I want to like shojo anime

I don't know why I don't like shojo anime.  I try to like it.  I really do.  I vote with my dollars and watch it on my limited subscription services.  I do so hoping that maybe if more eyeballs watch it, the production values will improve, and so will the actual anime adaptations.  And it just . . . doesn't?  The pacing is off.  It seems rushed. They try to cram too much into ever-shrinking-season-length space.  The production values are generally terrible.  Lots of stills and pans, off model characters, stilted motion, bad use of CG.  It feels made of shortcuts, and the journey is janky and not worth the effort.  The current aesthetic stomps the original art / character design into the same oblivion.  Did I mention the pacing? &

To be fair, I am only one viewer, so my sacrifice watching these shows probably doesn't sound like a ringing endorsement to Japanese production companies.  And also, I am not (and never have really been) the target audience for shojo.  At least not the kind that generally gets translated and ends up on our shores.  I am not (and honestly never have been) a young maiden in love.  Or an old maiden in love.  Or actually in love.  Shows made for the lustful female gaze (or maidenly crushing female gaze or "just likes to look at hot guys" gaze) are going to make my eyes glaze over.

There are exceptions to my summary of shojo anime above, but they feel like exceptions that prove the rule.

I feel somewhat aligned with Ashley McDonnell on Shojo & Tell.  We both like reading shojo manga just fine.  But there's something about the anime trying to drag and direct and trap our gaze on things we don't actually care about as much (on top of the crappy production values, bad pacing, and unappealing shortcut tropes) that makes it less enjoyable of an experience for us.

Why is this not the case with non-shojo anime that have female protagonists?  Why do I love both the Freiren anime adaptation and original manga (shonen-ish) and both Apothecary Diaries original novels and anime adaptation (seinen-ish) to name a couple recent examples?  (I should probably write essays on each.)  It's probably not fair to compare.*  In addition to having compelling worlds and stories and protagonists, these shows have BUDGETS.  They are beautifully and lavishly animated.    They have time to make us care about the characters.  They have room to tell the stories coherently and well (though editing choices to cut material are still made).  They have space to breathe and expand and enthrall and fill in the blanks between the manga panels.

I want to believe that if a shojo anime could just be given a good budget, support, and room to really tell the story beautifully (and not just whip through and spend as much time focusing on "hot" guys while stupid bells chime in the background), it could be just as good and appeal to just as wide of an audience as Frieren and Apothecary Diaries. I wish that when I hear of once-thought-impossible licensing announcements like From Far Away and Red River and the Yona reboot, I could feel excited.

Instead, I cringe.  Are they going to destroy these beautiful works by giving them the "shojo anime" nightmare makeover?  Are they going to reduce them to trope salads?  Or are they planning and budgeting to make a well-paced, gorgeously animated, Fruits Basket-remake or Banana Fish-level work of art#?  Because Red River is a fantasy historical EPIC work.  (Same for Yona.  And I don't think anyone has announced them, but Basara or even Please Save My Earth the absolute Sci Fi classic just to put that out into the universe.)  

A good adaptation of any of these works could be amazingly great.  A bad one would just be another disappointment, and the investors would say again, "See, it's not worth investing in 'shojo' anime because the audience is too small to turn a profit.  We'll just keep giving them 20 yen to make something terrible for fanservice."  But the problem is the vision of the people funding/making it and the narrow audience they are aiming at, not the stories or their original marketing categories.

I've heard that for shojo and-shojo adjacent anime, the thought process is that they are spending a little to reward the faithful fans.  So they want to make sure to give those fans exactly what they want, and they think that all fans want is hot, thin guys and chimes and tropes.  Maybe I get where they're coming from.  (See above chain where no one watches the bad thing they made, so they feel justified in continuing to not fund the things, so they keep being bad.)  And I've seen the sad fates of larger-budget adaptations that do not keep the original target audience in mind and appeal to no one and are absolutely worse than cheap, shortcut trope-heavy shojo.  I am glad they want to avoid that.  And again, I am not the target audience of the original marketing for the work.  However, I am a big fan of stories, and I love when they are told well, so I can recommend them to people who like good stories.  

The audience of people who like good stories is (hopefully) larger than the audience of faithful super fans of a(ny) particular shjojo manga.  Why not make something for that larger audience, regardless of the original target marketing demographic of the magazine/site/publisher?  I know the actual answer is budget and investors and executives, but I wish it wasn't.

If they come over here legally, you'd better believe I will watch Red River and From Far Away and Yona, no matter how bad they may be.  But I would love to reward the creators with my support not just because I'm trying to be kind to shojo anime creators who don't make as much from anime adaptations but because they are great works of art like Frieren and Apothecary Diaries and Fruits Basket.  If they are really good, I will buy the DVDs or BluRays or whatever physical media you kids do these days (please release them on physical media).  I will tell other people to watch them.  And I hope the risk of trying to make a really good shojo anime will be rewarded.  I'll do my part.   : D

Notes

&Hana Kimi (and The Other World's Books Depend on the Bean Counter) are this year's surprise shojo (and adjacent) anime I'm trying to support due to fond opinions of the source material.  And they are both standard, compressed, cheap, made-of-the-worst-tropes adaptations.  I should not be disappointed, but I sure am.  AND I AM WATCHING TO THE (SADLY) BITTER END.

*Ascendance of a Bookwork might be a better comparison.  The adaptation (especially the first couple seasons) is clearly on a shoestring budget (like most shojo), and they are forced to condense WAY TOO MUCH CONTENT into too small of a season size.  But the online and book following are not "just shojo," and, by golly, this season has a legit company adapting it with 20+ episodes, and I am full of hope.

#Still wish they'd kept Banana Fish set in the original time and been given more time to tell more of the original story (poor Jenkins and the other adults who were decent really got short shrift).  Still bitter about how cell phones wreck so many of the things that made the original make sense.  But, by golly, they took a swing and mostly made it work, and it was coherent (if still bonkers) and looked great.

Why I love Otomen

The thing about big, goofy satire is that it can be accomplishing lots of tiny, subtle, serious things. Thank you, Terry Pratchett and Aya Kanno.

I've loved this series since the first volume; it's true, but I liked the author's other work, too (and am still bitter Soul Rescue never got to go all those intriguing places it hinted at). I think one thing that makes Otomen work so well for me is that the author is an avowed non-girly-girl who feels about all this froufy stuff the way one of the characters' manly, martial-arts-loving single fathers does (check out volume 4 for that revelation and bit of hilarity). Kanno's eye for cutesy detail and her flare for making it are all the more funny for me because I know it makes her cold, and she thinks it's all kinds of ridiculous.

It's so ridiculously over the top sometimes that you just have to say, "Oh, come on; we're not like that." Except we are, just on a smaller scale. It's that aha! moment when you realize what's at the core of the exaggeration that gets you thinking even as you're laughing.  I guess that's what separates parody from social satire? Maybe. I don't know.

I just can't wait to see if our intrepid main character gets outed in the next volume of Otomen, which is not coming out until May to my immense sadness.

Elegy for Apothecarius Argentum 8

I just finished volume 8, and I am in mourning.  Not just for character X, whose death has been bumming me out every time I think of it all day (poor character X!!!!), but for the fact that I will NEVER FIND OUT WHAT HAPPENS. 

Seriously, I'm going to go cry some more about the demise of CMX, the company who published this fine series with its slightly amateurish art and its startling ability to casually go where no manga I've read has gone before.  Euthanasia, abortion, slavery, prostitution: is this really a shojo manga (nothing at all like Banana Fish)? 

And two characters finally got to walk a bit holding hands, and then political chaos breaks out!  And this totally unexpected cliffhanger with a zillion converging loose ends leaves you wanting more NOW, and you can't have it because you are a good, law-abiding citizen (seriously contemplating breaking copyright law to find out what happens because you can't buy what happens next).  A sad, aborted "ending" for another fine series that deserved a full run.

Go read it now before even what we have is out of print.  Oh, my poor character X!  This sucks for us all!

Flowers, Dragons

Two Flowers for the Dragon is a lot of fun.  I'm a big fan of the author, who always does something just a bit quirky and infuses her works with something just a bit off, a little out of the ordinary.  Her characters just don't conform to the usual stereotypes.

I enjoyed Recipe for Gertrude and am liking Palette of 12 Secret Colors a lot, so I'm not sure why I didn't read this when it first started coming out, but I'm glad it's so enjoyable.  It has so much potential to be lame, but it does not live up to that potential.


5 years ago, the heroine was engaged to the kind and shy son of a prominent family in the oasis her family ruled.  The kid disappeared in a sandstorm and was presumed dead.  She ended up engaged to the much older son of another prominent family (she's very practical about the whole political marriage thing, which is refreshing), and she's quite smitten with the man who treats her with a certain amount of exasperation and a little condescension.

Then the first guy comes back, and he's no weak little boy anymore.  He lost his memories, but he gained prowess in martial and, er, bedroom arts.  He's nothing like the boy she used to like, but can someone really change that much?  She doesn't care and has no intention of finding out.  Too bad her heart doesn't listen to her head.

Fiance 2, a cold, businesslike law enforcement officer, is feeling the squeeze a little because 1 knows all about how to be sensitive to how a woman wants to be treated, and the heroine is not used to getting much kindness from 2. 

With a love triangle that is actually interesting, some no-doubt entertaining battles ahead, and the potential for tragic backstories, Two Flowers for the Dragon has me hooked, especially this early, when we're still feeling out all the characters (and they're feeling out each other in this new, radically altered relationship dynamic).  I like it!

Nanoha A's: the perfect antidote for Black Lagoon?

So what do you watch with Black Lagoon?  Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A's!  I love alternating shows that make my brain hurt.  (That grinding sound and slight smell of burning is the gears in my head changing.)

Nanoha is one of the most earnest and sincere anime out there.  It is made of cute and trying hard.  There's a good bit of darkness here, but it can't overwhelm the sense of earnestness.  It drives all the curse words and ultra-violence of Black Lagoon away with the power of its purity, but I still find myself humming the Black Lagoon opening theme song (one of the best examples of Engrish available in the Western world, in my opinion).

Nanoha's back, and so are a lot of familiar faces.  If possible, this season's villains are even more pitiable than the last.  They are so not-evil that you just get all torn up inside.  I have one disc to go, and I'm going to be sure to have my tissues handy for the last one. 

I was actually surpised at the ground Nanoha A's covered in the second to the last disc.  It ended with the showdown and revelations I expected for the season finale, so now I've no idea what's in store in the last disc, but I'm wishing for some good, pure, unadulterated redemption!  Bring it.

Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha: here comes the cute

If you like a good magical girl show, you might want to try Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha.  (You should hurry before it falls off the face of the earth like other Geneon titles!)

IMPRESSIONS

Nanoha is a third grader.  There's a ridiculously long transformation scene with the longest amount of transformation nudity I have ever seen (you should probably not watch this with your non-anime-fan grandma or your kids).  The ferret bit is hilarious, especially when Nanoha realizes that not only was the talking ferret a boy but, you know, a boy about her age who's just borrowing the ferret's form, and now his discomfort with the hot springs incident makes more sense . . .  The English dub is . . . um, watch the Japanese with English subtitles if you can.  I suspect that there's more to Nanoha's family than it seems, but I may be getting a bit wild with my speculations.  There's magic and science and a somewhat sympathetic antagonist, and it's just pretty darn cute (except when the antagonist's mother is abusing her).

Did you like Cardcaptor Sakura?  Or Magical Do-Re-Mi?  Give this one a try!  Even if you hate it, it's only three discs long!  I think.  (I just finished disc 2.)


Have you seen this show or any of its sequels?  What did you think of it?  Any of the other magical girl titles?  Do you have others to suggest?