To Boldy Shojo Where No TWIA Has Before – This Week in Anime

Chris

I’d offer you a nice egg in these trying times, but that’s how you wound up in this situation. Instead, if it’s shojo specifically you’re looking for, great news: perennial deal-slinging website (and reason so many of our Steam libraries are bloated) HumbleBundle is offering a big batch of material from the genre! At as little as one whole dollar for the first volumes of the series featured, that’s cheaper than a pack of eggs even back in the day, and probably one we can finesse expensing to Daddy Kadokawa.

Also, we’ve put Rebecca through so much; this is as good a reason as any to spend a column chatting about shojo as a genre, like she’s so subtly asked us to.

Same for me! My experience with shojo trends more toward the version with “mahou” in front of it. This bundle’s focus on more of the grounded romance comics the genre’s magazines often deal in provided an opportunity to see what that was all about!

Not that said grounded romance is entirely the case, as seen in the first egg-cellent series we started talking about here. Shugo Chara! is, indeed, a magical girl series, with its own adventurous spins on top of some romantic maneuverings just getting going in the first volume.

If you have a hankering for out-of-context panels about eggs and embryos to clip, this is your book.

Shugo Chara!‘s take on magical girls definitely feels like playing around with the possibilities of the genre as it was in then-contemporary 2006. Amu’s “transformations” as alternate aspirational personalities inform a lot of her interactions with characters as she figures out the story and herself. Any magical combat or battles are more brief and incidental for now.

If Shugo Chara! was a series that lodged itself in my brain despite never reading it before now, that was 200% down to the fashion and character designs. I love Amu’s smart little plaid…sock skirts?

She’s pulling it off!

Peach-Pit are creators worth getting a column to themselves (I know readers are aching for our hot takes on the recently rereleased DearS). I also love the way they describe themselves in the author’s notes of this volume.

With Shugo Chara! itself, I can see a lot of the appeal in the setup even if it’s so full of components that its eggshell feels ready to burst. It’d have been nice to get a better idea of what the different little character sprites could do or how their personality switches could affect Amu. But I guess that’s what going back and buying the further volumes in that bundle is for. I can at least enjoy recognizing its standby genre ideas, like an antagonistic potential danger boyfriend who, for me, calls to mind Quiche from Tokyo Mew Mew.

Speaking of egg dishes.

Probably at least continues to be a better egg-themed magical girl series than Wonder Egg Priority…

I appreciate it as a signifier of how well Shugo Chara! did back in the day, that this sort of spin-off was even published here. But yeah, it’s cute and gives me a little more focus on the Charas themselves, like I said I wanted. It even packs in crossovers with the likes of Hell Girl and references to an extremely defunct Yahoo! page if you need to be immersed in as much of that mid-2000s sauce as possible.

Peach-Pit seem like good eggs! And from Peach-Pit to Peach Girl, I can let that bring me to the other series in this set that occupies that “saw it on the shelves constantly but never picked it up” space.

It’s a series that’s very direct about its self-image themes before the story even gets going.

Even as removed as the societal opinions of Japan in 1997 could be, I think Peach Girl does a good job of demonstrating why Momo specifically has such a tumultuous relationship with her massive amounts of melatonin. Several of these shojo volumes deal with girls grappling with social judgments for their looks, and I like how Momo lets herself hit back. Often with a mean right hook.

Don’t know why I never got around to reading this series back in the day, Momo rules.

I similarly lobster up from being out in the sun unprotected too long. So I can sympathize with the need for that strong sunscreen.

The societal judgements are the background radiation of Momo’s issues, but it’s not helped that her immediate circle of acquaintances foments her body-image problems in the foreground. A huge part of her disdain for her skin tone comes from a past apparent misunderstanding with her childhood friend/crush. And that misunderstanding is further propagated by her awful “friend” Sae.

Sae is, frankly, incredible, by the way. I love any romance antagonist who reaches mustache-twirling levels like this.

A lot of that is admittedly down to me wanting to see Kiley get subsequently owned.

Miwa Ueda‘s art is a standout; you can see why Tokyopop wanted to plaster pictures of Momo all over their promos back in the day. Even if I also have to chuckle at their choice to render a character name that’s all but certainly supposed to be “Kairi” as the aforementioned Kiley.

It was good to go to Peach Girl, I think, before I looked over the other romance entries on this list, since as one of the older series in the set, it demonstrated for me a lot of the tropes and typicalities that shojo romance manga have been dealing in over the decades—multiple degrees of misunderstandings and dudes who occupy various points on the asshole-to-heart-of-gold spectrum.

He also gets to the line quickly enough, so good on Say I Love You. for not doing any false advertising.

Say I Love You. shares what I clocked as quite a few structural signifiers with multiple manga in this bundle. You’ve got a socially struggling girl who incidentally interacts with the hottest dude in school, who turns out to be more sensitive than you might expect. It’s sort of shojo‘s version of a seemingly powerless shonen hero who finds out he actually has the strongest power—except this genre’s leaning toward reality lets it feel rooted in the (often directly described) real backgrounds of its creators. And given the preponderance of bad boys in some of these spaces, it’s nice to have some more genuine guys, and also still have them get kicked in the face sometimes.

Yamato’s got taste, which definitely brings him up in my book.

I like how this series, and others in this bundle, make romance work as a driving narrative thrust not necessarily from wanting to see characters get together, but from wanting to see their relationships help them grow as people, regardless of whether they stay together. Mei’s learning to trust people more from her interactions with Yamato, and she likewise wants to see her classmate Asami overcome societal judgements about her body (for another Peach Girl parallel).

The romance can move incrementally, a slow burn, as these are wont to be, but like you said, many of the interactions are charming enough that they carry it.

Right, a series like Say I Love You. superficially shares a lot in its high school setting and setup with another series in the bundle, A Condition Called Love, but they each feel like their own thing due to different nuances in their character writing, to say nothing of the entire era separating them from each other.

Part of me can very much appreciate the setup of an Extremely Normal girl paired with an Extremely Normal guy.

This is a case where I could enjoy the seeming sensitivity and funny excesses of Hotboy McPopularguy as he was attentive to Hotaru in this first volume, while alarm bells were also ringing about how he might get down the line in future volumes.

Things like the bit about him showing up preternaturally early to wait for Hotaru are funny, I laughed, but that also highlights how the character feels more like he’s here to do bits than be a character at this point.

Speaking to the modernity of A Condition Called Love, it feels like current mystery-box style writing as applied to a shojo love interest, and in practice means that I have less idea of who Hananoi is as a person compared to the likes of the aforementioned Kiley and Yamato.

At least Hotaru carries things a bit with her own brand of funny little face game.

MARS was one you and Rebecca both shouted out as we were getting into this bundle, so my interest was piqued just off that. It’s also the actual oldest manga in this bunch, beating out Peach Girl by about a year. And it stands out on that pedigree for the genre, down to the antisocial girl protagonist and the bad boy with a heart of gold who can see something special in her.

It’s distinguished by the aforementioned melodrama and a serious motorcycle racing fandom. It’s endearingly funny every time Fuyumi Sōryō shifts into near-edutainment on the subject of this motorsport.

I talked about the stations of many of these shojo romance heroines, unapologetically drawing on the experiences of their manga artists, and so here I appreciate Kira’s status as an artist and how it factors into the story. It provides an effective window to tell that Rei has more to him than being a disaffected bad boy, in how he can appreciate Kira’s art. And other art, in his own particular ways.

He’s also got a philosophical streak, which sets the stage for so much of that mentioned melodrama.

Of all the guys and their layered constructions of charm points as the primary love interests of these manga, I think Rei hits the mark the hardest as a complexly attractive prospect. He’s genuinely cool, and in this first volume, he comes with just enough tortured mystery behind him to make you, the reader, believe you could fix him as well as Kira seems to be.

It hits so hard with Kira’s previous positive appraisal of this creepoid teacher, contrasting with what we’ve seen of Rei’s bad-boy persona so far. It fits with that element you mentioned earlier about recreating the complex environments of schools, with a bonus of power imbalance and reinforcing the themes about not judging people based on their first appearance-based impressions.

As we’ve reviewed, that point comes up a lot in these comics.

I posted the low-five scene that follows that because I loved it, but yes, this whole bit is incredible. Makes Rei appear even more awesome, and even slips in backstory details like him growing up in LA, hence his perfect English (presumably this is also where he picked up his basketball-hustling skills). I gotta remind myself that this was only the first volume of MARS alongside all these other initial entries, since this manga within that amount of pages is getting up to those sorts of antics alongside the kind of violent girl bullying that makes so much shojo manga proud.

Also, confirmation that Rei has mommy issues. Because of course.

This was my first exposure to actually reading all of these manga, and MARS was absolutely the one I came away enjoying the most. It proves a couple of things: you can’t beat the classics, and shojo romances have always had the juice. You just aren’t getting these kinds of emotional indulgences from the genre’s different-demographic cousins.

It does feel like the prominence of the genre and its promotion over here has fallen off a bit compared to Tokyopop (for all of Disco Stu’s other ills), knowing they had an effective audience outreach collection in titles like MARS and Peach Girl back in the day. Virtually the only shojo adaptation this season, April Showers Bring May Flowers, didn’t even get picked up for a simulcast. That’s disappointing, since even a surface-level sampling of the genre, as we’ve hit here, shows how it’s not just important, but damn entertaining in its own right.

At least I know I’ve got plenty of Peach Girl and MARS to follow up on as a result of this indulgence, and a cheap way to do so if I go back and buy now. And I’ve also got an understanding that there’s plenty to seek out in further readings. Like you said, the shojo well runs deep.

Which is to say, don’t worry shojo fans: I’m sure we’ll hit certified art like Hot Gimmick in the next batch we sample.