Nameless: A Feature in Development

[helloladies]

At the end of every week, we gather at Lady Business HQ to share media thoughts and chat about the recent happenings in our tiny spheres of human experience. Puns welcome.

In theory, eventually this feature will have a name once we all agree on one. In the meantime, to open the festivities, a gif to sum up 2016 so far:

Comments

[spindizzy]

Q: Susan, did you spend all of Monday reading through a stack of like twenty BL manga?
A: Hahahaha, what do you take me for — yes, yes I did, that was me.

SO MUCH MANGA, GUYS, MY NUMBER OF BOOKS READ FOR THE YEAR ARE NOW A M A Z I N G!

But in news not related to me putting lots and lots of dubcon stories in my eyes (Please, someone, recommend me lots of BL manga with no consent issues, I will be forever in your debt! I can think of... Little Butterfly, and Flutter, and then I can't remember any more.), a cinema near me is doing a Studio Ghibli season! Me and my friend (who has never seen a Studio Ghibli movie before) have been all over that this week. :D We saw Spirited Away on Wednesday and When Marnie Was There yesterday, and they were pretty good! I will be back later to have MANY OPINIONS, in the meantime has anyone else seen Marnie?

[bookgazing]

Oh the SG season sounds so cool. I haven't seen Marnie (the nternet says it will make me cry - will it?) but I've seen a bunch of other films from Ghibli because Film Four is pretty good at putting them on. The most recent one I saw was Kiki's Delivery Service and it was soooo lovely.

[spindizzy]

It's an amazing idea, I'm really glad I found out about it. :D (You're welcome to come with! But I'm 99.9% certain it's out of your way.) It was really sad! In a kinda hopeful way, but still really sad! Everyone has a sad backstory and I just want them all to have hugs. :(

I clearly need to hook up my tv again, because I don't think I've seen that many Ghibli movies – like, I've heard Kiki's Delivery Service is good, but I've never managed to catch it. I'm glad to hear you liked it though!

[renay]

Well, were any of the BL manga, you know, good?

[spindizzy]

*laughter intensifies*

ACTUALLY, no, that's unfair of me!

[spindizzy]

• The Moon and The Sandals by Fumi Yoshinaga is actually pretty good, and had pretty much the most consensual sex and least drama-that-was-not-resolved-with-sensible-conversations in the entire pile of books.


• Liberty Liberty! by Hinako Takanaga was fun but a bit... Weird about its trans secondary character.


• Your Honest Deceit has GAY LAWYERS and made me crave Phoenix Wright fic like burning.


• Oh My God! by Natsuho Shino was also fun, but it was fun in a way that reminded me of a couple of different different series rather than being good on its own merits? Does that make sense?


• Hero Heel by Makoto Tateno could have been good because it was all about actors in a super sentai tv series! And then the main character extorted the guy he has a crush on into having sex with him in the last chapter and I nearly threw the goddamn book across a room.

... But yeah, no, everything else in that pile was NOT GREAT.

[(Anonymous)]

Non-dubcon BL: Yoshinaga's "What Did You Eat for Dinner Yesterday?" (Warning: This tends to become more and more of a cooking manga, complete with recipes, as the series goes on. This can get frustrating if, like me, you're a lot more interested in the gay couple's relationship than in the exact step by step process of how lawyer/amateur cook Shirou cooks the dinner du jour) and "Hide and Seek" (at least for the first two volumes--I haven't read the third yet, though I doubt there will be any dubcon in that, either). Also "Future Lovers." (One of the guys had previously considered himself straight until he wound up being seduced by a guy he met at a bar while kind of drunk and distraught over having been dumped by the woman he'd been dating. So I suppose that's a bit questionable, but he's the seme and there are no physical intimidation or blackmail-type issues. Unfortunately the publisher went out of business, so finding this two-volume series could be difficult.)

Marfisa (who only has an LJ account)

[spindizzy]

Oh you beautiful soul, thank you! Fumi Yoshinaga is one of my favourite manga artists (but weirdly I can't get into the one that actually wins awards because something about Ooku pings as Not For Me), and I... Actually quite like her food manga, so this sounds good to me! I can see how that would get frustrating though, yeah.

Thank you so much for these recs, I'm going to see if I can track them down! :D

[(Anonymous)]

Whoops. In case you hadn't figured it out already, the title of the Yoshinaga manga is actually "What Did You Eat Yesterday?", not "What Did You Eat for Dinner Yesterday?" The English-language publisher is Vertical and the series is apparently still ongoing--they've already released ten or eleven volumes.

You'd probably also like Yoshinaga's "Not Love, But Delicious Foods, Make Me So Happy." (This was published by DMP several years ago, so it may be a bit difficult to get hold of, due to their erratic print runs and habit of letting things go out of print ridiculously quickly.) "Not Love, But Delicious Foods..." is actually a sort of quasi-autobiographical series that some Japanese magazine commissioned as a series of dramatized manga reviews of various Tokyo restaurants. This sounds ridiculously over-specialized, unless you're planning a trip to Tokyo and want tips on Yoshinaga's favorite restaurants. But each review also doubles as a vignette of Yoshinaga (or "Y-naga," as she calls herself in the manga) hanging out with various friends at one of the restaurants in question, discussing stuff like how she and one of her female friends defy food-related Japanese gender expectations by preferring stereotypically male-coded meat dishes to the sweets and desserts that Japanese women and girls are supposed to dote on. This phenomenon is also referenced in Yoshinaga's excellent but technically non-BL series "Antique Bakery," in which Tachibana, one of the four male protagonists, decides to open a fancy bakery/pastry shop and accurately anticipates that the vast majority of the customers will be female. He and the pastry chef he hires, a "gay of demonic charm" who turns out to be an old high school classmate of Tachibana's who disastrously confessed to having a crush on Tachibana right after their graduation ceremony, are both disconcerted when a macho young straight guy shows up and starts begging them to hire him as an apprentice pastry chef. It turns out this guy was a successful welterweight boxer who has just been forced to quit the sport due to potentially blindness-inducing injuries, and the only other thing that interests him anywhere near as much as boxing is cakes and pastries. (The idea of cakes, etc., appealing primarily to women also turns up in a number of non-Yoshinaga shoujo manga where the latest hot patisserie has an all-female line of customers stretching down the street outside the store, occasionally leavened by somebody's embarrassed big brother or boyfriend who's there to pick up the specialty du jour on behalf of a female associate. There's also a brief gag scene riffing on this in one of the later volumes of the shonen title "Assassination Classroom," in which Koro-sensei, the vaguely octopus-like alien[?] who's threatened to blow up the Earth within the year if the class of problem students he teaches at a Japanese high school don't manage to assassinate him first, attempts to indulge his love of sweets by sneaking into what's labeled as a "women-only cake buffet" in drag.)

Anyway, perhaps the highlight of "Not Love, But Delicious Foods..." is the chapter in which Y-naga belatedly finds out that one of the old college friends she's about to have dinner with is gay, and she's apparently the only member of the club they all belonged to back then who'd never realized this, even though she makes her living drawing BL manga. The mortified Y-naga apologizes to her friend for having unwittingly culturally appropriated his experience by writing and drawing BL based mostly on her own imagination, since she'd been under the impression that she didn't actually know any gay men in real life. Luckily for her, the friend seems a lot less bothered by this than she does--possibly because Yoshinaga's gay male characters are among the least stereotyped in the BL genre, despite the fact that she apparently created them less out of research or experience than by speculating about how she might feel if she were a guy in that situation.

Marfisa

[spindizzy]

Thank you so much for the recommendations! I've read "Not Love But Delicious Foods..." (My library has a habit of getting the most obscure titles in, I've never found the logic), but I've not read the others, and your recommendation makes them sound really good! Thank you! <3