All By Myself

Miyazaki

Hayao Miyazaki is considered to be the godfather of animated movies in the West, with his films often being Westerner's first experience with Japanese animation. I myself am no exception, with my mother coming across his work and quickly collecting as many films as she could get her hands on, and sharing them with little kid me. I fell in love with his worlds, with the stories and adventures, with the imperfect characters and their choices that felt human and real. As I've grown older, I've grown out of the blanket idealization and the thought that he could do no wrong, but I still enjoy much of his works.

KISS KISS FALL IN LOVE

Romance manga and shojou has a special place in my heart.

As someone who is admittedly a very soft, squishy ball of emotions, I readily admit to being an absolute sucker for a good romance story. However, romance shojou in particular really strikes a chord with me because the first anime I ever watched was Ouran High School Host Club. Admittedly, I can be very picky about said romances, keeping a wide berth between the common formulaic rom-com movies that dominate the home movie scene. While I will accept most cliché's and archetypes with open arms, there are a few which I cannot abide by, including miscommunication being the only source of tension for a story, pushing a male and female lead into a relationship because they're the only characters with any development or any attraction beyond the fact that they're the male and female leads in the story, the male character's flaming reptile turd of a personality being written off as being a mysterious "bad boy", or, in the few mainstream queer romances, queer angst about being simply being queer. No thank you on that one, I've got enough of that in my own life. I think that's why I tend to be drawn to monstrous or horror based romances, as they tend to require more development and thought because of the fact that they are set in a world that is not our own. It causes the characters to look beyond the physical and develop actual relationships that make my heart squeal and dance with delight. Plus, what can I say, I like big monsters and I cannot lie.

I Saw It! Response

Reading Nakazawa’s “I Saw It: A Survivor’s True Story” was a harrowing and gut wrenching experience to say the least. His illustrations hold nothing back, and the image of people still attempting to walk as their skin was melting off their flesh will haunt my dreams for a good few months to come. While I've read accounts from children who survived the Hiroshima attack, none of them were in the center of the explosion like Nakazawa, and there weren't visuals to accompany the atrocities they did witness. I personally am a very visual person, so his works made far more of an impact on me. It's something I won't forget anytime soon.

Personal Presentation Topic

The topic that I would like to present on is the representation and visibility of the queer experience in anime and manga. Japan has a different outlook on queer lives than much of the Western world, and I would like to explore this further, as well as the fetishizations of the queer experience seen in yaoi/"Boy's Love"/yuri/Yurizoko genre. My suggestions for when to present this would either be February 14th, as Valentine's Day seems to be fitting for an exploration on love and sexuality, or March 7th, in conjunction with My Lesbian Experiences With Loneliness.

Suggested texts and resources for this presentation would be:

•  Lonely Wolf, Lonely Sheep, by Fuka Mizutani. Two women with the same name happens to meet each other when they're at the same hospital for the same injury. They want to become closer, but both must overcome their insecurities and self-loathing first - this story is an exploration of internalized shame, homophobia, and mental illness as well as a sweet love story that has a happy ending. Trigger warnings for self harm. 
• Yuri: An In-Depth Look at Women in Love, from the Artifice -- examining the genre as a whole and specifically in regards to the lack of queer writers for what are explicitly queer stories.
• Boys Love Manga and Beyond: History, Culture, and Community in Japan, by Mark McLelland, Kazumi Nagaike, Katsuhiko Suganuma, James Welker. Specifically looking at this excerpt here in regards to fetishization of the M/M romance or yaoi and fujoshi. 
• AsiaPacifiQueer: Rethinking Genders and Sexualities, by Fran Martin, Peter Jackson, Mark McLelland, Audrey Yue

Yonkoma