skygiants | (no subject)

ojuzu asked me to list my top five shoujo manga.

Which, as with the top five Magical Girls question, is difficult because - while I've seen a fair amount of shoujo anime - I don't think I've actually read five shoujo series. You guys keep exposing my ignorance! I have been reading and loving lots more manga this year, but most of it has been shonen (FMA, Pumpkin Scissors), seinen (everything Urasawa and, weirdly, Emma and Yotsuba&!, both of which I thought might be shoujo but apparently not) or josei (Gokusen, apparently, which I would have thought was shonen or seinen. SHOWS WHAT I KNOW).

So you guys are going to get my top three shoujo series, which are also my only three shoujo series (discounting After School Nightmare, which I can't really judge yet on the basis of one volume).

1.

Still reading my way through the manga version of Ouran! STILL LOVING IT. For anyone who does not know, Ouran focuses on Haruhi Fujioki, a sort of accidental cross-dressing girl who also happens to be the only middle-class student in a super-elite high school. Through a series of wacky mishaps, she ends up posing as a guy and joining a group of extravagantly posturing bishonen as a member of their host club. HIJINKS ENSUE.

My favorite thing about Ouran is the way the series is constantly playing up, lampshading, and subverting ALL THE TROPES. All the characters except for Haruhi are thoroughly self-aware caricatures of their "type" who gradually get developed into three-dimensional people; meanwhile, Haruhi herself is one of the most amazingly unflappable and long-suffering heroines I have ever encountered. Also, it is so hyperactively enjoyable that even when it does something that would be annoying in any other manga, you just can't stay mad at it! (At least up through volume 10 or so, I can't speak for the rest yet.)

2.

Angel Sanctuary was actually the very first manga I read all the way through. THANKS SHATI. (

shati was also the reason that Utena was my very first anime. There may be a trend here.) On the bright side, everything after this seemed much easier to follow . . .

So Angel Sanctuary focuses on Setsuna, who is an Ordinary High School Boy, except actually he is a REBEL who is IN LOVE WITH HIS SISTER, except ACTUALLY he is the reincarnation of the rebel archangel Alexiel and everyone is really disappointed to find out he's a boy now, and then a whole bunch of angels and demons are after him to either kill him or make out with him OR BOTH, and then the world basically ends in Volume 3 and everyone spends the rest of the series making epic field trips to heaven and hell, and everyone is either a reincarnated angel or reincarnated sword or reincarnated Lucifer or ALL OF THE ABOVE, and some people turn into cannibalistic zombies and other people turn into tentacle monsters and still more people are killed by exploding cake and at some point there's a destructive rain of angry flying fetuses, and it's either amazing or terrifying OR BOTH. And I still have no idea what happened at the end. Maybe it's better that way.

3.

I enjoy Hana-Kimi, but it can't really compete with the joy that is Ouran or the glorious WTF that is Angel Sanctuary. It's still a lot of fun, though! Another cross-dressing manga, this one features Mizuki, a very determined girl who cross-dresses and goes undercover at an all-boy's boarding school in order to get closer to her idol, a basketball player who quit the game due to backstory angst. Cue the inevitable hijinks and gender and sexuality confusion!Hana-Kimi isn't anywhere near as subversive as Ouran, but it's clearly having so much fun with itself and its premise that you can't help but have fun with it too - at least as far as the first four volumes go, which are all I have read because

jothra has yet to live up to her promise to visit and bring me more.

SO, you know what is coming next: guys, rec me shoujo manga!

You probably have a pretty good idea of my tastes already, but for the record, some things I like: cross-dressing and more general gender-role subversion, awesome ladies who are recognized as awesome, cracktastic plots, general hilarity! Some things I do not like: jerktastic alpha male heroes, endless pointless love triangles, everyone dying in the end from cancer. (If everyone dies from a rain of flying angel fetuses I'm probably okay with that.)

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I'm not up on current series, so be warned that even though these manga have been translated into English they may be out of print or otherwise hard to find:

(1) Sailormoon. Eighteen volumes of pretty sailor-suited soldiers punishing various supernatural and alien villains in the name of the Moon! I'm fairly sure that it's out of print, but it's possible to track down legit or fan translations.

(2) Magic Knight Rayearth: One of the classic CLAMP standards, in which three girls get zapped away from Tokyo Tower in the middle of a school field trip and dropped into another world to save its princess...or so it first appears. Came out in a total of six volumes, now out of print, but according to Amazon is set to be released in two omnibus editions early next year.

(3) Library Wars: Love & War: The shoujo manga version of Toshokan Sensou, now being translated. It's a relatively faithful adaptation of the light novels and enjoyably illustrated, though it does ratchet up the Iku/Doujou UST to unexpectedly high levels. At the end of the most recent volume, they've just introduced Tedzuka's brother, so there's still a lot of material to cover.

(4) Kodomo no Omocha (Child's Toy): A cracktastic series involving the hyperactive 11-year-old Sana Kurata, a popular child actress who declares war on her sullen, monosyllabic classmate Akito Hayama after he and his friends take their teasing too far one day. Has a great cast of characters and fun storylines, with plenty of realistic pre-teen and early-teen drama. (I have VHS fansubs of the anime, and am about to have them ripped to DVD, so I intend to inflict this on you at some point, anyway.)

Other than that...I am drawing a blank, at least on series that I've personally read and like enough to own.

I am still definitely planning to *ahem* Sailor Moon from Feather next time I see her! I feel it is a NECESSARY CLASSIC for my education.

. . . I have never actually heard of that last one, but I in no way object to having this inflicted on me. :D

To give you a hint of what you're in for, here is one of the best anime music videos in existence.

Note: None of the footage is speeded up. That is exactly what the series is like.

EXCELLENT. Saving for when I am home from work!

. . . okay, that is fantastic. *_____*