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SHOJOS_DESCENT
February 26, 2011
(shojo_beatme?)
Three points along a curve, perhaps:
o The manga "Monkey High" is a very
sweet high-school romance: an
elegant, restrained young woman
finds herself plunged into a rowdy, The Transfer Student
low-class public school that keeps is one of the
reminding her of some monkey standard tropes.
mountain at the zoo... and
nevertheless she finds herself Perhaps "The Mysterious
falling in love with the monkeiest Transfer Student", as
of the monkies, a boy everyone Haruhi Suzimiya would
calls Manchau. have it.
o The manga "B.O.D.Y." is about a young
woman who falls in love with a sullen,
"bespectacled" boy who turns out to be
a Host (i.e. he works as a gigolo, if In the first volume of
not a male prostitute), and in her B.O.D.Y. our heroine
efforts to get him free of a boss who displays a complete
values his services highly, she agrees inability to read the
to work in his place, and ends up character of men.
fighting pressure to do something a
little more than Hostess work. Originally she thinks the male
main character is a nerd, but
it turns out he's literally
fighting off women in his spare
time. Another male figure
appears on the scene, a jock
who she's certain is chasing
after her... but it turns out
he's gay, and he's really trying
to get closer to her boyfriend.
o The manga "My Girlfriend is a Geek" has a
male student attracted to a slightly older
woman, who initially displays an odd
amount of interest in his style when he's
in student-mode: he wears reading glasses,
uses colored tabs to mark up books he's
reading, and so on...
He was unaware of the "Bespectacled
Man" fetish (moe?) that's going around,
and a friend has to explain it to him.
It turns out, though, that this woman's odd
obessions go much further than this, she
explains that she's an "otaku", more than
that she's a "fujoshi":
"My brain is rotten." FUJOSHI
The two of them like the same sports manga
but it turns out that when *she* reads it,
she's actually fantasizing about a
homoerotic back-story that's not at all
indicated in the foreground text.
This obsession of hers starts to
get a bit disturbing when she
begins projecting it onto the male
main character's friendships-- she
describes seeing detailed scenes of
male-male flirtatiousness that
never actually happened.
I formed a theory that I was looking
at a genre evolving (descending?)
into a period of greater acceptance
of sexual quirks and perversion, We might call this
and along with that a greater "decadence", in a few
self-awareness and self-commentary. different senses.
Before checking the publication DECADENCE
dates of these three:
"Monkey High" (2008)
"B.O.D.Y." (2004-8)
"My Girlfriend is a Geek" (2010)
I expected to find that they were
in chronological order (actually,
they're roughly the same time
frame, mid-to-late Naughts).
But then I don't know the history
of the use of these tropes in the It's not a shock when something
endlessly imitative world of I've just recently encountered
manga/anime. turns out to be very derivative
of something done years before.
My chronological descent
theory might be salvaged A case in point: there's
if I knew precisely when apparently a predecessor
different elements were to "My Girlfriend is a
first used. Geek", an internet manga
that began around 2006
An alternate theory would called "Tonari no
simply be that these different 801-chan", about a male
series are marketed to readers otaku who dates a fujoshi.
of different ages and levels
of sophistication.
In any case, I suggest HOST
that the otaku culture
has shown an increasing There's an episode of the Ouran High School Host
embrace of what you Club, where a little girl's brain has been
could call perversion, corrupted by reading too much manga (she looks at
along with a sense of the Host Club and immediately identifies it as a
perverse pride, reveling "reverse harem" and begins cheering "Debauchery!"
in a (supposedly) while the guys look on in confusion).
reviled sub-culture.
SHAMELESS_DEVOTION
Pulp fiction
begins as a blind,
a refusal to face
your demons. VILLAINOUS_MASK
It can evolve into a
way to come to terms
with your obsessions,
a recognized avenue
of expression.
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