Manga Genre Conventions
Sep. 13th, 2020 12:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
writerkitIs badly-handled rape a *thing* in contemporary-set shojo manga (or at least, was it a thing in the late nineties and early 2000s), or is it that the ones with rape are most likely to get translated, or did I just coincidentally happen to pick up all the ones that were like this? (By "fully-contemporary" I mean "with no fantastic or science-fictional elements".)
I ask this because I've finally gotten my hands on some of the later volumes of Mars, and as it turns out right after the point where I stopped as a teenager it takes a sudden swerve from "quiet girl likes biker boy with some extra complications from biker boy's unresolved issues about his identical twin's suicide" into "we have an ACTUAL SOCIOPATH in our school targeting us and also it turns out girl's stepfather raped her and now her mother wants to get back together with the stepfather!" Which I'd just take as Mars having an unusually high HSQ-- this is the same manga that gives us a girl credibly threatening to break another girl's fingers to get her to stay away from the boy and then them becoming best friends a couple of chapters later in, like, the first two volumes-- except that the other two I've picked up along these lines are *also* like that and what I've read in other genres *isn't*.
No one liked contemporary high school anything when I was regularly buying manga-- I was 100% looked down on for reading it even though I was *also* reading the fantasy everyone else was--- so I was mostly buying these by what had the most attractive cover copy on the first volume. Both Mars and Kare Kano bill themselves as cute high school romances. Mars I described above; Kare Kano I still haven't finished but I have been given to understand the hero rapes the heroine later on and they still get married.
Life is slightly different in that its tagline is "Real teens. Real stories. Real Life," and it *was* billing itself as Dramatic and Controversial. But it still initially advertises itself as being about cutting because your best friend turns on you when you get into a high school and she doesn't, and it escalates *extremely* quickly to "heroine's new friend's boyfriend is blackmailing heroine into being his sex slave by threatening to make friend miserable if she doesn't comply." (And he's, like, incredibly mustache-twirly "I am a VILLAIN, watch me VILLAIN" about the whole thing when he's alone with the heroine, in a way I'm very skeptical of real abusers ever being.)
Of the other manga I've read, it's all in other genres, and none of it is like this. Fruits Basket is probably closest in that it's *explicitly* contemporary-set and the fantastic elements are limited to the curse on the Sohmas-- this is not an alternate world and not a world where "magic" is a thing for most people. Fruits Basket deals a lot with child abuse, but despite how awful some of the characters can be, there's never, ever any rape. Occasional physical abuse, and a lot of verbal abuse, but never rape. (The scary elements also build much more gradually and cohere well and do not give you a sense that you are racing from melodramatic moment to melodramatic moment with no room to breathe.)
Magic Knight Rayearth is a portal fantasy-- they start out in contemporary Tokyo, but they don't stay there long, we don't see them there, and once they're through the portal everything's focused on plot. Even in the sequel series, where romance starts to creep in a bit more, we don't get this kind of thing.
Library Wars and Chobits are both set in near-future and have no dark elements at all. High-energy plot, yes, especially in Library Wars, but the plot is, in both series, mostly concerned with standing up for the people you love and doing what's right.
(What I read of Naruto and Trigun also are not like this, but those are both shonen so I wouldn't necessarily expect them to be.)
Now that I write this out, I wonder if *having* a plot is part of it-- the speculative ones have plots focused around the speculative elements, so that even once the couples have actually succeeded at getting together there's still a lot of plot to be had. Even after most of the couples in Fruits Basket are together, there's still the issue of the curse. Hideki figures out he likes Chi pretty quickly, but there's still the issue of where she came from and why she has weird powers. Kasahara and Dojo are still in the middle of fighting off the forces of censorship even once they start working out they have feelings for each other. If your entire plot *was* the romance and now you're stuck, maybe Rape As Drama is the go-to? (Though that only works for the romances. Life hadn't resolved any of its previous plot threads when it went to that well.)
Or did I just happen to get the bad luck to pick the only ones that do this and most contemporary high school drama doesn't do this?
I ask this because I've finally gotten my hands on some of the later volumes of Mars, and as it turns out right after the point where I stopped as a teenager it takes a sudden swerve from "quiet girl likes biker boy with some extra complications from biker boy's unresolved issues about his identical twin's suicide" into "we have an ACTUAL SOCIOPATH in our school targeting us and also it turns out girl's stepfather raped her and now her mother wants to get back together with the stepfather!" Which I'd just take as Mars having an unusually high HSQ-- this is the same manga that gives us a girl credibly threatening to break another girl's fingers to get her to stay away from the boy and then them becoming best friends a couple of chapters later in, like, the first two volumes-- except that the other two I've picked up along these lines are *also* like that and what I've read in other genres *isn't*.
No one liked contemporary high school anything when I was regularly buying manga-- I was 100% looked down on for reading it even though I was *also* reading the fantasy everyone else was--- so I was mostly buying these by what had the most attractive cover copy on the first volume. Both Mars and Kare Kano bill themselves as cute high school romances. Mars I described above; Kare Kano I still haven't finished but I have been given to understand the hero rapes the heroine later on and they still get married.
Life is slightly different in that its tagline is "Real teens. Real stories. Real Life," and it *was* billing itself as Dramatic and Controversial. But it still initially advertises itself as being about cutting because your best friend turns on you when you get into a high school and she doesn't, and it escalates *extremely* quickly to "heroine's new friend's boyfriend is blackmailing heroine into being his sex slave by threatening to make friend miserable if she doesn't comply." (And he's, like, incredibly mustache-twirly "I am a VILLAIN, watch me VILLAIN" about the whole thing when he's alone with the heroine, in a way I'm very skeptical of real abusers ever being.)
Of the other manga I've read, it's all in other genres, and none of it is like this. Fruits Basket is probably closest in that it's *explicitly* contemporary-set and the fantastic elements are limited to the curse on the Sohmas-- this is not an alternate world and not a world where "magic" is a thing for most people. Fruits Basket deals a lot with child abuse, but despite how awful some of the characters can be, there's never, ever any rape. Occasional physical abuse, and a lot of verbal abuse, but never rape. (The scary elements also build much more gradually and cohere well and do not give you a sense that you are racing from melodramatic moment to melodramatic moment with no room to breathe.)
Magic Knight Rayearth is a portal fantasy-- they start out in contemporary Tokyo, but they don't stay there long, we don't see them there, and once they're through the portal everything's focused on plot. Even in the sequel series, where romance starts to creep in a bit more, we don't get this kind of thing.
Library Wars and Chobits are both set in near-future and have no dark elements at all. High-energy plot, yes, especially in Library Wars, but the plot is, in both series, mostly concerned with standing up for the people you love and doing what's right.
(What I read of Naruto and Trigun also are not like this, but those are both shonen so I wouldn't necessarily expect them to be.)
Now that I write this out, I wonder if *having* a plot is part of it-- the speculative ones have plots focused around the speculative elements, so that even once the couples have actually succeeded at getting together there's still a lot of plot to be had. Even after most of the couples in Fruits Basket are together, there's still the issue of the curse. Hideki figures out he likes Chi pretty quickly, but there's still the issue of where she came from and why she has weird powers. Kasahara and Dojo are still in the middle of fighting off the forces of censorship even once they start working out they have feelings for each other. If your entire plot *was* the romance and now you're stuck, maybe Rape As Drama is the go-to? (Though that only works for the romances. Life hadn't resolved any of its previous plot threads when it went to that well.)
Or did I just happen to get the bad luck to pick the only ones that do this and most contemporary high school drama doesn't do this?
