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Brain Diving - I Don't Wanna Grow Up


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penguintruth



Joined: 08 Dec 2004
Posts: 8459
Location: Penguinopolis
PostPosted: Wed Mar 16, 2011 5:05 pm Reply with quote
Moomintroll wrote:


Aren't you contradicting yourself? If he threw it in there to "dirty up the scenario", it's designed to be titillating..


By "dirtying up" I mean to add to the grittiness of the piece. The mean streets of Chicago.

Quote:
I can certainly see why you might like it in spite of the sexual elements. I thought that the writing was dreadful, the plot shallow and the characterisation perfunctory but I also remember thinking that the action scenes were exceptionally well handled (especially the driving scenes) and being impressed with the technical art (if not the character designs and backgrounds).
But I also remember it having some fairly blatant paedophilic elements that I found disturbing at the time - and enurtsol's post would appear to strongly back up my admittedly feeble memory - and I'm not sure why you think I should say otherwise just because my understanding of a work you enjoy makes you uncomfortable.


The writing was fine for the type of manga it is, an action manga with attractive women with guns hunting deranged criminals. It's a perfect celebration of 70s/80s/90s shoot-em-up flicks. And actually, I think the characters are very charismatic and interesting.

But I don't believe there's any blatant pedophilic elements.

And in fact, the scene in question where May "services" a guy as a prostitute is not a flashback to her old days as a prostitute, but her going undercover in the present, as a 17 year old. A few pages later one of the other prostitutes recognizes her from her past.
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Shay Guy



Joined: 03 Jul 2009
Posts: 2107
PostPosted: Wed Mar 16, 2011 5:28 pm Reply with quote
Quote:
She brings up points that I hadn't really considered before, namely that a lot of doujinshi and lolicon manga has its roots in shoujo manga that emphasizes feelings and beautiful femininity rather than the more typically masculine gekiga, or story manga.


I've suspected for some time now that much of the "moe" phenomenon can be traced back to Sakura Kinomoto.
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eyeresist



Joined: 02 Apr 2007
Posts: 995
Location: a 320x240 resolution igloo (Sydney)
PostPosted: Thu Mar 17, 2011 12:23 am Reply with quote
Good review.

BassKuroi wrote:
And her account of Kosuke Fujishima's hatred towards otakus in the same book looks kind of contradictory.

How so?

Re Lolicon, surely the term encompasses not only sexually explicit works, but also the general eroticisation of underage-seeming characters.
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BassKuroi





PostPosted: Fri Mar 18, 2011 12:57 am Reply with quote
I've just discovered that the editor role in manga is not quite new and exclusive for manga: Kawabata Yasunari had an editor, called Sugawara, who supervised and helped him giving him advices. We're talking about a Nobel Prize Laureate.

eyeresist wrote:
BassKuroi wrote:
And her account of Kosuke Fujishima's hatred towards otakus in the same book looks kind of contradictory.

How so?


Page 134. She textually quote him:

"(...) People say my work is otaku- ish (otakuppoi), but I don't delinerately write in a otaku style. I don't really see what they mean really. I don't mind fi my fans are otaku but I don't like the kind of letters and parcels I get from the fans. They are creepy. I think those people might get into amateur manga and animation because it's not the real world. They are not really bad, they just seem kind of lonely"

penguintruth wrote:
Gunsmith Cats can't be called lolicon manga in any real definition of the word. Yeah, it has some borderline elements, but just barely, and they're not really part of the main narrative or even that reoccurring. It's a laughable thing to even accuse that title of.


I completely agree with you. The fact that GSC is called a lolicon manga is almost hilarious. Kinsella called Rally Vincent a lolita in an illustration (page 123).
In a definition (page 122): "Lolicom manga usually features a young girlish heroine with large eyes and a childish but voluptous figure, neatly clad in a revealing outfit or set of armour (...)."
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rinmackie



Joined: 05 Aug 2006
Posts: 1040
Location: in a van! down by the river!
PostPosted: Fri Mar 18, 2011 4:55 pm Reply with quote
Quote:
In a definition (page 122): "Lolicom manga usually features a young girlish heroine with large eyes and a childish but voluptous figure, neatly clad in a revealing outfit or set of armour (...)."


Wow, according to that definition most anime girls are lolis!
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