My Top 20 OTPs of all time!

[herongale]

I originally started working on this list years ago (literally years ago), but then I set it aside because my descriptions of each pairing were getting to be ridiculously long, and I was talking about the backstory and facts and all of this annoying stuff which really has nothing to do with why I like certain pairings

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[tl__dr]

I bought a few manga anthologies of GTO: The Early Years and started reading them recently.

That's actually the series he wrote before GTO (even if silly Tokyopop is marketing it as a ~*~prequel~*~), so it's super fun to read it all in order and watch his abilities to draw and to write women progress slowly over time!! Um and if you like slash - oh jeez, just wait till you get to the later volumes (it's all lolzy penis comparisons and adoring traps till Kamata and Eikichi's boyfriends lose their minds in volumes 9 and 10). GTO is a girl-on-girl tacofest, but Shounan Junai Gumi was just all bromance, all the time. Also it really sets the stage for Onizuka as a character in GTO, because in GTO he's sort of a sieve through which everybody else's angst can be poured and turned to gold or something /so bad at metaphors ahah, BASICALLY, he's the main character but he has no visible journey of his own? But in Shounan Junai Gumi his angst is, aside from VIOLENCE IS BAD GET ME AWAY FROM IT, it's all this subtextual MY FRIEND IS STRAIGHT AND I AM GAY I'M TRYING TO BE JUST LIKE HIM BUT FAILING lolol and so reading GTO from that perspective, watching him trying to find a professional path in life that makes him match up to Ryuji and watching him mimic heterosexual dynamics because there's no longer room for prioritized same sex bonding in the world of (heterosexual) adults, and watching him instead be drawn to a school setting where same sex and platonic relationships reign supreme....lol I'm not sure if I'm making any sense, but it basically just gives a lot of his motivations and behaviors some depth that they don't have if you read GTO without at least some of Shounan Junai Gumi!

I am rambling but I love SJG and am happyyyy you're reading some of it. :D