When I want to read about unbelievably virtuous heroines and people who undergo unwanted transformations, with a lashing of cross-dressing, boys of flawless beauty, and stylistic conventions I just don’t understand, I go to shojo manga. And for my money, Fruits Basket is the best of the shojo manga. Its heroine has the reader’s complete sympathy from the moment we meet her living alone in a tent at the bottom of a mudslide waiting to happen. The mysterious family she moves in with after the mudslide does happen are intriguing and have a romantic, fantastic family curse; the story becomes more entangled and entrancing with each volume, and the resolution is as mysterious as the beginning. I was hooked through the whole series.
And it was full of conventions I just don’t understand, which for me is half the charm of manga. For instance, I don’t understand:
– why transformations that occur when hugged by the opposite sex are such a common trope
– why cross-dressing the male leads is regarded as such fun
– what these school festivals where each class puts on shows are all about
– why so many male romance writers appear in shojo manga
– why they all seem to have a thing for school girls
– why ‘cute’ characters so often appear with just the tips of their tongues sticking out
– the extreme displays of devotion by (apparently) straight schoolboys toward other (apparently) straight schoolboys
I need to find some scholarly articles on manga to explain all this stuff!
