May 24, 2010 22:14
So instead of studying for Japanese oral exam tomorrow, I think I'm getting carried away being in LJ and want to rant about shoujo manga.
These last few days, I've been spending hours of shoujo manga/manhwa marathon, on "You're So Cool" (Lee Young Hui), "Bokura ga Ita" (Obata Yuuki), and "Mars" (Souryo Fuyumi) especially. What they have in common is the "bad boy"/guy with mental issues-meets-innocent girl-who-accepts-and-loves-him, (which I find also quite comparable to "Let Dai" (Woon Soo Yeon), except that last one is BL, and... a number of romance stories I somehow can't remember right now -___-)
What fascinates me about this is how making these hot guy characters have mental problems, like showing their suffering and twisted, violent, and complicated character, make them... hotter. I'm thinking that what I like about it is the feeling of being emotionally destroyed while reading manga with such kinds of tragedy (even though they still contain a lot of comic-reliefs, especially "You're So Cool," it's like 70% comedy, but still with pretty unsettling parts), and, of course, got to give Aristotle the credit for saying that tragedy --> catharsis --> good! But on the other hand, I'm also suspecting that I simply want to get emotionally "destroyed" because my current life is pretty tedious and flat, thus leading me to fantasize that having a really dark & depressed boyfriend would actually add more color to it (not forgetting the hot secks). Hmm... actually, why not? Don't some people live to experience excitement by risking their lives (e.g. motorcycle racers, snowboarders, skateboarders)? It shouldn't be a surprise that some people may live to experience intense(, painful?) emotions then.
But I can't ignore the fact that the manga titles I mentioned above are targeted for female audience. I guess the stereotype is that women are attracted to "bad guys" due to a motherly instinct to take care of them and make them good. Or maybe, due to sympathy, they want to know what things are like in the "man's world." Or maybe just because women "easily cry" or even "need to cry." Ugggh stupid gender roles -___- . I still find it kinda strange that personality types that are supposedly more attracted towards stuff like tragedy/romanticism are more associated with women. I guess there are also quite a number of shounen/seinen tragedy manga, like "SaiKano" (Takahashi Shin) (my favorite <3). However, even "SaiKano," which focuses a lot on psychological/emotional tragedy, like many other seinen tragedy manga, has to go together with the physical/visualization of tragedy in the form of gore & bloodbath. Not that I have a problem with that. I just don't like it when the gore is always in your face & not proportional to the psychological tragedy that the gore doesn't have much effect anymore after a while, like in "Eden" (Endo Hiroki).
manga,
romanticism