if I weren't worried about breaking the spines, I would scan pages to back this up
Hello! How are you? Good, I hope! Me? I've found the perfect manga.
No, seriously, I have found. the perfect. manga.
Unfortunately, much like the perfect anime--i.e., Princess Tutu--it's got one of the worser names I've come across in a while:
Setona Mizushiro's After School Nightmare.
Yeah. Yeah, it's a terrible name. I'm not even sure why I picked it up, except maybe I was driven by fate. Or the fact that it's published by a smaller translating company, and I usually try to give those a chance because they tend to bring over all the crazy stuff. And this story totally lived up to that expectation! Mainly because it is completely and utterly insane.
Let's start with Wikipedia's summary, despite the fact that it doesn't even begin to scratch the surface:
"Mashiro Ichijo is the girls' idol, handsome and kind, but he has been hiding a secret for all his life: he's neither a male, nor a female. (I.e., he's a hermaphrodite.) When a mysterious school nurse introduces him to a new class, he finds that in order to graduate he has to go to a world of dreams to find a mysterious key, and his classmates can come into his dreams; will he be able to keep his secret hidden?"
Well, I guess it's a start. The "key" is literally a key, but it is almost always hidden inside the body of one of the dreamers; cue a battle royale scenario, where all the dreamers think they have to basically kill or at least mutilate each other in order to 'pass' and get the key to graduate--and yet, every character who we see graduate goes completely against this assumption. But before you think that this is an obvious plot where the characters have to learn to become whole and comfortable with themselves and kind, I should warn that while we only see the slightest hints of what graduating involves, those hints are really, really creepy. Essentially, "to graduate" means to cease to exist.
So think about the implications of that for a second, and then we'll move on to the really fun stuff involving the characters.
There are two reasons to like this series: one, the art for the nightmare scenes is almost on par with Ghost Hunt for being genuinely unsettling--it never stops getting to me that Kureha's dream self is always missing one shoe, even before and especially after we learn what memory that self is reflecting--and two, the gender issues and the symbolism make me want to reread this with a copy of Jung to psychoanalyze the whole thing.
The first layer of gender issues is pretty obvious--the story contains a love triangle between Mashiro, Kureha (girl), and Sou (guy), with Sou insisting that Mashiro is a girl and Kureha insisting that he's a guy (which is what Mashiro also thinks of himself as). But the story goes beyond that, by delving into the fact that they both only like him because he has similar gender traits to them; Kureha hates men (for a reason) and states a few times that she likes Mashiro because he isn't a normal guy, and Sou pays more attention to Mashiro the more he acts like a guy than a girl (there's one very clear example of this, but it's a spoiler). And then the issues stretch out further and further, affecting more characters: there's Shinbashi--who I LOVE TO PIECES oh my God, I could not capslock enough to convey how much I love that guy--who gets tangled in the triangle, and there's Sou's sister, who . . . I can't really convey the amount of fucked up involved in that situation, partly for the spoilers, partly because the translated volumes haven't gotten to all of it yet (up to book 5 is out, with only some hints about their backstory), and partly because you just have to see how Sou physically reacts to her to really get it.
When we first meet Sou, he's much like any other BL seme--he sleeps around constantly with girls. Then we learn that he liked Mashiro even before he learned that he was a hermaphrodite, which would seem much like a BL plot, too, and tie in with all the girls.
But then we chuck in Sou's sister, who he is clearly sleeping with (it's hard to deny the double spread splash page) and who says she'll find him a good girl to date and who he both idolizes and is terrified by. I honestly love her slightly, because it's only around her that Sou's 'I am suave seme who totally fails at courtship HARDCORE' facade collapses and he looks either uncomfortable or outright panicked. At least half of his slutiness is tied to her, rather than to Mashiro; and it's things like that, where Mizushiro twists the standards of a BL and a love triangle story that make ASN fascinating.
Going further into the issues, I mentioned above that Sou shows more interest in Mashiro when he acts like a guy, and there I was referring to Sou's dream self. His dream self torments Mashiro's in equal proportion to how he tries to get closer to him in normal life: one time he tells Mashiro to fight him (with swords) because "I always enjoy killing you after a good fight;" and another, Sou pulls the key from Mashiro's body by literally cutting him open, reaching in, and fishing it out in some hideous and blatantly sexual symbolism. I read through this too fast to remember what occurred between Mashiro and Sou in reality before this, but I bet it's connected.
The symbolism is also a big thing in here, even though it's used in a very subdued way. The most blatant example I noticed was the flowers. Like every good shoujo manga, there are often backgrounds or foregrounds of flowers all over the place; but if you look closer, you notice that the style changes based on Mashiro's mood--around Kureha, the flowers are a kind with astoundingly phallic stamens, while around Sou they tend to be tulips or other vulvic types. But this is only at first--eventually, the phallic and vulvic flowers start getting mixed around, with the latter sometimes appearing around Sou and the former in relation to Kureha, in time with the story getting more and more muddled with the gender issues. There are also smaller things, but they're tied primarily to the dream world.
I have some problems with the story, I admit. Like I mentioned under the cut, the plot often has the feel of a generic BL story to it, and while Mizushiro is good with twisting those elements or working them into much larger and deeper-running aspects of the characters, wading through the generic similarities to get to the refreshing differences can be irritating. There's also the fact that, because the main character wants to think of himself as a guy yet is pursued physically by another guy insisting that he's a girl, there's a lot of sentiment in the first couple books that's borderline misogynistic. However, just when it was getting to the point that it was annoying even me, we got this scene:
Mashiro: *wakes up in the dream world to find himself faced with a personification of his female side*
Mashiro: What are you doing here?
Femme Mashiro: Bitch, I am so sick of you blaming your issues and inadequacies on me. CAGE MATCH DEATH FIGHT.
Mashiro: . . . D:
Femme Mashiro: *NO MERCY*
Really, Mashiro does need to get in touch with his feminine side, because she is so much more Machiavellian and badass than him.
I feel I should mention that above, I said "annoying even me" not because I'm willing to tolerate a lot of misogyny in my reading material, but because this manga was written by Setona Mizushiro, who is the same person who did X-Day--and X-Day is up there with Pet Shop of Horrors, King of Bandits Jing, and Land of the Blindfolded on the list of manga I can (and have) read over and over and over again without getting sick of. So I walked into this willing to grant a lot of leeway to things that might have turned me off from another artist, because I already knew that Mizushiro is excellent about delving into psychological matters and writing some really, really impressive things. Any comments made by Mashiro denigrating what he views as his weaker, female side should be judged in comparison with the development of Kureha over the volumes.
So, I recommend After School Nightmare with only minor reservations, because it is an emulsion of madness and hilarity. Much of the hilarity comes from the madness, but I approve of that.
No, seriously, I have found. the perfect. manga.
Unfortunately, much like the perfect anime--i.e., Princess Tutu--it's got one of the worser names I've come across in a while:
Setona Mizushiro's After School Nightmare.
Yeah. Yeah, it's a terrible name. I'm not even sure why I picked it up, except maybe I was driven by fate. Or the fact that it's published by a smaller translating company, and I usually try to give those a chance because they tend to bring over all the crazy stuff. And this story totally lived up to that expectation! Mainly because it is completely and utterly insane.
Let's start with Wikipedia's summary, despite the fact that it doesn't even begin to scratch the surface:
"Mashiro Ichijo is the girls' idol, handsome and kind, but he has been hiding a secret for all his life: he's neither a male, nor a female. (I.e., he's a hermaphrodite.) When a mysterious school nurse introduces him to a new class, he finds that in order to graduate he has to go to a world of dreams to find a mysterious key, and his classmates can come into his dreams; will he be able to keep his secret hidden?"
Well, I guess it's a start. The "key" is literally a key, but it is almost always hidden inside the body of one of the dreamers; cue a battle royale scenario, where all the dreamers think they have to basically kill or at least mutilate each other in order to 'pass' and get the key to graduate--and yet, every character who we see graduate goes completely against this assumption. But before you think that this is an obvious plot where the characters have to learn to become whole and comfortable with themselves and kind, I should warn that while we only see the slightest hints of what graduating involves, those hints are really, really creepy. Essentially, "to graduate" means to cease to exist.
So think about the implications of that for a second, and then we'll move on to the really fun stuff involving the characters.
There are two reasons to like this series: one, the art for the nightmare scenes is almost on par with Ghost Hunt for being genuinely unsettling--it never stops getting to me that Kureha's dream self is always missing one shoe, even before and especially after we learn what memory that self is reflecting--and two, the gender issues and the symbolism make me want to reread this with a copy of Jung to psychoanalyze the whole thing.
The first layer of gender issues is pretty obvious--the story contains a love triangle between Mashiro, Kureha (girl), and Sou (guy), with Sou insisting that Mashiro is a girl and Kureha insisting that he's a guy (which is what Mashiro also thinks of himself as). But the story goes beyond that, by delving into the fact that they both only like him because he has similar gender traits to them; Kureha hates men (for a reason) and states a few times that she likes Mashiro because he isn't a normal guy, and Sou pays more attention to Mashiro the more he acts like a guy than a girl (there's one very clear example of this, but it's a spoiler). And then the issues stretch out further and further, affecting more characters: there's Shinbashi--who I LOVE TO PIECES oh my God, I could not capslock enough to convey how much I love that guy--who gets tangled in the triangle, and there's Sou's sister, who . . . I can't really convey the amount of fucked up involved in that situation, partly for the spoilers, partly because the translated volumes haven't gotten to all of it yet (up to book 5 is out, with only some hints about their backstory), and partly because you just have to see how Sou physically reacts to her to really get it.
When we first meet Sou, he's much like any other BL seme--he sleeps around constantly with girls. Then we learn that he liked Mashiro even before he learned that he was a hermaphrodite, which would seem much like a BL plot, too, and tie in with all the girls.
But then we chuck in Sou's sister, who he is clearly sleeping with (it's hard to deny the double spread splash page) and who says she'll find him a good girl to date and who he both idolizes and is terrified by. I honestly love her slightly, because it's only around her that Sou's 'I am suave seme who totally fails at courtship HARDCORE' facade collapses and he looks either uncomfortable or outright panicked. At least half of his slutiness is tied to her, rather than to Mashiro; and it's things like that, where Mizushiro twists the standards of a BL and a love triangle story that make ASN fascinating.
Going further into the issues, I mentioned above that Sou shows more interest in Mashiro when he acts like a guy, and there I was referring to Sou's dream self. His dream self torments Mashiro's in equal proportion to how he tries to get closer to him in normal life: one time he tells Mashiro to fight him (with swords) because "I always enjoy killing you after a good fight;" and another, Sou pulls the key from Mashiro's body by literally cutting him open, reaching in, and fishing it out in some hideous and blatantly sexual symbolism. I read through this too fast to remember what occurred between Mashiro and Sou in reality before this, but I bet it's connected.
The symbolism is also a big thing in here, even though it's used in a very subdued way. The most blatant example I noticed was the flowers. Like every good shoujo manga, there are often backgrounds or foregrounds of flowers all over the place; but if you look closer, you notice that the style changes based on Mashiro's mood--around Kureha, the flowers are a kind with astoundingly phallic stamens, while around Sou they tend to be tulips or other vulvic types. But this is only at first--eventually, the phallic and vulvic flowers start getting mixed around, with the latter sometimes appearing around Sou and the former in relation to Kureha, in time with the story getting more and more muddled with the gender issues. There are also smaller things, but they're tied primarily to the dream world.
I have some problems with the story, I admit. Like I mentioned under the cut, the plot often has the feel of a generic BL story to it, and while Mizushiro is good with twisting those elements or working them into much larger and deeper-running aspects of the characters, wading through the generic similarities to get to the refreshing differences can be irritating. There's also the fact that, because the main character wants to think of himself as a guy yet is pursued physically by another guy insisting that he's a girl, there's a lot of sentiment in the first couple books that's borderline misogynistic. However, just when it was getting to the point that it was annoying even me, we got this scene:
Mashiro: *wakes up in the dream world to find himself faced with a personification of his female side*
Mashiro: What are you doing here?
Femme Mashiro: Bitch, I am so sick of you blaming your issues and inadequacies on me. CAGE MATCH DEATH FIGHT.
Mashiro: . . . D:
Femme Mashiro: *NO MERCY*
Really, Mashiro does need to get in touch with his feminine side, because she is so much more Machiavellian and badass than him.
I feel I should mention that above, I said "annoying even me" not because I'm willing to tolerate a lot of misogyny in my reading material, but because this manga was written by Setona Mizushiro, who is the same person who did X-Day--and X-Day is up there with Pet Shop of Horrors, King of Bandits Jing, and Land of the Blindfolded on the list of manga I can (and have) read over and over and over again without getting sick of. So I walked into this willing to grant a lot of leeway to things that might have turned me off from another artist, because I already knew that Mizushiro is excellent about delving into psychological matters and writing some really, really impressive things. Any comments made by Mashiro denigrating what he views as his weaker, female side should be judged in comparison with the development of Kureha over the volumes.
So, I recommend After School Nightmare with only minor reservations, because it is an emulsion of madness and hilarity. Much of the hilarity comes from the madness, but I approve of that.