telophase | (no subject)

I read and love "Hot Gimmick" and (as fascinating as it is) I die a little more inside whenever I do.

Thank you!

The problem with the "She's Asking for It" article is that it makes me want to say, "Get off my side! You're making my side look dumb!" because I agree with many of its complaints about Hot Gimmick (which is addictive but which really seems to want me to root for its protagonist to stick together with her abusive boyfriend), disagree with censorship as a solution, and think the declaration of US culture as a sexism- and misogyny-free zone is just plain whacked.

I replied to

octopedingenue at about the same time you did, explaining that the outrageousness really is part of what I enjoy about manga and manwha. :)

In "Hot Gimmick", I am fascinated by leads Hatsumi and Ryoki as characters, and I am...interested in their romantic relationship: I cannot exactly root for them to stay together as they are, but neither do I want them to break up forever, because that would make the fascinating trainwreck go away. There is a lot of really kinky fucked-up psychological damage and power-playing and sexual posturing under a sweet fluffy coating going on in "Hot Gimmick", and that's fine, that's great, that's why I read it--but I don't get REALLY horrified until I go to Amazon and read misspelled but enthusiastic reviews left by teenage girls gushing about it. That people find "Hot Gimmick" a fascinating story, I completely understand. That people find "Hot Gimmick" a mirror and a model of real life behavior makes me back away in horror.

There is another series also by Miki Aihara called Teacher's Pet that I pray never gets licensed in the US: its main romantic pairing is a high school teacher and her male student, also her fiance's younger brother, who blackmails her for sex and had sex with her for the first time by raping her. I am uneasy at the best of times with the tendency of "Hot Gimmick" to present itself as hyperrealistic and at the same time present over-the-top situations the reader is supposed to accept without blinking--but "Teacher's Pet" is too much for even me. My friend

gweniveeve points out that in some ways, "Teacher's Pet" is less offensive than "Hot Gimmick", because "Teacher's Pet" is far more explicitly a kinkstory (teacher/student, coerced sex, powerplays), while "Hot Gimmick" is a kinkstory-wolf in fluffy shoujo sheep's clothing and a lot more insidious. But I'm still staying the hell away from "Teacher's Pet"--and it makes me wonder just how much of the psychological horror in "Hot Gimmick" was actually intended by the mangaka.

I'll keep reading "Hot Gimmick" for Subaru and Akane, man. They are cute and sweet and give me hope and the only characters I don't want to strangle at least once a volume.

Do you think that maybe the teenage girls gushing about it are responding to it on the kink level but don't have the words or, perhaps, the self-awareness to realize that yet?

There's a yaoi manga out that has a teacher/student power play thing in it, but while I like well-written power play things, teacher/student is for some reason too squickmaking for me to enjoy.

Do you think that maybe the teenage girls gushing about it are responding to it on the kink level but don't have the words or, perhaps, the self-awareness to realize that yet?

That could be true, and I REALLY hope so. If the message they're taking away from HG is that there isn't a cookie-cutter way that a relationship should be, that relationships have power struggles, that powerplays can be sexy, often because they aren't politically correct, and that submissive isn't the same thing as powerless, and maybe (reaching a bit here) a healthy interest in BDSM or similar atypical relationship structures--that's a very good thing. If the message they're taking away is that it's okay if your boyfriend hits you because you weren't there to answer the phone every time he called you from Australia, it's your fault because you kneeeeew how insecure he is--that's a very bad thing.

teacher/student is for some reason too squickmaking for me to enjoy.

For me, also. For "Teacher's Pet" and teacher/student fanfiction (so popular in Harry Potter!) and the like, I do the "your kink is not my kink" thing and move away.

I know as a teen I probably would have been gushing about HG, and would probably know why, but I'd be too embarassed to explain why, even on a relatively anonymous webpage.

Of course, there's plenty of girls who buy into that mentality without the use of manga at all, as we all know. :) When I was doing a semester abroad in Wales during undergrad, my (American) roommate was pining for the Mexican-national boyfriend she broke up with right before going to Wales. From what she said, he had a right-and-proper stereotypical Hispanic machismo thing going on, and they'd had a lot of ups and downs. When they broke up, she'd always come back to him and they'd make up - he never came back to her. And on top of that, she did all this work for him - she typed his class notes for him, fer crissakes! And right before they broke up, she'd addressed and stamped a bunch of envelopes with her Wales address, because otherwise he'd never bother to write. Of course, since they were officially broken up at the time, he didn't write her or call her, even though she called him once.

It was like the perfect manga relationship. And she didn't complain about all the stuff she did for him while getting very little other than male attention back - she almost sounded proud of the stuff she did when she talked about it - because she was in luuuuuuuuuurve.

Another girl in the program had a stoner boyfriend who'd call her twice a week (need I mention they were from very wealthy backgrounds?) but was such a stoner that he couldn't actually finish reading her letters - he'd toss them aside half-read. At the time, her plan was to marry him and then be a successful pilot while supporting him being a professional artist, which I am all about, except that she also said she was going to put her foot down and tell him to choose her or the pot. The decision he was going to make in that instance seemed awfully plain to me.

I can think of other friends and acquaintances that had bizarrely imbalanced or unhealthy relationships, although the one person I knew who got married at 16 and got beat by her husband divorced him because of that within a matter of months, telling me "If I'd wanted to be hit by a man, I'd have married a boxer," which I always thought was a reasonably healthy attitude to have. The rest of them were all psychologically and emotionally battered, which is always harder to recognize and escape from.

So, another manga relationship. Maybe these girls are responding to HG and the like because it does accurately reflect their lives, which is a really scary thought as you've said.

I think that is the part we need to be disturbed by. Not "why are Japanese manga perpetuating these stereotypes?" but "why does this stereotype still speak so deeply to American girls?" I mean, even in high school I wouldn't read something like that and think, 'oh, that's a great idea.' But I can see people going, "oh, I have a friend who was in/I've been in a relationship very much like that."

WORD.

I guess it's more fun to blame the Japanese because they're OMG SO DIFFERENT FROM US.

OH NO! OUR YOUNG'UNS IZ BEING CORRUPTED BY ~~THE NEW YELLOW MENACE~~ MANGA!!

You're absolutely right.

Yeah. It's very difficult to determine exactly why people read and enjoy what they do, because everyone is getting something different out of it. Some girls might read it as a realistic cautionary tale, some might find it kinky and sexy, some might take it as a role model, some might just be entertained, some might keep reading it because they're so outraged by it, and some might be fans of the art.

...think the declaration of US culture as a sexism- and misogyny-free zone is just plain whacked.

Word. *trots out famous 'Bitch, please' icon.*

Heh. I chalk it up to the outrageous over-the-top stuff that's typical of manga and manwha - like Soul to Seoul, which I've seen criticized as unrealistic because one of the main characters has this bizarre desire to be a total criminal gangsta[1], but that sort of thing often appeals to me because I read manga going "OK, this thing was outrageous, what can they do to top that next?" Kinda like the Ninja Baseball ep of Samurai Champloo - there's a point at which the outrageousness goes from "WTF??" to farce, and once you realize that, you get settle back and enjoy the ride. Only the farce doesn't have to be funny - it can be outrageous drama-queen tragedy or romance.

[1] which I really chalk up as being caused by overseas attitudes about what America in general, and New York in particular, is like.

For "Hot Gimmick", I think the thing that disquiets me most about it is not its outrageousness but the unevenness and ambiguity with which it's applied. HG doesn't seem to want to be farce; it employs outrageousness while still insisting on its hyperrealistic setting and characterization, and the dichotomy doesn't always hold up well. We're meant to take Azusa's attempted gang-bang of Hatsumi seriously, but we're also meant to forgive and re-sympathize with him almost as soon as Hatsumi does; the whole incident ends up being more about Asuza's "cry for help" than Hatsumi being assaulted. Shinogu's hopeless love for his adopted sister is supposed to be more realistic, more complicated, less titillating, and more realistic than the Traditional Manga Sibling (Pseudo) Incest, but we're also clearly supposed to take much of the same scandalous delight in it and to view him as a viable romantic possibility for Hatsumi.

In "Fruits Basket", Kyou whaps Tohru in the head, too. But it's clear that they're affectionate lovetaps not meant to harm, and that he would never, ever physically hurt her on purpose--which makes the 2 times I can remember that he does hurt her (by accident, with the table the first time they meet, and with his claws the first time she approaches him in his cat-cursed form) be taken VERY seriously by all the characters (Yuki kicks Kyou's ass for it), especially Kyou (who is still kicking himself in the heart for it, somewhere). Ryoki whaps Hatsumi playfully too--but he also hits her in earnest, which makes those affectionate lovetaps much harder to stomach. And while when there are other characters around to see Ryoki hit Hatsumi, they always get mad at him and tell him not to do that, the protest never goes farther than that: Ryoki never really gets called on it and everyone has forgotten about it by the next time they're together. Even Shinogu's righteous anger at his sister getting hit gets chibi-fied and played off for laughs and is never brought up again. I am always unsure how seriously I should take the violence, because the setup and character reactions for it in the story itself is never the same. It's doing the same thing over and over again and getting different results, which is...crazy!

I suppose we'll have to wait until the end of the run to find out if the Love of a Good Woman is going to Transform the Bad Boy(s). MARS sort-of did that, but it was more on the order of the Bad Boy had transformed himself by the time he found the Good Woman.

I wonder if this sort of thing is also due to the original story being serialized? How does pumping out product on a weekly basis, with no real end in sight, and trying to keep the elements that make it popular, change the basic functioning of the story? Does it not seem quite so relentlessly misogynistic if you're reading each chapter on a weekly basis isntead of a whole book at once?

I remember watching the many episodes of Naruto that consisted of Orichimaru's attack on the village all in a marathon, and my God by the end it was mind-numbingly tedious, but if I'd watched it a week apart, I probably wouldn't ahve had quite the same experience. Hm.

Off to do my stint at the Ref desk now.

Rei was also not abusive to Kira in MARS, and Kira got transformed as well. (Not as much as Rei did and I wish her storyline had gone as far that way as he did, but at least there was an effort made in that direction.)

Yeah - Kira had some pretty heavy stuff to deal with and managed to overcome it, more-or-less. I wanted to slap her mother, who was very much the "But I"m in luuuuuurve!" type of person. Hey! You! So you'd be alone if you booted him out?

As part of this whole discussion, PEACH GIRL is, to me, a perfect example of a story in which people keep trying to be in relationships while none of them is ready to be in one (which actually describes most of highschool). I haven't read it in a while - I think I stopped due to the money crunch at around volume 8 or 9, so I don't know how it's been playing out, but I do recall not being able to get through a volume without wanting to slap someone.

I was pretty sure in MARS that the readers are supposed to want to slap the mother. I sure did.

Dammit, hit some key that posted the comment before I finished the first paragaph. The res tof it is supposed to read:

IT'S NOT A DEATH SENTENCE, YOU BIMBO!

This is definitely a case of Love of a Good Woman transforming the Bad Boy (Boys if you count Azusa, I guess), and an interesting twist on it, in a way: you cannot magically instantly change your Bad Boy, or anybody, through the power of love; any change that comes in Ryoki is going to come frustratingly slowly. That scan I posted elsewhere on the page, as much as it makes me want to hurt him, also gives me hope in a fucked-up way--it's the first time he's made the connection in his head that hurting Hatsumi is bad not because people yell at him or because he feels bad but because it hurts Hatsumi. Tiny, fucked-up baby steps. Ryoki is so good at analytical intelligence and so ignorant in knowing how emotional connections work & actual people interact (and so hyperdefensive about his own inexperience and vulnerability), and of course that is what makes him fascinating and frustrating. He rarely seems able to tell if what he's doing is right or wrong (as compared to, say, Azusa, who knew exactly what was wrong about what he was doing and did it because of that). That should still be a reason for Ryoki to act as he does, not an excuse or justification. Nonetheless. Intellectual intelligence + emotional disconnection & inexperience + vulnerability = oh yes. Fictional kink.

"Hot Gimmick" runs in Betsucomi, which I'm pretty sure is a montly magazine, which means the serial story is even more stretched out, which may alleviate the misogyny somewhat.

I think I'd go MORE insane if I had to watch the "Naruto" anime fights stretched out from week to week--I'd end up yelling at the screen "five weeks of 22 minutes and THIS IS ALL THAT'S HAPPENED?!" I've been letting the recent Naruto/Sasuke arc build up a backlog of episodes in the anime before I watch it, because the length of the same arc in the manga nearly drove me off the edge!

Well, if Ryoki is actually showing signs of change and realization that what he's doing is bad, mmkay, then it puts a new spin on things - in that a lot of people's problems with is are due to the slow pacing of the serial, and the character change that occurs may, at least in part, make up for and be made more powerful by all the stuff that went before.

We always have to look at market forces driving things like this - the creators are responding to what the public wants to read and then the question becomes what

mistressrenet said above, with a slight change: "why does this stereotype still speak so deeply to ~~American~~ Japanese girls?"

The Konoha fight drove me insane because it was episode after episode after episode of the only action being Orochimaru wiggling his fingers to drive the sword deeper into the Hokage. It's like reading the drama serials in the comics page - over in the funny strips you can save the world in the same amount of time it takes Mandrake the Magician to introduce you to his brother-in-law.

I haven't read Hot Gimmick and this discussion is not making me want to read it, but I also don't see Kyo's bonk on Tohru's head and similar incidents as violent. There's a clear distinction in Fruits Basket between what you could call playing rough for fun and real violence (or real and damaging accidents), which is highlighted both in the incidents you mention and in the real physical abuse handed out by Akito.

Kyo's behavior is pretty typical martial artist stuff-- the karate students at my dojo really do whack each other all the time in a non-painful, friendly way, and I mean outside of class. In fact you can tell who's good friends with who by looking at the people who feel comfortable smacking each other.

I agree, and that's what I was trying to say. I'm sorry I didn't make that clear, as I was trying to highlight that distinction between the two series: Kyou is CLEARLY not trying to hurt Tohru when he playfully whaps her, and you're right that the physical violence of Akito throws that whapping (and even the violent but curiously less deadly scrapping between Yuki/Kyou) into sharp relief. Ryoki's playful whapping of Hatsumi in "Hot Gimmick" is NOT as clear, however, because Ryoki (who is not a martial artist) does sometimes hit her intending to harm, or at least startle/chastise--and even when he's actually hitting her, it's sometimes meant to be taken as funny and/or affectionate. That makes all his playful assaults on her suspect, no matter how innocuous.

In conclusion, Kyou is the MUCH better pseudo-boyfriend. *G*

*uses L-as-boyfriend icon* Totally socially inept but intelligence is a kink of mine. And hey, unlike Raito, that whole "not a serial killer" thing is a plus!

*re-uploads Ryoki icon for this discussion* Oh, I adore Ryoki for just that reason (analytically intelligent, emotionally disconnected); he is by far my favorite character in the series. He's also the one I most often want to strangle. *G*

Oh, I got what you were saying. I was agreeing and amplifying on it. I don't read the Kyo/Yuki fights as "real" violence either-- they're not as innocent as the bonks on the head because there's real anger behind them, but they're also formalized and playing by mutually agreed-upon rules, as it were. And both of them can hit back, as opposed to the victims of the assaults by Akito. (Or Ryoki, it sounds like.)

I think martial arts are sufficiently a part of Japanese culture and cultural history that the audience there easily draws a line between martial artists sparring (ie, Yuki vs. Kyo, or Kagura vs. Kyo) and people hitting each other with intent to harm. That is, martial arts "violence" is not automatically a sign of real violence or even that the characters dislike each other, but is just a means of interaction to be interpreted depending on context. (You see this in Hong Kong movies as well: characters who spar beautifully together may well be in love.)

I'd date Kyo.

Oh, I got what you were saying. I was agreeing and amplifying on it.

Forgive me, I completely missed the "also" in your first sentence! I very much appreciate the amplification. The "mutually agreed-upon rules" of Yuki and Kyou are interesting; they do fight like they're moving in a dance for which they've memorized the steps...

If Hatsumi fought Ryoki back, "Hot Gimmick" would be a completely different series (in some ways, a both more palatable and less complex one). I don't think Hatsumi in her passiveness is being held up in the series as a paragon of what girls should be, since she and the other characters are always on her(self) to stand up for herself and be less indecisive. The only real contrasting female character is Hatsumi's younger sister, Akane, who is forceful, headstrong, sexually experienced, and manipulative--and also involved, as the dominant partner, in the only (mostly) happy romantic relationship in the series, with Ryoki's very nice & otaku-y best friend Subaru.

I feel like watching something with intelligent women killing evil things now. :D

The art style in HG is interesting - in the memory scenes (at least in books 1-3, dunno if it changes), the lines are all uniformly and perfectly thin and there's no line variation or dark spots, but the characters are more fully realized in three dimensions in the present-day scenes. I have a really hard time telling the charactes apart, though, even though one of the male leads wears glasses and the other doesn't.

You can also draw a parallel between the main character beign pushed about and crushed and the company-housing culture they're forced to live in, but that's not strong enough to carry all the messed-up stuff in the storyline.

There's that one page where Hiro rips Tohru's bookbag away and she falls over, but as I said, the mangaka uses flowers to note the non-seriousness of it, and Tohru's crying afterwards is due to her mother's picture being inadvertently stolen, and not anythign deliberately caused by Hiro.

And Hiro is very much depicted as being out of line and isn't anything resembling a love interest for Tohru.

I hadn't noticed that about the memory scenes. I'll have to go back and re-read them. Neat! I can never decide whether I like the "Hot Gimmick" art or not; I also get annoyed by all the males looking alike, and the tendency for everyone's noses to disappear. But much of the art is terribly pretty, and the faces are good at showing emotion (even when they have no nose), and the stylized neon pop-art style of the covers and inset pages and such makes me happy. It's a distinct style in all its shoujo-ness, whatever it is.

There's a parallel there, yeah... The company-housing culture messed up everyone's lives badly, starting with the parents, so the kids could be messed up by the company housing AND by their parents. I think you could also draw a slight parallel between Hatsumi's inability to speak her mind and the ways keeping silent and keeping secrets have royally messed up everyone as well. Nobody's honest with each other or themselves in Company Housing Land.

I was far more worried about Tohru having a heart attack over her mother's picture than I was about her being harmed by Hiro's "attack". (I was also waiting for Kyou or Uo to show up and kill Hiro, but then other stuff happened and now I love Hiro.)

The romantic leads, Ryoki and Hatsumi:
First I give Ryoki a cookie. Then I STRANGLE HIM TO DEATH.

(I don't believe him. "I can just kick you in the stomach instead!")

Their relationship (and the series) is more complicated than that (which is why I keep reading), but...............yeah.

Heehee. I read the first three volumes of it, then hit a money crunch and scaled down my manga spending. Now that I'm spending more on manga again, I look at the sheer number I have to buy to catch up on that, Vagabond, and Rurouni Kenshin, and whimper a lot.

Ewwwww!

A world of emphatic nodding.

....oooh. So that's why I read shonen. ::nods sagely::

I don't even know where to start on the generalisation of Eastern vs Western comics on women. I mean, yeah, okay, DC sucks, buts hey guesswhat? It's not the only Western comic producer in the world, and it's still not half as bad as most manga. Nevermind the whole fantasy != reality argument.

As for the sexual abuse/asking for it thing, there was an interesting point raised in an article about yaoi I once read that otherwise didn't have much going for it, that it's got to do with conceptions of sexual dirtiness and sort of overcoming it. Like, no matter how much the uke/shoujo is violated, she's still adored by her darling prince, whereas the reality of many relationships even in the supposedly oh-so-progressive West is often different.

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spoilers for Hot Gimmick & Fruits Basket, I suppose

Re: spoilers for Hot Gimmick & Fruits Basket, I suppose

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a little context, from "Hot Gimmick" volume 8

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Here via Reena's ranting...