cheap triumph

Jul 13, 2011 11:36

I read a short manga series the other day with your typical dash-it-off shojo premise:

Girl's discovered as a singer though she has no self-confidence about it, gets coerced into show biz by a hot guy, who is secretly her long-time musical crush, and they end up together.


I have never read this manga, but I already know what it's about...

The premise is cliche, but I read because sometimes these little two-shots have a heart to them, or at least something fun about them.

Not this one.

I think the main problem in it's lack of heart is something problematic with a lot of teen sports victory movies or artistic endeavor stories, too:

cheating on the actual work.


Mighty Ducks, super secret move special!

In this case, I think the person may not have been musical--and one of the strongest scenes is almost directly mirroring an early Skip-Beat! sequence.

It's not the lack of realism that bothers me though--it's all the potential that's squandered.

There's almost nothing as satisfying as seeing someone fight for what they want and achieve it. I love this about the Crimson Hero manga: the heroine has talent, and she also has a passionate drive, but that doesn't mean she gets what she wants, because the other teams aren't treated as idiots, and their own problems aren't treated as one pep talk away from disappearing.

And that is awesome.



As a YA writer, I really want to be able to get inside the pursuits other people love and know where the sticking points are, and also the parts that are the most exciting from the inside. If you're putting on a play, it's not the curtain call necessarily, or the praise afterward, but that moment of utter silence when you say a line with weight, or the laughter escalating through a sequence of jokes.

In this particular manga, I want to know why her voice was awesome, even though she thought her sister's was so good she didn't have to bother. I wanted to understand why this manager dude was frantic enough to get her to sing his song he'd date her with that as his motive.

Nothing. She was just implicitly awesome, and he was just destined to really fall for her because this was a shojo manga.

Chalk another one up to the MarySue. I think the ones about the arts annoy me the most. (I secretly kind of love the action-hero ones.) What about you?

manga, ya, writestuff

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