Forum - View topicJason Thompson's House of 1000 Manga - Rica Takashima and Yuri Monogatari
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pasteloverdose
Posts: 20 |
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Err... Why not both? There are some women who enjoy yaoi due to feminism, equality, and so forth. There are others who enjoy it for having a lot of men together on one page  And even then, there are women (and maybe men?) who enjoy yaoi for all of the reasons above - it's the combination of all these elements that makes them love it. More importantly, different yaoi series aren't always meant to produce the same effect. Yaoi/BL/shounen-ai/etc. had changed so much over the course of 30-something years. Some BL series might be aiming at the whole "equal relationship" aspect, and others will be more focused on the guys being attractive. Read Hagio Moto's The Heart of Thomas, then read The Tyrant Falls in Love. They feel very different and serve different purposes, just as Rica'tte Kanji and Strawberry Panic are a lot different from each other.
Okay, back on topic. Rica'tte Kanji is great. Probably my favorite translated "yuri" manga. (Not really yuri by association, since it's more of a LGBT work than the usual schoolgirl stuff - not that I have anything against schoolgirl series - Marimite is a great show.) Someone above me mentioned Honey & Honey as another sadly-unlicensed realistic yuri manga, but personally, I prefer Amamiya Sae's Plica. It's not autobiographical, but it's very realistic. I for one related to the characters so, so much. |
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LauraOrganaSolo
 Posts: 109 |
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I have no interest in yuri (although I like MariMite's tender raburabu) but I enjoyed this informative article.
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agila61
 Posts: 3213 Location: NE Ohio |
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February 28 2006 Okazu review of Plica |
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zgripţuroicǎ
 Posts: 140 Location: Newburgh, NY |
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For your first paragraph, even being a guy, I can tell you, yes there are still plenty of things people feel women aren't "supposed" to say. To go with the easiest example, which I here mentioned more than any others, guys tell their friends they've slept with a different woman every night for the past month, they get a legendary status with their friends. In a lot of places in the US, if a woman said the same thing, she'd be called a slut or a whore. There are plenty of double standards. For the second one, I think you may be taking it out of context. I read that as referring to female yaoi fans in Japan, rather than those in the US. In Japan, there are still plenty of stereotypes about how women should behave, what they should be interested, etc. Also, being interested in yaoi because you like project yourself into the story doesn't prohibit your from reading heterosexual manga, just as guys projecting themselves into lesbian porn can just put themselves in the role of the guy if they're watching straight porn. |
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ptolemy18
Manga Reviewer/Creator/Taster
Posts: 357 Location: San Francisco |
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Thanks for the great post, littlegreenwolf. I generalized broadly when I said that people read yaoi (or yuri) because they're not quite ready to imagine themselves in heterosexual relationships; I know plenty of sex-positive, non-repressed yaoi readers too. And Hagio may be showing her age as a first-generation feminist by assuming that yaoi means a fantasy escape, or a sort of devaluation of actual women's experiences. But like pasteloverdose said, I do think that both reasons can be true; I think that all these reasons for liking yaoi and yuri can be true for different people. When I was younger, I definitely read yuri because I felt uncomfortable with male sexuality (despite being a man), so I find it easy to believe that there are women who feel the same way about yaoi. I'd like to think that we're getting closer to the point as a society when gay relationships are no longer exoticized or demonized, but each gender will always have some misunderstandings or exoticization about the other gender, just because we can't switch bodies and see the world from within one another's heads. Yaoi and yuri manga play off of this fantasy, regardless of whether they have any relationship to social attitudes towards same-sex relationships etc etc. In fiction, you're always either looking at the character from outside, or projecting yourself into the character. Actually, when I was really young (like elementary school) I would stop reading any book in which I personally couldn't imagine myself doing something that the protagonist had done. If they did something too gross, or immoral, or whatever, I'd stop reading. -_- I just couldn't get over the idea that *I* was the protagonist. As I got older, luckily, I got over this, or I wouldn't read very much manga. But anyway, I think it's natural to imagine yourself inhabiting the body of a character when you read a story; whether you're thinking "ooooh I'm a boy/I'm a girl" or, more rationally, "I'm a human being in this scenario", that's up to the individual reader. |
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