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

Comments

[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!