manga

Swords, Shuriken, and Seasons: Passing the Torch With New Shonen

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I’ve always been a sucker of sorts for shinobi or ninja-based series. Rurouni Kenshin was my first love in that regard, as I quickly fell in love with the weird, diverse cast of characters, Kenshin’s code of honor and ever-present desire to help and protect those in need, as well as the flashy swordplay and sword arts, moves, and styles. For a young Tofu, it was absolute heaven. Other series caught my eye similarly – Naruto was an early favorite, for instance. Between the hype that came from watching it as it aired and the ever-present escalation and new uses of interesting and powerful jutsu, the show had me hooked. As I grew older and branched out beyond the shonen genre, I found myself deep in the throes of shows such as Samurai Champloo, which took the idea of warriors embodying the idea of the samurai I had come to love and re-positioning it in a way I had up until then not seen.

Not all first loves last, though.

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My Brother’s Husband – An Instructional Guide to Being an Ally

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Back when Ryan Lewis and Macklemore were writing the songs for their album The Heist, Ben Haggerty (Macklemore) was having a hard time coming up with the lyrics for “Same Love.”  He finally decided on an idea of telling the story from a gay individual’s perspective. However, when he showed this to Ryan Lewis, Ryan shot it down immediately.  He stated to Ben that there was no authenticity behind these words, and that if he really wanted to make an impact, he should tell it from his perspective. Ben rewrote the song with this in mind, taking his own perspective and feelings of support for the gay community and translating them musically.  The song went on to be an anthem for the gay community and a banner for allies to rally under as they pushed harder to finally enact legal gay marriage in the United States.

As someone who likes to write in his free time, I always suffer trying to find how to write characters that aren’t the same background as me, whether it’s a different ethnicity or a different sexuality.  To be honest, it genuinely is an impossible thing to try and do this by myself. I can’t understand the struggle or the abuse people have gone through for being gay because I’m just not. That is why I always talk to those around me from these backgrounds in order to help me understand on some scale, and then constantly keep the conversation going as I write.  Any writer who is gay would far better be able to detail how that feels than me, and we should encourage them to write those feelings.  However, for those of us that are allies, I feel that if we want to express these types of characters in the stories we tell, we have to make damn sure we do it right.

That is why I love My Brother’s Husband as a series.  This short but endearingly sweet manga very much acts as an instructional guide for the ways allies can help and make the best of being the support class in the Equality Squad.  Gengoroh Tagame in this manga shows people, such as myself, how to be that ally that the gay community needs, how to accept them and work with them to make a better place.

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Pick of the Month: Mado Kara Madoka-chan

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This manga is this perfect little cap off to the day for me.  Mado Kara Madoka-chan is a cute little series about a office worker who walks the same path to work every day outside of a woman’s house, who loves to play games and roleplay with him as he passes by.  Every time that our protagonist comes by, Madoka-chan begins a different kind of game with him to keep both of their lives fun, dramatically changing the layout and look of her home.

Each chapter is a different strange experience with the eccentric Madoka-chan  as she performs something within her four walls either for the salaryman passing by, or seemingly to entertain herself. However, her eccentric nature and the dramatic transformations of her place, sometimes in a matter of minutes, makes me feel as if there’s a hint of Magical Realism in this series. Like, there are some chapters where she closes her shutters and not five seconds later, they slam back open to reveal a restaurant. It’s insane but also always fun, especially because as magical as she may seem, Madoka-chan doesn’t always get everything right and so interactions between the two characters can become dynamic and sometimes downright hilarious.

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Picks of the Month – Mousou Telepathy

Selie 1 Comment

Mousou Telepathy is a story that takes a look at what having a super power most consider cool would really be like of it came with no off button.  Ayako Nakano is a student in high school who ever since she could remember has been able to see other people’s thoughts. However, after being called creepy by her mother when she was very little, she’s always kept this to herself.  Unfortunately, this becomes harder to hide when a seemingly stoic popular boy in her class with a very overactive imagination falls madly in love with her, constantly thinking about her throughout the school day.

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Picks of the Month – My Brother’s Husband

Selie 3 Comments

This is genuinely one of the most heart-warming things I’ve read in awhile.  My Brother’s Husband is a multiple award-winning story about a single father, Yaichi, living in Japan.  His twin brother Ryoji, had moved to Canada and there found love and legally married his fiancé. However, after ten years living abroad, Ryoji suddenly died.  Now, a month has passed and suddenly, Ryoji’s husband, Mike, has decided to come to visit Japan to learn more about his husband and his family that he never got a chance to meet.  While living with them, Mike helps to change the lives of our main character Yaichi and his daughter, helping them to not only come to terms with his brother’s passing, but also his own biases that didn’t allow Yaichi to fully accept his brother.

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Pick of the Month – Gokushufudou: The Way of the House Husband.

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I feel Gokushufudou works for the same reason of why I love Leslie Nelson’s brand of comedic movies.  It’s a very serious character in a completely out of tone situation. Our main character, Tatsu, is an ex-yakuza who left all of the gang violence behind to completely support his wife in her work by taking care of their house.  However, even with the smallest chores of cleaning the bath or doing the dishes, he treats it with the same horrifying and meticulous seriousness of a gang-sanctioned killing.

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Pick of the Month – I’ve Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years and Maxed Out My Level

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If it’s not obvious from the title, this is 100% an isekai light novel story.  Rather than your typical one, though, this one caught my attention because it wanted to go for a different approach, which will always catch my eye.  The manga (as it’s the version I ended up reading) follows our main lead Azusa Aizawa who is a businesswoman that literally works herself to death. A god or being of some sort takes pity on her and sets her up in a new life as a young mage with eternal youth/life.  Azusa decides that this will be her retirement and begins a life in another world doing… absolutely nothing. Having worked all her life since she was old enough to, she doesn’t want to do anything at all related to work. She gets by killing the “lowest level” (the world has MMO logic but it’s a fantasy realm) creatures she can find, slimes, and selling the gems they drop for the various food and resources she needs.  Being immortal, she ends up doing this for so long that she’s become quite a powerful being and even a well-respected individual in her small town thanks to her healing potions she makes in her free time. However, after Azusa finds out how truly godly powerful she’s really become, she does everything she possibly can to avoid interrupting her streak of 300 peaceful years as a hermit. Too bad someone leaked how powerful she was to the world and now creatures far and wide have come to test her might…

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Pick of the Month – Satoko & Nada

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Okay, this one… This one right here?  Delightful.

Satoko & Nada is a simple series about two young women finding themselves as roommates in University and exploring each other’s cultures.  Satoko is a Japanese exchange student to America who finds her expectations for her roommate are very unlike what she initially thought when she meets Nada, another exchange student who comes from Saudi Arabia.  However, the two find themselves as incredibly fast friends and, for the benefit of this manga, very open and accepting about sharing their cultures with each other.

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New Series – Picks of the Month!

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Hey!  Mythos, here.  I wanted to try something new.  If you’ve followed us for a while, you may have noticed a bit of a dry spell from us and I know we’ve apologized a million times over it.  All three of us try to do this site on the side from our own lives, which unfortunately have gotten super busy to the point where it’s kinda out of our hands right now.  We’re still committed to doing this blog and starting a lot of fun and interesting discussions, however. So, instead of apologizing over and over again, I decided I’d do something a little different to help out over the course of this blog being a little slow with updates.  So lemme get to this.

I typically don’t have a lot of time for things but where I suffer from insomnia, I usually have an unfortunate ton of time before my meds kick in where I’m just laying in bed waiting to sleep.  So I’ve been doing a lot of reading, mostly manga and webcomics. As such, I figure I’m already doing the research for it, so why don’t I write about what I’m reading?

These won’t be super long pieces, as while I have time for the reading part of this, I still don’t have a ton of time for the actual writing.  So these will just be little short pieces either detailing a specific manga, manwha, or webcomic I’m going through and either explaining the plot or detailing a specific idea or concept from them I find interesting.  I love giving a shout out to fun ideas or stories as there’s always a lot of negativity about. So hopefully, these can act as a nice bit of levity from all that. And who knows? Maybe you’ll find something you like with some of these and take a look yourself!

One last bit here and as a bit of an aside:  I usually play a little loose and fast when it comes to scanlations when I can’t find an official release.  However, I always, always want to support the source material if I can and buy the official version.  So while some of these may not have an official English version, many others do.  I highly recommend buying it and will always try to link to someplace that you can, if possible.  In fact, if you all ever find a legal version of any of these, and I don’t mention it, PLEASE let me know about it.  I will buy this shit in a heartbeat because 1) I absolutely want to support the authors and 2) I’m a collector so I need dat shit in my life.  So lemme know if you ever find the full release of some of these and I will buy it and share where everyone else can as well.

That’s it!  Hope you enjoy.  The first of these new posts is linked below!

Pick of the Month – Satoko & Nada

A Response to “Moé, Misogyny and Masculinity: Anime’s Cuteness Problem–and How to Fix It”

thebackloggers 5 Comments

Preface

A recent post was made discussing the topic of “Moe” within the anime industry. You can find a link to it here.

This post, while interesting in itself, has sparked a response from multiple camps of critics and fans of anime alike, with opinions of all kinds surrounding the article. Given the nature of the post, and its submission on a feminist positive blog, there has obviously been some blind emotion on the topic. However, some have come forward to give their feelings, critique, and attempt an actual conversation about the topic. We thought we might do this as well.

Since our website is run by three different people who each have relatively different views, we figured it’d be best to add to the conversation individually, noting our personal feelings on this subject. None of these will be an in-depth analysis on the topic, and one or all of us may do something like that later, but for now, here our thoughts on the post specifically and what it talks about.

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