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Since we've just had three consecutive summer days in Seattle, which I associate with those Suggested Summer Reading displays in bookstores, I decided to devote this column to a literary device (or perhaps cliché) I've noticed in genre fiction written primarily by women for women, which encompasses yaoi or BL manga. I can also think of examples from children's fiction, such as L.M. Montgomery's
Anne of Green Gables or the Harry Potter books. It seems to me that many women[1] enjoy their protagonists at top volume, i.e., shouting at the top of their lungs, mostly in two situations: the tell-off and/or the confession of love. I imagine it's a form of wish fulfillment: the pleasure for the reader lies in the release of repressed emotion, and/or the freedom of saying exactly what is on one's mind, without the usual consequences.[2] Being right. Being
listened to.
The tell-off, for example, occurs with increasing frequency (in ratio with her rise in status among the supernatural) in the Sookie Stackhouse series by Charlaine Harris: the heroine of the books often yells at beings much more powerful than herself, specifically two vampires she is romantically entangled with.[3] In Fumi Yoshinaga's manga
Antique Bakery,[4] the role of the tell-off is more complicated and its gratification for the reader is not as transparent. When gay high school student Ono confesses his love to his male classmate Tachibana (more on that below), Tachibana responds in the cruelest way imaginable, ending with a loud (judging by the size of the lettering and the double exclamation marks) "Hurry up and die!! You homo!!"
Years later, when Tachibana must woo Ono professionally to work in his bakery, this sequence and this event haunts both characters. [5] The reader (who, if she is reading
Antique Bakery, is almost certainly queer-friendly) is not supposed to identify with teenage Tachibana's homophobic outburst; it's a touchstone that Tachibana's and Ono's growing friend- and-business partner –ship is measured against, and illustrates just how far Tachibana and Ono have to come to arrive at the bond that they share at the end.
The "love confession" is a ritual in and of itself in manga, and it frequently takes place at higher decibel rate. In all fairness, I feel that manga series in general, such as
xxxHoLic, and
School Rumble, are much more prone than American comics to contain male protagonists who shriek their feelings. Though these works are not always specifically marketed at girls and women—the aforementioned titles are for adult men and boys, respectively-- they are often created by them. In yaoi or BL comics, the increased volume level has an added "the love that dare not speak its name" dimension. Repeatedly, not only are the protagonists going to speak its name, they are going to holler it directly at the object of their lust/love/affection, naysayers, etc. This is the case in Maki Murakami's
Gravitation, a BL manga that helped popularize the genre in the U.S. The main character, singer Shindou Shuichi, spends quite a bit of time yelling about how much he likes romance novelist Eiri Yuki.
Of course, I believe it's no accident that quite a bit of this sound and fury takes place in books and comics, where the reader can create for herself the voices and the tones of the characters (and in prose, the visuals), thereby lessening the potential to become an annoyance: it's an important factor that the reader can calibrate the noise level for herself. Still, I've recently become fascinated by which characters raise their voices, and when, and its effects, and I think the matter is ripe for further investigation.
Notes:
[1] Please insert the usual disclaimer here: it's common enough that a large number of women must respond to it, but of course many women do not enjoy genre fiction aimed at women, etc. etc.
[2] Tell-offs in real life do not end up the way they do in fiction. Unfortunately.
[3] An analysis of the "tell off" in Season Two of the television adaptation of the Sookie Stackhouse books, True Blood, would be fairly fruitful, although no longer under the rubric of fiction created for women by women. Sookie gets to go off Bill's ex, as does Bill, and the most powerful character of all — an angelic-looking male vampire, thousands of years old — speaks little, and in the commentaries it is mentioned that the teen actor chose to portray his strength by holding still and speaking quietly.
[4] Since Antique Bakery borrows from so many genres, as other reviewers have noted, it's difficult to classify; however, for this column's purposes, it won the Kodansha Manga Award in the shoujo category.
[5] Antique Bakery has a lot in common with Rumiko Takahashi works such as Maison Ikkoku in that it delights in throwing mismatched characters into an ensemble, and then watching them evolve into a functionally dysfunctional family, changing each others' lives for the better rather in spite of themselves.
Image credits:
Top image: Cover illustration by Erika Fusari
Middle image: From Antique Bakery Vol. 4 ©2006 Digital Manga, Inc.
Bottom image: From Gravitation Vol. 4 ©2002 Maki Murakami
Kristy Valenti currently works for The Comics Journal and Fantagraphics Books, Inc.
Uncharted Territory is © Kristy Valenti, 2010
