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NEWS: Mayu Shinjo: "I Don't Think I'll Ever Write Shojo Manga Again"

Considering that BL is a genre that mostly caters towards women and girls, it's an odd kind of sentiment to make about your potential demographic.

whiskeyii wrote:

Considering that BL is a genre that mostly caters towards women and girls, it's an odd kind of sentiment to make about your potential demographic.

I thought that she was talking about the manga, not the readers.
Isn't that world of men what the BL demographic wants?

I'm guessing the parts most people disagree with are the bolded parts:

Quote:

I also like the fact that girls don't appear in it. Since a long time ago, I've loved the world of men. Even if we're not talking about boys-love, I really like things like friendship between men and fights with men, kind of a world that women can't enter.

While I'm more sure that the first bolded part is just because Mayu Shinjo doesn't like drawing women, it sounds very exclusionary. The last part even more so. Considering that BL is a genre that mostly caters towards women and girls, it's an odd kind of sentiment to make about your potential demographic.

However, it is also crazy problematic saying that your own gender "cannot enter" other gender's places.

Momokochan wrote:

However, it is also crazy problematic saying that your own gender "cannot enter" other gender's places.

Well, men are from Mars and women are form Venus as they say Both genders think and behave differently at their core.

I have to say I've always admired this kind of freedom of expression out of anime/manga, and I suppose Japanese culture in general. With how America is so concerned with female portrayals in media lately, I can only imagine the fallout it would cause if someone said this in some interview on Kotaku. Really though, Japan has such a diversity of anime/manga/games and media in general there's something for everyone to enjoy at the end of the day. If she wants to write about men instead of women, more power to her. She probably doesn't need radicals jumping all over her and scrutinizing her career choices.

-Stuart Smith

I've been thinking about how I'd react if a male mangaka stated that he wanted to give up shonen romance manga and focus on yuri manga for men. It's still a person eschewing one gender to write unrealistic, fetishizing stories about the other for straight peoples' satisfaction. It's problematic (not saying it's *wrong*). I don't know if it's exactly the same, though. The problem is not only what she said, it's how female characters were written in her manga, and how her comments reflect a bigger problem of female characters being dismissed in problematic ways by fujoshi--in BL, in shonen, and even in shojo manga. People are bringing up different mangaka who have had different attitudes towards BL. Fumi Yoshinaga is a great example of a BL/Yaoi focused mangaka who has positive attitudes towards women, female characters, and actual gay men. In her autobiographical work, "Not Love But Delicious Food Make Me So Happy", she writes about meeting a gay man for the first time and actually apologizing to him for writing about gay men without knowing any, and possibly offending them. She cares about how she portrays her characters and is sensitive to how those portrayals affect actual people in real life. Comparing her attitude to that of a mangaka who doesn't seem to be interested in portraying women or gay men in a sensitive manner isn't fair; both are writing fiction and neither is hurting anyone, and there's a place for it. But it's uncomfortable, problematic, and seems to come from a place of internalized misogyny to dismiss female characters and fetishize gay ones.

Wow, I don't know what to say about this. I wonder how messed up Japan is for us to see this level of internalized misogyny in these poor women. They've been brainwashed by the rampant sexism running around in the culture. I hope someone can help her.. could we petition for her to move to America and start making American comics instead?

Agent355 wrote:

I don't blame them, though, I blame the worst aspects of their culture (which, let's be honest, is just another aspect of a global, historical disregard for women).

If you call this a culture of disregard, I don't know what to say.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy

I think she's just saying men have a special bond/friendship that women could never have or understand with a guy or another girl. Like some kind of "bro code".

Something that I have observed over the last few years is that extremists and people who like to feel victimized have become far more vocal over the Internet (with Gamergate being just a small part of it). It's rare to find a place online nowadays that's open to the public with an open discussion area that doesn't soon get flooded with people who feel injustice is going on there or discussed there and want to say what they want to say. (I suspect many of them are trolls who know it's far too easy to stir up trouble with controversial statements and fringe opinions though.)

When I was a younger fan and initially discovered the concept of yaoi/BL/etc was pretty floored. I've never seen such an abundance of gay fiction before! I thought "I'm home!!!"

But after perusing through a lot of it for awhile I came to realize something was just...off. It was all stuff which obviously didn't even have gay men in mind, all coded in a way to appeal to women who were looking for something that was naughty and "felt forbidden", and written by people who it seemed never to have met an actual gay person in their life.