Too much excitement at work and around home. This blog is a bit stalled.
Genshiken 75 must wait on Genshiken 76. Browse all the way back to my first posts. Did I call it? Clean miss, partial hit dead on? Just how much influence did SHE have on Hato, what and how? Hmmmmm! A cliff-hanger! Remember at least that I predicted SHE might pop up 1/2 a year in advance! 1 point for yours truly! Perhaps we won’t even know the full story until Genshiken 77 and 78. Whew!
More reviewing? I might have to switch off to Zizek’s “A Plague of Fantasies” and drop “… Essays on the Sexual Ambiguity and Cross-Cultural Fandom of the Genre” for a while, as it looks like it might be a crushing bore that endlessly expands on and recaps the wiki entry on yaoi.
On hold: I stumbled across a scathing, very well written review that started out by stomping on A Game of Thrones (cable series version), and then went on to blast away at 50 shades of asshatery and the Twilight from which it spawned, It suggested to me a few parallels with hard yaoi, without the abstracted “distance” that fakee-gay-guys misbehaving offers.
Of course I lost the source and the link. phtttttt! But I was wondering if both genres’ creepy obsessive attackers are some kind of distorted obverse of the default cartoon obliviousness to relationship and interpersonal cues that form the safe behavioral convention for “normal” guys, both Japanese and Western, and leave all the bucket-work to women. Grey started out as Twilight fan-fic pron. Apparently it reads like it too. SNORT!
Compare and contrast to non-ecchi conventional high school harem manga: Male fantasy stories built up from the well -worn premise of a reluctant, though still manly (mistaken for a delinquent etc.) hero besieged by a pack of boyfriend-seeking babes.
Along with a “monogamous” fixation, is a male ability to have a clue about the other within a relationship only expressed in deviant ways in women’s fantasy?
Or is this just the same old Richard III shit warmed over?
Then again, Japanese women might like yaoi because it goes well with cookies and ice coffee. What do I know?
Also on hold: trying to figure out whether Korean manga teams (not manhwa, but made in Japan manga) have a plan to elbow their way into the harem/ecchi category with busty zaftig characters that (shazaaaam!) look like adult women rather than moe loli bait and coincidentally are far more export-market friendly; in effect riffing on the neojaponism.com article on K-pop girl bands vs akb48. and the underlying “when the going gets tough, the weird turn pro” theme of that site’s series on recent trends in Jp. anime and manga (only the freaks have cash left to buy, so the market distorts, causing a death spiral).
This must wait until I can read more “busty babes in the manga publishing industry” manga vs “my crazed aunt wants me to seduce 14 coeds so she can finish her research on gengi” manga. I will not be reading Freezing. There is only so much I can take, even for science.
There was also the idea for a nice quick fun review:
ABJECT, FURY, DEMON – Watashi ga Motenai no wa Dou Kangaete mo Omaera ga Warui, Hell Girl and Lucu Lucu (admit it, they do look a bit related if you squint) The sub-theme here would be “moe gone bad”, but c’mon! Emma is a Japanese mythology fury that would be at home in the Oresteia “The Friendly Ones”, with no chance for Athena’s bargain, while Lucu is one of the sharpest and funniest examples of the Japanese love of mangled xtian (and buddhist) mythos around. And our poor unpopular girl is a monster who is slowly going mad trying to become a “normal girl”. Otome wa tsurai yo again!
Can’t lose that one!
But for now, too much to do in the real world.
Shoganai…
HEARTS OF FURIOUS FANCIES 