Revisiting My Teenage Manga Favorites
Stories I once Adored But Now Have Conflicted Feelings About
Hello!!!
This is Joyie and welcome back to my little bookish corner of the internet where I talk all things books!
Have you been reading anything this week? This week I’m reading Moonlight Shadow, the short novella included in Kitchen.
A couple days ago, I watched a YouTube video where the creator talked about an anime they adored when they were young. But after revisiting it, they felt somewhat differently. And that hit very close to home.
When I was in my teens, I used to read a lot of mangas, which are Japanese graphic novels, generally serialised over a period of time in magazines. Like One Piece.
I had two favourites: Taiyou No Ie (House Of The Sun) and Love So Life. I was obsessed with these two. Both stories had a young female protagonist: Mao in Taiyou No Ie, and Shiharu in Love So Life. Mao’s dad remarries after her mother ran away with another man, and she struggles to fit into this new family with her step-mother and step-sister. Shiharu on the other hand, is an orphan who has grown up in an orphanage.
Mao eventually runs away from her home and ends up living with her childhood friend’s brother, Hiro. As a child neglected by her parents, Mao was welcomed by Hiro’s parents into their house. But they both died in a car accident, and now Hiro lives in that house by himself, his siblings having moved away.
Shiharu works part-time at a daycare center where she meets a pair of twins. The twins are two years old and generally very scared of strangers, but they become extremely attached to Shiharu. So their uncle Seiji, who is currently their guardian after their father abandoned them, requests Shiharu to babysit them.
From there, both stories show the girls finding a place where they belong, something like a family, like a home, and of course their bonds with Hiro and Seiji eventually take a romantic turn. That could have been great but there’s a catch–Mao is seventeen and Hiro twenty-four; Shiharu is sixteen, and Seiji twenty-five.
As far as I remember, neither of the two male leads display any distinctly ‘predatory’ traits (except for being into an underage girl of course). They were nice and caring and in the case of Seiji, the story had him break contact with Shiharu where they promise to meet ten years later when she’s an adult.
Now, I read classic literature. I’ve seen romantic pairings that have made me want to throw hands. Still, the settings of those classics are so far removed from my real life that those relationships don’t make me as uncomfortable as seeing a contemporary highschool girl dating a man a decade older than her does.
I actually stopped following both these stories after a while. Still, I can’t deny that being an ill-adjusted teen, I found them very wholesome and comforting. Which I think highlights the exact problem with these types of depictions, especially in stories aimed at a young girls. Like, even now when I look back on those mangas, the emotional part of me still has a fond, warm feeling. But the critical part of me is like hell no!
What about you? Do you have any stories you loved when you were younger but now feel differently about? I'd love to know!!!
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That’s it for today, I'll be back in your inbox next week.
Until then,
Joyie 🌻