Bakuman

[sub_divided]

AKA The manga by the Death Note writer-artist team about... a writer-artist team trying to conquer the world of shounen manga. XD; Shujin (writer) and Mashiro (artist) decide to team up in middle school. They share the same goal, of getting published in Jump, coming in #1 in the popularity polls, and having their work made into a anime so that

Comments

[lacewood]

I read this! Though some of relationship plot developments are kind of ?!?!?! and/or make you want to smack the cast up the head. See: the hospital arc, Shuujin and Miyoshi's engagement and a chunk of their relationship XD

[sub_divided]

Yes! The hospital arc! Where Masahiro is unable to rest after being hospitalized for not being able to rest. And then his friends and bosses at Jump have to go out of their way to force him to take care of himself. I know this is a kind of Japanese trope, where the responsibility for making a sick person stay home devolves to other people, but it drives me crazy. I think the fact that his uncle died from overwork DOES ACTUALLY have some bearing on this situation, because that shit is inheritable, geeze.

Shuujin and Miyoshi's engagement, oh my God. Shuujin insisting he doesn't have to explain himself because Miyoshi should just trust him! And so, since he hasn't done anything wrong (she doesn't know that!) and doesn't owe her an apology (she isn't asking for one!), he'll just do nothing and hope the problem will go away. For two months! How can you put your girlfriend, who still really likes you and is just waiting for an explanation so she can continue to like you, on hold for two months? The longer he leaves it the more

[lacewood]

The whole hospital arc! It was like MASHIRO YOU DUMBASS, sit down shut up and get the hell better already omg. The chief editor is TOTALLY JUSTIFIED FOR TRYING TO CAN YOUR SERIES when you insist on DRAWING MANGA IN HOSPITAL. Though I guess the arc also did show that working hard is all very well, but in the real world, you also kind of need to make sure you don't do it to the point of COLLAPSE because shit will go down. >_

[sub_divided]

It's even worse than the regular shounen careless assumptions about girls because there's a lot of dialogue in Bakuman, so the characters talk about their views of women. >_> And not in stock phrases where you're just like, well, whatever, it's conventional to say that. It's obvious from the writing that a lot of thought has gone into the author's derogatory views of women.

At this point I deal with it by thinking of it as a chance to analyze Ohba and his hangups... he really, really has a thing again the smart and pretty, high-achieving but socially backward beauty who goes to To-oh. This character is exactly like the one in Death Note. There's even a scene like the one in Death Note where two women get together to talk about their work... and it's super uncomfortable, like watching two robots talk. XD; On the other hand, thanks to this scene, the series does pass the Bechdel test.

[lacunarity]

I didn't read Bakuman, not because of the sexism (I wasn't in the loop enough to even know that much about it) but because it was a manga about mangaka. Few things are as quick to annoy me as books whose protagonist is an author, books written by a historian where the main character is a historian, comic books about comic book writers, and manga about mangaka. There's just something so mindlessly self-indulgent about it.

But I checked it out because you mentioned it, I'm in the middle of chapter 2, and I've got to just close the window and do something else for 10 minutes because I just read two really anti-woman scenes in a row. And I was really enjoying the idea of the manga and the artwork is lovely as always, but I'm just getting worse and worse at ignoring the occasional gender/race/disability/sexuality fail in an otherwise good piece of work.

I'm going to keep reading in a bit since I am interested, but I'm also getting kind of tired of having to make these kind of compromises whenever I read or watch something.

[sub_divided]

It's a good manga about mangaka, though. It's not self-indulgent in the way you're talking about, it's actually really a shounen manga about hard work and perseverance where the obstacles to the hero's dream just happen to be things like bad editors and weekly popularity polls, instead of things like bad coaches and weekly sports tournaments. The stuff about the creative process is analytical not wishful - or as their editor comments, "Your stuff isn't the typical Jump stuff because your characters aren't self-inserts".

(Though they totally, totally are. XD;; Or rather they've got traits that are similar. Like Shujin can't read a literary novel because "if it's not sci fi or a mystery, it doesn't interest me".)

Yeah but the anti-women scenes don't go away. At this point I just wonder what Ohba's problem is - rejected by one too many smart, pretty girls?

[tarigwaemir]

I read the first twenty chapters but haven't caught up again though maybe I should. And hah, know exactly what you mean by Ohba's obvious misogyny and not pleased to hear it's been creeping back up lately. Ah well.

[sub_divided]

Obvious misogyny is obvious! I just hope this doesn't turn into like an Anne Rice thing where the editors no longer bother to exert control over the direction of the script. Not sure how well the series is doing in Japan - it doesn't seem to get many color pages, and the art has gotten a lot looser suggesting that Obata is spending less time on it, but those by themselves don't mean anything.

[supplanter]

Goddamn, even if it's not nearly as loltastic as I'd assumed it was, there is no way I will bring myself to read it.  Shame! :\

... I wonder if Ohba is Fukumoto. XD  Just because you said their specialty was entrapment schemes, which of course was DN's initial appeal, and Akagi and Kaiji are all about psychological one-upmanship etc while still being totally unlike DN, and though I certainly wouldn't know it seems like it could be possible that Fukumoto is sexist, just because, uh, THERE ARE NO GIRLS IN AKAGI, HOW WOULD ANYONE KNOW OTHERWISE?

... that is a bullshit theory, but now at least I can amuse myself thinking of DN rendered fukumoto-style and vice versa. XD

[sub_divided]

Welllll, I don't know, I thought Ohba said something in an interview about being a manga newbie and how amazed he was when Obata was able to take his scripts and turn them into well-paced manga with cool characters - ie toward the end of Death Note he'd stopped writing detailed outlines and was just turning in scribbles for Obata to elaborate on. XD;

It is two bad, because how often do you read shounen manga where the main character is actually TWO PEOPLE? XD

[supplanter]

Oh, I hadn't heard anything new since that early rumor that Ohba was an established mangaka that decided to do DN under a pseudonym because it was so unlike his previous work.  Although I remember Hotta making a similar comment (about Obata's mad skillz!) in rakugaki for HnG, too. XD

I think thinky shounen is rarer, kind of?  OK, Nana is a shoujo with two leads, but... I guess HxH is closest.  Gon is really the main chara but he has relatively little trauma, so Killua can have a lot of input depending on the arc.  Though I guess that's more of a rotating ensemble cast with Killua and Gon sort of constant?  I wonder if Togashi has ADD or something.  That could explain why he keeps changing POVs in the current arc, he just draws whoever he feels like in a given week. XD

[sub_divided]

Maybe he has ADD or maybe he just needs some way to keep himself interested after THREE DECADES of drawing manga for Shonen Jump. XD

HxH really is the closest, Gon is the stereotyped shonen hero (displaying all the scariest traits of the species) but Killua is the one who knows the world the two of them are traveling in... Gon is the heart and Killua is the brain?

Yeah I heard that one too - that Ohba was a gag manga author? Which, considering the attitude the Bakuman protags have toward gag manga (it's stupid! only stupid people like it!) is kind of...XD.