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.

Read the rest of this entry »

My curios­ity got the bet­ter of me as soon as I saw the tags on its Manga-Updates page: “Cross­dress­ing” “Or is it?”

This may very well be the best gen­der­ben­der manga writ­ten yet. The rea­son? Because it does the one thing that most gen­der­ben­der man­gas failed to do: keep on gen­der­bend­ing in both direc­tions by stay­ing ambigu­ous. Because in the end, our dear hero­ine is both boy and girl yet nei­ther at the same time, and far more than Kinoshita Hideoyoshi will ever be. Hence why this series is not just amus­ing but also intrigu­ing, because when the awk­ward humor passes, you’re left won­der­ing whether she really is a “boy” or a “girl”, left keenly aware of just how mixed up gen­der iden­tity really becomes at times…

Well? What would it be?

Prunus Girl is a very recent series, first pub­lished in 2009 by Mat­sumoto Tomoki, who doesn’t have any other notable works yet accord­ing to Manga-Updates or MAL. The premise is a sim­ple one: the main char­ac­ter Maki-kun (who is actu­ally a smart, ath­letic, and popular-with-girls guy for once!!!) goes to check out his high school entrance exam results and meets the bishoujo Aikawa Kizuna in a fate­ful encounter. Well, at until the first day of class when s/he intro­duces him/herself.

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It’s been a while since I feel in love with a manga so quickly and after being utterly impressed by the sheer orig­i­nal­ity of it. Is the Otomen con­cept com­pletely unique? Not quite, there have been sim­i­lar con­cepts, but I can’t think of one that’s this well pre­sented and inter-supported. The fact it turned the tra­di­tional shoujo con­cept box inside out also gained huge points.

And Asuka-chan is SOOOOOOOOOO MOE~!!!! >.<

Otomen is about a funny yet some­what seri­ous story of gen­der role-reversal in the mod­ern world still filled with gender-based stereo­types. It fea­tures an orig­i­nal premise, an excel­lent male lead (main char­ac­ter) with all the quirks of a real human being, and a tri­an­gle of bestest friends that fits together so per­fectly. Although, the sto­ry­line is rather light and pre­dictable though, great for pure enjoy­ment but not enough to be con­sid­ered dramatic.

On that note, Viz Media released Otomen vol­umn 5 this month, and vol­umn 6 and 7 are due in May and August. I’m so late on this already!!!

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With Sono Han­abira ni Kuchiduke wo trans­lated, I thought back to my fun time with Aoi Shiro and grabbed it in a flash. Well unfor­tu­nately things didn’t go as I would like— the game ended up dis­turb­ing me in under ten min­utes. Why? Because this is no yuri romance story, it’s almost pure yuri H, with two really per­verted girls nonethe­less and prob­a­bly more H text than story writ­ing… Really, the cute title and soft color pal­lette fooled me. But it’s been a long time since I’ve dis­liked a yuri story and that got me thinking—

I wish I had an onee-san like Yuki-chan

Most peo­ple clas­sify yuri as a pri­mary genre, like romance or action (as opposed to secondary/tertiary gen­res, like psy­cho­log­i­cal, school, etc, which are more like descrip­tor tags). This implies it’s amongst the main rea­sons to watch a show, and that if you don’t love yuri then you can’t enjoy the show. To date I’m still not com­pletely sure of this view. Yes, I’ve picked up yuri for the sake of it being yuri, but is yuri the tar­get that I’m look­ing for? Or, is yuri merely a medium of deliv­er­ing what I really sought? I’m reminded of what ETERNAL said:

Yuri, like all set­tings and devices and what have you, is sim­ply a premise.

Maybe when I sought yuri, I’m sim­ply look­ing for a really cute romance with an ele­gantly refined atmosphere.

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