Forum - View topicINTEREST: Today's Cerberus Creator Reveals Source of Pen Name
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Morry
Posts: 756 |
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Pretty dumb reason, even if it is unusual.
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Sakagami Tomoyo
 Posts: 940 Location: Melbourne, VIC, Australia |
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Didn't seem to hamper Takahashi Rumiko any. |
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Lemonchest
Posts: 1771 |
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Guessing the tweets were deleted since it's pretty easy for someone for figure out who the editor she's talking about was. Oops.
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animemaster1
 Posts: 105 Location: Beverly Hills |
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Or Hiromi Arakawa |
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Yune Amagiri
 Posts: 929 Location: France |
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What a harsh editor. Back then, it used to be ( and still is ) even rarer to see males artists drawing shoujo manga. He must be surprise that nowaday, women artists specialised in drawing cute girl and Shonen-esque battle manga are more and more frequent. Kyou no Cerberus is a good exemple of how good they are .
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Chrono1000
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That is a surprising comment for an editor to make considering the number of shonen manga that have been made by women. The editor probably was trying to help but that was a bad way to phrase it considering that was literally her job. It is possible that when the editor was young that it did make a small difference but in recent years I doubt that it would make any difference to the vast majority of readers.
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Dracospirit121
Posts: 95 |
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Kind of reminds me JK Rowlings choice of pen name, because they wanted boys to read Harry Potter.
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Sakagami Tomoyo
Posts: 940 Location: Melbourne, VIC, Australia |
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Or maybe he's just a common, garden variety sexist idiot. Even if he was "trying to help", he's still being a sexist idiot about it. |
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Chrono1000
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CrimsonHamburger
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I think you should also take in account that their demographic are actually 10 year old boys, and usually kids that age would choose the manga that's made by a man instead the one that's made by a woman, just because they might think reading the one made by a woman might be seen as girly. Obviously a lot of kids probably won't even bother reading the name of the author but it's still a very likely scenario, considering bullying is a pretty big deal in japan. And it's the job of the editor to fix little things like that. |
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capt_bunny
 Posts: 364 |
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I want to understand that reason of what you just said. But what about other shounen mangaka's that are women? FMA, Reborn!, and inuyasha were all top series that were done by women. Plus, there's a lot of women that do draw hentai, GL, and a lot of other media that people would expect a man to do that. I remember that KyoAni has mostly female animators? |
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Sakagami Tomoyo
Posts: 940 Location: Melbourne, VIC, Australia |
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There's a few things I think you should also take into account. First, their demographic isn't exclusively 10-year-old boys; magazines such as Weekly Shounen Sunday aim for a range a little under that to a bit over that. Second, given initial publication is based around magazines containing one chapter each of a couple of dozen series, how well an individual title sells on its own is not an immediate priority (though its popularity and how many people factor it into the decision to buy the mag does have some importance). Most kids will be buying the mag for one or more series that they're already interested in, and are generally going to check out what else is in the issue, be it to kill time or to get their 200 yen's worth. Third, most kids don't actually care about many of the factors that adults think they do. Sure, kids who reject something for having a female author will exist, but it's a small enough part of the audience to not really be worth worrying about. Seriously, many of the books I read as a 10-year-old boy were written by women, openly using their own name, and none of my male classmates gave a damn about that detail. Most of them were reading the exact same books, in fact.
It really isn't. Sure, bullying is a big deal, but there's usually more inviting targets to go for than "he reads a manga written by a woman", especially since no-one ever need advertise the fact that they read a given series. Anyone who would use that as an excuse to bully someone is going to just use some other excuse instead. |
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configspace
Posts: 3717 |
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Yep also found it surprising the editor suggested/insisted that, since many well known women have been making shounen manga. |
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S0crates
 Posts: 227 Location: Banned - Noticed our poor ethics |
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Well, everyone seem to take her statement at face value, as we aren't explained the reasoning behind it in enough details. Did the editor herself/himself just feel that to be the case or is it a legit marketing move that was meant to help her? We don't know, right? It's the same in the West where games or movies that have a lady in the front typically don't sell as well to a younger male audience.
There actually was a historical event in my country where there were "gender balancing" between children's books, where it used to be the 2 main publisher's called "Gyldendal Good Boy's Books" and "Gyldendal Good Girl's Books" that wrote targeted books accordingly, and they merged them into "Gyldendal's Good Books". They also adjusted all the heroes etc. to become more "gender neutral", as a part of the government program to secure equality of accessibility. The result of this experiment (back in the 80s) was that all the boys stopped reading (there was no difference in reading activity for girls). The reasoning by the experts seemed to be that the boys had a much harder time finding stories with girls as the heroes interesting, while girls had no problems finding stories with male protagonists interesting (Like Harry Potter). Regardless of the reason for this, if that's the reality (having a lady's name could potentially hurt your sales when drawing boy's manga in Japan), then being upset at the editor over that being the case is irrational. If it is the truth, then the editor gave her sound advice, as the world is what it is, and not what you want it to be nor what it should be. You can always try to challenge those ideas of course, but you're taking a financial risk by doing so. If you use a gender neutral pen name then at the very least you'd be sure you'd be judged at your merits and bypass any potential discrimination, so there's no way the advice could hurt her, so I'd at the very least would believe it to have been given in good faith if anything. |
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Agent355
 Posts: 5113 Location: Crackberry in hand, thumbs at the ready... |
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Very common, as someone pointed out, JK Rowling did it, too. But still, we're talking about the same publisher of Rumiko Takahashi, who's been writing some of the most popular boys' manga since at least the '70s. It's balderdash that boys don't read stuff women write.
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