week five: romance manga

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This week, we talked about romance manga! I reread several of my favorite romance manga to celebrate this week (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧


Wotaku ni Koi wa Muzukashii (Love is Hard for an Otaku), commonly abbreviated to Wotakoi, is one of my favorite romance manga that I'm following.

It's about - you guessed it - two nerds who decide to date. One is obsessed with games and one is obsessed with doujinshi. They both love anime and they have to keep it a secret to preserve their professional dignity at the company they work at together.

I like this manga because I think it's a really sweet representation of young people in the workforce bonding over their love of nerdy things, and it also shows the cultural impact of anime/manga in average Japanese life.

Also, the art style is really dang cute.
I've been following Skip Beat!! for, oh, maybe about ten years now? I definitely started reading it in middle school. Skip Beat came out in the early 2000s when a lot of romance shoujo manga had the exact same formula and looked the exact same. A cute and quirky girl who gets torn between Boy A (a bad boy) and Boy B (a more mature/sophisticated boy, maybe a childhood friend).

Skip Beat is an excellent deconstruction of romance tropes. The main character, Mogami Kyoko, has a goal. She has ambition. She's determined to become the top actress of Japan, and though that originated because she wanted to make her ex-boyfriend cry out of revenge for all the BS he put her through (this ex-boyfriend is also Boy A who also gets his own character development and falls genuinely in love with Kyoko - deconstruction!). Kyoko also develops excellent, complex relationships with the female cast, who are almost always first depicted as her movie star rivals. Kyoko's personality is incredibly flawed - she deeply represses her vulnerability, she has a trigger-happy temper, and a horde of spiritual demons that freaks out the rest of the cast - but she tries her best, and she fails, and yet she keeps getting up. And her relationship with Boy B (the main "actual" love interest, who later turns out to be Kyoko's childhood friend, and the top male actor in Japan - plot twist!) starts off rocky, because her motivation for going into acting wasn't out of love, but out of selfishness.

I really like the themes of this manga because a huge part of the "romance" is actually about the main character, Kyoko, learning how to love herself. The branch of the acting company she's in is literally called "Love Me". The manga goes deep into her past and shows that she's lived almost her whole life for someone else, whether it's her overbearing mother or her ex-boyfriend, and she struggles deeply to figure out what makes her genuinely fulfilled in life.

And here's some of my own fanart that I've drawn for this great manga:

(It's Kyoko before and after her "actress makeover"!)

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