¡¡Magdalenas vs. Muffins!!

Hi! I'm Hanaoka and here is my gourmet selection accompanied by assorted ramblings. Enjoy. Main blog (artblog) --> http://hanaoka.tumblr.com/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[unknownusername]

This is from another TB 1999 promo comic strip.

Some context: CLAMP were explaining how whenever Subaru’s actor smoked it seemed like Subaru was smoking, so here we have our precious baby having a sneaky cigarette whilst Hokuto tells him the fuck off.  You go, Hokuto-chan.

[genicecream]

a series of composition tips i’d been sharing on twitter!

and since some people had asked, i’ve put up a pdf version of this on gumroad along with a layered psd of one of the example images too

tips would be really appreciated, but it’s up for free!

[brickme]

my taste in music is 90s j-pop covers of 80s synthpop sung by two girl idols who never smile wearing costumes that indicate the Japanese had yet to realize their housing bubble had already popped set to a backdrop of early 90s psychedelic CGI

[myboyfriendpetebuttigieg]

“friendly reminder” posts annoy me, but here’s one anyway:

The word “problematic” was never meant to be the auto-win card of social justice discussions. Problematic is not a synonym for bad or wrong. Problematic literally means that an issue is complicated, open to debate, and raises important questions about an issue, questions that should be analyzed, discussed, and unpacked.

So when you say something is problematic, don’t just lean back in your chair, pat yourself on the back, and call it a day. Go deeper. Get a discussion going. Analyze that shit. Hear from others and come to some tough conclusions.

Saying “we shouldn’t do X because X is problematic” is as nonsensical as saying “the weather outside is weather.”

[brickme]

Nakayoshi all-star long long seal file (December 1992)

[brickme]

If you look closely at the first and fourth images, you’ll see that this furoku features Umino Tsunami, who recently had a smash hit with the TV adaptation of her series Nigeru wa haji daga yaku ni tatsu.

Umino actually made her debut in Nakayoshi magazine in 1989 and serialized a few titles there in the early 90s. This is one of the very, very few furoku (I’m tempted to say the only but I don’t know for sure) she was featured on, because she wasn’t very popular with the main readership of Nakayoshi. She always had dedicated fans, though, and moved on to josei where she finally had a breakthrough hit with NigeHaji. (The series featured on this furoku is probably Romance no tamago, which I quite like and I’d recommend if you like low-key shojo romance.)

If you look closely you can see this furoku also features Hiura Satoru, another artist who made her debut in Nakayoshi but only really had a big hit (Hotaru no hikari) once she moved on to josei and got picked up for a TV adaptation:

Hiura was more popular in Nakayoshi than Umino, but she’s talked about how Nakayoshi wouldn’t let her write what she wanted, and she only really came to the attention of general manga fans in the 2000s. Seems to be a trend with Nakayoshi (way back when, they also let go of Hagio Moto!).

[lgbt-cz]

a 16 year old czech girl scout stands her ground against a neonazi during a neonazi parade shutdown in brno (1.5.2017)

[honeycha1-deactivated20181021]

“I feel obligated to stand up against fascist ideologies and opinions, which are present in society and pose a threat. I think my friends feel the same. We don’t agree with spreading hate. I have taken part in similar events before. “

— lála myslíková for the czech news website romea.cz

[deadscanlations]

The Fragile Heart of Moe - Manga Documentary

Dailymotion United States - Playlist The Fragile Heart of Moe - Manga Documentary

The film deals with a particular sub-cultural phenomenon within the vast world of Japanese comics (‘manga’). During the early 1970s, manga fans began to create their own amateur manga, many of them using characters from their favorite stories that appeared in mainstream manga magazines. These they published themselves and sold in little conventions of like-minded people. ‘Comiket’, now the world’s largest comics convention, began as one such amateur manga event, where self-published authors would put up little stalls and buy and sell each other’s comics. Now Comiket is held twice yearly and attracts 500,000 people, more than half of them girls. The film focuses on a few such women authors, trying to understand the roots of this unique cultural phenomenon, and its strong yet subtle influence on contemporary Japanese society. The film also explores the social and economic structure that supports this kind of artistic activity, and the positive role that it plays in the lives of Japanese people.

[laikagohome]

what a coincidence!!!!!

[knitmeapony]

Kids.  Teenagers.  As someone staring 40 in the face lemme tell you a thing.

You are going to be horrified and embarrassed at some point by the shit you are doing now.

And you are going to wish with all your might you’d done more of it.  

You’re gonna wish you had more selfies, more photos, more videos being dumb with your friends.  You’re going to wish you’d had your hair even higher or your shoes even sparklier.  

Go.  Document the shit out of your ridiculous life.  Fuck trends but if you wanna be trendy, go all in.  Fuck in-groups and subcultures but if one sings to you, do it all.  Be exactly as cool or punk rock or goth or fandom or country or hardcore or hip hop or whatever, and don’t let anyone tell you differently.

Just don’t hurt people.  That’s the only thing you’ll ever genuinely live to regret.

[knitmeapony]

@palejoke tagged: #I mean no offense but why a 40 y/o on the hellsite

I think I have talked about this before, but because life doesn’t end at twenty or thirty or forty or fifty and thinking that folks are going to fall out of social media or that there won’t always be someone your age and my age and twice both of our ages interested in [insert anything, ever] is a very limiting worldview.  

Somewhere there is a sixty-five year old who unironically loves Taylor Swift’s music and a fifty-two year old writing Superwholock fanfic and a ninty year old who absolutely lives for the next episode of Archer and a seventy-one year old that can kick anyone’s ass in k-pop trivia.  There will always be these folks, and all the Internet has done is give fans of all ages a chance to interact in a way that they never had before.

Before BBSes and the Internet and Usenet and the World Wide Web and fanrings and forums and social media, those people would just love it in their own way, in the privacy of their own homes.  But now anyone can make an Ao3 account or a basic fansite or tumbl about whatever they want, and sometimes you’re gonna learn those people are old but they still get it, and sometimes you’re going to find out those folks are still kids, twelve or fourteen at the oldest, and marvel at their maturity and skill and attention to detail.  

And that is rad as hell, that is fucking incredible, that is… whatever the kids are saying these days, hah.

[esoteric-merit]

As a sidenote, once, about a decade ago, I decided to email one of my favourite authors before she bit it … she was pushing 90 at the time. ( … she’s still alive now). Anyways, we got to having a long discussion, because I shared my deadname with her late husband, and I actually had quite a long conversation with her. The part of the conversation I’d like to share with you about this now pushing 100-tear-old author isn’t that she developed a liking for her breakfast eggs from her honeymoon in Vienna, or that her Husband would sometimes steal her drafts to read them as soon as he could, or that she superglued a potted plant to her bookshelf to watch her orange cat try to knock it over and fail. Nono, I mention this to bring up what she would do as a writing exercise whenever she didn’t feel like writing her serious work. In short, erotic darkwing duck slashfic. You can find it online.

[knitmeapony]

This is the greatest addition this post has gotten so far.

[onegingek]

Hasebe is my favorite sword XD

[laweyd]

Drew Hori (Touken Ranbu) at the live stream! :D

[wordsnquotes]

Writers don’t write from experience, although many are hesitant to admit that they don’t…If you wrote from experience, you’d get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.

Nikki Giovanni  (via wordsnquotes)

[brickme]

HOW POPULAR WERE THE YEAR 24 GROUP, ANYWAY? or, The Otaku: its habitus and irrational hatred of the mainstream

This post might be more interesting (and make more sense, maybe?) if you read it in tandem with another post I made about the various movements of 70s shojo manga.

A while back, I read a hilarious blog post containing scans and transcripts of some essays Hagio Moto wrote about the art of manga, Manga ABC (1974) and Watashi no manga-ron / My theory on manga (1976, neither have ever been collected into tankobon). In both, she talks about “maniacs”*, a subset of her fan base who were so, so deeply obsessed with her, they would call her at home (how did they get her number?), show up at her house (how would they get her address?!), ask her for autograph, and tell her that she “shouldn’t write comedy, comedy is bad, manga must be art” and other such nonsense.

All that is quite funny (in hindsight; Hagio must have been quite bothered by it!), but what’s interesting is how she talks about herself as a writer who attracts this “maniac” type of fans. In one of the scans from Manga ABC, you can see a magazine editor comment that “She’s not popular at all, she always comes last in the popularity polls. But… she gets a ton of letters.” Hagio adds, “This type of writer is referred to as being ‘popular with the maniacs’ and these letters are called ‘love letters’ rather than ‘fan letters’.”

This aligns well with the famous story about how Hagio’s The Heart of Thomas was written: the series did so poorly in the popularity polls that it was originally going to get canceled almost immediately, but then the tankobon of Poe no ichizoku sold well, so the editors allowed her to actually finish the series. According to Hagio’s essay collection Omoide o kirinuku toki, the series ended up doing okay towards the end of serialization, but only okay — around number 5 or 6 in the polls. It also aligns with what Takemiya Keiko has said about Pharaoh no haka: she started the series with the expressed intent of climbing to the top of the magazine’s polls so she the editors wouldn’t be able to say no to her writing Kaze to ki no uta, but she only managed to reach number one with the last chapter of the series. Takemiya did go on to write Kaze to ki no uta, which was later canceled.

Something hilarious that the blog uses to exemplify how “popular with the maniacs” Hagio was at the time (and comparatively less popular with general audiences) is the “manga maniacs” magazine Ducks (later known as Puff**). The top 5 manga writers as voted on by the magazine’s readership in December 1978 looked like this:

Hagio Moto

Oshima Yumiko

Tezuka Osamu

Takemiya Keiko

Matsumoto Reiji

The readership’s top 10 manga included The Heart of Thomas, Poe no ichizoku, and They Were 11 by Hagio, as well as Wata no kunihoshi by Oshima, Kaze to ki no uta by Takemiya, and so on. And let’s be clear: I think these popularity polls are actually quite good. There are many people and titles in them that I personally love. But there is no way these polls matched what was actually popular with general audiences at the time, which is made blatantly obvious by the list of top 10 worst manga as voted by the magazine’s readership:

Gakideka (gross comedy so popular with kids there was a PTA protest)

Circuit no okami (car racing manga, massively popular and helped to introduce the “super cars” phenomenon to Japan)

Candy Candy (one of the top best-selling, most popular manga and anime in the history of shojo manga)

Kyojin no hoshi (one of the most popular and influential baseball series in the history of manga)

Todai icchokusen (the first hit manga by Kobayashi Yoshinori)

Makoto-chan (massively popular comedy by Umezu Kazuo)

Kaze to ki no uta (I can easily imagine Kazeki having many haters as well as fans)

Macaroni horenso (massively popular and influential comedy)

Ai to Makoto (massively popular romance by Kajiwara Ikki of Kyojin no hoshi and Ashita no Joe)

Uchu senkan Yamato (you know this one)

Holy crap! If I looked up the word “hipster” in a dictionary, the definition should be “people who voted in these polls”. I haven’t read most of these manga, but they’re so well-known that I’d obviously know of them, and they were definitely some of the most popular series of the 70s (most of them were the top series in the magazines they ran in). Personal tastes aside, I can only imagine incredibly bitter people insisting they’re the “worst” that manga has to offer.

Also, the prevalence of comedy, romance, and romantic comedy in the worst list is plainly ridiculous! It makes sense, to me, that the kind of person who voted in these polls would also walk up to Hagio and tell her to stop writing comedy, because manga had to be “art”.

In the essay quoted in the blog post, Hagio goes on to harshly criticize these maniacs/otaku, well knowing they make up a large portion of her vocal fan base: “These maniacs are extremely intelligent. But they are lacking in creativity. Because they’re intelligent, they see only faults in other people. But they would have so much more fun if they actually did something, rather than finding flaws in other people. So I look down on the maniacs. I feel that the general populace and general audiences possess so much more of a rich sensitivity to art and a rich imagination.”

Another blog post exemplifies the attitudes and thought processes of these maniac fans even better: it turns out that back in the 70s, Ikeda Riyoko used to receive hate mail from fans of Hagio, Takemiya, and Oshima telling her to stop writing manga (!), and what’s more, Satonaka Machiko once told Ikeda that she, too, was incredibly unpopular with maniac fans. When I read this, my mind immediately went to an interview with Ichijo Yukari about her seminal work Designer, in which she reveals that she used to receive letters from fans of Hagio and Oshima, telling her that she was ripping them off!

What one has to understand here is, Ikeda, Satonaka, and Ichijo were immensely popular writers of shojo manga in the 70s and through the 80s. Ikeda had already had a massive hit with The Rose of Versailles and written several popular works such as Oniisama e… and The Window of Orpheus; Satonaka had made an explosive debut at 16*** and gone on to write hits such as Aries no otome-tachi which broadened the scope of shojo manga and heavily influenced the birth of manga for adult women; Ichijo’s dramatic storytelling and ornamental art made a heavy impact on shojo manga and she continues to publish hit series to this day. These three women were the faces of the magazines they wrote for (Weekly Margaret, Weekly Shojo Friend, and Ribon respectively), and were the leading forces of shojo manga.

Keeping that in mind, what else but bitterness and petty jealousy could have made maniacs/otaku attack these writers and try to force them to stop writing manga altogether? It’s so easy to imagine the same kind of person who wrote to Hagio telling her to write only manga they approved of, and voted in polls to degrade every popular manga of the time, would also tell the most popular shojo writers to stop writing — because only manga that they approve of should exist, and they sure do not approve of anything funny, or exciting, or — god forbid — popular.

To get back to the point of this post, the year 24 group were not actually that popular. They didn’t come first in the popularity polls; their series got canceled, or at least came close to it; some of their fans even went so far as to try to force the truly popular shojo writers to stop writing. The Year 24 Group obviously played a major role in the development of shojo manga, and their work is rightfully considered important and influential now, but I find it interesting to look back and get a sense of perspective about their work. I also find it incredibly fascinating that this isn’t a case of the niche, “artistic” works gaining recognition in retrospect while the mainstream, “populist” works have long been forgotten — although that’s probably what the maniac fans were hoping for.

* The word she uses is マニア mania. It was used back then in much the same way otaku is today, meaning someone deeply obsessed with a particular (usually nerdy) subject. In Japanese, the noun doesn’t refer to the psychological mood as in English, but rather to a person. Interestingly, マニアック maniac is used as an adjective in Japanese. ** Puff was one of the most niche, indie, otaku manga information magazines in existence until 2011, when its publication was suspended. *** Both Hagio and Takemiya witnessed this shocking debut, and have later written about how impressed they were by Satonaka. Takemiya wrote in her essay comic Ashita no K-ko chan that she, too, had sent in a manuscript to the competition where Satonaka won the grand prize. Takemiya didn’t rank in it.

[ylva-li-deactivated20170215]

Kono BL ga yabai 2015 - Top 20 BL manga of 2014

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[pandiva]

[bizcochitowar]

#ana#makoto#makoana mi nuevo otp

Oyeeeeeeeeee

[themorninglark-deactivated20191]

MakoHaru's missing years

This has been on my mind for a while…

In the chronology of Free!, High Speed! 2 takes us up to the first tournament of these boys’ in middle school, which would be summer of their first year. The next time marker we get is in winter break of their first year, when Haru and Rin run into each other and have that fateful race at Iwatobi SC.

Then there’s a time gap until Free! S1E1. This is a lapse of roughly three years and four months, spanning the remaining two years of Makoto and Haru’s middle school lives, and the first year of high school.

We don’t really have much information on what happened during these missing years, so there’s not really a point in speculating about it too much, but what really intrigues me about them is the MakoHaru dynamic within these three years.

We know that Haru never told Makoto what happened with Rin. Makoto didn’t even know that Rin had returned that winter. So if we look at it from Makoto’s point of view, all he knew, back then, was that Haru returned to middle school from winter break and suddenly quit the swimming club, and on top of that, refused to tell him why.

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[ancoscorner-deactivated20190126]

I was looking at a gif of Makoto talking about him being jealous of Rin and it reminded me that

for Makoto being jealous of Rin

We also got Haruka being jealous of Kisumi both in the past and present lol

Just like for Makoto saying “it’s meaningless without you”...

[ixxxxxn]

Japanese edition of “His Roommate’s Pleasure” by Lana McGregor Cover illustration by Nakamura Asumiko Release date: 2014/10/25

Summary from goodreads: It started with an accidental click…but where will it end?

Desperate to turn in a paper, Adam borrows his roommate’s computer and mistakenly opens a folder that contains Josh’s collection of porn. Adam had no idea that his jock roommate was gay—and into leashes, paddles and domination. And Adam, an inexperienced virgin who’s only ever kissed one guy, is surprised to find himself curious about submitting…

Josh can’t believe that his roommate discovered his spank bank—and he can’t believe that Adam is so turned on by the thought of giving up control to someone. Taking a chance, he offers to look through the photos with Adam…and maybe try acting some of them out.

Night after night, the boys delve into their darkest fantasies of domination and submission. And as lust and experimentation grow into the promise of something deeper, Adam must decide if he’s brave enough to tell Josh how he feels.

30,000 words

Nakamura Asumiko! On a Harlequin gay romance cover! Somebody pass me my smelling salts.