(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

[littlebutfierce]

From what I've heard from torachan (he linked me to some of his posts about it when I watched like 2 eps of the anime & was wondering if the sexism was bearable), it sounds like so much awful throughout that it's probably not worth it -- maybe worth poking around his reviews though!

[tropicsbear]

Maybe ask fellow fans if there have been other instances of great moments for the ladies?

[torachan]

As littlebutfierce said, it's pretty bad throughout. I am twenty chapters or so behind (falling behind just before the MegaUpload blowout was so not a good idea! I don't know how I'm going to find those chapters now >_<), but fairly up-to-date, and it's just constant. Every female character (and there are quite a few now, not just the girlfriends) are written in a way that just makes me want to punch the author. And yet, the overall story is compelling enough to keep me reading it despite getting the eye-twitch every chapter.

I wouldn't recommend picking it up again, tbh.

[esmenet]

Most of what I remember about reading Bakuman was that I wanted to love all the characters (well, all the female ones at least—Aoki especially!) but ugh, the author made it so hard. And I guess that hasn't changed overall.

[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*