InsaneJournal

Bakuman
I hear people complain about the misogyny in Death Note a lot, but to be honest, I didn't really have a problem reading it. I hated the way Misa was portrayed, and I'm sure there was skeevy stuff with the reporter, but it's been so long I don't remember. So it could be that I just wasn't reading as critically at the time or that it was stuff that didn't push my buttons in the same way the stuff in Bakuman does.

But oh my God, Bakuman. I like the story of struggling mangakas and would probably still follow it even if I wasn't scanlating it, but. Almost every chapter makes me want to stab Oba Tsugumi in the face and the most recent one, chapter 52, was particularly egregious.

So for those who might be reading just for the rant, our heroes, Takagi and Mashiro, are high school students who are writing a serialised mystery manga called Detective Trap. Mashiro is the artist and Takagi is the author. They were doing okay for a while, but after they had to go on hiatus for a couple months because of Mashiro's illness, Trap's ratings have taken a dive and they're in danger of getting cancelled.

Their editor keeps urging them to incorporate more battle elements because this is Jump they're writing for, and Jump = battles. But they feel that would change the story too much. So Takagi gets the idea to read their fan letters to see if they can find any good suggestions.

They incorporate a bunch of suggestions and predictably, their editor tells them it's crap and that listening too much to the fans at the expense of your own story is the worst thing you can do. Now, this is not bad advice! But...almost all of the people who sent in fan letters were girls. And it's explicitly framed as "don't listen to the female fans because they don't know what would make a good manga". And the editor goes on about how this is Jump = for boys, and while it's nice that there are female fans, they are fans of shounen manga and like it as it is and if you try to appeal to girls, it won't be shounen manga anymore. Which...is contradictory. Because if these fans are fans of shounen manga and like it as it is, why would they be suggesting whatever super girly things he's imagining girls like with their alien girlybrains? But of course everyone nods because girls are weird and different!

This is an especially weird and out of place rant because a few pages ago when Takagi and Mashiro were talking about the suggestion they got the most, it was for more of Trap's school life, which doesn't sound particularly girly to me. And their decision was to set a mystery at Trap's school, which again...wtf? I've read plenty of Kindaichi stories set at his school, and I'm pretty sure that didn't make it spontaneously morph into a shoujo manga.

Anyway, so there was that. And then on top of it there is currently a big plotline with Aoki, the only female mangaka in the series. From the beginning her portrayal has been horribly misogynistic. At the beginning she was snooty and refused to take anyone's advice, and she was shown to have horrible taste when she liked this really bad manga best And fine, have a character like that. But why does it have to be the one female character who is then always shown to be bad and wrong?

She finally "reformed" a bit and things weren't so bad, but now her manga is in even worse trouble than Takagi & Mashiro's. It's a fantasy series called Hideout Door and of course it's the worst rated thing in the magazine (because it's by a girl, duh!). She is told that it will be cancelled if she doesn't make some changes, and she refuses to do so, saying that she'd rather get cancelled than change her vision. This is of course unreasonable when it's her, and of course she's punished for having an artistic vision and her series gets cancelled. Which again, fine. But why is it that the person whose manga is failing is the only girl in the bunch? Why can't we have a successful female mangaka, too? And why does she have to be snooty and not friendly with the rest of the guys?

Those were only the two issues in this chapter. That's not even touching on the girlfriends, which just...ick. So much ick there. Like when Takagi's girlfriend was feeling left out because the boys and her best friend Miho all had dreams they were working towards, but she didn't know what she wanted to do with her future. So she decided to try and write a cell phone novel. But Takagi ended up writing most of it for her and she got bored with it. Just like a girl, huh? And then do you know what she decided her dream was? For the boys to be successful!

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SO MUCH HATE I CAN'T EVEN.

If you're going to comment about how none of these things are problematic or sexist and I'm reading too much into it and being unreasonable, go ahead, but don't be surprised when I don't answer your comment.