Tag Archives: Love So Life

Backlog Conquest: Life So Happy

When I talk about shojo I was into when I first started reading manga, like many my age, the one’s that come to mind are Ouran High School Host Club, Vampire Knight, Say I Love You, and Dengeki Daisy. But there was another: Love So Life. I think this ultimately just doesn’t come to mind as often since it never got licensed in English. Which I can’t really blame any publishers for since it’s a long series (17 volumes), now an ‘older shojo’ (2008-2015) and has the problematic element of being an age-gap romance between a teenager and an established adult. And to be clear, that element is a slow burn and nothing even happens until she’s an adult, but I get that’s a concept that will put off a lot of people. Honestly, themes like this generally don’t bother me in fiction, particularly if it’s portrayed like this and nothing really happens until later.

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Realistic Shojo and Why It’s Important

My_Love_Story_manga

Watching a recent episode of My Love Story I got thinking about how realistic and down to earth the series is being. Sure there are most certainly a few things that are a little on the crazy side, but for the most part it’s doing better than Kiss Him, Not Me for example.

Of course most of us read manga and watch anime and don’t really expect or want it to be down to earth and completely realistic, but in some ways I think it’s important to have a few series that break the trend of being completely sakura blossoms and overblown teenage feelings. Lets take a favourite series of mine, Say I Love You as a perfect example of what I’m going for here. The story is focused on shy Mei who has never really had any friends and certainly isn’t thinking of dating, but when she meets Yamato that slowly changes and the two of them must work through their problems, very real problems that couples have, if they wish to stay together. What makes this better is that the manga, given it has more time than the 13 episode anime, deals with a lot of problems that everyday kids go through at one point or another. I appricate the series a hell of a lot for this, especially author Kanae Hazuko who is heavily writing from her own personal experience.

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