skygiants

vivien529 asked me for my top five "fandom wtf!?!?" moments, which is a question that could be interpreted two ways!

The first way - and the way I think Viv probably meant it - is the top five times that fandom made me spit my diet coke out at the screen, but to be honest there are SO MANY of these moments that narrowing them down would be simultaneously well-nigh impossible and almost pointless, seeing as for lo these several years I have reached the kind of zen state re: fandom in which I can't even be shocked anymore, just laugh. Of course there is Care Bears BDSM fic! IT'S INEVITABLE. Certainly SGA needs a girl scout cookies AU! WHY NOT. There are so many points of similarity between Giles and a weretiger? WELL OBVIOUSLY. This is just what fandom does.

What is far more likely to make me go WTF!?!?! is when an actual for-profit piece of fiction seems to think that it is in fact cracktastic fanfic, and this is how I have chosen to compile my list!

( Top Five WTF Moments In Fiction )

OKAY, GUYS, YOUR TURN. I will be disappointed if I don't spend today shrieking either because of things I tragically forgot to include, or because of things I was probably much happier not knowing!

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).

( Below the cut! )

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.)

Okay, so I have been hearing people talk about the cracktasticness of Kaori Yuki's Angel Sanctuary for many years now, and I thought that there was no way it could live up to the hype. I had been spoilered! I thought I was prepared for the insanity!

Ohhhhhh how wrong I was.

I ended up reading the entire run in about a week - twenty volumes, I think - because at the end of every issue, something so insane and inexplicable would occur that I had to obsessively continue to find out what the hell was going on. Also I fell in love with Kurai, the tiny tomboy demon princess dragon master. (She is not the main character. The main character is Setsuna who is a reincarnation of a rebellious lady angel named Alexiel and who is also in love with his sister. There are also a multitude of other characters, the vast majority of whom have at least one secret identity, often including a gender change or past life as an inanimate object or long-lost angry tentacle eyeball fetus twin in a secret laboratory. I can't describe the plot because all the best parts are probably spoilers, and anyways I have a suspicion it would end in flailing and cries of "and then the tiny cannibal angel decides to run away with the tentacle monster who was going to eat her and it's adorable!') I have no idea what happened at the end, but that appears to be okay because no one else in the world has any idea either! The important part is the insanity in the middle, most of which actually manages to be strangely touching as well as hilarious. Except for the bits where people demand that their beloved zombie mentor figures eat their shoulders because they just want to be of use to them SO MUCH. That's just hilarious.

Also I really feel the need for an icon of Kurai giving Heaven the finger.

If this write-up sounds insane and incoherent, this is just because I am attempting to give a feel for the experience of reading this manga . . . um.