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[skygiants]

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.)

Comments

[hafl.livejournal.com]

Seventh anything by Moto Hagio. There is a new collection of her stories that was recently published in English (Drunken Dream and other stories), but she also did a lot of other work. I think that 11nin iru! (We were eleven), was published in English, but is long out of print. If you can get it, it is a really good sci-fi story with some transgender elements.

Eighth, though not really a manga, the Akage no Anne, Kaze no Shoujo Emily and Wakakusa Monogatari anime series. There are adaptations of foreign novels for girls, respectively Anne of the Green Gables, Emily of the New Moon and Little Women. As one of the biggest fans of Lucy Maud Montgomery I know, I have to recommend this. (Okay, Little Women are not LMM and I don't really like the book, but it was rather important in development of shoujo in Japan.) I think all the series can be found in English.

Ninth, Ribon no Kishi by Osamu Tezuka (translated as Princess Knight). A country can only have male heirs, so when a girl is born, she is brought up as a boy and made to always act like a boy. She also fights crime and practices some recursive crossdressing, where she pretends to be her own twin sister, so she can have romance with a prince. The main conflict is between the role of prince and princess and it had a lot of influence on Utena. I think the English translation is out of print. There is also an anime series, but I know nothing about it.

Tenth and last, Aoi Hana, but only because I need to round up my Top Ten Shoujo Recommendations and Shimura Takako is always good. It is a yuri series, where the main character moves back to the town where she grew up to start high school. She reunites with her childhood friend, who goes to a neighbouring high-class school and falls in love with an upperclassman who unwittingly uses her to avoid some issues she has about her former teacher marrying her sister. (I should probably tidy up the pronouns in the sentence, but this list is going on for too long and I'm getting tired.) That's the plot of the first story arc, which is also covered in the anime series. Manga is still not finished, but all chapters published until now can be found around the Internet. Anime is also available in English.

Oh, and seconding the recommendations of Sailor Moon, Rayearth, Card Captor Sakura and Skip Beat.

(I think I lost all my manliness with this list.)