hecker

Amateur essayist, anime & manga fan

Resident of Howard County, Maryland, systems engineer, and amateur essayist and data scientist. Author of the book That Type of Girl: Notes on Takako Shimura's Sweet Blue Flowers. Staff writer for Okazu.


Twitter
@hecker
Mastodon
@hecker@mastodon.social
Bluesky
@hecker.bsky.social
Email
frank@frankhecker.com

saralily
@saralily

@VampireExpert asked me what my other recommendations were for works that hit me harder about my past or about the loss of a hypothetical childhood so I thought I'd share some here.

I had denied myself manga in my first puberty because it didn't feel like it was for me. I now know this feeling to be somewhat common among people like me, but then I thought it was either something base, giving into a desire that should have been sublimated to "higher" art, or something. I was a pretentious child because that "intellectualization" was a thick emotional shield. I took Japanese my freshman year, and around that time a lodger stayed with our family to finish out high school after his mom left to marry a rich man in another state. He was born in Japan and watched a lot of J-Drama and action movies, spoke Japanese, cooked Japanese food, and was a huge influence on my musical tastes; he introduced me to Muse after their Japan tour through live recordings. I only recently realized I had a huge crush on him.

I only got into manga in the last seven months, so I'm not widely read or anything close. I don't care for work that focuses on something other than human relationships and the feelings and norms we have to navigate to be a part of the social world. All the manga I truly love is problematic in that it explores the cultural and normative boundaries between thought and action and explores the consequences of transgressing those boundaries in the name of what feels right.

I mentioned If I Could Reach You, Yurikuma Arashi and Welcome Back, Alice already.

My first real foray into serious yuri, and really in any manga was when I read Bloom Into You. I found it because it has been the most popular and celebrated yuri series since it came out; it comes up everywhere when searching for recommendations. I hadn't read anything that explored the complexities of relationships at that age. One day I'll write more about it (after I re-read it). Without spoiling anything, I resonate deeply with Touko's experiences, what she shoulders and how she shoulders it. It's poetic, sparse, and its quiet moments hold a space for feels that are hard to put into words. It directly confronts transgression, violation, power, violence, and love without categorical rejection. In terms of queer relationships, it's not just about yuri, either. (Note: this is very hard to find in print as a complete set in English right now; I think I bought the only copies of 6 and 7 for sale in the last few weeks, both as parts of separate lots.)

Lily. I am not done with this yet; I'm half way through and taking a break because whenever I read it I get so into it that I read for hours and hours and feel gutted when I've caught up to the official translation. This is the slowest burn I have ever read (even slower than the incredibly long — and good — light novel Date Her Instead). It is 926 chapters long, each 8 pages of full color illustrations. The subtleties in facial expressions come literally hundreds of chapters before conscious realizations. I deeply sympathize with Lan Rouxi and her experiences, her armor and her shields.

Doughnuts Under a Crescent Moon is another gentle and quiet exploration of the blossoming of love. It's slow, quiet, and deeply introspective. I love this series because of how slow and gentle it is with its pacing, and how it surfaces the characters' interiors without tropes or misunderstandings.

Even Though We're Adults. Takako Shimura is my favorite mangaka. This series is about discovering queer love while married, separation, and the complexities of coming to know yourself in your mid-thirties. @kaybee and I relate deeply to the main characters as we both went through experiences like this series depicts in the last few years. It describes perfectly the tonality of sleeping in the same bed as the person you're separating from; the fear in how it feels to fall into a new love while trying not to harm your previous partner; the nuance of divorce between two people who still love each other but have fallen out of love; what moving on feels like; the tightrope of agency and intimacy after a separation that itself comes after the realization that the love you want is new and different.

A Tropical Fish Yearns for Snow. This is about the nebulousness of pining, of wanting to break out of your shell in face of depression. It is a queer story. There are vapid debates about whether or not it is yuri. It's a quiet place explored through gesture, thought, and hope. This one is probably divisive.

Goukaku no Tame no! Yasashii Sankaku Kankei Nyuumon and Tonari no Heya kara Aegigoe ga Surun desu kedo. These aren't translated, but you can find scanlations. They're about poly relationships. It makes me happy they exist.

I'm currently reading Haru to Midori which is about a woman who adopts the child of her childhood crush after she dies. I'm only a few chapters in and it hits some pretty key things about death, loss, and love that resonate viscerally. I'm not sure where this one is going but I'm enjoying it a lot, as hard as it is to read.

Finally...

Aoi Hana is my favorite manga. I'm getting a tattoo from it. It is beautiful the way Arvo Pärt's music is beautiful. It is about a girl falling in love with her childhood friend after being separated for a few years. It is about maturing into a social and normative reality that has already rejected who you are and who you love and stolen it from you once. It is about loss, and making what you can with what you have. It is about the construction of a family. It is about what we inherit, what we reject, and what we accept, and how that changes us. It is simple and sparse, and within that simplicity presents visual and narrative tones and harmonies that resonate the core of my soul. Every single panel is a beautiful work of art. Takako Shimura does not draw unnecessary things, so many panels consist only of a foreground and maybe a middleground. Then suddenly you turn the page and the most beautiful grayscale landscape full of the most minute details shines back at you, dappled light playing over a face, a hand balled into a fist, sun-kissed shoulders.

I had some of my childhood taken away by circumstance, over time. A little before I turned nine my father took his own life. I did not know what it meant to be a teenager, to grow older and more mature, though I thought I did. My romantic relationships, or attempts at them, started with people I saw as similar to me: depressed, sad, but filled with something else that drove us forward despite that darkness, or because of it. But those relationships lacked something, some kind of foundation, because I didn't know who I was, really, and wouldn't know for 20-something years. Those relationships had a special timbre, a gentleness, that felt like part of some kind of private dance whose steps we knew but whose roles escaped us. I realize now that all my relationships have been queer, but I didn't know that then. Aoi Hana brought a lot of this back to me; it gave me a way to reinterpret those relationships, to explore my past reframed in a hypothetical space where I had the girlhood I never did. This is a selfish way of interpreting a text but it's all I know how to do — I refuse to keep myself out of the stories I read.

I wish I could revisit those memories with the ones I loved then, but I can't. The first I fell out of touch with as we got older, as our paths in school and life diverged. The second was a good friend, and we stayed in touch after we moved to different cities after college. We talked for years every few months about depression, darkness, how to go on. Both of them killed themselves before I transitioned. My memories of them now warm me like sunlight.


hecker
@hecker

I've read all of the ones @jtth recommends that have been released in English, except for A Tropical Fish Yearns for Snow, and agree with her comments. Here are some of my own recommendations, in no particular order:



(My apologies, I couldn’t think of a clever headline for this.) In a comment on my “Life in Patreonia” post, @tekgo asked whether the number of patrons of Patreon projects was distributed in a similar way to the earnings for Patreon projects.

The short answer is “yes, it is.” The long answer is here. The in-between answer is that in the sample of about 218,000 projects, the number of patrons per project appears to have a log-normal distribution (like earnings), with a median number of 6 patrons per project. The chances of having more than 10 patrons is about 40%, the chances of having more than 100 is less than 10%, and the chances of having more than 1,000 is less than 1%.



If you’re like me, you probably contribute to a project on Patreon. You may have even started a project on Patreon yourself, or are considering doing so.

Patreon boasts about its success: “8 million+ monthly active patrons ... 250,000+ creators on Patreon ... $3.5 billion paid out to creators.” Other sites run articles like “How Much Money Can You Make on Patreon?” and “25 Patreon Statistics You Need to Know.” There’s even a Patreon project devoted to collecting and publishing such statistics on an ongoing basis.

Occasionally you’ll find someone injecting a note of caution, as in a relatively in-depth analysis from five years ago. But the one set of statistics I could never find was about exactly how Patreon earnings were distributed across the whole set of projects, including what typical Patreon projects could expect to earn, and whether there was a straightforward way to characterize that distribution of earnings. So I decided to try doing that myself.