Hey! Thanks for pointing that out. I'm pretty much of the same mind that most 'yaoi' manga is completely yawn-worthy, but I appreciated the cultural observations made in that essay.
Out of curiosity, have you read Antique Bakery yet? I can't remember everyone on my friend's list who has, but it's such a jewel of the genre it's worth a look.
I think it's so far the best essay on the yaoi/shounen-ai subject I've read, mostly because it avoids assuming that readers read something that the author doesn't really "get" because of wish-fulfillment since they're missing something in their own life, a trap which most essayists on fanfic, genre romance, slash, Mary Sues, yaoi, science fiction, etc. who aren't readers of the genres fall into.
Yup! I loved it - it took a while for me to get into, because everyone kept reviewing and recommending it as yaoi, and it's not yaoi at all, not even by the new Americanized definition. Once I stopped looking for the yaoi that people kept telling me was in it, I was able to appreciate it. :D
* You've got something in Yuri Monogatori 4, if I remember right? I just, as in about three minutes ago, sent in an order for it and a couple of other ALC books. :D
I was going to be published in the YM next year, but I withdrew because I haven't had/and I don't think I will have in the future, enough time to develop my idea and execute it to my liking. However, I do hope to participate in the installment after that. I'm just not sure how much having a wee parasite will interrupt my productivity levels. Other parents are so fond of doom-saying with 'GIVE UP YOUR LIFE AS YOU KNOW IT FOR IT WILL ALL CHANGE AND YOU WILL BE A MISERABLE SLAVE TO YOUR OFFSPRING HARHARHARHAR'
Ah well. :D Yeah, the amount of time and energy you'll have is completely up in the air - some kids are absolute time-sinks, and others are prefectly happy to go off on their own.
It's one of the more sensible articles around, especially as you say in not viewing it as some weird phenomenon that indicates something lacking in the reader. But it's got the same problem as all articles based on translations. English BL manga isn't just the tip of the BL iceberg, it's a couple of ice cubes floating in the iceberg's wake. General judgments made on such a tiny amount of data (biased to the soft stuff through publishers' decisions, further skewed by translators' spin) are more likely to be off than on.
I really miss manga bonbons. That indicated, at least visually, the variety of what's out there.
But on the other hand, if he's analyzing the phenomenon of BL/yaoi popularity in the English-reading US market*, doesn't it make sense to use the books available to that market? I'm not sure that using BL/yaoi that the readers over here haven't read is useful in figuring out why the readers over here like it.
He does refer to the Japanese market here and there, but I feel the overall thrust of the essay is more focused on popularity in the US market, even though he doesn't say so in so many words.
* The market I'm most familiar with. I have no idea what the British or English-reading European market is like.
I feel the overall thrust of the essay is more focused on popularity in the US market
OK, if you were taking it in that sense. I saw it as a description of the BL genre in general based on the works available in English. But I wonder why he chose to theorize only on the basis of published translations, when the English BL readers I know seem to depend on scanlations that offer more variety than a mainstream publisher dare provide.
You're getting a lot of thinking-out-loud here - I may turn this into a column about the differences between the online audience and teh offline market at some point, so I just blathered on to get my thoughts out as they occurred.
I think that as someone who works in the industry - he's an editor for Viz - he's probably more interested in the market that's buying the translated stuff at the moment. Which, I gather from various things here and there, does not overlap to a huge extent with the scanlation-reading audience.
But that's something that affects online fandom in general - as tech-savvy Internet people and readers of manga, you and I see and interact with a skewed version of the manga-reading public. The majority of the people out there buying manga, watching TV shows, reading books, seeing movies, don't focus that much attention online, and so we see movements online that take a while to filter out to the general public.
It's something we can see in the Harry Potter online fandom: the majority of HP readers aren't online and aren't as batshit insane as the online vocal members are. I remember seeing some number estimates by Diane Duane (the author, who's got a Journalfen account and occasionally posts there) in one of the HP wanks about the number of online fans vs. the number of offline fans, and you see that even in the huge HP fandom, the online fandom probably numbers just a few thousand, with the hardcore participants just a few hundred, and the really crazy, vocal ones even less than that. So you see a skewed version of HP fans online, when they represent probably one to five percent of the total number of people who consider themselves fans (or "I'm not a fan, I just really like the books and standing in line with other readers at midnight to buy them" people) of HP.
So I expect that what we see with the scanlation readers online are just a percentage of the translation-buying market - the early adopters, if you will. Casting about for a metaphor here, they/we are the equivalent of the people currently jonesing to get the Wii, who will own it within the next three months, or who are begging their parents to get one for Christmas. The majority of the eventual Wii owners are waiting for a few months to a year or two, until the hype and the price drops, more games are available, and refurbished systems are on the market, and aren't getting online at the GameFAQ forums to wank loud and long about the good/bad points of the Wii.
To bring that belabored point home, I think the majority, maybe only by a few percentage points, but still enough that they're significant, of the commercial market for BL/yaoi over here at the moment are the people who don't spend time downloading scanlations. The scanlators are the point people - the ones to keep an eye on as to what might sell in the future, who follow trends in Japan and bring stuff to the attention of the scanlation-reading people, who then disseminate it among and recommend it to their offline friends. Even the convention-going audience isn't the majority of the market. Most people who buy manga will never go to an anime convention, because they don't know about them, or they think it's weird and don't identify as fans, because they don't have the money, or because there's never one close enough they can get to.
And since it can take a year or more more to go through the licensing, translating, and publishing process, we're seeing things published now that originally came to the attention of the online scanlation readers some time ago, and they've already moved on to other things.
Alternately, if the scanlation-reading audience is large enough to be a huge chunk of the potential BL/yaoi-buying market, there's an incentive to avoid the stuff that's being scanlated now - a significant chunk of the scanlation-reading people, no matter what they say, won't buy it translated because they have no money or because they have problems with the translation. That is a really big motivation to not publish things stuff that's being read in scanlation right now, and to purposefully aim the books that are published at a different section of the market.
"So you see a skewed version of HP fans online, when they represent probably one to five percent of the total number of people who consider themselves fans (or "I'm not a fan, I just really like the books and standing in line with other readers at midnight to buy them" people) of HP."
Which, in turn, is only a small part of the actual book-buying market.
Oh yeah- her remarks about how 'shounen-ai' doesn't do the trope of "we're not gay we just love each other"-- I think this post (http://supacat.livejournal.com/86978.html) by supacat should be more widely known, very specifically this thread (http://supacat.livejournal.com/86978.html?thread=744386) of it. Japan really is another country. They do things differently there.
URgh. I think LJ ate my post so sorry if this shows up twice. I really don't agree with the classification of Hana-kimi as shonen-ai. There wasn't really anything shown with a boy/boy relationship until volume 14 and that was more of a side story then anything with the main characters. Unless I have misread something/don't remember something.
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manga_talk? Hmmm?
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Out of curiosity, have you read Antique Bakery yet? I can't remember everyone on my friend's list who has, but it's such a jewel of the genre it's worth a look.
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Yup! I loved it - it took a while for me to get into, because everyone kept reviewing and recommending it as yaoi, and it's not yaoi at all, not even by the new Americanized definition. Once I stopped looking for the yaoi that people kept telling me was in it, I was able to appreciate it. :D
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I really miss manga bonbons. That indicated, at least visually, the variety of what's out there.
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He does refer to the Japanese market here and there, but I feel the overall thrust of the essay is more focused on popularity in the US market, even though he doesn't say so in so many words.
* The market I'm most familiar with. I have no idea what the British or English-reading European market is like.
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OK, if you were taking it in that sense. I saw it as a description of the BL genre in general based on the works available in English. But I wonder why he chose to theorize only on the basis of published translations, when the English BL readers I know seem to depend on scanlations that offer more variety than a mainstream publisher dare provide.
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I think that as someone who works in the industry - he's an editor for Viz - he's probably more interested in the market that's buying the translated stuff at the moment. Which, I gather from various things here and there, does not overlap to a huge extent with the scanlation-reading audience.
But that's something that affects online fandom in general - as tech-savvy Internet people and readers of manga, you and I see and interact with a skewed version of the manga-reading public. The majority of the people out there buying manga, watching TV shows, reading books, seeing movies, don't focus that much attention online, and so we see movements online that take a while to filter out to the general public.
It's something we can see in the Harry Potter online fandom: the majority of HP readers aren't online and aren't as batshit insane as the online vocal members are. I remember seeing some number estimates by Diane Duane (the author, who's got a Journalfen account and occasionally posts there) in one of the HP wanks about the number of online fans vs. the number of offline fans, and you see that even in the huge HP fandom, the online fandom probably numbers just a few thousand, with the hardcore participants just a few hundred, and the really crazy, vocal ones even less than that. So you see a skewed version of HP fans online, when they represent probably one to five percent of the total number of people who consider themselves fans (or "I'm not a fan, I just really like the books and standing in line with other readers at midnight to buy them" people) of HP.
So I expect that what we see with the scanlation readers online are just a percentage of the translation-buying market - the early adopters, if you will. Casting about for a metaphor here, they/we are the equivalent of the people currently jonesing to get the Wii, who will own it within the next three months, or who are begging their parents to get one for Christmas. The majority of the eventual Wii owners are waiting for a few months to a year or two, until the hype and the price drops, more games are available, and refurbished systems are on the market, and aren't getting online at the GameFAQ forums to wank loud and long about the good/bad points of the Wii.
To bring that belabored point home, I think the majority, maybe only by a few percentage points, but still enough that they're significant, of the commercial market for BL/yaoi over here at the moment are the people who don't spend time downloading scanlations. The scanlators are the point people - the ones to keep an eye on as to what might sell in the future, who follow trends in Japan and bring stuff to the attention of the scanlation-reading people, who then disseminate it among and recommend it to their offline friends. Even the convention-going audience isn't the majority of the market. Most people who buy manga will never go to an anime convention, because they don't know about them, or they think it's weird and don't identify as fans, because they don't have the money, or because there's never one close enough they can get to.
And since it can take a year or more more to go through the licensing, translating, and publishing process, we're seeing things published now that originally came to the attention of the online scanlation readers some time ago, and they've already moved on to other things.
Alternately, if the scanlation-reading audience is large enough to be a huge chunk of the potential BL/yaoi-buying market, there's an incentive to avoid the stuff that's being scanlated now - a significant chunk of the scanlation-reading people, no matter what they say, won't buy it translated because they have no money or because they have problems with the translation. That is a really big motivation to not publish things stuff that's being read in scanlation right now, and to purposefully aim the books that are published at a different section of the market.
I have no conclusion: I just ran out of steam. :D
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"So you see a skewed version of HP fans online, when they represent probably one to five percent of the total number of people who consider themselves fans (or "I'm not a fan, I just really like the books and standing in line with other readers at midnight to buy them" people) of HP."
Which, in turn, is only a small part of the actual book-buying market.
PS
Re: PS
2) See my remarks about this being a US-centric reading of the genre, for the most part.
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I haven't read Hana-kimi, so I have no idea one way or the other. :)
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