(I actually kind of hate the sweet-and-gentle-and-quiet thing)

[esmenet]

So, Bakuman! It is a manga about people drawing/writing manga, and I fell a little bit in love with it a ways back just because of that. Unfortunately, it was also pretty damn sexist ("Boys have dreams that girls will never understand," what the fuck is that) so when I dropped it a hundred or so chapters ago I didn't look back.

But. See, the thing is, one of our main characters has a girlfriend, Azuki Miho. And just like they want to be big-time mangaka, she wants to be a big-time voice actress. She's quiet and polite and sweet and doesn't appear very often, stereotypical shounen love interest kind of thing.

And someone posted a notice in the LJ comm (which isn't very busy, so I'm still following it) of the latest few chapters, with a note that Azuki did something really cool. And so I read them just in case this was true. It was! Like, she made a speech about romance, okay, but it was pretty cool. And she told all her fans that she wanted to hear their true feelings, hateful or not.

So I am conflicted. Do I go back and pick up where I left off, in the hope of more great moments with the female characters? Do I keep checking back occasionally to see if they've done anything more with Azuki? Or do I take this as the one-off it probably was?

Comments

[torachan]

I do like the female characters for the most part. It's mostly just what he does with/to them that is so enraging. And I know that's many people's complaint about series like Naruto and Bleach, too, and yet for some reason Bakuman bothers me more and I don't know why. It could be because I started reading Bleach and Naruto before I was aware of stuff like this and so I have more good will built up from the time I was an uncritical reader (even though I now can see what people are talking about with those series and agree they have major problems), or it could be because Bakuman is a realistic setting and thus the misogyny bothers me more, or maybe it's a combination of both.

[esmenet]

YES. I think the realistic/contemporary setting does make it a lot worse, because with something historical or fantastic you can kind of blame it on the setting—that is, you can handwave it in-universe even though you can tell it's the author's fault—but when it comes to really sexist things set in the real world it's a lot worse, because you can't say it's depicting 'that reality' accurately because guess what, Amano Akira and Hoshino Katsura fucking EXIST and there is no goddamn reason for a manga about writing manga to pretend they don't.

Ahem.

Actually, I think I do give Kishimoto some points on the sexism thing, because he clearly knows it's a problem and acknowledges that, he just doesn't really know what to do about it. Bleach doesn't even do that, which makes me sad, but at least Bleach's women are supposed to be awesome even if they never actually get to do much. Bakuman, in comparison, feels kind of like a kick in the face sometimes (but sometimes it's not! So tempting).

[torachan]

Ugh, yeah, in fact, it really feels like the female mangakas in Bakuman are a jab at RL female Jump mangakas (apparently the author of the recently-discontinued Enigma is female, too). There's a lot of "oh, girls are only good at writing romances" kind of stuff. *eyeroll*