By Rize Shinba and Pentabu. Released in Japan as “Fujoshi Kanojo” by Enterbrain, serialized in the magazine Comic B’s Log. Released in North America by Yen Press.
Fandom can be a scary thing. Especially if you really have no idea what goes into it. Just explaining to someone who’s never dealt with internet fandom the huge appeal of ‘twincest’ can have people backing away and avoiding you. But of course, you could say the same about being a huge sports fan. Or train spotting. Everyone has their little obsessions, and if you want to get closer to someone, you learn to accept them – or at least live with them.
Taiga is our hero, and he seems, for the first couple chapters, to be a lucky guy. His job’s fairly easy, and there’s a cute woman working there. She’s pretty, she’s hardworking, she’s nice – and she seems to be single. Sure, she gets a little weirded out when he sees her reading manga, but hey, that was his fault, right? So he asks her out.
To Yuiko’s credit, she knows what she’s like. She confesses to him that she’s a fujoshi, and asks if it makes any difference. Unfortunately, not everyone knows what a fujoshi is. And so he says NO PROBLEM!
And then the manga *actually* begins, as the whole point of this manga is not to see the loving romance, or even the comedic romance, but to see Taiga get tortured. This does not run in a shoujo romance magazine, Enterbrain doesn’t have any of those. Nor does it run in their men’s magazine Comic Beam. No, it runs in Comic B’s Log. Which is technically shoujo, as it’s definitely for girls, but its genre is yaoi. Well, not quite. Almost yaoi. Yaoi-ish.
And this is the fandom Yuiko is part of. Fujoshi literally means ‘rotten girl’, and refers to what North American fandom calls a ‘yaoi fangirl’. And once the two of them start dating, Taiga can’t quite be sure of Yuiko likes him as a good boyfriend… or just likes fantasizing about him with other guys. What’s worse, he likes the shonen manga she’s obsessed with… having never even thought of its yaoi potential… and he can write, after a fashion. He’s perfect!
If you’re after characterization and romance, this title will likely seem lacking. Mostly as Yuiko is a complete cipher. She has slotted Taiga into the ‘I can be obsessive around him’ slot in her mind, and when that happens, it is very difficulty to realize just how far you’ve gone. More to the point, however, he worries that she’s only using him to fuel her fantasies. He may be absolutely right. The whole thing is from his perspective.
That said, anyone who has been involved in fandom, even a little bit, will find situations to laugh about here. The manga they’re talking about is a shonen sports manga about sepak takraw (kick volleyball), which reads to me a lot like Eyeshield 21, a manga which DOES have a huge yaoi fandom, both here and in Japan. But more than that, the whole thing is filled with the little in-jokes that all fandoms get, the ones where other people go “huh?”. Such as her insistence on calling Taiga Sebastian when he’s pretending to be a butler. Sayonara, Zetsubou-sensei did that joke as well, and I’m fairly certain Black Butler will too. It has to do with Dog of Flanders.
Yen’s translation is good. I think their choice of retitling it as ‘Geek’ is ultimately a good one – Yaoi Fangirl reduces your potential audience. I’m not sure, judging by the excerpt from the novel printed here, if I could stand it for a full length work, but who knows? Other writers have published their blog posts successfully.
I don’t think I could recommend this manga to everyone. I saw Ed Sizemore’s review, and he’s right. If you don’t want to read 5 volumes of a guy alternating between getting frustrated and humiliated, with perhaps the occasional bone thrown of her showing actual interest in him, you’ll hate this. But for what it is – a broad look at fujoshi culture from the outside, and how it can be both freakish and understandable all at once – it’s pretty good.
