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Got to work late, as that migraine was still here this morning. (now mostly gone, except for a nagging ache in the back of my head, arg.)
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cicer used the AutoShoujo Title Generator to come up with a few titles and gave them one-line descriptions, and I again found that knowing shoujo story conventions, it's amazingly easy to come up with an expanded description. XD I'm reposting my comment to her here.
cicer: Promise Cake Perhaps involving the ever-popular childhood marriage promise. With...cake.
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telophase: You see, the heroine and the hero made that childhood promise years ago when they were six, then their families moved apart. Now it's highschool, and our heroine wants to be a pastry chef, and every day after school works for a bakery making cakes and other delicious desserts.
A new boy arrives at school. He is tall, cool, mysterious, snarky, etc. etc. and so on. It is her intended! Only he is strangely cold towards her. She tries to win him over with her best cake, but he rejects it! He says he doesn't eat sweet things, and seems to shun her!
A challenge! She figures that if she only tempts him with THE PERFECT CAKE and he eats it, he will turn into the sweet boy she once knew!
Only what she doesn't know is that it's not that he doesn't like sweets, it's that he likes them too much! He moved away, taking him away from all his friends, because his parents divorced and he filled the gap with an addiction to sweets and cakes. He's only recently managed to lose all the weight that he gained, which had turned him into the fat dork at school, and moved back to this area because his dad was transferred here, so he's trying to start all over again, leaving behind the fat dork that he was. He hates having to shun the heroine, because he still loves her, but he believes that it is only IRON CONTROL that keeps him from falling into that addiction again and that if he takes ONE BITE of that DELICIOUS cake she keeps tempting him with, he will lose that hard-won control!
(I see an epilogue, set a few years after the fact, where they're happily married and she's an award-winning pastry chef and he has conquered the addictive impulse because he is now HAPPILY FULFILLED IN LOOOOOVE. He's gained some weight back, of course, and is now slightly pudgy in that cute way, but has also taken up some sort of highly athletic pursuit such as marathoning or cross-country skiing in order that he can eat all the cakes she makes. XD)
WHY AM I NOT A MANGA WRITER IN JAPAN?
====================================
That's the description that immediately sprang to mind. If I was developing this into a real shoujo story, I'd want to put a more body-image-positive spin on it. The hero, following shoujo conventions, would probably still have his focus on food caused by his lack of LOOOOOVE, but I suspect I'd have him demonstrate that he's not really such a jerk by remembering what it was like to be ridiculed for not looking like everyone else and coming to the rescue of other kids who are the target of bullying for being fat, dorky, uncool, wearing glasses, etc., and encouraging them to have pride in themselves as they are and to stand up for themselves. and that he would eventually embrace his inner dork.
Although I suspect what with Japan's tremendous social pressure on thinness, if I were in Japan I'd not be allowed to do that, and I'd have to say THIN IS IN. :)
At any rate, there would be a lot more thinking to do about that, and adjusting to do to make it a good story that speaks to The Outsider and have people win because they are the way they are and not because they change to fit social norms.
But I have to go do actual work now.
cicer used the AutoShoujo Title Generator to come up with a few titles and gave them one-line descriptions, and I again found that knowing shoujo story conventions, it's amazingly easy to come up with an expanded description. XD I'm reposting my comment to her here.cicer: Promise Cake Perhaps involving the ever-popular childhood marriage promise. With...cake.telophase: You see, the heroine and the hero made that childhood promise years ago when they were six, then their families moved apart. Now it's highschool, and our heroine wants to be a pastry chef, and every day after school works for a bakery making cakes and other delicious desserts.A new boy arrives at school. He is tall, cool, mysterious, snarky, etc. etc. and so on. It is her intended! Only he is strangely cold towards her. She tries to win him over with her best cake, but he rejects it! He says he doesn't eat sweet things, and seems to shun her!
A challenge! She figures that if she only tempts him with THE PERFECT CAKE and he eats it, he will turn into the sweet boy she once knew!
Only what she doesn't know is that it's not that he doesn't like sweets, it's that he likes them too much! He moved away, taking him away from all his friends, because his parents divorced and he filled the gap with an addiction to sweets and cakes. He's only recently managed to lose all the weight that he gained, which had turned him into the fat dork at school, and moved back to this area because his dad was transferred here, so he's trying to start all over again, leaving behind the fat dork that he was. He hates having to shun the heroine, because he still loves her, but he believes that it is only IRON CONTROL that keeps him from falling into that addiction again and that if he takes ONE BITE of that DELICIOUS cake she keeps tempting him with, he will lose that hard-won control!
(I see an epilogue, set a few years after the fact, where they're happily married and she's an award-winning pastry chef and he has conquered the addictive impulse because he is now HAPPILY FULFILLED IN LOOOOOVE. He's gained some weight back, of course, and is now slightly pudgy in that cute way, but has also taken up some sort of highly athletic pursuit such as marathoning or cross-country skiing in order that he can eat all the cakes she makes. XD)
WHY AM I NOT A MANGA WRITER IN JAPAN?
====================================
That's the description that immediately sprang to mind. If I was developing this into a real shoujo story, I'd want to put a more body-image-positive spin on it. The hero, following shoujo conventions, would probably still have his focus on food caused by his lack of LOOOOOVE, but I suspect I'd have him demonstrate that he's not really such a jerk by remembering what it was like to be ridiculed for not looking like everyone else and coming to the rescue of other kids who are the target of bullying for being fat, dorky, uncool, wearing glasses, etc., and encouraging them to have pride in themselves as they are and to stand up for themselves. and that he would eventually embrace his inner dork.
Although I suspect what with Japan's tremendous social pressure on thinness, if I were in Japan I'd not be allowed to do that, and I'd have to say THIN IS IN. :)
At any rate, there would be a lot more thinking to do about that, and adjusting to do to make it a good story that speaks to The Outsider and have people win because they are the way they are and not because they change to fit social norms.
But I have to go do actual work now.