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FLOWER_FOOD

                                             April  03, 2013
                                             August 21, 2013

"Boys Over Flowers":

That's US title of a manga, whose Japanese
title is "Hana Yori Dango", which I gather     This is a commoner-gets-
is a saying something like "Food is More       involved-with-rich-boys
Important than Flowers".                       story (in spite of herself,
                                               without any gold digging
   This is a distinctly                        schemes, of course),
   deranged shoujo manga,                      where the rich boys are
   far crazier than anything                   also pretty boys, a clique
   I've ever seen before.                      that goes by the nickname
                                               "the four flowers" (or
   It's often a problem in shoujo              something like that).
   land that the "bad guys" are
   supposed to be won over by the                   So there are some
   sheer niceness of the young                      overlapping meanings
   female main character, when                      here-- the rich boys
   really someone needs to just                     function both as
   shoot 'em.                                       flowers and meal
                                                    tickets; so there's a
       Forgiveness, diplomacy and                   confusion of motives.
       togetherness all sound nice in
       theory, but there are limits.



           Beyond those limits is "Boys Over Flowers",
           where the male main characters are privileged
           children who essentially run their high school
           like a kid gang, and order the student body
           to effectively lynch anyone they don't like.

           The leader of the central faction is a
           particularly unstable, violent character,
           e.g. known to attack people for accidentally
           bumping into him.

           The female lead is physically assaulted
           multiple times because of this guys orders,
           and sometimes directly by him.

           So yes, here we have a classic
           "forgive thy rapist" story (or in     But remember: this was
           this case, a near-rapist-by-proxy).   *hugely* popular, and 
                                                 translated into other media
                                                 and to other countries,
                                                 where it was *also*
                                                 enourmously successful,
                                                 e.g.  the Korean drama
                                                 "Meteor Garden".







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