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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

[skygiants]

I haven't read any of the manga, but I've actually been watching the anime too - I mostly like it so far but I'm reserving final judgment until the end of the anime run to see how they handle some of the issues. I love that it actually portrays varieties of lady nerds, though! And I actually really respect how they've been handling the almost-date-rape of the older brother, which is a situation all too often played for laughs.

[opalleon.livejournal.com]

I completely agree! I found it a completely refreshing look at a subculture that to this point I've haven't seen in anime or manga.

I mean, yes, we know there are otaku, but when portrayed in media, its usually men. So to see a group of not girls, but adult women, who are otaku in the Japanese sense was something I felt definitely time for!

Not only that, it really spells WHAT a Japanese otaku is, because Americans simplify things and automatically think the Japanese otaku equates to the *insert your pick of whatever variety American social outcast*, and that is incorrect.

And not only is there the cultural information that is relayed with this series, there is the potential for some very interesting character development! I really hope the ending does not fall flat!