Manga Club Week #2 (My Sword of Lesbian Experience)

[CourierRice]

Hello Select Bottoms, it is that time again. This week we read the first volume of Sword of Paros, as well as the single volume of My Lesbian Experience With Loneliness.

Full disclosure, I haven’t finished Lesbian Experience yet because chapter one flattened me into a depressed pancake and so I need to finish it today! I did finish Paros Vol 1, but all my saved pages are on my phone so I gotta look those back up. My commentary will be forthcoming.

Reminder that the guidelines/pamphlet(?) for manga club can be found HERE and I worked moderately hard on it and it’s charming you should read it and say nice things to me about me.

---

For the next week, we’ll be continuing Sword of Paros with Volume 2. Vol 1 ended on a scary cliffhanger, but I just know everything’s gonna be oooookay in this gay+trans angst tale.

But with Lesbian Experience out of the way, we’ve got another poll! Since the most recent readings were so serious, I’m gonna go with some lighter reads:

• Moeyo Pen by Shimamoto Kazuhiko
• Sand Land by Toriyama Akira

Moeyo Pen (aka Blazing Pen)
Author: SHIMAMOTO Kazuhiko
1 Volume

Hot blooded manga about… writing manga.

Pretty straightforward! Shimamoto seems to enjoy not taking his subjects seriously by Taking Them As Seriously As Possible. Shimamoto is otherwise known for authoring Aoi Honoo (Blue Flame), which I think has a live action adaptation now! It’s a fictionalized (though I don’t know to what degree) account of some Big Time Anime Names going to school together.

Sand Land
Author: TORIYAMA Akira
1 Volume

In the far future, war has destroyed the entire Earth, leaving only a barren wasteland called Sand Land where the supply of water is controlled by the greedy king. In search of a long-lost lake, Sheriff Rao asked the king of the demons for help… and got the king’s son, Beelzebub, and his assistant, Thief. Together the unlikely trio sets off across the desert, facing dragons, bandits, and the deadliest foe of all… the King’s Army itself!

u kno wtf this is

Both of these manga can be read over at batoto.

[r-i]

in correspondence with the heartrending nature of the one-off book I’m incidentally in a particularly amplified state of non-existence so I can’t post with any sort of structure or insight like the last thread. My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness has a certain earned reputation as being relentlessly, desperately candid with discussing the deepest wells of depression. panel structure an endless clean rectangle grid with only brief dramatic points of bleed, emotive cartoonish art amplifies a universally-receptive nature rather than focusing on cuteness. others who have been consumed by depression can probably relate in some fashion to every other page, much less the queer contents. on that note. the trick how of the titular experience was not in and of itself cathartic, but a step that allowed her to re-arrange her perspective on her dire state, is a good twist for the inevitable narrative-imposition on a biographical looking-back on abject dissolution. the lasting hope and success is in having shared the work at all and seeing one isn’t alone in feeling like death, after all, as the last chapter focuses on.

aside from the queue jumping pages I posted in the last thread

other personal highlights:

on this most recent chance to re-read it and read about the book post-english-release, with it probably being pernient to discuss our own personal struggles with mental illness… what comes to mind first is how much I lean on my support network. even in a garbage state as I currently am I still am being propped up by a close friend, a psychologist, and the vague presence of selectbutton. meanwhile… well, the real emphasis in any title is on the loneliness, after all. Nagata tweeted that her family could only discuss how they’re worried about her contracting AIDS after this book was published, and her second autobiographical (as of yet untranslated) book Solo Exchange Diary is about how she has tried to cope with her life by crafting different personalties to talk out her anxieties with.

---

also, I guess there’s another work that happened this week. kinda think two volumes a week is a bit much but my week was raw terror so.

Sword of Paros is gorgeous aged shoujo fit ever so appropriately to ambiguous gender/queer status and social structure disapproval, and this sort of space has its own value for reminders that such isn’t alone temporally either. can’t manage amateur analysis beyond that since I put off reading past the first chapter until today when I’m far beyond wilting, though maybe it’s appropriate considering we’re going to read through the whole three volumes. I appreciate that the very second chapter lets these queer folx quickly relate their issues and traumas to one another, giving more weight to the relationship than just some princex being enamored with the personalty or looks or some pauper.

while endless flower / hair / sparkle effects and the gay angst are nice, the use of “lady-son” in the translation and the love triangle cliffhanger both sting a bit.

[GlamGrimfire]

everybody vote sand land its so good

[CourierRice]

Apologies to anyone waiting on my commentary, I’m in a bit of a rough spot right now and it’s hard to find the time and energy to take part. Not sure when I’ll be in a better spot at the moment. I guess I should have considered that before starting a club!

I’ll still close the poll on Monday and make a thread on the subsequent Friday if people are wanting to carry the conversation, but if you don’t want the pressure I can also go ahead and put the club on hiatus.

[Tulpa]

So I’ve had a few drinks this evening for star trek related reasons but there’s one thing that I want to touch on about Sword of Paros (and other retro gender-focused shoujo) that tends to get short shrift in modern discussions. I feel like we tend to be much more cavalier about shitting on the (sometimes fumbling) gender explorations of sincere, narratively successful and explicitly anti-patriarchal works than about some chauvinist ecchi manga written by men.

Like, sometimes these criticisms have the vibe of “expecting japanese women writing in the 1970s and 80s to be fully in sync with 2010s gender discourse” which seems utterly wrong to me. I guess I don’t have much to say beyond that, but I think broadly put me down on the side of “They Were Eleven is a more sophisticated take on sex and gender than Birdy the Mighty and I don’t get why we’re so ready to shit on the former and give the latter a free pass”

I guess this relates to some parts of how sword of paros was originally pitched, and I know that this post is explicitly breaking the rules of “don’t be mean about other people’s opinions” but I’d much MUCH rather deal with outdated gender stuff that’s about explicitly struggling against an unjust system of gendered oppression (which is very explicitly the plot of Sword of Paros so far) than with something that very quietly reifies that same unjust system of oppression.

Or, to put it simply, something can get the exact wording wrong but still be broadly right and good. Wording, phrasing, language will all continue to transform at a rapid clip and I can’t bring myself to worry about or be affected by that so long as the content itself is smart.

Sword of Paros is good, y’all, sorry if I come across as too harsh in this post. I tried to phrase things inoffensively. Please understand I harbour no hostility towards anyone on this forum. (this should really be my signature lol)

[GlamGrimfire]

I don’t think that’s a relatively wrong stance to take at all. so much of the discourse around gender and sex is focused more on getting the language right, and there’s the constant belief that even a sincere attempt at making a decent work about sex/gender (even from another time in history with another level of understanding) should still be taken as Bad By Modern Standards No Matter What, Regardless of Intent.