Flower of Life 1-3, Yoshinaga Fumi

[snarp]

My response to this manga is a string of little hearts.* My favorite is the chapter about the girl who has a crush on Yamane. I want more stuff with Yamane in it. She is perfect and I love her.

This particular Yoshinaga manga’s Horrible Relationship is so deep into horrible it comes out the other end. It’s like Edward Gorey or something. I can’t figure out whether to cringe or laugh at it. It’s very, very horrible.

* But I’m not putting them here because I’ve developed an anal-retentive habit of avoidance of special characters due to fear of problems with my WordPress database. Though I feel that this dysfunction has on occasion damaged the integrity of my writing, it persists nonetheless. There is a small fearful twinge close to my heart when I switch on the Japanese IME, an almost tactile thing, as if UTF-8 character encoding was a physical organ within my body.

(I have such awesome problems.)

(Originally published at SarahPin.com. You can comment here or there.)

Comments

[severefun.livejournal.com]

I've been trying to decide since I read it whether Gerard and Jacques is supposed to be a sort of self-parody in this respect. There are massive infodumps about the horrors of the French revolution in deliberately comically huge speech bubbles, existing largely to set up and cool down scenes where Gerard and Jacques engage in well-written Relationship Stuff. There's the scene where Jacques complains to Gerard that, though the heroine of his erotica is living through a time of great social change and change in her own life, "all she does is sleep with Colette!" That is an astute observation, Jacques. (Though since it's a Yoshinagi Fumi manga, Jacques also sometimes criticizes cakes.)

That is fantastic.