I Want to Punch a Hole Through Shoujo Manga

Recently, I’ve started watching Chihayafuru. It’s an anime based on some shoujo manga I’ve never heard of (well……it obviously has the same name……I mean……it’s an adaptation you get what I mean though right?)

To my utter surprise, I actually found myself enjoying the anime, despite that it was an adaptation of a shoujo manga. In terms of quality and characters, it reminded me a lot of Hanasaku Iroha, an anime that I really enjoyed last season. However, I liked Kaichou wa Maid-sama for 7 episodes, but then I dropped that piece of shit around episode 15 when I couldn’t take anymore shoujo-shit like flowers and sparkly men.

A man should never fucking sparkle. It goes against everything that is man. The only things that should sparkle are wiggles.

Still, I digress (You know, I used to like using the word “digress,” but now I kind of hate it. Yet, I digress…………fuck.)

If there’s one thing I like about most Shoujo anime, it’s that they don’t look like shoujo manga. Shoujo manga, quite simply, look like a whole bunch of shit wrapped in frills with lots of hair, huge fucking eyes, and a whole bunch of other shit piles all over the fucking place.

That’s right folks, the thing that I hate most about shoujo -the main reason why I don’t read it- is how it looks.

I’m not only judging a book by it’s outward appearance, but it’s inward appearance as well. The content could be amazing. It could be a riveting story that I would otherwise love, but I’m still going to drop any shoujo halfway through because the art is so fucking annoying. I’ve even dropped some yuri manga because the art was pissing me off so much. If that doesn’t tell you how much I hate the drawing style, then I don’t know what else will.

First, I need a picture of some type of shoujo manga. For reference sake, I’m going to pick on Kaichou wa Maid-sama, and possibly bring up a lot of bad memories about the shitty anime in the process:

 

Okay. Four pictures. I figure that’s enough for me to highlight a few of my least favorite aspects of shoujo manga drawing style.

1. All that background shit.

What the fuck? Every God damn picture has some type of gray shapes or flowers or some shit in every background. Almost every time, these background shapes are created with lots of little dots, which just makes every thing look stupider. To me, it just clutters everything up. I can’t concentrate on the story or the characters with all this fucking shit spotted all over the page. I mean, you got shit over here, sparkles over there, lines all over the fuckin place, a bunch of hair that doesn’t even look cool flyin through frames……oh right the hair.

2. The Hair.

I hate the hair. Look at all the guys. They all have the same fucking hair:

It’s all over the fuckin place.

Some might call this “detail.” I call it “kid who needs a fuckin hair cut.” All male characters always have long hair, so that it jusssst hides the top part of their eyes. This allows them to make moves to brush the hair out of their faces. Wow. if getting girls were as easy as brushing hair out of your face, then how come I wasn’t the most popular guy in high school? Oh yeah, long hair looks fucking retarded on men. The same is true for most manga.

And don’t think I forgot about the girls. Girls have more hair than guys, so in shoujo, their hair is long, stringy, stringy, and stringy. Still, I don’t really mind the girls hair as much as the guys. It’s really mainly the guys’ hair that pisses me off.

3. The Letter Bubbles

Here’s a big issue of mine. The word bubbles. There’s like……2048585 different kinds. Some are see-through, some are shiny, some are dark, some are faded, some are frilly……on any given page you can find up to 395 different word bubbles going on. That brings me back to the whole “way too much shit going on at once on this page” issue. How about a little consistency? Some times the work bubbles even have background shit (see 1.) and then there’s more background shit outside of the bubbles, creating a whole page of shit! FUCK YOU SHIT!

4. Everything’s Really Pointy

…like their chins and hair. Granted, most manga/anime is like that……but seriously, there’s a limit, isn’t there?

5. Flowery, Sparkling, Men

I feel like I can’t really complain much about this, seeing as shoujo manga is made for girls, so naturally they’d doll the men up for their viewing pleasure. But it bothers me, and I will ask this of the girls:

“Do you really prefer guys to cover themselves in glitter and carry flowers around everywhere?”

Fuck that, I got hair on my balls, I like to throw boulders, run through mud, and eat meat. When I get older, I’ll be fat and drink plenty of beer.

So my main complaint is this: Shoujo has it’s pages filled up with endless shit. Half of the time, I’m too busy looking for where words are and who is saying them. Most of the time, I end up giving up and moving on to the next page. The stories are all the same anyway (girl likes guys and then the love and the flowers and the sparkles come…eventually a kiss happens…girl blushes constantly).

This brings up my next point. Currently, I’m stuck reading a manga called Akuma to Love Song. It’s a shitty shoujo manga with shitty art (even shittier than Kaichou wa Maid-sama, which really wasn’t as bad as other shoujo manga out there) about an AWESOME female lead who kind of just says what she wants, and it pisses everyone off. She also have one facial expression, which is a scowl. Awesome.

Too bad the story is actual shit, all characters except her SUCK, and the art is ANNOYING AS FUCK FOR ALL THE REASON I STATED.

Yet, I can’t stop reading it. I’m going to cry myself to sleep tonight. After reading some Akuma to Love Song.

Someone kill me or delete this manga from my memory.

EDIT: Okay, so I completely caught up in Akuma to Love Song, and now I like it. I still hate the art though, and the plot is still kind of dumb.