Still Enjoying Manga

@StillEnjoyingManga

Posting about some of the manga I read. I read manga in Japanese.

Still Enjoying Manga @StillEnjoyingManga4/23/2024, 12:52 PM

I feel sources in English talking about the roots of yuri pay too little attention to BL's role, despite it having had a clearer influence than S. Maria-sama ga miteru is an especially important case—its inspiration was the idea of doing soft shounen-ai but with girls. Oyuki Konno said in an interview in Eureka 2014 Dec: Yuri Bunka no Genzai that she didn't know about S until after she had created MariMite and people were asking her about whether Hanamonogatari had been an influence.

In the case of Shiroi Heya no Futari, Ryoko Yamagishi wanted to do a shounen-ai story, but made it about girls instead, suspecting that would be more palatable to shoujo manga readers. Around the same time, Moto Hagio worked on November Gymnasium, the one-shot that would be basis for The Heart of Thomas, and had an early draft where it was about a girls school, so it sounds like Yamagishi wasn't the only mangaka to have that worry.

#yuri #boys' love

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Frank Hecker @hecker4/23/2024, 1:55 PM

This is an excellent point. Pre-war S literature was characterized by often tragic tales of love between girls, and post-war (1970s and beyond) that got switched to often tragic tales of love between boys, likely due to changes in Japanese society and the Japanese educational system (my takes on why S literature went extinct and BL as a successor to S literature).

I'd also add that Marimite doesn't actually follow the traditional S template in terms of plot and theme; it's an entirely different thing (my take on Marimite). Although if Oyuki Konno was totally unfamiliar with S literature then it's not clear where the whole Catholic school milieu came from. Maybe that was just because Catholic-run girls schools were popular among Japan's upper and upper-middle classes, like the Nogi Girls’ High School founded in Kamakura in the 1940s and later renamed Shonan Shirayuri Gakuen High School.

Still Enjoying Manga @StillEnjoyingManga4/23/2024, 2:30 PM

I think S was fading once heterosexual dating was less scandalous and publishers could sell straight romance stories to schoolgirls. I just skimmed what you wrote about it, and seems like it's along the same lines?

I think an important difference S and MariMite is that sœur relationships were a tradition at a conservative school. They had a kind of mentorship aspect. S was a modern trend, pushing at boundaries.

There's definitely a general association with girls' school and Catholicism, but on top of that Konno herself went to a Catholic kindergarten. Her schooling is another side of where MariMite came from: she attended an all girls high school and a women's college.

Frank Hecker @hecker4/23/2024, 9:34 PM

Yes, it seems as if dating as we know it really wasn't a thing in Japan until after WW2, given the prevalence of arranged marriages, and once it did become a thing then literature for girls shifted aways from girl-girl relationships.

Also, I think you are absolutely correct about the relative importance of BL ("the iceberg", as you put it). For a footnote in my book I did a count of all manga listed on Anime Planet and found that BL accounted for about 20% of them, about 6 times more than yuri.

Still Enjoying Manga @StillEnjoyingManga4/23/2024, 9:14 PM

I've read the linked chapters properly now. Interesting and well written, but I do think there's various places where you were going out on a limb. For instance, your speculation about MariMite appealing to its older audience as an alternative vision of Japan. I'm confident that's not what appealed about it to me and I don't think I was out of step with the fandom around it.

Frank Hecker @hecker4/23/2024, 9:29 PM

Thanks for reading the chapters! I was going out on a limb a lot in this book, especially as someone who didn't know Japanese. That was a good part of the fun of writing it.

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