Recently in the manga-blogging scene, there's been a lot of back and forth about shojo manga (Japanese comics for teen and preteen girls.) Long recap short, it's sprung up a series of mini-debates about maturity, melodrama, and all the other issues of literary merit that follow teen girl entertainment around the world.
Melinda Beasi of Manga Bookshelf has written a great essay on what draws her to shojo, even as an adult.
Who am I? Who do I want to be? Whom can I trust? Does this person love me? These are all questions that still loom large in the life of this forty-something. When I cried for a half an hour after reading volume four of We Were There, it wasn’t because it reminded me of the pain of adolescence. It was because it reflected pain I was experiencing right then at the time. When I see Shugo Chara!‘s Amu struggling to reconcile the variations in all her would-be selves, it speaks to my ongoing career angst and the many decisions I have not yet made, even at my age.
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