Geeky Girl's and Women's Anime/Manga

[alias_sqbr]

Most anime and manga recced at Swancon tends to be aimed at men/boys and I thought it would be good to have a panel on geeky anime and manga aimed at women and girls. These are my initial thoughts. I am a long way from being an expert on anime/manga or Japanese culture in general, and haven't read as widely as I might have (a disproportionate number of these are about crossdressing :D), so other people's input would be very much appreciated! (EDIT: I am feeling too lazy to edit in people's suggestions, read the comments on both versions of the post for some great sounding anime/manga)

So, a brief note on terminology: a lot of manga starts life being serialised in magazines aimed at one demographic or another, and from these come the various genres of manga, and thus anime. Those aimed at boys are called shonen, those at men seinen, those at girls shoujo, and those at women josei. These genres do not always fit typical Australian ideas of what stories aimed at each gender look like, so for example Azumanga Daioh, with it's charmingly funny stories about teenage girls, is aimed at boys, while yaoi porn about same sex relationships between men is aimed at women.

As far as I can tell the usual pattern is manga to anime, and then on to drama cds, games, live action drama etc, but sometimes it goes in some other order. I've only mentioned anime and manga since that's the topic of this post.

Shoujo

Although manga aimed at girls have been a staple of the medium from the beginning, it wasn't until the 1970s that female manga artists really had a chance to break into the profession, and it was from this point that shoujo really took off as a defined genre. Common repeating motifs are sparkles and roses and a sweet natured young female main character who finds happiness and saves the day through determination and goodness and trying her best.

The obvious geeky subgenre is magical girls, the superheroines of shoujo: young girls given a destiny and magical powers in order to save the world, often with the help of a secret identity, pretty outfit and a talking animal friend.

• Sailor Moon I haven't read it, but the manga is apparently really good, and the anime not too bad either despite some datedness.
  
• Cardcaptor Sakura: sweet and funny, with some very well drawn relationships and a surprisingly involving "collect all the cards" plot.
  

Deconstructions:
Being based in girly fantasy, shoujo makes a great genre for deconstructing gender and the stories we tell ourselves: how much freedom does a princess really have? Why does she have to fear the witch and be rescued by the prince? What if she wants a different sort of happy ending?

• Revolutionary Girl Utena: Utena is determined to live up to the ideals of a Prince. But then she meets the Rose Bride and discovers that her new school is not all that it seems. This anime is amazing and intense, the quintessential femslashy crossdressing women with swords fighting the Patriarchy story (which is my favourite genre of everything :D) It veers between dark melodrama and fluff and surreal comedy (and then the movie takes this to a ridiculous extreme, and the manga is apparently crap. So watch the anime)
  
• Princess Tutu: a duck wishes to become a princess so that she can save a prince in peril. Less intense and bizarre, more about stories than gender, but really good. Lots of pretty dancing! I haven't read the spinoff manga.
  

Other Shoujo:

• Fruits Basket: a teenage girl encounters a family cursed to turn into the animals of the Chinese Zodiac. I seen it described as the shoujo version of a video game, where the heroine defeats each boss of angst with increasing levels of sweetness and kindness. Sweet and funny and moving. The anime covers the start of the (now finished) manga quite accurately, then stops abruptly.
  
• Ouran High School Host Club: a girl who dresses as a boy out of convenience gets dragged into various hiijinks by a club that exists to make girls happy. Wall to wall hilarious parody of romance shoujo tropes, as well as what is blatantly a slashier version of Fred and George from Harry Potter. The anime is a good adaptation of the start of the manga, which is now finished and has a very sweet ending.
  

Josei

Aimed at adult women and thus less full of sparkles and speculative fiction and more filled with real life worries like career and relationships. Less of this gets licensed in English, so it's harder to track down.

• Gokusen: The kickass granddaughter of a yakuza boss tries to hide her background and become a maths teacher at a rough boys school. Shenanigans ensue. The manga is finished and fantastic, the anime covers the start pretty well and has a satisfying-ish ending.
  
• Princess Jellyfish: a jellyfish geek in a house of other female geeks (train watcher, history buff etc) unable to deal with the real world is dragged into the world of fashion by the flamboyant crossdressing son of a politician. The (currently ongoing) manga is flawed but a lot of fun, I haven't seen the anime yet but based on the opening credits I really want to!
  

Yaoi

I'm not into yaoi (male/male) or shonen-ai (like yaoi but less explicit?) but if anyone has any good speculative fictions ones to rec I'd be interested to hear about them.

Yuri

Some of this is aimed at men, but some is aimed at women.

Morishima Akiko has some very cute yuri manga about being queer in Japan, including some about being a yaoi geek.

I can't believe it's not Shoujo/Josei!

Stuff I was going to list before realising I apparently had the genre wrong.

• Dennou Coil I haven't seen this yet, but it's apparently a very good story about a group of teenage girls figuring out some conspiracy involving virtual worlds in the future or something.
  
• Angelic Layer A young girl joins the exciting world of miniature robot fighting. Not the best anime ever, but certainly the most adorable fighting anime I've ever seen. I haven't read the manga, apparently there are some differences.
  
• The Manga Guide to Databases Has a princess and a fairy and romance! :D
  

Really not very geeky

But I like it anyway.

• Skip Beat (shoujo): After realising that her rockstar friend/crush was taking advantage of her, Kyoko decides to get revenge by becoming an even bigger star. Lots of fun and the anime is available streaming free on Crunchyroll. The manga is ongoing and alas goes downhill not long after the point the anime stops at.
  
• Kimi ni todoke (shoujo): Really adorable highschool romance about a very shy awkward girl learning to come out of her shell. Both anime and manga are ongoing.
  
• Kimi wa petto (josei): a business woman takes in a young man as her pet. Sweeter than it sounds! The manga is finished and lovely, though some of the side stuff is dodgy, there's no anime but there are some Japanese and Korean live action dramas I haven't seen.
  

Totally not shoujo or josei at all

Full Metal Alchemist (Brotherhood): Two alchemist brothers join the army of a steampunk alternate Germany in 1910. All they want is to restore their bodies after alchemy gone wrong, but they get drawn into the repercussions of war, power and sacrifice. This is blatantly about and aimed at boys, but it's by a woman and my favourite speculative fiction anime, and there are a lot of really good secondary female characters, so I'm mentioning it anyway :P The manga is apparently even better, but it and Brotherhood follow much the same basic plot (the original anime has a whole other plot and isn't as good)

Comments

[lilacsigil]

Antique Bakery by Yoshinaga Fumi is shonen-ai filled with cake and baking geekery. Complete in four volumes, all translated, very good.

[lea_hazel]

I've been meaning to try out Utena for a while, is there a good place where I can watch the first 2-3 episodes?

cribbing from the wai-con yaoi panel

[velithya]

well I don't know, does Star Driver count? I mean, the main character is the GINGA BISHOUNEN (galactic pretty boy) and the series basically ends with a canonical threesome between the main girl and the two boys [EDIT: I should clarify: more specifically, it ends with the girl basically saying that she loves both of them and then the two boys making love heart eyes at each other. THERE ARE NO ACTUAL THREESOMES ON SCREEN]. Also there are GIANT ROBOTS. I mean, I guess it's more shounen than shoujo? but I found it delicious to my little shipper heart. (HOW MANY series with a love triangle just end up cutting someone out? BUT THIS ONE DOESN'T. SO MUCH LOVE ♥)

I guess - what's your definition of 'geeky' here?

[flamebyrd]

The first thing that jumped to mind for me was They Were Eleven, which is character-driven science fiction. It's a movie and a short manga. I see that the manga was published in Shoujo Comics but it won Shogakukan Manga Award for shounen. *scratches head* The style is very 70s shoujo, anyway.

[torachan]

I hesitate to call Antique Bakery shounen-ai/yaoi/BL, though. That's the equivalent of saying any fic with a gay character in it is slash. One of the things that makes AB stand out is the fact that it's a story with a gay guy as one of the main characters (not just a supporting role, not just as humor), but it's not a romance.

[kerravonsen]

I'm afraid I'm only familiar with the translations/remakes, not the "real thing", and I have no idea what "genre" the originals were, but I have to put in a word for:

Bubblegum Crisis - group of women have secret identity the "Knight Sabres" with super body-armour, who fight evil androids.

Ghost in the Shell - very cyberpunky; touches on "what is human?"; if one is so much a cyborg, does one leave one's humanity behind? Main character is a woman.

Serial Experiment Lain - main character Lain, a girl going to high school. This goes beyond cyberpunk, because it gets quite surreal and makes you wonder it reality itself is being bent in this story. Fascinatingly confusing.

[lilacsigil]

I agree that it's unusual but that seems to be the way it's normally categorised. I definitely wouldn't call it yaoi, but it does contain gay sex and relationships - and I would call a fanfic with gay sex and relationships in it slash (as opposed to a gay character in gen fic).

[torachan]

Yeah, I know some people call it that, but it bugs me, because BL is specifically romance. And by calling this BL it seems to be saying any story with gay characters is romance. I would not categorise her current series as BL, either, because although the main character is gay and lives with his boyfriend, it is not a romance; it's a food manga.

[alias_sqbr]

According to wikipedia (and I don't know how accurate a source that is), the original manga is shoujo but the spin-off m/m romance doujinshi by the same creator are yaoi. Which could cause a lot of confusion.

[alias_sqbr]

I got given the episodes on disc, so I have no idea, sorry. Also, I should have added a warning that it can be very disturbing if you have any sort of triggers. Or need plots to make sense at every point in the narrative :D

Re: cribbing from the wai-con yaoi panel

[alias_sqbr]

My definition of geeky was very inconsistent and "I know it when I see it" so anything that feels geeky to you counts, I'm not being too picky.

It's hard categorising original anime, Star Driver mainly sounds like shonen to me but I see what you're saying about the shoujo-ness. And of course not everything fits into these neat categories.

[alias_sqbr]

Like any genre classification there's always ambiguity, I guess. It certainly looks shoujo to me :)

[torachan]

Yeah, the author basically wrote fanfic of her own series and did so under her own name.

[alias_sqbr]

While I adore Ghost in the Shell and Serial Experiments Lain, they are both definitely aimed at men, and from what I know of Bubblegum Crisis it is too (Wikipedia classifies it as seinen) It can be hard to classify this stuff, Japanese genres don't match up to ours very neatly.

[alias_sqbr]

Eh...I don't know. I mean, Cardcaptor Sakura has a gay relationship in it, but I certainly wouldn't call it shonen-ai. I'm using the Japanese categories as much as possible, and according to Wikipedia it was marketed as shoujo. The m/m spin-offs the writer wrote in their spare time are apparently yaoi though :)

[alias_sqbr]

The "what's canon?" arguments amongst fans must be intense :)

[lilacsigil]

Okay, that plus other aspects of Antique Bakery could also make it josei, I think, though it was marketed as shounen-ai.

[torachan]

I think the doujinshi are AUs, rather than continuation of canon, so probably not as much argument as there could be.

[bunny_m]

Bubblegum Crisis is most definitely aimed at males. A damn fine show for it's time, it's a bit dated nowadays.

[bunny_m]

Sailor Moon is very good, and not at all the fluffy kids show you'd expect from the US dub. Warning: This show can get pretty damn dark. It can also be exactly as fluffy as you'd expect from the US dubbed version, at times.

Angelic Layer is easily my favourite CLAMP series, and really very sweet. I love it to bits and bought the boxed set ages ago.

Gokusen, Fruits Basket and Ouran High School Host Club are all awesome.

Denno Coil I've only seen a little bit of, but what I did see is intriguing. Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood is already on my 'To Watch' list, and I'll be adding Princess Jellyfish and Kimi no Todoke to that list after watching the opening credits.

Thanks for the recs, Dr S. ^_^

[velithya]

Bubblegum Crisis 2040 is a little more modern!

Re: cribbing from the wai-con yaoi panel

[velithya]

My main problem is that I don't really watch that much anime!

[bunny_m]

[oldschoolsnobbery]I vastly prefer the original.[/oldschoolsnobbery] ^_-

More seriously though, I do feel the original version was better, even with the dated animation.

[velithya]

haha yeah I don't think I've seen the original! But I remember thinking 2040 was pretty cool :)

[qem_chibati]

More shoujo:
Otomen, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otomen
When Asuka's father, comes out as trans and leaves the family, Asuka's mother takes this very hard and insists that Asuka becomes the manliest of men. Asuka doesn't want to be a woman but now must hide the fact that he likes cute things, sewing and cooking.

I can't believe it's not shoujo
Fujoshi Rumi
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fujoshi_Rumi

Lots of good natured yaoi fangirl humor.




Genshiken is an anime/manga series about an anime/manga/pop culture club and the original series starts of as very dude centric, but becomes mostly a club of girls in Genshiken 2.

[qem_chibati]

I think its more that the djs arent as well know and the authors notes tend to be that this is a dj, private author thoughts. I haven't read them all, but they also have different pairings so it's would probably hard to take all of them in...

Although the magaka says specifically for dj 6 that it's her private continuation and that people who dont believe h stuff could happen in the store shouldnt read as its not a dream, the Ono and Tachibana scene.

[terajk]

Takako Shimura's Aoi Hana (Sweet Blue Flowers) is a yuri manga and 11-episode anime about high school girls in drama club, and their romantic relationships and friendships with each other. (I'm familiar with the anime, and it is ADORABLE.) I can't find a demographic classification for it, though. I do know it was serialized in Manga Erotics F magazine. (I hear Shimura has a manga about trans kids, as well.)

[wordweaver]

The remastered episodes of Revolutuinary Girl Utena are currently streaming on Youtube.

[alias_sqbr]

Always happy to oblige :) (Also: I have finished 12 kingdoms and am happy to give it back whenever)

[alias_sqbr]

Oooh, Otomen looks like exactly my sort of thing, thanks! Fujoshi Rumi looks like a lot of fun too.

[alias_sqbr]

That's two recs for Aoi Hana, I really should check it out, thanks. I really liked the anime Wandering Son based on her manga, it's a really sweet portrayal of trans characters and just general slice of life school stuff.

[bunny_m]

No rush, I'm sue it safely make it's way back at some point.

[bunny_m]

Hmm, Otomen looks very interesting. I'll have to investigate that further.

Thanks for the rec!

[bunny_m]

*reads the wiki link about Aoi Hana*

Sounds interesting, and I don't think I've seen a show yet with Horie Yui in it I didn't love, so that'll go on my 'To Be Watched' list too.

Thanks!