(no subject)

[skygiants]

Back in August, jothra, who knows well my irrational love for crossdressing girls, presented me with the first four volumes of Hana-Kimi. Which is a manga about an American-Japanese girl who cross-dresses and goes to a boy's school in Japan so she can stalk express her pure admiration for stalk her favorite high-jump athlete Izumi Sano. Of course they become roommates! Sano basically figures out Ashiya is a girl in the first chapter; the rest of the school is much slower to catch on.

My favorite parts about the whole setup are a.) EVERYONE except the guys at the school just automatically assumes Ashiya is a girl (best disguise ever, Ashiya!) and b.) how Izumi Sano is the most hilariously mushy tall-brooding-stoic-romantic-lead ever. You get a lot of interactions like this:

ASHIYA: Oh no, I think I'm falling for Sano, but he doesn't know I'm a guy! But if I just give him a hug, that's . . . suitably manly, right?
SANO: Ashiya doesn't know that I know she's a girl! But if I just give her a hug, she'll . . . never suspect I know . . . right? oh god boobs I forgot about those
(READER: Sano, why don't you just tell Ashiya that you know she's a girl?
SANO: Because . . . . that would basically end the manga right there?
READER: That is kind of a lame excuse, Sano.
SANO: Because . . . I sort of don't mind having a girly roommate I can cuddle with in a totally manly fashion without feeling insecure about my stoic masculinity?
READER: Better, I guess.)
ASHIYA: So, want another hug? That's . . . how we express manly affection in America!
SANO: I mean, if that's an American custom, who am I to say no.

Then there is the rest of the cast, who are pretty easy to sum up.

NAKATSU: Is totally not gay! Just wants to take Ashiya home and cuddle him and dress him up in girl's clothes and punch out any guy he spends time with and oh god WHAT IF HE'S GAY. @_@
SCHOOL DOCTOR UMEDA: Is gay.
NANBA: Umeda's nephew and the RA! Extremely pretty. His special RA techniques include a lot of flirting. But mostly he's a ladies' man. Probably.
SCHOOL DOCTOR UMEDA: Still gay.
NAKAO: Other than Ashiya, the prettiest boy in school. After some initial one-sided rivalry, they become BFF and talk about boys and clothes together and it's adorable (although it does not make up for the fact that the manga has yet to pass the Bechdel Test.)
NAKATSU'S ROOMMATE: Sees dead people. This is mentioned every time he appears and has yet to be elaborated on, but I AM EXCITED.
SCHOOL DOCTOR UMEDA: Did I mention he is gay? Because I still have not mentioned it as many times as it is mentioned in an average chapter of the manga.

All this, for the record, is basically just background for a whole bunch of relatively standard shojo high school rom-com chapters about school festivals and sports competitions and summer vacations and so forth. What's weird is that half the time it seems to play the shojo tropes totally straight, half the time it hints at subverting them, and half the time it just goes for utter crack. So I am constantly a little off-balance, especially coming straight off Ouran, which is 100% subversive all the time. (Which is why Ouran is still absolutely my favorite, but it would be difficult for anything to equal the brilliance of Ouran.) I am also constantly laughing at the amount of ignorance that is attributed to Ashiya because she grew up in America. In the future, I predict: a girl crushing on Ashiya and Ashiya having to pass herself-in-a-dress off as an identical twin sister. I would predict more cross-dressing guys, but . . . four volumes in, every guy in the cast has already cross-dressed for a beauty pageant, so I'm not sure how much further it can go!

I also need to briefly mention that the extra stories that have been included at the ends of some of the volumes invariably fill me with WTF. Volume 4 had one about a forbidden love between an engaged doctor's daughter and a street orphan that took a turn for the surprise incest and then ended with a tragic death from heart disease, all in the space of twenty pages!

Comments

[futuresoon.livejournal.com]

SUDDENLY WE ARE READING THE SAME THING AGAIN! Although I uh am not doing it in quite as legitimate a way you are. Possibly I will buy it in the future, except for the part where it is 23 volumes and I am not sure I want to have more shoujo than I have Monster. Currently I'm on volume 7, and yes, there is indeed Bechdel test-passing eventually! Bechdel test-passing that involves shenanigans.

The reason I'm reading it, actually, is because at Vividcon someone made a vid of the live-action drama based on it--I thought it was a movie at first, but no, TV show. The vid is totally adorable, except for the part where it makes it look like the show is about Nakatsu and Sano is never mentioned. Still, the guy playing Nakatsu is all the adorable, I mean I want one, and there are actual cartoon hearts coming out of characters' eyes, I am not even kidding.

is it weird that Doctor Umeda might be my favorite character, it is kind of weird

[jothra]

(I don't think it's weird.)

[futuresoon.livejournal.com]

(Good, good. Sometimes it is okay to like creepers! I must remember this.)

[skygiants]

*cracks up* I totally wondered when you made a post about reading a manga that suddenly turned out to have 23 volumes, and I was like "I just started reading Hana Kimi and found out it has 23 volumes, but - nah, that seems unlikely!" Anyway yes, I am able to acquire it in a legitimate-yet-still-free-fashion thanks to jothra's generosity, although that means it will probably also be a slightly slow fashion.

I am excited for Bechdel-test passing! I am also totally curious about the show, I will admit - I actually heard about the jdrama before Jo started telling me about the manga in the context of 'HERE ARE LOLARIOUS CROSSDRESSING HIJINKS,' and it did indeed sound lolarious. But I can't decide if I want to finish the manga before I start it.

I am 100% shocked that Doctor Umeda is your favorite. *solemn* I like him too! He's so snarky, it's awesome. I just hope that they will stop feeling the need to remind us that, no really, he is really and truly gay, it's not a lie or a joke every chapter. It's okay, Hisaya Nakajo, I believe you!

[futuresoon.livejournal.com]

My tags included 'hana-kimi', you are bliiiind :P (Or maybe your layout does not show tags, that is probably it.)

I don't know if the drama gives any resolution to the story, given that it's 13 episodes as opposed to 23 volumes, so maybe it just makes shit up? The vid did not spoil me for anything unpredictable, anyway. Except that maybe there is male cheerleading in the future.

Snarky and gay are two of my favorite things, not gonna lie. They do occasionally not mention it! ...okay I cannot actually think of any moment when he is introduced and they don't mention it, BUT THAT DOESN'T MEAN THERE AREN'T ANY.

[skygiants]

. . . I can totally see tags on my layout, I just am apparently blind. >.>

I have actually seen the cheerleading sequence on youtube! I just figured that was an extended sequence from the school festival bit where Nanba has to lead his team in a cheer competition that they don't actually show. BUT PERHAPS I WAS WRONG.

EVERY TIME. The standard introduction is basically "hello, Umeda! Still gay? Okay, now let's get back to talking about the plot."

[ivy-chan.livejournal.com]

I fell for this manga about a year and a half ago. Haven't watched the drama, but the cartoon hearts make me want to start! (I shipped so many doomed couples in it though, I swear.)

[skygiants]

I am totally kind of shipping Nakao/Nanba. Alas that Nanba is insistently a ladies' man!

(Also I seem to recall reading somewhere that everyone comes out of the show shipping Ashiya/Nakatsu . . .)

[ivy-chan.livejournal.com]

I definitely shipped Nakao/Nanba. DAMN YOU, NANBA. BE BICURIOUS AT LEAST. FOR MEEEE? Also shipped Umeda with his screwed-up first gay love, and shipped Nakatsu with Julia. Also shipped Gilbert/Ashiya. My ships are always so, so doomed.

[skygiants]

Nanba only fakes bicuriousness with Ashiya, with whom it does not count. Alas, unfair!

Julia is the American BFF, right? I don't think I've gotten to Gilbert yet!

[ivy-chan.livejournal.com]

Julia is the American BFF and...well, I guess you'll get to Gil, then. XD As for Nanba, he shall be bicurious in my mind, which is the only place that matters! Oh, Nakao, you deserve requited love.

[marfisa.livejournal.com]

Apparently so did the author of the manga "Girl Got Game" (original Japanese title "Power!"), another manga about a girl posing as a boy at boarding school for sports-related reasons which is strikingly similar to "Hana Kimi," except with a Nakatsu-like guy as the main love interest.

The most cracktastic aspect of "Girl Got Game" is that in this case, the girl winds up posing as a boy at a *coed* boarding school where it turns out her father had surreptitiously altered her application to delude the school authorities into believing she was male. His reason for doing this? Our heroine is good at basketball, and he hopes that if everyone thinks she's a boy, she'll be selected for the (boys' ) school team and distinguish herself so impressively that she will eventually be recruited by the NBA. Not the WNBA, which I'm not sure anyone had even heard of back in the '90's, when TokyoPop began publishing this series (it was before Viz started publishing "Hana Kimi," confusingly enough, although I'm pretty sure "Hana Kimi" appeared first in Japan)--the NBA.

Apparently dad was a pretty great basketball player himself back in his youth, but a knee injury scuttled his own alleged chances of being recruited by the NBA. Maybe the author was assuming that if American teams were recruiting Japanese baseball players (although I'm not sure whether that had really gotten started yet at the time of original publication, either), the same thing was bound to happen sooner or later with Japanese basketball players. This appears to ignore the fact that American basketball teams that recruit abroad, like American basketball teams in general, tend not to bother with anyone who isn't well over six feet tall. So that seven-foot-tall Chinese player whose name is not actually Ling Yao, but something close to it, got snapped up, but so far I have yet to hear of even one male Japanese basketball player being recruited by the NBA. And the heroine of "Girl Got Game" is about five foot three, which initially causes her some problems even in try-outs against the only moderately taller boy players at her new boarding school. So her dad is obviously dreaming. But hey, it gets her in a position to do the Rosalind/Viola thing surrounded by an entire dorm full of cute boys, so what's a little insanity among parental units?

"Girl Got Game" is actually pretty good, and, as I vaguely recall, somewhat more focused on the main characters than "Hana Kimi," which in the later volumes tends to go off on long tangents in which Ashiya and friends are basically guest stars in various dramatic arcs spotlighting other people. (Most of some volume around 14 or 15 is basically an extended flashback to Dr. Umeda's teen years at, I think, the same boarding school. Although this actually seemed considerably more relevant to the main storyline than the several-chapter digression a volume or so later about the problems of a gorgeous but peevish male model who didn't even have any connection to the school.) Perhaps because of this tighter focus, it wraps up in a mere eleven or twelve volumes. Unfortunately, the final English-language volume came out so long ago that most stories seem not to carry the series anymore, and it's possible that it may not even still be in print. Still, if you can get hold of "Girl Got Game," it's definitely worth reading.

[skygiants]

That does indeed sound interesting - thank you for the recommendation! (I do not actually mind the prospect of an extended flashback to Dr. Umeda's teen years, but the several-chapter digression about a male model does sound more potentially frustrating . . .)

[marfisa.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, the Dr. Umeda flashback was actually a lot more interesting than some of the later stories about present-day dorm hijinks. It actually seemed to have a real reason to be there besides providing yet another digression to prevent the present-day love interests from getting together, thus ending the main storyline. The same thing happened with "Kare Kano" ("His and Her Circumstances"--another shoujo series that is quite good overall, although sadly it has no real crossdressing), which was also about twenty-two volumes long. After the first nine or ten volumes, you sometimes wound up getting nearly two volumes at a time of what were essentially side stories about the love lives or backstories of various supporting characters. Even when these were interesting and/or somewhat relevant to the main plotline, after a while it became frustrating that you barely saw the alleged hero and heroine for entire chapters. After a few months of this, the people following the serialized manga in the magazine at the time must have been going nuts. At least Dr. Umeda's shonen ai-ish backstory both gives you some idea why he keeps helping Ashiya despite his snarkily sarcastic personality and ties in thematically with the overall genderbending/subverting of traditional gender roles elements of the series premise.