang wars?

Well, Ban­cho pol­i­ticks aside, Arakure (or Wild Ones as Viz Media calls it; no clue) sure taught me that I’ve never paid atten­tion to the Japan­ese Roman­ti­ciza­tion of Yakuza. While Arakure mostly avoids the ‘crime’ part, it really high­lights the beau­ti­ful ide­al­ism sur­round­ing them, from the broth­erly love to their ver­sion of chivalry; plus, the Yakuza humor is just hilar­i­ous. Read the rest of this entry »

At first glance, Misa-chan is any­thing but your tra­di­tional girl. She’s aggres­sive assertive, inde­pen­dent, and bold; she is part-timing to earn income for her house­hold despite still being a stu­dent; most of all, she is the Stu­dent Coun­cil Pres­i­dent of a for­merly all-boys school, tak­ing lead­er­ship over an over­whelm­ingly male pop­u­la­tion. Even fem­i­nists would be proud of her accom­plish­ments, as Misa-chan stands out as the obvi­ous first place wher­ever she goes…

Except when Usui it around, whose mere pres­ence instantly demotes her to sec­ond place. As this is from a pop­u­lar shoujo manga, do girls have a thing for being in sec­ond place? No, don’t think that way for even a sec­ond. Read the rest of this entry »

For the longest time I won­dered about why I read Zero no Tsukaima, which might be bet­ter than its anime adap­ta­tion but is still pretty sub­par in just about every aspect. Then I remem­bered some­thing a friend said: “does it mat­ter whether or not I’m actu­ally play­ing a game as long as I feel like I am?”

From last season’s Baka to Test to Shokanju to this season’s Angel Beats, the game inspired premises are becom­ing more and more obvi­ous. Is this just a coin­ci­dence? Does the ‘game-like’ story/setting have an appeal of its own? After all, the cur­rent gen­er­a­tion of anime-fans are also those who grew up play­ing video games, espe­cially the styl­is­tic clas­sic adventure-party RPGs that range from table­top D&D (Stan­dard RPG Sys­tem for Japan­ese) to Final Fan­tasy. So I’d say there’s some­thing spe­cial in mak­ing the viewer feel like they’re immersed in a well-paced game, espe­cially when it not only takes less time, but also saves you from the bore­dom of grind­ing and side-questing.

But what makes a story ‘game-like’? Is it just the con­cep­tual sim­i­lar­i­ties like NPCs, recov­ery exams points, and lev­el­ing up? Well, it’s all that and much, much more. The game-like story shares a great deal with both the clas­sic adven­ture and shounen gen­res, but to truly give the excite­ment of play­ing a RPG your­self, there’s a cou­ple of bases you to cover and bal­ance. Read the rest of this entry »

Tales of sav­ing the world usu­ally involves adven­tur­ing and con­fronting dif­fi­cult adver­saries right? Well, what about sav­ing the world by befriend­ing a lit­tle girl and savor­ing cakes, stars, and the joy of every­day life? Momo is rather unique in this, and despite being a shoujo slice-of-life which usu­ally falls to extremely slow pac­ing, the series quickly sucked me in with its plot hooks, rapid char­ac­ter devel­op­ment, and some light drama that touches the com­mon inse­cu­ri­ties and issues in real life.

It’s also nice to read a shoujo manga where fawn­ing over guys is the last thing on the heroine’s mind, where she is not only inde­pen­dent and strong, but also very level-minded. Com­bin­ing a lack of unnec­es­sary angst and no per­fect bishies steal­ing spot­lights goes a long way to adding real­ism to the char­ac­ters and their actions.

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