Afterschool Nightmare: notes

[owlectomy]

Afterschool Nightmare is the story of a school where students -- some students, students with personal issues -- take part in dream classes after school on Thursdays. In dreams, they appear as their true selves, the selves they hide in real life. Mashiro has always thought of himself as a boy, despite having girl parts below the waist, but that gets harder when he starts his period... and when his dream self wears a girls' school uniform. He spends a lot of time being defensive about his masculinity and his heterosexuality. It is a weird and fascinating series.

1) Names: 'Mashiro' is 'pure white,' 'Ai' and 'Sou' are shades of blue, 'Kureha' is 'scarlet leaves.' I'm wondering if the color words are coding who is an Important Character -- beyond that, 'Mashiro' is interesting. Pure white is purity and blankness. It's a screen upon which you can project anything you want to project. And Kureha's relationship with Mashiro is essentially her projecting on him what she wants to see -- the perfect boy, the boy who poses no danger at all to her. Interesting that as the series goes on, I think she comes to realize the gap between that projection and the real person behind it.

2) It's interesting to me that the artist, Mizushiro Setona, has previously written both BL and shoujo -- I think both sides inform the series and where it goes. Her sense of visual storytelling is incredible -- look at about the first ten pages of vol. 1 for how quickly and how viscerally she establishes the basic situation. More importantly, maybe, is that she has the illustration chops to pull off making Mashiro believably androgynous (in a way that he isn't just a long-haired prettyboy; Mizushiro very logically decided that someone so defensive about his masculinity would keep his hair short.) She draws his shoulders, his figure, his facial structure in such a way that it looks just subtly off when Mashiro wears a girl's uniform.

3) I always seem to overidentify with characters who don't fit the traditional gender binary, so I wasn't really surprised to overidentify with Mashiro, but I feel like Mizushiro is doing something pretty interesting here. Mashiro's body is a site of anxiety, of confusion, even a site of horror. And obviously it's hard to vigorously defend one's masculinity when one menstruates. (Side note: please, someone, get the boy some iron pills? We don't all faint every twenty-eight days, thanks.) But in fact, how strange is it for a girl's body to be a site of anxiety, confusion and horror to herself, for a little while in adolescence? I want to say that it's kind of normal. And in Mashiro we have a character for whom it is undeniably normal (not strange, not pathological, not something to be socialized away) that he is a little horrified by his own body. We can recognize that he has to do real work in reconciling himself to himself. I think we tend to wallpaper over that work in real life.


4) Something manga can do better than American television (almost always) and movies -- they can show character development in a couple of lines of dialogue in a picaresque filler episode. The broader overarching story arc can develop slowly, almost under the surface. At the beginning of the series, Mashiro was almost pathologically insistent on proving himself to be a Real Man, defining what it was to be a Real Man. A real man doesn't get beaten in kendo; a real man drinks black coffee; a real man protects women. He comes back to that, but I feel like he's opening himself up a bit beyond that; he's recognizing that he can't just decide by fiat that he's going to be a Real Man and that's that, and he seems to be trying to open himself up to other possibilities, however reluctantly.


5) There's a bit in volume 4 where the teacher tells Mashiro that both the real world and the dream world are realities created for him. That's very intriguing, though on a literal level of course it's true at least in the sense that Mizushiro Setona created them! The school's logo is a bird inside a cage. I can't help but wonder if that's an Utena ref, and it's certainly an indication that the school may not be just a school.

6) All these people seem to think that sex will fix their problems. That's so smart! It always works!

7) I don't have any more of this! Aaugh! I have bought up all the Japanese-language volumes at Book-Off, Kinokuniya and Asahiya have none, and I'm currently debating whether to order them off Amazon or call Mitsuwa in Jersey and see if they have them. Or I guess read them in English, but with a manga like Afterschool Nightmare it's kind of nice that you don't have to specify gender in your sentences.

Comments

[mystickeeper.livejournal.com]

OH MY GOD, READ IT ONLINE!

In fact, I should do that for volume 10, :O

[takumashii.livejournal.com]

If there's any publisher I'd be really loath to pirate, it's Akita Shoten/Princess Comics, who publish the series in Japanese -- they did my absolute favorite series in high school, and I mostly got them used, so... if Amazon Japan has fast fast shipping (it does) I can just about convince myself to pay for it.