Love*Com Continued

Aaaand it looks like the author of Love*Com intends to do exactly what I feared by making her characters conform to gender norms despite their "flaws" of being too tall and too short. Awesome. Well at least I made it to Volume 3 without getting disgusted?

I was initially intrigued by the entrance of Risa's childhood friend Haruka, a boy with a girl's name who liked girls' things and was always getting picked on. I happen to like girly-boys very much, but manga is never, ever kind to them. Anyway, Haruka developed a crush/obsession with Risa because she always saved him as a child. He confesses this to her, but right as this happens a dog comes up and scares them. Ootani comes out of nowhere and saves them, yelling about how Risa is still a woman even if she's a giant and still needs to be protected. And Haruka ends up saying that even though Ootani is short, he's still manly and that he himself must become more manly so he can protect Risa like a good heteronormative couple.

Sheesh.

Well, it's still not bad enough for me to entirely put down, but it's not looking good. I'll keep on reading to see if it redeems itself or just gets worse. Stay tuned for more updates. 

Quick Review: Love★Com

Something you may not know about me yet (but you could probably guess): I am not a fan of shoujo. I was a pretty butch kid growing up, and I preferred the manga directed towards men because of their epic storylines, epic battles and epic friendships. Romance has never been my thing, and unfortunately that is the target of most (if not all) shoujo manga. However, I've lately realized that if I'm going to have a go at manga from a feminist perspective, I have to read the things that are targeted toward women and girls. So I'm embarking on an epic quest to find a shoujo manga that (a) has a good, believable love story and (b) has a good strong female protagonist.

My first foray into this wilderness was the first volume of Love*Com, or Lovely Complex by Nakahara Aya. The premise is promising enough: the budding highschool romance between a girl who is too tall and a guy who is too short. The title comes from the complexes that each of them have about their heights. The protagonist, Risa, is rejected by boys because she is too tall and therefore "too masculine," while her friend Ootani has a similar problem with being too short. They argue constantly (a sure sign of romance to come for shoujo manga, somehow... I guess all that annoying highschool sexual tension), and consider each other enemies until they both find a common goal—each one likes the friend of the other. So they conspire to help each other get dates with the other people. Of course this scheme fails miserably, and Risa comes out realizing that she and Ootani are actually very similar, sharing the same interests, hobbies and love of adventure. And oh no, could this be... LOVE???????? I'm sure they'll get that far maybe 17 volumes later, but oh well.

So far I'm actually moderately enjoying this. I really like Risa's design, and she ends up making some hilarious facial expressions. Ootani is also ridiculously cute and effeminate looking despite his constant wish to be seen as "a man." I actually have some hopes for this though, because the manga revolves around two people who don't really fit well into the assigned gender roles. Of course the mangaka could easily destroy this by having them happily become a "man" and a "woman" by the end of the manga, resolving their conflicts by having them fit in with standards of femininity and masculinity, rather than realize how useless those categories are in the first place. For now I will continue, however warily.

Manga Review: Vampire Knight（ヴァンパイア騎士 )

So I've decided to take a quick look at a comic that has recently taken the shoujo world by storm: Vampire Knight. As Maggie can tell you, vampire stories have seen a huge uprising recently in YA Lit (Twilight, Vampire Kisses, etc.), television (True Blood is the new one on HBO), and film (the recent film adaptation of Twilight), so it's no wonder that a manga with a title like Vampire Knight would be flying off the shelves. I should preface this post with a disclaimer: I don't like vampire stories. As a whole I find them rather contrived, as they all rest on that popular "she's a girl, he's a vampire" dilemma wherein he has to hold in his raging urge to rip her throat out  (read: man lust) to preserve her innocence (read: virginity) all in the midst of fierce sexual tension (read: high school brand hormones). However, I figured I would look into this one to see if it had any new play on the tired out gender cliches. And I'll go ahead and tell you, the short answer is no.

The main protagonist is Yuuki ("gentle princess"... ugh) Cross, the spunky and clumsy yet caring, innocent and unknowingly super hot adopted daughter of the Cross Academy's headmaster. The academy is made up of a Day Class for normal, human students and a Night Class for the vampire students, who are all really hot. The head of the vampire class is really really hot Kaname Kuran (seeing a pattern?), a "pure blood" vampire who happened to save Yuuki from a mean, ugly vampire when she was little. The other protagonist is Zero Kiryuu, Yuuki's angsty (hot) childhood friend who is totally in love with her who also happens to be a vampire, because he was bitten by one when a "pure blood" vampire killed his whole family...whew. I wish I were making this up, I really do. Zero is my least favorite type of character: the hot friend who secretly loves the girl, is super protective of her but a huge dick to her face. And of course, I am betting 5 bucks right now that this is the guy she will end up with.

For the first, oh, fourteen chapters, Yuuki is the only notable female character in the manga. I am serious. There is one other girl who has like seven lines, which are all about how she hates Yuuki and wants to bone Kaname. So the manga has already fantastically failed The Bechdel Test. What else? Yuuki has little to no agency in the entire manga. Typical of vampire stories, she is constantly in dangerous situations from which she needs to be saved by Zero or Kaname, only to have her savior slather all over her neck and then push her away so he can hate himself for giving in to his raging lust. She has a fighting stick but she never, ever uses it, or else it is knocked out of her hand in the first five seconds so that she can get slathered on by her attacker before getting slathered on by her saviour. Because of the sexual implications of vampirism, every dangerous encounter that Yuuki has is colored by the possibility of rape, and basically every safe encounter she has with Kaname or Zero is sexual. Sometimes there is some uncomfortable blurring between the two. So far, the manga is a complete fantasy for women who want to surrender to hot guys who are mean to them.

I'm only fourteen chapters in (and I'm impressed I got this far), but I think I will continue because apparently a new girl is about to enter the scene. If she is what I predict (an evil, beautiful but ultimately innocuous rival), I will certainly throw the thing down in disgust. If not, maybe I'll be back to report some more. For now, I'm giving myself a break from bad shoujo and reading some China Mieville. Goodnight everyone.