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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   36219 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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Over at ACX item 38 in "Links for June" was a breakdown of reviews on Goodreads by genre and sex. The original link is broken, but here is the chart.

"Sequential art>Manga" is pretty far on the female side of the chart. It matches my experience: the only kind of comics my wife reads are manga, and she reads them daily. Unlike western comics there are a lot of manga that are aimed at a female audience: heck, based on what my wife keeps reading there seems to be an endless amount of manga that are just isekais where the protagonist is reincarnated as the villain of a visual novel! There's a lot of content for ladies in the world of manga.

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I suppose I was thinking of the Japanese readership polls, which tend to skew pretty heavily male. The population at cons and such also tend to skew male too, I thought; and I’d be surprised if there wasn’t a significant male readership even of that specific villainess reincarnation genre.

AO3 is a female dominated site. Whenever I search for anything by hits or kudos on any of the big fandoms like Harry Potter, I have to filter out all the gay romance. If you look at the top stories on FFN for HP, it's all male: plot-based stories and power fantasies with little romance. On AO3 there's all this shipping for females, mostly homosexual or angsty stuff.

Goodreads is definitely skewed female: given that, the Manga reviews are significantly more skewed female. Definitely not a perfect measure, but I think its illustrating something real.

Furthermore, looking at the genres for manga on MAL "Romance" is by far the biggest and "boys love" (readership is not gay men..) alone is bigger than "action".

endless amount of manga that are just isekais where the protagonist is reincarnated as the villain of a visual novel!

Is hamefura still the best? It's the only one I've watched an anime of, read some scanned translations of the light novels.

I quite enjoyed 'So I'm a Spider, So What?', kind of an isekai antidote as the wish-fulfillment is turned down to -11.

I couldn't possibly comment on "best" as there are far too many and it's not really my genre. My wife did ask me to watch Hamefura with her, and it was fun. Some of the manga she's shown me are better, but it's hard to compare a manga and anime since they have different constraints.

The other ones are most likely all ripoffs of Hamefura.

Not quite since Hamefura didn't come first. Like modern isekai in general, most "villainess" stories originate from the endlessly-derivative world of Japanese webnovels. HameFura ran as a webnovel on Narou 2014-2015, then a light-novel series from 2015 to present, then a manga adaption starting in 2017, then an anime. I think that's fairly early on but I know there were still several prominent villainess webnovels that came earlier, and presumably even more that never attained prominence and/or were abandoned incomplete by their authors.

I think a good comparison is to fanfiction in the English-speaking world, except that instead of people doing fanfiction of a specific work they do their own version of a stock premise. This is why isekai often has some sort of distinctive twist on the idea right at the beginning (the original idea the author had to differentiate it from the other isekais a click away on Narou), weird pacing because it was being written and uploaded a chapter at a time, etc.

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