Takaya Natsuki - Fruits Basket, vol. 01 (Eng. trans.) (reread)

[oyceter]

Finally, I start a week late in the Great Manga Reread Project: Fruits Basket edition!

Spoilers for this volume under the cut; spoilers for later volumes further hidden using spoiler code. Please use spoiler code for later volumes in the comments! Also, I've only read up to around ch. 126 (aka, I am where Akito is female, Momiji and Hiro have had

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[snarp]

The Sohma family seems to be typed as upper class or at least upper-middle-class, particularly with the designation of Yuki as prince of the school.

[my questionable senior research project follows]

The Prince-type characters are pretty much always upper class, as well as being light-haired and wearing Western-style clothes - I was kind of surprised, re-reading a few months ago, to see Yuki in wafuku in all those flashbacks, because he follows the guidelines so well otherwise.

My theory about who-wears-wafuku versus who-wears-youfuku in manga is that really "stereotypically" Western or Chinese-looking clothes (because the Crazy Westerner and the Crazy Chinese Person Stereotypes seem to work nearly identically), like Aya's big frilly dresses and the thing the girls make Yuki wear for the fair, mark characters who are somehow emotionally distant/insincere/shallow/nonthreatening and de-sexed, while wafuku indicates characters who are emotionally intense/dangerous and sexually potent. Hence Akito nearly always wearing wafuku, Aya nearly always wearing Western- or Chinese-style clothes, and Yuki wearing wafuku only in flashbacks, where he's not yet emotionally closed-off. You could also probably say stuff about Momiji and Shigure.

I can't think of a lot of other examples right now, but there's Tamaki-versus-Kyoya in Ouran High School Host Club, where Tamaki is half-French and heavily-associated with Western things, and overly-theatrical and in denial about any serious emotion that might come into his head, while Kyoya is associated with traditional Japanese things, and serious and dangerous. And Yuuko-versus-Himawari in XXXholic where Yuuko mostly wears wafuku and is "sexy" and dangerous, and Himawari wears mostly wears her uniform and is "cute," and it's supposed to come as a huge surprise that she might not be safe.

[/my questionable senior research project]

[oyceter]

Oh! Cool! I didn't really think about that with regard to "stereotypically" Western or Chinese-looking clothes. Saionji in Utena is associated with more "traditional" Japanese things like kendo, and he's pretty emotionally intense (and insanely jealous...).

(also, you got to write a senior research project on clothing choices in anime and manga?!?! SO COOL!)

[snarp]

Saionji works, too! I hadn't thought of him. And Anthy fits pretty well as the opposing Westernized character, because she's so closely associated with the roses (Western symbol) and so apparently shallow and asexual at first... it totally works! (My theoretical model gains 15 EXP!)

The clothes thing doesn't always work by itself, I don't think, but when you start looking at characters who have got other markers of Western-ness or Chinese-ness - light hair\the side-buns thing, frequent use of foreign words, various types of food fetishes - I think the pattern's definitely there. And then there's the fact that if an anime has a solitary "cute" child character, it's usually blond, and then there are all those emotionally-repressed superhuman albinoes that pop up everywhere...

(I was afraid to try and cover that much in one paper, so it was probbbbably a good thing someone else had already taken "depictions of non-Japanese culture in manga" as their topic, and my adviser wanted us to avoid overlap. I stuck to talking about transvestites and gender ambiguity and their cultural baggage. This obviously not being much better...)

[oyceter]

Yes to the blondness thing! I was just thinking that, especially how the non-fantasy-world manga/anime tries to rationalize the blonde characters by saying they're half-something/half-Japanese, despite the fact that I have never met a half-Asian with blonde hair.

Gender ambiguity in manga! EEEE!