Tuesday 24 August 2004

Pic of the day: That's not a boy, that's a girl, but there is a boy in there too, of course. Where there is a girl, you can reliably expect there to be a boy before long.

Marmalade boy, the manga

The first time I heard about Marmalade Boy was when I first got into anime. My online friends on the Acid Reflux forum were, for the most part, interested in anime. I should probably say "hooked on anime". As they were generally nice people, I was intrigued, and asked them to tell me more. They recommended I download a fansub of Child's Toy (Kodomo no Omocha, often called just Kodocha) which was, they said, "like Marmalade Boy on caffeine". (Or perhaps it was on speed, but I don't think any of them ever used that themselves.) I had never heard of Marmalade Boy, so that was not very descriptive, but I downloaded an episode anyway. (At the time, a couple years ago, it was in RealPlayer format and not very sharp, as you could not easily download large files the way we do today.)

I loved Kodocha, but I never saw Marmalade Boy. That doesn't mean I forgot about it, though. And when I saw the books in Outland, the local Anime, Manga, Fantasy and Gaming bookstore ... well, curiosity won out and I bought the first book. Later the same day I bought the rest. (The series is 8 books.) It was that good.

This manga (Japanese comics) is made by Wataru Yoshizumi, a female artist clearly. The intended audience is also probably mostly young girls, for there is a glaring absence of pointless nudity and panties- glimpsing. (A Japanese acquaintance claims that many Japanese school uniforms actually have as short skirts as portrayed in manga and anime. You would think this would place the boys at an unfair disadvantage when it comes to concentrating on school work, but I guess you get used to most things when you grow up with them. Anyway, the school uniforms in Marmalade Boy are among the more decent I've seen.)

Anyway, this is all romance all the way. No detective work, no superpowers, no robots or cat-girls, and no pointless violence. Just a tangled web of romances, a boy's search for his unknown father, and a plot twist that is visible from the start of book 1 but does not actually happen until book 7. At this point the story becomes ethically challenging, especially for the religious reader, I would think.

***

One endearing feature in this series is the "free speech" author notes. Every few pages she uses the margin of a page to write something, usually related to Marmalade Boy but sometimes just a kind of diary. Among other things, she writes about the ongoing attempt to make an anime out of the series, and her doubts about it – the anime must necessarily be a bit different from the manga, in order for people to buy both and because they are of different length. So there are characters in the anime that were not in the manga, and she fusses over this.

I like author notes. I enjoyed Piers Anthony's notes at the end of his books, but I think I enjoyed these margin scribbles even more. I wonder if something like that would work with a novel, for instance? Probably not nearly as well. Since a novel is already text, it would be confusing. Too bad. Hmm, what if I used a very different font or background color?

Anyway, I greatly enjoyed the series, and would probably have enjoyed the anime as well. Some of my favorite anime are romances. I guess that's the only romance I have in my life and this may be part of it, but perhaps not. I've enjoyed love songs since I was a teen at least. Perhaps I just am the romantic type, in theory. It certainly doesn't show in practice. ^_^*