Whoooeee!
I have found a couple more fujoshi, before they have been cataloged by
the ever-vigilant Ogiue maniax, and this bunch is a fine group of
Genshiken – related specimens!
I almost forgot about Girl Saurus DX! The manga wrapped up in 2008, but grey sources only completed it recently and somehow I lost track and neglected to enjoy the remaining fun. Boy finally gets girl! Boy stops vomiting blood in her presence. The harem that pursued him (mostly) gives up the chase and a GOOD ENDING is had by all.
I like the stuff that Kei Kusunoki dreams up. She has a way of mixing ecchi fan service with homilies about the essential strength of women that lets her pull off a lot of risque and often downright reactionary humor.
Quote the wiki:
“”The story revolves around 16-year-old Shingo Chiryu who had been beaten and hospitalized for a month by a morbidly obese girl whose naked confession he had rejected. As a result of the encounter, Shingo has developed a fear of all women, called gynophobia. While Shingo tries to hide his fear, the school nurse notices it and advices him to join the boxing club. However, Shingo soon finds out that all of its members are girls, the club’s adviser is the school nurse, and one of the clubs members, the now slim Haruka Nishiharu, is the very girl who had put him in the hospital.””
Haruka pre-diet is more than an “morbidly obese” girl, she was a towering girl bodybuilding bouncer gone to flab; Jabba the Hut has been mentioned by other reviewers, and worse.. our hero’s mom is a toned down version of her.
Plenty of other extremely odd physical types pop up in Saurus, as well as plenty of cute, well endowed babes, but Kusunoki is so ruthless in portraying ugly girl characters that she must be drawing on some deep well of in-culture stereotyping.
MULTIPLE SPOILER WARNING! (Oh Why bother…)
The plot mechanics are brilliantly obvious: Our hero must keep it secret that he is a afraid of women, all while almost every woman he meets – inside the harem/ club or not- suddenly wants him. The earlier version of the franchise had him divulge his secret to Haruka, which bogged down the plot with too much Haruka-guilt and Shingo hatred (but trotted out a light bondage scene for fan-service as a result) The reboot – Girl Saurus DX – keeps his secret safe from all but the scheming man-killing school nurse. Haruka instead feels that Shingo cannot really forgive her, while Shingo fears that that new Haruka or not, she still has the ability to go berserk at any time and stomp him.
A sex comedy made for teen males can be a very conservative medium. All the girl characters are sexual beings, but their sexuality runs on rigid tracks of prescribed progression towards normal adult female fulfillment – all the better to go off the rails. The girls/women get to carry most of the burden of desire and keep the plot rolling along. The boy reacts.
The school nurse is our first example of what happens when the eroge of life goes bad: a late 20′ sex bomb, she regards Shingo as a minor amusement when she isn’t running schemes to marry a rich geezer or pull off some other form of marital/ inheritance fraud. She represents what happens when a woman somehow fails to find true love and achieve a proper level of domestic bliss – Cowboy Bebop’s Faye Valentine without the urges towards friendship/ loyalty and only her “do unto others before they betray you” attitude. As such she is one-dimensional as heck. She briefly becomes entranced with Shingo when he becomes domineering towards her, mistaking his toothache-induced bad mood for S&M play.
The main harem members are all quite appealing, with modest personality kinks –
the real nastiness is saved for secondary characters. Most pitiful of the bunch is Shiogamaguchi Ichigo, an “ugly girl” burdened with a concentration camp body, hideous glasses and demonic buckteeth – she looks like something dreamed up by American propaganda cartoons during WWII. Her sin turns out to be anorexia, she becomes quite pretty if she can hold down her food. Ugly or not, she wants a physical relationship with a boy, and will stop at nothing, including assaults on random males, to find fulfillment. Late in the series, she she develops supernatural powers, available only to extremely ugly skinny virgin girls and contents herself with the attentions of ghost boyfriends.
Close to Ichigo in pure abjection are the fujoshi girls of the manga club and here is where the fun begins.
“I just had a hallucination where I saw myself getting nailed by a guy in a manga!”
The yaoi chapter in Girl Saurus DX is a direct send-up of Ogiue’s “original sin” in Genshiken, with far more overt examples of fujoshi fun, balanced by a savage treatment of the fujoshi girls themselves.
Holy crap! Kei Kusunoki lays it on thick when she draws ugly girls! The fujoshi tribe in DX contains a number of hideous specimens, including an even worse “WWII propaganda jap” bucktooth caricature than Ichigo! Another member is a pudding bodied fatty with an angry butterface (Why hasn’t the schools chuby-chaser found her?) The ringleader is a demonic version of Fujoshi Rumi, with wild twin braids and xray-specs pairing goggles. Then there is a fat, bespectacled unibrow. Some of them may reference other manga fujoshi – whatever.
They like their BL hard core! So does their lady teacher-adviser, so there will be no tearful scene with the principal and parents to save Shingo, who gets cast as the school sou-uke.
Shingo is enraged, but at no time does he exhibit any signs of feeling that his sexuality is threatened. He KNOWS he wants normal heterosexual love,
he just needs to stop vomiting blood whenever he tries to kiss Haruka.
Shingo remains a manly guy, even if he has a fear-reflex for women. Instead of switching schools, he confronts the enemy in their den, (surprisingly easy as their ugliness does not trigger his reflex) bides his time,
and then, with naked torso showing manly scars, ends up on top of the ringleader with a handful of surprisingly ample breast and a mouthful of first fujoshi kiss.
That was easy!
Shazzam! She doth instantly transform into a shy beautiful young maiden! She is cured of her deviant fujoshi behavior! Very funny indeed!
Haruka, who had converted to fujoshidom to get a substitute Shingo fix clouts him and drags him out of the club, where after the fujoshi tribe destroys all Shingo material lest it contaminate them with normal urges.
It goes on. Only a woman mangaka could get away with this stuff.
One of the harem continually announces to Shingo that she is ovulating. Another continuously trips and loses her panties. All are burdened by the pursuit of the idealized boyfriend, because that’s what you have to do to become an adult woman, This is a harem manga, so the girls have to be guy-crazy.
The only males who actively court / pursue the girls are perverts, the aforementioned fatty-chaser and a pedophile who chases Shingo’s too-developed-for-her-age younger sister. One other poor schlep is so bishie-looking that most folks who look at him see his girl aura and think him female – a talent that he does not exploit -so he is an otokonoko-refusenik. He has a hopeless crush on one of the harem, and will do anything for her but is friendzoned into despair until right at the end when she drags him into make-out scene in a harebrained idea of stopping Shingo and Haruka from consummating their love. Duh? Such are Good Endings for foot soldiers.
I am ready for love!
The moral of the tale is simple: Girls are strong and scary, but desirable. They have urges too, perhaps more than you do (yeah, right…).. Boys: overcome your fears and find your special someone, because odds are she is out there hunting for you.
And never turn down naked advances from huge strong girls.
Awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww!
But it still looks like the girls have to do most of the work.
Strange how “bullied by girls” does not yet have its own trope listing in TVTROPES – it seems to be a fave of ecchi manga. Minamoto-kun of Minamoto-kun Monogatari is a bullied-by-girls-in-middle-school guy with no place to live but with his over-hot aunt who has ideas about turning him into Casanova – or rather Genji.
Just as he enters college and makes a promise to himself to overcome the trauma of his past, his father remarries and asks him to move out of the house. Dad’s younger sis is a prof at the university, and is dead serious about her Genji project, to the extent of “forcing” him to fondle her so that he can overcome his fears and inexperience and setting him off on missions to seduce various young women – starting with his shy H-manga loving, possibly fujoshi cousin.
A bit of background is in order here. Genji is notorious in academic circles for the rape/ no rape debate. Proper 13th C. court ladies couldn’t say yes, so the original Genji might have overdone it a bit during his adventures. Then again morals were different back then, nobody’s kinfolk tracked Genji down and nailed his nuts to the tea house wall, so he must have done something right. Then again, Genji is a fiction, a 13th C Japanese bodice ripping romance, the first of its kind, and a sacred cultural masterpiece, so lighten up.
Back to our hero: He is a conventional bundle of raging hormones and self-doubt. When he overcomes his fears, his pickup skills range from grab to fumble.
He forces himself on cousin, then wallows in guilt. Cousin is well endowed and built for pleasure, though less pneumatic than psycho-aunt. Cousin dresses frilly and cute, with plenty of cleavage and pantsu shots, but is afraid of men. She is a lit. student, easily manipulated by auntie and an otaku if not a fujoshi. Pretty boys are to be enjoyed as 2D and not touched, lest they rape you. After he makes a couple of pathetic attacks in her direction she of course begins to fall for him.
Gotta love the nuanced characterization in ecchi manga
Of note in Minamoto-kun Monogatari is how the women characters are drawn ample and busty, more so than in Girl Saurus. No nymphet lolis here – auntie and cousin are far more porno than the Sauruses. Boobs and butts are always overflowing out of too tight lacy clothing, skirts are short, camera angles lurid. There is no point in distinguishing fan service from “normal scenes – the absence of sexed up content is a rare exception. Still there is effort made at plotting and characterization, if only to justify and continuing series that must see our hero prodded by psycho auntie into chasing at least 13 other babes before god knows what. Melting Psycho Aunts cold cold heart? Running away to a fishing village? Duh? I don’t know how long I can follow this one. I only started following it because It looked like it was drawn in a style close to the over-ripe women in certain Korean manwha / manga (more on this in the future).
If nothing else, we now can explain the long tradition of extremely high literacy rates in Japan! They have found a way to get teenage males to read!
HEARTS OF FURIOUS FANCIES 