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Mitsukazu Mihara, Doll, vols. 1-2: Dolls are machines that look just like humans and are programmed to be perfect servants, of whatever kind required. Illegal modifications can give them blood and guts, for greater verisimilitude. The stories are therefore mostly about the horrible things that people do to dolls, which are horrible because they feel like they’re being done to people, and/or because focusing on the dolls leads people to ignore the other actual people around them. And of course the question of consciousness is foregrounded: what does it mean to be a “person” worthy of moral consideration? Even if dolls aren’t people, isn’t it inherently wrong for the doer of horrible deeds to do those things to entities with the outward forms of humans? Or is it only fantasy, like the manga itself? Unfortunately, I didn’t feel that the manga did anything but raise those questions—it felt like it wanted to do more than titillate, but I wasn’t seeing anything more.
Kaori Yuki, The Cain Saga, vols. 1-4 (in 5 volumes, which is a signal about what’s inside): Earl Cain is a Victorian aristocrat, for values of Victorian aristocrat that are extremely wacky. His birth is shrouded in secret shame; his father hates him and whips him cruelly; his butler Riff (named, yes, for Riff Raff) worships him; he has a poison collection and goes around using two wrongs to make a right. Here’s my not-so-secret shame: I’m not fundamentally a visual person, except for the most conventional (to me) of visuals, and I just don’t get Yuki’s art. Hair shade seems to change from panel to panel; the main characters all have the same face shapes (the little girl Merriweather, Cain’s beloved half-sister, is distinguishable, but mostly because she’s even more like a doll than everybody else) and enormous eyes; and when people get mad, jealous, or embarrassed, their faces turn into vampire caricatures that I can’t make fit into the rest of the artwork. Instead of getting sucked into the baroque family dramas—incest and possessed women, with whatever meaning of “possessed” you can imagine, figure prominently—I was distanced, and it doesn’t work with distance. P.S.: If Yuki is your thing, and you want these volumes, drop me a note.
Kara, Demon Diary, vols. 1 & 2: Okay, I clearly had a fundamental misunderstanding about my preferences with the woman who sold me this stack of manga. This is kind of the story of a young boy being trained to be a demon lord though he has no temperament for it and would rather blow bubbles and giggle, or some such. So he does a lot of dumb stuff and the experienced demon training him gets mad. In volume 2, there’s a meta moment where one character insists that he’s the protagonist because he got bigger panels in the previous installment, and the artist and the writer pop up in the corner to shrug and snipe about it. The “face changes to caricature for anger/embarrassment/jealousy” thing is in full effect, except that people’s emotions swung so wildly that I spent most of my time cringing. Demon lords kill a lot of people, but somehow that doesn’t translate to any angst, and the slashiness (I think—I was a bit surprised when someone I would have sworn was a boy turned out to be a girl; but then there was a short story at the end pf vol. 1 that more clearly featured boy/boy UST, at least, so I’m tentatively going with slashiness in the main story) wasn’t motivated by anything other than “I just have a feeling when I look at him,” and since I didn’t myself have that feeling, it didn’t work for me.
Kaori Yuki, The Cain Saga, vols. 1-4 (in 5 volumes, which is a signal about what’s inside): Earl Cain is a Victorian aristocrat, for values of Victorian aristocrat that are extremely wacky. His birth is shrouded in secret shame; his father hates him and whips him cruelly; his butler Riff (named, yes, for Riff Raff) worships him; he has a poison collection and goes around using two wrongs to make a right. Here’s my not-so-secret shame: I’m not fundamentally a visual person, except for the most conventional (to me) of visuals, and I just don’t get Yuki’s art. Hair shade seems to change from panel to panel; the main characters all have the same face shapes (the little girl Merriweather, Cain’s beloved half-sister, is distinguishable, but mostly because she’s even more like a doll than everybody else) and enormous eyes; and when people get mad, jealous, or embarrassed, their faces turn into vampire caricatures that I can’t make fit into the rest of the artwork. Instead of getting sucked into the baroque family dramas—incest and possessed women, with whatever meaning of “possessed” you can imagine, figure prominently—I was distanced, and it doesn’t work with distance. P.S.: If Yuki is your thing, and you want these volumes, drop me a note.
Kara, Demon Diary, vols. 1 & 2: Okay, I clearly had a fundamental misunderstanding about my preferences with the woman who sold me this stack of manga. This is kind of the story of a young boy being trained to be a demon lord though he has no temperament for it and would rather blow bubbles and giggle, or some such. So he does a lot of dumb stuff and the experienced demon training him gets mad. In volume 2, there’s a meta moment where one character insists that he’s the protagonist because he got bigger panels in the previous installment, and the artist and the writer pop up in the corner to shrug and snipe about it. The “face changes to caricature for anger/embarrassment/jealousy” thing is in full effect, except that people’s emotions swung so wildly that I spent most of my time cringing. Demon lords kill a lot of people, but somehow that doesn’t translate to any angst, and the slashiness (I think—I was a bit surprised when someone I would have sworn was a boy turned out to be a girl; but then there was a short story at the end pf vol. 1 that more clearly featured boy/boy UST, at least, so I’m tentatively going with slashiness in the main story) wasn’t motivated by anything other than “I just have a feeling when I look at him,” and since I didn’t myself have that feeling, it didn’t work for me.
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I don't have a great sense of what you like, but I can try to rec things if you want? My general recs to ease into manga language might be Mushishi (little short stories about things called "mushi;" the stories feel folklore-ish), Eternal Sabbath (SF thriller about psychic kids raised in a lab now turned mass murderer and a very socially awkward female scientist), Monster (thriller about a doctor chasing a murderer that goes much more into questions of guilt and responsibility and what makes people monsters or not), Nana (very good characterization of two women named Nana and their friendships and romances), Fullmetal Alchemist (SF involving alchemy, homonculi and really cool worldbuilding and an awesome pair of brothers), After School Nightmare (buymeaclue seemed ok with the manga language in it; really interesting gender stuff), and Emma (Victorian cross-class romance between a maid and a now-wealthy merchant's son; actually has good research, as opposed to Yuki Kaori).
Uh. Possibly that was overload, sorry!
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Eternal Sabbath (ES) was the first thing I thought of for you, in fact. I am not sure that you'd like Emma--it might be too romance-y for you--or even After School Nightmare, although it might intrigue you. As replacement recs, I'd suggest >Cantarella (reasonably well-researched and yet cracked out and extremely slashy historical fantasy series about Cesare Borgia!
Bleach initially hit my partnership kink hard but then ended up de-emphasizing the aspects I was interested in.
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Here's my thing with romance: I love it. Except, and this is a change from my youth, what I really want to do is like and bond with the characters before the romance kicks in. An awful lot of romances raise my hackles because I feel like they're telling me, rather than showing me, how awesome the characters are and why I should care, in order to get more quickly to the romance elements. I can see--I can remember--why one would want to handwave some establishing issues. Hell, I do it all the time with things like "for some reason, X has wings!" But I need some foreplay for my romance! And, of course, I can get my peanut butter and my chocolate together much of the time in fandom, so I haven't been as aggressive as I might have been in pursuing the kind of romance I like in profic.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gokusen
It features an idealistic granddaughter of a Yakuza boss, who decides she wants to mold teens and goes to teach at an all boys high school full of idiot delinquents. But she's not the helpless, girli-girl type of idealistic - she also kicks serious ass, and sometimes bursts out with inappropriate comments in front of students and tries to give the kids a sense of responsibility for their actions and honor that are sometimes slightly less "real world" and more "yakuza culture."
I don't know where to get it in solid form, but it's available in scanlation format from the bishounen project.
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