From Shugo Chara to Hot Gimmick, Chris and Steve decide to throw Rebecca a bone by looking at the shojo manga bundle offered by HumbleBundle.
Disclaimer:The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network. Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead.
Chris
I'd offer you a nice egg in these trying times, but that's how you wound up in this situation. Instead, if it's shojo specifically you're looking for, great news: perennial deal-slinging website (and reason so many of our Steam libraries are bloated) HumbleBundle is offering a big batch of material from the genre! At as little as one whole dollar for the first volumes of the series featured, that's cheaper than a pack of eggs even back in the day, and probably one we can finesse expensing to Daddy Kadokawa.
Also, we've put Rebecca through so much; this is as good a reason as any to spend a column chatting about shojo as a genre, like she's so subtly asked us to.
I was about to say, Rebecca has been (very kindly) prodding us to cover more shojo in TWIA for a while, so my accumulated guilt kicked in as soon as I saw that bundle. And I'm glad it did! I have a lot of shojo blind spots, and this was a great opportunity to familiarize myself with some titles I recognize from the store shelves, but had never actually picked up and read.
Same for me! My experience with shojo trends more toward the version with "mahou" in front of it. This bundle's focus on more of the grounded romance comics the genre's magazines often deal in provided an opportunity to see what that was all about!
Not that said grounded romance is entirely the case, as seen in the first egg-cellent series we started talking about here. Shugo Chara is, indeed, a magical girl series, with its own adventurous spins on top of some romantic maneuverings just getting going in the first volume.
I'd obviously heard of Shugo Chara, but I had no idea it was so egg-centric. The premise is basically "what if the 'Nanami's Egg' episode of Utena kicked off its own separate magical girl story?"
Shugo Chara's take on magical girls definitely feels like playing around with the possibilities of the genre as it was in then-contemporary 2006. Amu's "transformations" as alternate aspirational personalities inform a lot of her interactions with characters as she figures out the story and herself. Any magical combat or battles are more brief and incidental for now.
Yeah, it's wrapped up in goofy antics for most of the first volume, but that premise of eggs containing alter-egos or shadow selves that can temporarily take hold of your personality is a pretty psychologically rich one! Especially for Amu, who has three of the little chibi critters running around.
If Shugo Chara was a series that lodged itself in my brain despite never reading it before now, that was 200% down to the fashion and character designs. I love Amu's smart little plaid...sock skirts?
Peach-Pit are creators worth getting a column to themselves (I know readers are aching for our hot takes on the recently rereleased DearS). I also love the way they describe themselves in the author's notes of this volume.
With Shugo Chara itself, I can see a lot of the appeal in the setup even if it's so full of components that its eggshell feels ready to burst. It'd have been nice to get a better idea of what the different little character sprites could do or how their personality switches could affect Amu. But I guess that's what going back and buying the further volumes in that bundle is for. I can at least enjoy recognizing its standby genre ideas, like an antagonistic potential danger boyfriend who, for me, calls to mind Quiche from Tokyo Mew Mew.
And that isn't even all the egg action you get for a dollar. The bundle also includes the first volume of Shugo Chara Chan, a yonkoma spinoff collection. It doesn't really have a standalone appeal, but it's a cute bonus.
I appreciate it as a signifier of how well Shugo Chara did back in the day, that this sort of spin-off was even published here. But yeah, it's cute and gives me a little more focus on the Charas themselves, like I said I wanted. It even packs in crossovers with the likes of Hell Girl and references to an extremely defunct Yahoo page if you need to be immersed in as much of that mid-2000s sauce as possible.
Lol, I was going to bring up the website too. Such a charming relic of the time. And that anthropological aspect is probably what I got the most out of this volume. Plus some good self-deprecating gags at the expense of the mangaka.
Peach-Pit seem like good eggs! And from Peach-Pit to Peach Girl, I can let that bring me to the other series in this set that occupies that "saw it on the shelves constantly but never picked it up" space.
A Tokyopop classic if ever there were one (and if "Tokyopop classic" were a phrase we would want to accept into our vernacular). But yeah, Peach Girl sits firmly in the romantic quadrant of shojo, here dealing with the tumultuous high school life of Momo (of course), whose main issue is that people make snap judgments about her due to her tan.
Even as removed as the societal opinions of Japan in 1997 could be, I think Peach Girl does a good job of demonstrating why Momo specifically has such a tumultuous relationship with her massive amounts of melatonin. Several of these shojo volumes deal with girls grappling with social judgments for their looks, and I like how Momo lets herself hit back. Often with a mean right hook.
Don't know why I never got around to reading this series back in the day, Momo rules.
She's almost absurdly likable. And while Peach Girl doesn't use this exact term, it's remarkable how frankly it addresses colorism, which remains an issue throughout the world to this day. Momo's darker skin is constantly criticized by others, and she internalizes those comments as insecurity, wishing her skin were lighter.
I wouldn't call the manga perfect in its handling of this, but I'm relieved that Miwa Ueda at least understands that Momo's skin color isn't a problem that needs to be solved (and given her author's comments, it sounds like she speaks from her own experiences on the swim team).
For the record, I cannot speak from my experience on any of this. I'm so pale that I skip the tanning stage entirely and go straight to sunburn (picture related).
The societal judgements are the background radiation of Momo's issues, but it's not helped that her immediate circle of acquaintances foments her body-image problems in the foreground. A huge part of her disdain for her skin tone comes from a past apparent misunderstanding with her childhood friend/crush. And that misunderstanding is further propagated by her awful "friend" Sae.
Sae is, frankly, incredible, by the way. I love any romance antagonist who reaches mustache-twirling levels like this.
Agreed! Peach Girl finds that sweet spot where the meddling characters are just cartoonish enough to flip their awful qualities into compelling ones. Sae lives for the drama. Kiley makes you want to punch him. And I actively want to see both of them make things Worse.
I think it helps a lot, too, that Peach Girl has an amazing face game. Momo delivers my favorite expressions out of all of the manga we sampled this week.
Miwa Ueda's art is a standout; you can see why Tokyopop wanted to plaster pictures of Momo all over their promos back in the day. Even if I also have to chuckle at their choice to render a character name that's all but certainly supposed to be "Kairi" as the aforementioned Kiley.
It was good to go to Peach Girl, I think, before I looked over the other romance entries on this list, since as one of the older series in the set, it demonstrated for me a lot of the tropes and typicalities that shojo romance manga have been dealing in over the decades—multiple degrees of misunderstandings and dudes who occupy various points on the asshole-to-heart-of-gold spectrum.
All genres have their staples. For better or worse, shojo is full of handsome and rakish love interests who can't stop themselves from kissing the heroine without her consent. Say I Love You has the same type of guy, except he is the most mid-aughts emo/visual-kei dreamboat boy I have seen in a loooong while.
Say I Love You shares what I clocked as quite a few structural signifiers with multiple manga in this bundle. You've got a socially struggling girl who incidentally interacts with the hottest dude in school, who turns out to be more sensitive than you might expect. It's sort of shojo's version of a seemingly powerless shonen hero who finds out he actually has the strongest power—except this genre's leaning toward reality lets it feel rooted in the (often directly described) real backgrounds of its creators. And given the preponderance of bad boys in some of these spaces, it's nice to have some more genuine guys, and also still have them get kicked in the face sometimes.
Critiquing shojo en masse for having toxic love interests is definitely something you can do, but I also think it's disingenuous to dismiss the genre for it. These are, after all, works of fiction meant to entertain, and you can extract tons of entertainment out of messy romantic polygons with a splash of flavorfully rancid vibes.
I like how this series, and others in this bundle, make romance work as a driving narrative thrust not necessarily from wanting to see characters get together, but from wanting to see their relationships help them grow as people, regardless of whether they stay together. Mei's learning to trust people more from her interactions with Yamato, and she likewise wants to see her classmate Asami overcome societal judgements about her body (for another Peach Girl parallel).
The romance can move incrementally, a slow burn, as these are wont to be, but like you said, many of the interactions are charming enough that they carry it.
I also really liked the stuff with Asami. I think bits like this, even if they're not the main focus of the narrative, prove that these shojo manga are looking at the big picture thoughtfully. Like, sure, many of these are romances that take place in high school, but that in itself is a highly complicated social and cultural ecosystem, and each example here looks at it a bit differently. That's a meaningful difference when compared to other anime/manga where the school setting feels incidental to the plot.
Right, a series like Say I Love You superficially shares a lot in its high school setting and setup with another series in the bundle, A Condition Called Love, but they each feel like their own thing due to different nuances in their character writing, to say nothing of the entire era separating them from each other.
It's the most recent of these by about a decade (based on its start date), plus it just got an anime adaptation last year. And while its male lead may not forcefully smooch the protagonist out of nowhere, don't take that as evidence he's normal.
This is a case where I could enjoy the seeming sensitivity and funny excesses of Hotboy McPopularguy as he was attentive to Hotaru in this first volume, while alarm bells were also ringing about how he might get down the line in future volumes.
His vibes are...strange...to say the least. In general, it felt to me like A Condition Called Love softened many of the rougher edges present in the older shojo series, but I don't know if that was smart. Like, I know how to parse characters like Kiley and Yamato. They're archetypal bad boys with unique identifiers who perform their roles well in their respective narratives. Hananoi feels more mercurial, and not in an intriguing way.
Things like the bit about him showing up preternaturally early to wait for Hotaru are funny, I laughed, but that also highlights how the character feels more like he's here to do bits than be a character at this point.
Speaking to the modernity of A Condition Called Love, it feels like current mystery-box style writing as applied to a shojo love interest, and in practice means that I have less idea of who Hananoi is as a person compared to the likes of the aforementioned Kiley and Yamato.
I also like the one rather raw look we got into Hananoi's interiority, when he talked about the intensity of his feelings compared to Hotaru's more tepid curiosity. That, to me, is a compelling contrast, and I think that's the nugget the manga should dig into more.
I can absolutely agree with food being part of the lexicon of her love language. Turns out there's plenty to relate to in these shojo manga!
And speaking as someone who developed a fascination with astronomy at a very early age, you can bet I was eager to see what kind of science-fiction yarn Mars would spin.
Turns out: not a lot of space travel in this one. It does, however, have my other obsession of choice: over-the-top melodrama.
MARS was one you and Rebecca both shouted out as we were getting into this bundle, so my interest was piqued just off that. It's also the actual oldest manga in this bunch, beating out Peach Girl by about a year. And it stands out on that pedigree for the genre, down to the antisocial girl protagonist and the bad boy with a heart of gold who can see something special in her.
It's distinguished by the aforementioned melodrama and a serious motorcycle racing fandom. It's endearingly funny every time Fuyumi Soryo shifts into near-edutainment on the subject of this motorsport.
Fuyumi Soryo wants you to know she can draw motorcycles, and I respect that. She also originally went to school for fashion, and you can see that for yourself whenever Rei is on the page.
[bites my tongue to stop myself from making a "stussy" joke]
I talked about the stations of many of these shojo romance heroines, unapologetically drawing on the experiences of their manga artists, and so here I appreciate Kira's status as an artist and how it factors into the story. It provides an effective window to tell that Rei has more to him than being a disaffected bad boy, in how he can appreciate Kira's art. And other art, in his own particular ways.
Of all the guys and their layered constructions of charm points as the primary love interests of these manga, I think Rei hits the mark the hardest as a complexly attractive prospect. He's genuinely cool, and in this first volume, he comes with just enough tortured mystery behind him to make you, the reader, believe you could fix him as well as Kira seems to be.
In general, I think Mars is the most economical of the bunch. Each of Rei's and Kira's scenes accomplishes something, either pushing their relationship forward or our understanding of them. Soryo's art, too, uses negative space and creative paneling to make the most out of the fewest lines.
Mars also executes its tropes a cut above the rest. Like, both Peach Girl and Say I Love You feature a scene where the heroine is sexually harassed or threatened, in response to which the asshole with a heart of gold rescues her. Mars' iteration of that, however, feels the most genuinely skin-crawling.
It hits so hard with Kira's previous positive appraisal of this creepoid teacher, contrasting with what we've seen of Rei's bad-boy persona so far. It fits with that element you mentioned earlier about recreating the complex environments of schools, with a bonus of power imbalance and reinforcing the themes about not judging people based on their first appearance-based impressions.
As we've reviewed, that point comes up a lot in these comics.
But here's where Mars goes above and beyond: it follows this up with an incredible scene of Rei writing the teacher's crimes on the blackboard in perfect English, after which the teacher tries to murder him by cutting his motorcycle brakes.
I posted the low-five scene that follows that because I loved it, but yes, this whole bit is incredible. Makes Rei appear even more awesome, and even slips in backstory details like him growing up in LA, hence his perfect English (presumably this is also where he picked up his basketball-hustling skills). I gotta remind myself that this was only the first volume of MARS alongside all these other initial entries, since this manga within that amount of pages is getting up to those sorts of antics alongside the kind of violent girl bullying that makes so much shojo manga proud.
Also, confirmation that Rei has mommy issues. Because of course.
The final page of the first volume tells you everything you need to know about what Mars's tone is. Real apocalyptic adolescent drama, just the way it should be.
But seriously, that commitment to its exaggerated version of reality lets Mars get away with florid lines like Kira comparing a motorcycle's engine to the sound of crying. I never could have come up with this. I love it.
This was my first exposure to actually reading all of these manga, and MARS was absolutely the one I came away enjoying the most. It proves a couple of things: you can't beat the classics, and shojo romances have always had the juice. You just aren't getting these kinds of emotional indulgences from the genre's different-demographic cousins.
Which makes it a shame that shojo remains so unrepresented when it comes to anime adaptations. I'd agree that Mars had the most juice out of all of the titles in that bundle, but it's also the only one to never get an accompanying anime, so its footprint in wider Western spaces is practically nonexistent. I couldn't even tell you how I originally heard about it. And I'm sure there are plenty of shojo titles I've never heard of that are as good or better.
It does feel like the prominence of the genre and its promotion over here has fallen off a bit compared to Tokyopop (for all of Disco Stu's other ills), knowing they had an effective audience outreach collection in titles like MARS and Peach Girl back in the day. Virtually the only shojo adaptation this season, April Showers Bring May Flowers, didn't even get picked up for a simulcast. That's disappointing, since even a surface-level sampling of the genre, as we've hit here, shows how it's not just important, but damn entertaining in its own right.
Amen, Mr. Nozaki-kun. Hope you get a second season someday.
At least I know I've got plenty of Peach Girl and MARS to follow up on as a result of this indulgence, and a cheap way to do so if I go back and buy now. And I've also got an understanding that there's plenty to seek out in further readings. Like you said, the shojo well runs deep.
Which is to say, don't worry shojo fans: I'm sure we'll hit certified art like Hot Gimmick in the next batch we sample.
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