Archive for the Now This Is Only My Opinion Category


A Genre of One’s Own – Yuri Comes of Age

August 28th, 2012

Everyone who follows manga in Japan is familiar with the four demographic-based “genres” of Japanese manga – Shounen, Shoujo, Seinen and Josei, that is for boys, for girls, for men, for women. There are other demographic-based genres and subgenres that are less well-known; things like manga for children, and various subgenres of erotica/porn for both adult men and women, but those are four basic categories into which most manga is divided.

Western fans of Japanese manga tend to be of the opinion that these demographics serve no real function when it comes to the western market. So what if Death Note is “for boys” when clearly, loads of girls love it? Or so what if Hetalia is “for girls,” when all the smart guys know cosplaying as /fillinyourfavecharacter/ will make them instantly hot? ^_^

My argument for the understanding of these demographically aligned genres is merely as a gateway to one’s own personal enlightenment. In a story that is in every other way sexless, like One Piece, it just makes sense to understand that the audience is still presumed to be teen, male and…well, let’s be honest, horny. Hence Nami and Robin’s inexplicably ever-largening breasts. It’s a Shounen series. QED. It sounds aggressively ignorant to my ears when people hate an element of a manga that is a common trope of the demographic/genre for which that manga is written. Often the answer to these kind of complaints is “it’s a manga for girls, that’s why.” Or, “it’s a manga for men, that’s why.” That *is* the answer, whether you like that or not. Each of these demographic/genres has specific tropes of its own, just as scifi in America has specific tropes, or action, or mystery, or romance.

In recent years there has been a slow growth of a fifth “genre” – manga for people who like manga. Jokingly, we refer to this around here as the Fifth Column of manga and I’ve written about it at length elsewhere. The most interesting thing about this fifth “genre” is that it is largely genre-less. Manga Erotics F is as likely to appeal to an adult woman as it is to an adult man. This is so breathtakingly different in Japan that it’s really worth mentioning. The Japanese Magazine Publishers Association puts out sales numbers for manga magazines…all of which are categorized into those four demographic categories. There is no “Other” category. Publishers there are still thinking inside this box. So it’s important when something, anything, breaks through the wall of this self-imposed limitation.

Okay, so it’s pretty well known that BL/Yaoi is a subset of Shoujo and Josei. But there’s enough of it – and the tropes of the genre have become so ingrained (and in fact have a nickname – the Royal Road) – that it warrants its own section in Japanese manga stores. Nonetheless, it’s still “for females” and so far, nothing that BL has done has changed that. I’d love to see this shift…I think there’s some room for growth there, but a lot of things have to happen before we’ll see any movement in that area.

Well, okay, BL is “for females,” so GL is “for males,” right? And here is where Yuri is and always has been the dark horse, the red-headed child of manga. Because the answer is…no, not really. Let’s turn to the history of Yuri briefly. Conceived in the 1920s as part of ‘S’ class literature, what we now call Yuri was mostly drawn and written by women. There are early proto-Yuri ‘S’ manga as far back as the 60’s, manga that exposed the intense platonic love of girls – the same exact kind of thing that made Maria-sama ga Miteru so popular. These were manga meant for girls. By my reckoning, the first truly Yuri manga is Shiroi Heya no Futari, also a Shoujo manga, published in the early 70s.  Yuri was not, of course a genre name then, although lillies as visual imagery was already common.

Of course lesbian porn manga for guys existed. Frankly, I think that has about as much to do with Yuri as Playboy magazine has to do with literature and art. ^_^ In the 70s, Yuri was primarily a feature in girls’ manga. After Sailor Moon in the 1990s we started to see more and more manga/anime-based lesbian porn. In the way of such things, this was when the term “Yuri” started to become more commonly used and, in the way of such things, the things men did completely overwrote the things women did. Yuri now equaled explicit lesbian porn….even if it didn’t.

The 2000s saw the birth of Yuri as a sub-genre. Sure, Maria-sama ga Miteru was an insanely popular girl’s Light Novel series, but Kannazuki no Miko was an insanely popular anime series based on a comic for men that used Yuri as a fetish…Yuri was firmly fixed as a subset of Seinen. Yuri was for men…women need not apply. Girls could read love between girls in girl’s manga, but that wasn’t “Yuri.”

In the 2000s, there were warring factions, Yuri for men had the “Girls Keep Out” sign affixed on their door, the Yuri is for anyone faction lived at Yuricon. (We still do.  Heck, the party has barely started!) A third party – women drawing women in love for other women were quietly changing the world in Japan, but no one noticed for a long time, and then it was like, “Yeah, we’ve been here all along.” ^_^

The 2010s have born Yuricon out. Yuri is drawn by and for men and women. If I ask you to name your top three Yuri artists, you’re just as likely to come up with male or female names.

But this isn’t the end of this story, it’s really just the beginning. Shoujo, Shounen, Josei and Seinen each have specific tropes associated with them. And, as Yuri moved into each of these demographic/genres, it took on some of those tropes. The boyish hottie from Shoujo, the sexy femme fatale from Shounen, the young professional woman from Josei, the badass from Seinen and the hyper cute girl from all of them…Yuri now includes all these things side by side.

JManga today listed Yuri as a separate genre page. Shounen, Shoujo, Josei, Seinen, BL…Yuri.

What does this mean for us? It means that finally, freed of being associated with any one specific demographic, one set of tropes, one audience, Yuri stands on its own, with its own styles and messages.

Yuri is the very first genre that belongs to everyone.

How fucking awesome is that? ^_^





Why Yuri Cannot be Financially Successful…The Gospel According To Fandom

July 23rd, 2012

Sorry to start the week off with such heavy-duty overthinking, but something’s on my mind and I want to get it down before I lose it.

Ever since ALC announced that we’re partnering with JManga to get some Yuri titles out in English, I keep seeing the same (so *much* the same, that I have to think it’s one or two people over and over) accusations against me and the folks at ALC. A handful of people angry that they can’t get free scanlations of a title that is now legitimately available for sale isn’t something I need to address, really. I know that. But I wanted to have a response to point to in case this comes up again in the future.

Here are the key points of these repeated accusations, as I understand them:

Making fans pay for Yuri is “selling out”
Translating and editing for money is “selling out” 
I, personally, am rolling in your $ as a result of this deal

Because fandom at large is used to Yuri being a underserved audience, they are also used to turning almost exclusively to scanlations. As a result, a rather large portion of Yuri fandom expects that Yuri remain free forever and that by wanting people to pay for it, Yuri is being betrayed.

In reality, it’s the other way around. I and many other people love Yuri so very much, that our goal is to bring more of it over in a way that provides jobs and livelihood to more people, so it can sustain itself as a genre. To be blunt – if a person relies on scanlations when a legitimate version is available to them, then they are the one selling out Yuri. It’s really quite simple. Your purchase of an item goes to pay for the work that has already been done by compensating the company that paid for it, supports the current work and provides royalties to the creator. Ideally, it also creates money for investment into new projects in the form of profit.

In effect, these fans say that, if Yuri were to ever become a financially viable genre, it can only ever have done so by “selling out.” Just as any band or artist that becomes successful must, by the nature of entertainment, have “sold out.”

There’s something terribly sad to me, that some of the people who read Yuri find it impossible to cough up a few $ to support it. JManga is charging $5/volume of manga for most of what they are selling. It’s not really asking a lot for you to pay $5, is it? If it is, then I’m sorry, because when you don’t have the money, then it is hard, but for some fans, I think entitlement has attained the point that homophobia has attained in the anti-gay movement…it’s become so deeply ingrained and so inflexible a position that the only thing left to do is keep defending the position with increasing desperation. If someone out there is that unreasonably angry at being charged $5 for a few hours worth of entertainment, then I really only feel sympathy for them. It’s hard to justify that kind of position to someone who isn’t already a believer. In that sense, I guess the forums where I’m seeing this anger have become the echo chamber of this refrain.

In effect, these “fans” have decided that Yuri being financially successful is a crime against fans of Yuri and against Yuri itself.

I will not tell you what our contract with JManga says, even if I could. I can tell you this – most of the money goes to the translator on a project.  I wonder, truly, how much some of these people think we make from translating and editing a book? Whatever that amount is that those people think, I’d like half of it. ^_^;  If I offered them the ability to read a book for free, would these people still find something to be angry about? I honestly believe they would. For some fans, being dissatisfied seems to be the real entertainment value. (Don’t believe me? Read a few forum threads about how *angry* these people are at various scanlation circles for not being fast enough or for stopping work on a series that is now for sale, or for some other thing.)

I know that this post is unlikely to change any minds out there. People who are convinced that their right to free scanlations is inviolable are not going to suddenly stop and think, “What am I saying? Of COURSE the people who work on this stuff have a right to make a living!” Nonetheless, on the off chance that one person does think that, I’m saying this plainly: The people who work on Yuri have a right to make a living doing so. “Selling” Yuri is not “selling out” at all. There is nothing at all immoral in a person getting paid to draw, write, translate, edit, letter, proofread or sell Yuri to an audience willing to buy it.

Yuri is not yet sustaining itself in the west. Not in the way BL or shounen is. Shoujo and josei are largely in a similar bind – everyone wants it, but when it’s made available just not enough people actually pay for it. I know that the Okazu/Yuricon audience is the exception – I know you pay for what you want, I know you “support” Yuri in every way possible.

On behalf of the creators, translators, editors, letterers, publishers, printers, marketers, graphic designers and project managers in the industry, I want to thank you all from the bottom of my heart. When the Yuri audience as a whole understands that what you do and what we do is not a crime against the genre, when “selling” is not synonymous with “selling out,” then – and only then – will Yuri be successful. I await that day with anticipation. ^_^





It’s A Woman’s World: Bodacious Space Pirates, Maria-sama ga Miteru and The Bechdel-Wallace Test

July 10th, 2012

Bodacious Space Pirates came to an end and I thought it delightful in every possible way. As I (over)thought how I’d approach a final season review, I started to think about the qualities that made the series stand out for me – and what, specifically, that meant in terms of storytelling. And, ultimately, I started thinking about how the series portrayed women.

Courtney Duckworth on Broad Recognition has a really excellent review of Pixar’s Brave, in which she discusses something that any woman in the corporate world knows…to be a successful woman, you have to be a man. I remember a conversation I had with a young executive who was being groomed for a CEO position in the company I worked for at the time. He was having a little crisis because, in order to be the man they wanted him to be, he had to give up his family life. It was expected, respected and demanded that he not be there to see his kids play in their first ball game, not attend recitals, because his company needed him. I watched him as he talked his way through this, as he justified letting his family drop off in importance and the company become the thing he would care about. In the end, he became a very successful CEO, and I remember this conversation as the saddest one I have ever had with another human being. For women, who are presumed to be primary caregivers, the stress of letting go of family in order to be successful as a CEO is almost insurmountable. Let someone else raise your kids? (Doesn’t matter if it’s your husband…it’s NOT YOU.) You’re heartless. Focused and driven? You’re a bitch. Want to take time off to see your kid’s recital? You’re not dedicated. There is no way to win, because you are not a man with a wife who will watch the kids in the background.

Merida, like Ermina (Paros no Ken), Safire (Princess Knight) and Lady Oscar (Rose of Versailles), excels at men’s skills, in a world that pretty much has one path to excellence – being as brave and competent as a man.

Let’s stop here and take a look at the Bechdel_Wallace Test for a second. As a reminder, the test goes like this.

1. [The media in question] has to have at least two [named] women in it.
2. Who talk to each other
3. About something besides a man

In a recent email exchange with Alison Bechdel, she and I discussed the idea of “would Mo watch it?” as an unwritten, extra factor to measure if a media property follows the letter, but not the spirit of the Test (that is, it fits the criteria strictly, but it’s still not the kind of thing that Mo is looking for in entertainment). ^_^

So what does this have to do with Bodacious Space Pirates and Maria-sama ga Miteru? Everything.

Let’s start with Maria-sama ga Miteru. In the rarified and protected world of Lillian Girls’ School there are no “men’s jobs.” The leaders of the student body are women, the Principal and many of the teachers are women. The presumption with which the entire series is presented to us is that Youko or Sachiko or any of the other members of the Student Council  will move into positions with decision-making power when they graduate – if not effortlessly, then they will certainly be capable of standing up for themselves, because they have been trained to be leaders. No one ever comments that they are as good as men, or that they run the student body with masculine focus. Lillian is a woman’s world and within it, women do jobs women can do, if they are give the opportunity to do them. (This is something that research bears out – given equal opportunity to excel, women will excel equally.)

In Bodacious Space Pirates, Marika is going to school in a woman’s world, but she isn’t thinking about it that way, any more than Yumi was. It’s just…school. Then something changes and Marika is indeed sent into a world that is traditionally inhabited by men – piracy. And here, at last, we get to the point. It’s true that Marika faces some trials based on the fact that she’s y’know, a high school girl, but her gender alone is less of a problem than one might have expected in a series like this. Being a woman doing “man’s work” is pretty much never an issue, except in one or two totally valid scenes. (Two young women trawling the back alleys of a pirate hangout is a completely reasonable use of that kind of tension.)

Both these series star female characters in a relatively female-heavy cast, and so they both fly through the letter of the Bechdel-Wallace Test easily. But…there’s more to them. In neither series is there a focus on turning a sexualized male gaze on the characters. It really doesn’t matter how “strong” a female character is – when we are forced to stare continually at their crotch or chest, there’s a different story being told – “Yes, she could kick your ass, but it’s okay, you could still have sex on her, so you’re still superior to her..”

Let’s think, for a second about the inevitable “beach episode” in Bodacious Space Pirates. In any other series, if I ask you, “What was the beach episode about?” the only real answer you’d have is “It was about reducing the female characters to a series of sexualized visual images.” Now think about the beach episode of BSP. What was it about? The plot was the trial run for the dinghy race, but it was *about* Ai-chan. In any other series, would there have been an entire episode about a relatively unimportant character like Ai-chan? Would there have been a follow-up episode about her? Would she have been developed as more than a name at all?  There was no attempt to turn Marika or any of the characters into a pair of jiggling boobs.  Yes, we absolutely saw the female characters in bathing suits…but we also saw Kane in a bathing suit. He was not ripped, but he was fit. We saw his ass as many times as we saw the girls’. I don’t care about *either* the girls or Kane in a bathing suit, but the service was pleasantly even-handed and blessedly low-key. It would have been hideously easy (and hideous) to simply stare up the Yacht Club members’ skirts all the time, as anime as a genre slides into a low place in which a majority of viewers seem content to huddle – but that does not happen here.

Both these series have female-heavy casts, but not female-exclusive casts. These are not reverse harems, not reverse shounen series. There are brothers, fathers, uncles, male teachers, colleagues and crew in these worlds, just as there are in the real world. A woman’s world in these series does not mean “the exclusion of all men,” as it might in a male gaze fantasy like Strawberry Panic!  These women have society, which is, in my reading of it, the meaning of the third and final criteria of the Bechdel-Wallace Test.

Maria-sama ga Miteru and Bodacious Space Pirates are about strong women as *I* understand the concept. Women who are perfectly capable living in a world populated by men and women; women who can take command of both men and women and be respected as leaders – and who are not judged by a set of standards that are skewed so they can only ever fail. Women who can find their own solutions to issues, not to have to excel at men’s thinking or men’s skills to be considered a success.

In these series, women are shown as being as brave and competent…as a woman.

Would Mo watch these? I think she might.





We Don’t Need No Stinking Publishers!

April 17th, 2012

This is a real conversation I had with someone recently:

Them: Why do we need publishers? We can publish without them!

Me: Who will license the book?

Them: Well, of course someone has to do that.

Me: And who will translate it?

Them: We have a translator.

Me: And don’t forget, you need a letterer and editor and layout person.

Them: Right, we can do that, too.

Me: And someone to manage the project so it makes deadlines and has quality control.

Them: Of course!

Me: And don’t forget someone to line up distribution, and you’ll need someone to do marketing.

Them: Right, yes.

Me: And, when you get all that together, you know what they call that?

Them: ….

Me: Congrats on recreating the concept of the publishing company from scratch. ^_^

***

To their credit, they got the point and were very gracious about it.





Invisible Layers of Manga

April 1st, 2012

I often refer to the fact that I very often mention “steps that were skipped” or “things readers don’t see” in reference to manga publishing. I’m asked about that quite often – what are those steps? What is it that readers don’t see?

I’ve been meaning to address some of this for ages and today seemed like a good chance to mention some, but probably not all, of the things that readers probably don’t know about (and frequently don’t care about.)

Let’s start with licensing. I imagine very few readers really have any grasp of what this entails, and to be honest there’s no one formula for licensing manga. Different companies have different requirements, some have agencies that represent them, some hire individuals, others have in-house groups that handle that. American manga companies may also hire an agent or representative, but they are more likely to do licensing in-house. In book publishing, this stage is handled by an “acquiring editor” who interfaces between legal and the author or agent. There are no acquiring editors in manga right now, because relationships are so often personal before they are professional and many of the Japanese companies, once they create a relationship, still prefer to go for exclusive agreements. That’s changing a bit. And some manga artists, especially independent ones, are starting to use an agent, but most still rely on their publisher to represent their interests.

Licensing involves more levels of negotiation than you can possibly imagine if you’ve never done it. This stage might takes months or years, while every single detail is hammered out – even down to the way the title looks, the way the credits are handled, distribution for first and successive printings, payment, milestones, formats the files will be sent in…Every. Single. Detail. Obviously, scanlation groups skip all this – they can hit the ‘net faster, because there’s no pesky lawyers, company wanting to know how the books will be distributed or how it will look, making sure that previous contracts are not infringed upon or creators wanting to be paid and make sure the spellings are the way they want them.

After the licensing is done, then the folks who are doing the localizing can get to it. The translator gets a script from what would, in the book publishing world be called a “managing editor.” Managing editors manage the project from this point on until it actually goes to the print. Ideally, these days the manuscript are the pages of the raw manga in digital form. This is where scanlators start the process, having skippped all the tediousness of licensing negotiation. Manga companies do not typically have a “managing editor” and the editor in chief of the company may act as project manager if it’s a really small company.

Translation is not a science. It’s an art. I’ll keep saying that until people get it. ^_^ There is no “right” way to translate, there are a number of ways to translate any given thing.

At this point, there’s a couple of ways a company can go. Some translators send the script as a text file to the adapter. Maybe that person has a bit of understanding of Japanese and has the manga to hand, so they can compare, but that’s pretty rare, honestly. Most companies now require translators to do their own adaptation. Some are better than others at it. Usually this takes some fluency as a writer in the language being translated to. That’s an entirely different thing than just speaking your own language fluidly. The most important thing removing the adapter does is 1) removes a fresh new pair of eyes looking over the script, and so losing an opportunity for some input on things like Voice. 2) It saves money and time, as well.

Some companies have an editor look over the script at this point. A few do, and you usually can tell, because those companies have unusually good translation. Copy editors do not just proofread. They are looking for consistent language use, widows and orphans in the text, grammatical and syntactical errors and other larger issues. Of course, they also find typos. Most manga companies have a translator and an “editor” who does the copy editing and project management. Because of this – and because the quality of editors are so variable, you sometimes get rougher “translation” to your language than you might like.

Then the script goes to lettering. Oh, but wait, there’s no way to letter a page with lettering already on it, so first the page is cleaned up and touched up in places and then it is lettered. Scanlation circles typically use a DPI of about 200 or 300 for their distribution. I can tell you from personal experience that that is absolutely nothing like cleaning up a page at 1200 dpi and retouching it, so that 1-pixel specks don’t show up as black dots in a print version.

Then lettering begins. Companies make hard choices about things like sound effects, which are so often drawn into the manga panels. Do they just translate them, or do they go to the considerable time and effort of replacing them? In almost all cases, I replace them at ALC, because it looks so much nicer. But it definitely takes way longer. And in a few cases, there’s just no way around it and a sound in English has to be set next to the art.

Here’s where it all gets very messy. In book publishing, the managing editor then gets a “galley” copy – a rough copy of the printed volume. This is sent back out to the editor and more importantly, another missing layer here – a proofreader. Some manga companies send lettered manuscripts to the copy editor at this point. It’s a little harder to make changes, but it’s pretty key because…

Okay, so when I reviewed JManga.com this week, I told you that there are almost always errors in manga. Well here’s why….because there are no galleys. Manga publishers do not get rough copies back. In offset printing the most expensive book is the first one and every time the plates are set, it costs. Even big manga publishers here in the US don’t have in-house printing and can’t afford this step. So there are no galleys to send back to the editors and proofreaders who can then spot the mistakes the letterer made. THIS is why one has to presume there are typos in every manga.

And, in some cases, where the letterer has already done their work, there still is only one layer of editing, so after the copy editor makes changes, *no one checks the finished manuscript.* This drives me absolutely crazy. Every manuscript needs more than one editor looking at it once.

True story – when we finished the very first Rica ‘tte Kanji!? volume, we had a total of 5 editors and proofreaders – and there were still two typos that escaped. You can never have too many eyes check a manuscript.

So, in book publishing, the galley goes back to the copy editor and then a proofreader…and then if the managing editor is not a moron, they take a look at it and THEN it goes to print.

In manga, the letterer gets a script that’s been edited once and no one checks the lettered manuscript for errors. Or, if the editor gets the manuscript after lettering, no one checks it a second time after those have been fixed. There can never be too many eyes. And manga companies almost always skimp on eyes.

So, why do they do that? Well, remember, manga companies have been constrained by comic book and bookstore distribution until recently. That means that they had to determine a release date way back at the beginning of the process. Readers expect the book to be ready by then, and are very demanding about things going as fast as possible, which means the company has to get that thing out the door to the printer asap to be ready. (Printers are never fast.) So they send books to print after one read rather than holding the thing up while they wait for a second round of reading/changes – and forget a third round. I have friends in book publishing who will be hired to copy edit/proofread books going to second and third printings and even with all those added layers, they still find errors.

About half the time when you see an editor-in-chief’s name on the book, they never actually edited it. Again, at ALC I always re-read a book after the editors have sent in their changes and then I hand it off to proofreaders to catch the things I still missed (and we still miss some. It’s just the way life is.)

True story – when I was a child I had a book I loved. (This was back in the day when publishing books was a respectable job.) At the very climax of the book there is a critical typo that changes the entire story. At 11 years old, I crossed out the wrong word and wrote in the right one. It just bothered me that much. ^_^

Then we head into issues of distribution and marketing which I have talked about previously, so I won’t belabor the points here. But they also take time, one of the many things fans are always so dissatisfied about.

I hope this gives you a little glimpse into some of the layers that readers never see – and hopefully explain to you why you see errors, and wonder why the company never caught it or what’s holding the book up or other questions and concerns readers have, but have no answers for.

Perhaps this new world of digital distribution will make it simpler for readers to catch an error and companies to fix it. Here’s hoping. ^_^