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SHOJOS_DESCENT
February 26, 2011
(shojo_beatme?)
There 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
homerotic 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 characters 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 be a shock when
endlessly imitative world of something I've just
manga/anime. recently encountered
turns out to be very
My chronological descent derivative of something
theory might be salvaged done years before.
if I knew precisely when
different elements were A case in point:
first used. there's apparently a
predecessor to "My
An alternate theory Girlfriend is a
would simply be that Geek", an internet
these different manga that began
series are marketed around 2006 called
to readers of "Tonari no 801-chan",
different ages and about a male otaku
levels of who dates a fujoshi.
sophistication.
In any case,
I suggest that
the otaku culture
has shown
an increasing There's an episode of the Ouran High
embrace of what School Host Club, where a little
you could call girl's brain has been corrupted by
perversion, along reading too much manga (she looks at
with a sense of the Host Club and immediately
perverse pride, identifies it as a "reverse harem"
reveling in a and begins cheering "Debauchery!"
(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 HOST
with your obsessions,
a recognized avenue
of expression.
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