Sing me a bawdy song, make me merry

It’s time for another episode of I Make Really Terrible Life Choices. Because I am, as always, a hopeless masochist. In fact, I’ll just come right out with it:

Haou Airen

Those of you who have heard of this thing are doubtless already facepalming and/or hurling nearby objects across the room. For those of you who haven’t heard of it, I’ll try to explain:

Mayu Shinjo is a mangaka who could be described as the queen of Horrible Brain-Scarring Shojo. I don’t know if she’s the worst, but she’s definitely up there. The lady has got a massive rape fetish and all of her works prominently feature the Bastard Boyfriend archetype. Hell, one of her BB leading men is actually Satan. You know, the Satan? You can’t get any more Bastard Boyfriendy than that! But until now, I only knew about Shinjo's work second-hand, via TV Tropes. Until now, I’d managed to resist morbid curiousity. But then a TV Tropes image link happened and suddenly it was 7 am this morning and I was finally going to sleep after mainlining the whole thing in one sitting.

Which brings us to Haou Airen, which I gather is Shinjo’s darkest work so far. Oh come on, “dark” is an understatement — it’s basically a giant tsunami of ~sexy~ rape scenes glued together with plot. It was licensed and almost got an English release, but was cancelled at the last minute when the publishers found out what was actually in it. Hey, just like Kodomo no Jikan! However I’m pleased to report that reading Haou Airen was only a mildly horrible experience because a) I’m jaded ever since reading Hot Gimmick and b) this manga is actually pretty funny. How is that even possible? One word: MELODRAMA. Even horrifying subject matter can be narm-ified when paired with stupid dialogue and even stupider plotting, and Haou Airen is so overwrought and has so many ridiculously bone-headed plot twists that it becomes darkly hilarious in the sense of “I can’t believe someone got paid to write this horseshit.”

Speaking of plot, it boils down to this: naive innocent ordinary high-schooler Kurumi happens upon wounded bishie Triad boss Hakuron and tends to his injuries. He thanks her by whisking her off to Hong Kong with the intention of making her his mistress. That’s about it. I didn’t read the first 15ish chapters, but I glean that Hakuron was relatively nice to Kurumi during them and the two were kind of falling in love. However, the shit hits the fan in chapter 16 when Hakuron murders Kurumi’s secretly-evil best friend right in front of her, causing her to turn on him and declare that she hates him. So Hakuron has to figure out some way to make her stay with him. You can all probably guess where this is going.

( Click to read the selected highlights (lowlights?) of Haou Airen! Or don't, you probably have better things to do. )

So yeah, this manga is creepy, gross, and horrible. Don't read it unless you share the author's fucked up set of fetishes.

So the other day, nenena posted about this new-ish shonen manga called Shingeki no Kyojin aka Attack on Titan that recently got licensed, and she was especially focusing on all the gender-related stuff that this series does really well.

And I was like, "Hmm, ladies. Ladies and shonen."

>.>

<.<

Oh come on, you guys know me by now. The best way to grab my undivided attention is to put the words "shonen" and "awesome ladies" in close proximity. It was basically inevitable that I was going to read this thing.

Anyway, I wanted to record my first impressions of this manga for posterity. I flipped through the most recent two chapters (34-35 I think) and two things jumped out at me:

Thing 1: A badass ninja-looking chick with dual-weilded swords flipping out and fighting a giant building-size woman who is naked in a non-fanservicey way.

Thing 2: Some bishie-looking dude with glasses interrogating another guy by dangling him over the edge of the city walls and basically going "I'm tired of your bullshit, either tell us what you know or learn to fly."

Oh wait, except that bishie-looking dude is actually a woman.

I only found this out by going to the character's tag on Pixiv and being like "Wait, why is everyone drawing this character genderflipped? ... OH WAIT"

You know why I couldn't figure this out from the manga itself? Because a) the military outfits worn by the main characters are unisex and are loose-fitting enough that boobs are not easily visible, b) this character's facial features aren't drawn with any kind of feminine coding like doe eyes, prominent eyelashes, or accentuated lips — her face just looks like a regular person's face, and c) her personality (in that scene at least) comes across as your typical shonen dude — direct, tough, favoring force over diplomacy, and not taking crap from people.

Okay, Attack on Titan: YOU GOT ME. You pushed all the right buttons. I'm yours. <3