We were hiding out in some Japanese school.
I remember almost nothing from this one, but it was a combination of Raki☆Sta (particularly the bit starting
here) and another school series. (It's been so long, I've forgotten what the latter was.) I've never even read or watched the former, but it's one of the ones
blitzcon told me he was going to show me long, long ago (but not early enough that I could actually get the videos), so I've been breaking my usual rule in its case. Consequently, most of my knowledge of it is from
Ms.? Maitake's
illustrations and
comics (although I haven't actually been reading the posts since I haven't even started the series yet), which is undoubtedly skewing my preconceptions of its content.
You may remember that
I fouled up a while back and that I
later decided not to worry about it. I neglected to mention that Ms.? Maitake replied the very next day and pointed out that it was clearly stated on the site that duplicating things without permission was prohibited, which rather scuppered
a post I'd made.
Meanwhile, when I contacted her/him to ask whether I could post direct links to individual posts, I decided to ask about her/his gender so I could address her/him less awkwardly, but she/he declined to say. (Japanese writers/illustrators sometimes take PNs that would suggest genders different from their own, but I've never seen anything proving that any have made false claims about this. Then again, nor do I have any proof that any Japanese comic writer/illustrator has ever been captured on camera (with the exception of
Akamatsu, whose mug I do not fondly remember seeing, particularly considering that he's actually married to
a lady who's more than 13 years his junior now), so that's hard to say with certainty, either. You can take this into account for my generalizations in the next paragraph.) I would tend to assume that she/he's a man like me due to
the demographics (?) of what she/he seems to find interesting, but that's a bit of a disservice to
Ms. Hayashiya, Ms.
oneirotsai, and many others. Of course, in English, there aren't any honorifics except title prefixes, so it doesn't make much difference; in Japanese, I've just been using speech patterns somewhere in-between.
I do find it interesting that I see ladies who draw stuff aimed at male audiences all the time (with
Ms. Takahashi being the classic example), but never confirmed examples of men drawing stuff for ladies. (The fact that ladies draw lots of yuri, yet I never hear about men drawing much yaoi, is less surprising.) The closest I've seen is
Fujieda, who has been suppressing his style (judging by
Iono Sama Fanatics, his only independent work I've read) in various YuriHime Comics mooks (and of course the compilations), but although they always use feminine second-person pronouns, the content of even
the main series is more moe than shōjo, so he's still a bit short of
Jack Nicholson.
In my research for
Projects Abdiel and
Homuncupunk, I was surprised to find that in modern English, the one language I've encountered that has almost no ways of showing respect, we have retained the plural/formal singular objective from the early modern variety as our sole (before conjugation) second-person pronoun.