various kinds of anime/manga


to ranma@ML.usagi.org
from Albert-Lunde@northwestern.edu (Albert Lunde)
subject various kinds of anime/manga
date Mon, 03 Apr 2000 22:47:39 CDT
> *cries*  EEK!!  I can't believe you said that.  I have to say that if it
> wasn't for Sailor Moon I would have never gotten into Anime and
> THEREFORE would have never been here.  

On the other hand, I got interested in the characters of Sailor Moon,
in part from Ranma cross-over fan fiction. Well, also I think
Hitoshi Doi listed the Sailor Moon R movie as one of his favorite
movies. And I started with the ranma and megami MLs as my first anime 
e-mail lists back in fall 95. So you _might_ say that it was Ranma 
that brought me to Sailor Moon.

I do wonder about some attitudes I've heard elsewhere about shoujo
anime. One of the anime fans I know in Chicago said of Marmalade
Boy "If I watched that constantly I'd turn into a girl.", and
someone else said of another shoujo series, "You can only
watch that so long before you have to see some mecha blowing
up buildings." I _think_ they were exaggerating for comic effect.

I, on the other hand, have listened to the audio tracks of Marmalade
Boy, Karekano, and Himichan's Ribbon repeatedly (with no visible
effect on my gender ;) (I've also listened to Maison Ikkoku,
and some Ranma 1/2, AMS, and KOR for that matter.)

I think the series that are the most interesting, to me, are focused 
on feelings and relationships, so Marmalade Boy or Maison Ikkoku
which are pure "soap opera" are especially good examples.

I suppose my genre is "romantic comedy" because a series that's
pure drama with no comic relief is hard to sustain in the long run,
and because I get enough dark stuff in real life.

One argument I made in the past, was that Takahashi was able to keep
Ranma 1/2 going so long because she mixed different kinds of story
arcs: action, comedy, romance. If you look at the later volumes
the "serious" story arcs are broken up by short one or two chapter
stories with less serious content.

And because Ranma has such a episodic sense of time, it can be 
padded to almost arbitrary length.

Maison Ikkoku shows that she can also write a plot with a pretty
definite sense of time.

Inuyasha seems like it lies somewhere in between: it's more linear
than Ranma or UY, but the framework is more open-ended than
Maison Ikkoku because it's not a contemporary setting and a lot
of magic is involved.

--
    Albert Lunde          Albert-Lunde@northwestern.edu (new address)
                          Albert-Lunde@nwu.edu (old address)


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