/jp/ - Otaku Culture

What makes a girl turn into a fujoshi instead of a female otaku?

>>17649264
Based on the reading I would say it has to deal with the degree to what she is satisfied with what femininity entails. By this I mean what society says how a woman should act and think.

BL presents the chance to experience sex/romance as an entirly non-active member. Or to experience it from the perspective of an active partner (the seme), contrast this with the very passive role Japanese women are encouraged to have. Even the uke's are actually very active compared to the average otome heroin. The whole thing also presents a chance to self insert as a character that is at least someone masculine.

>>17649285
Basically penis envy.

>>17649293
It's more envy of social roles.

In a way it's empowering. Not only is it a fantasy about gaining more power but it also turns male power in on itself. Having the one being penetrated and submissive also be a male basically turns the whole 'patriarchy' (I hate that word but it's accurate) against itself.

What's distinct about Fujohsi, at least the Japanese ones, is that they are not man-hatters. If they hate any gender it would be women. The word fujoshi translates to "rotten girl" and the group seems to be completly fine calling their own hobby something lowly.

So the Western fujoshi who is an SJW is not something that has a mirror in Japan. They don't advocate or defend real gay men, just the fictional ones. A homophobic fujoshi is not an oxymoron and is a category.

>>17649014
>scholarly work
>psychoanalyzing
Trash. I refuse to read it. I trust any anon more than a communist academic faggot.

>>17649324
Well as someone who has spent a lot of time invested in BL I didn't find any of their theories unrealistic, lots of them I concluded myself. A lot of it is based on testimony from influential BL writers as well or from interviews with avid fans of the art.

Marxism is about economics not psycho-analysis, so please can take your tin-foil hat and shove it up your ass.

>>17649324
Go back to /pol/ ""kudasai""

>It's more envy of social roles.
in that case, it would be less sexual oriened and, they would have women in positions of power instead of men. They see penises as something powerful.

>>17649317
>It's more envy of social roles.
in that case, it would be less sexual oriened and, they would have women in positions of power instead of men. They see penises as something powerful.

>>17649395

> they would have women in positions of power instead of men
They don't see women as being able to possess power. In a way they might even hate women, this actually pretty blatant in the early BL but has become much less common.

>in that case, it would be less sexual oriened
There's several branches of BL and one of them shounen-ai does not have sex. Yaoi is defined only be sex. In the West we use yaoi, BL, and shounen-ai more or less interchangable but in Japan they refer to specific sub-genres with clear rules. There's other subgenres as well like June which is based on trajedgy and must have unhappy endings (Kaze to Ki no Uta and Heart of Thomas for instance).

>>17649264
Short answer: does she really really like anime boys kissing each other? Then yes. She isn't otherwise.

Some people just like yaoi, holy shit, who cares.

>>17650035
That's not an any kind of answer and you should probably reread the question. .

I don't get the need for a psychoanalysis on fujoshi but nobody cares about yurifags

>>17651131
Yurifas are either fujoshi who are secure enough to admit they're gay for watching two girlish guys act like girls, actual lesbians, or moebuta who can't cope with dudes being in their media, lest they feel NTRed

Does that mean that deep inside Fujoshi just wants to secretly rape men?

I feel like some of those excerpts are overly broad trying to attribute some of these things to all women but some of it is interesting too and I think there is some validity to yaoi being an expression of self-hatred and/or a way to escape gender oppression in some cases. It certainly must vary based on the individual though, and the claim that women can't feel sexual desire is ridiculous (though the claim that women's ability to feel sexual desire is repressed by society isn't).

>>17651131
The book claims to be the first comprehensive English-language overview of BL published. I'm not sure anyone has done the same for yuri with a book, but somebody did write a PhD thesis on yuri.

http://ubt.opus.hbz-nrw.de/volltexte/2015/944/pdf/Maser_Beautiful_and_Innocent.pdf

>>17649424
>There's other subgenres as well like June which is based on trajedgy and must have unhappy endings (Kaze to Ki no Uta and Heart of Thomas for instance).
Do you know if a there is a specific name for the same genre for yuri?

>>17649317
While most Japanese fujos aren't really interested in any real world social politics, I rarely witness active homophobia or woman-hating from them. I can even think of several examples of nicely portrayed females and characters that call themselves gay in popular BLVNs alone, and that's just a small sample of BL. There are definitely works that have negative undertones in them, but it's just as easy to find ones that don't.

Anyway, while there's some valid points in the OP pic, you'd get a lot of different answers from nip fujos if you went around asking them about it. There's far too many of them to generalize.

>>17651131
There's probably psychoanalysis for yuri as well. I just didn't look for any. Queer studies isn't just a meme. There was a small piece that analyzed self-identifited lesbians who read yaoi written by queer studies people, it concluded the readers like to interpret them as women and are not bothered by their bodies, the feminine looks help.


>Do you know if a there is a specific name for the same genre for yuri?
I don't know.

>>17651233
Some definitely do, the one's that relate partially to the seme. Keep in mind though that a lot of them relate to neither and take a voyeuristic approach relate to both at the same time.

>>17651259
Keep in mind the experts are based exclusively on studying Japanese fujo.

>>17651503
The woman hating is definitly more of a product of the past. The exceprt I posted that described that is from a paper written in the 90s where the author examines hundreds of doujinshis of popular slash fandoms at the time (Naruto, Saint Seiya, etc.) Towards the end you can see her aknowledge that BL has since moved in new directions.

JP fujo is uniquely non-political compared to western fujo.

Stuff about fundashi from the book

The conclusion for gay men that read BL (keep in mind that BL and Bara are different categories in Japan) are by and large unmasculine males that find relief in seeing such people and relationships glorified (self admitted by several readers). Another answer is that BL shows romantic feelings of people in a more equal relationship than hetro manga. To support this the most popular comics with gay men had little to no sex while the stuff that was just fucking were the least popular.

Only around 10% of men identified as the seme, 40% as the uke, and the rest as not exclusive with either. However ukes are almost always the protagonist so it does make it easier to self-insert as them.

I found some stuff psychoanalyzing male shota lovers in one word: auto-erotisism. I can post more if anyone cares.

>>17651748
>I can post more if anyone cares.
I care. It's pretty interesting.

>>17651789

Keep in mind. Shota is made primarly for and by men and these texts are only psycho-analyzing men.

>Nagayama concludes that male shota desire is primarily stimulated by reading stories concerning shota–shota relationships, an act of reading which allows men to play both the seme (shota) and uke (shota) roles, without having to choose one or the other. His analysis thus suggests that the shota genre for men represents a narrative involving “having sex with myself” (watashi to watashi no sekkusu), signifying that this desire is essentially “auto-erotic.

>I would like to suggest that the male beating fantasy represents a (subconscious) male desire to become a small boy (self-feminization) and thus be loved unconditionally by a strong, masculine Other

>Shota is constructed as a fantasy of perfect existence, which is able to embrace the nullification of a strong ego, in the same way that, in the context of modern Japanese literature, shōnen are also portrayed in terms of self-objectification. The shota characters, too, apparently escape complicity with the aims of modernization, which have as their corollary the development of a strong male ego and a comparably masculinized nation. In this regard, having previously been overwhelmed by the power of this nationalist myth of masculinity, fudanshi project shōnen attributes onto shota as a potential means to escape this myth. Fudanshi themselves wish to be unconditionally loved, as if they were shōnen, with none of the gender responsibilities that Japanese society has otherwise assigned them. As Takahara shows, the (homosexual or homoeroticized) shōnen

>Fudanshi themselves wish to be unconditionally loved, as if they were shōnen, with none of the gender responsibilities that Japanese society has otherwise assigned them.

>BL shota to express their opposition to the contemporary Japanese social situation, in which a man is only valued if he behaves like a perfect, self-established man

>While shōnen are typically described as weak, unstable, and fragile, without a strong sense of self, these shōnen characters themselves are inclined to cherish their own passivity.

>>17651914
Anything on straight shota?

>>17652343
You could probably just read up on generic psychology for that. Straight sexuality has the lion's share of research and books.

Fuck off sodomite enablers.

>>17652912
Go home to /pol/.

Excerpts of a sociologist observing fujoshi in their natural interacting.

>Shrieks and squeals, shouting, thrashing arms, gnashing teeth, clapping hands—I observed all of these in moe talk among fujoshi.28

>For example, Sugiura Yumiko observes that fujoshi talk about sex as if evaluating food or handbags,25 because they are not talking about themselves or real people but rather the moe points of sex between fictional characters

>Tomo asked, “How would you couple Randy?” All three took for granted that Randy was the bottom, and instead focused on who the top should be. Megumi responded bluntly, “He’s too damn sweet. It’s impossible.” Hachi chimed in, “Juliuos and Randy, like as big brother, little brother?” Not convinced, Megumi interjected, “Randy needs a firm hand, like a teacher, so it has to be Sei-Lan. He may be mean, but imagine him spoiling cute little Randy while bullying everyone else.” Megumi’s character coupling—older and younger, teacher and student, cruel and kind—struck a chord with Tomo, who blurted out, “Moe!” The discussion gained momentum as the three friends began to imagine romantic and sexual relations between the characters. Someone suggested that if Sei-Lan was mean to Randy most of the time, then the affect would be amplified when he was finally nice to him (a relational pattern called tsundere). A “hurt/comfort” scenario33 was suggested with Sei-Lan violently raping Randy then caring for him afterward; Randy’s vulnerability, even when caused by Sei-Lan’s abuse, was said to make him cuter.

Japanese fujosho are far more advanced than us!!!

>Hachi clicked on a link embedded in the text and she and Tomo were suddenly exposed to a digitization of one of Hokusai’s woodblock prints, The Great Wave at Kanagawa. The image is iconic—a wave about to crash over a tiny boat with Mount Fuji in the background—and seemed terribly out of place. Both Hachi and Tomo dived into the accompanying text, giggling as they questioned the poster’s strange maneuver. Hachi read aloud: “The strong and confident boatman went too far and was caught up in the pounding surf.” After a moment of silence, the connection was made: wave as top and boatman as bottom. As in the yaoi fan-fiction they were reading, the top was a quiet and reserved man who was pushed too far by the bottom, and so responded with overwhelming force and power. The Great Wave at Kanagawa was a visualization of the concept of “assaulting bottom” (osoi uke), where the bottom attacks and provokes the top, instigating a sexual encounter. Hachi and Tomo started laughing uncontrollably. Hachi said, “This is so great! I’d have never thought of such a thing.” Tomo commented that the poster, like the boatman, had “gone too far” (yarisugi), but this was a positive assessment. Tomo said that she might “die from moe” (moe shinu)

>>17652941
Fujoshi aren't the problem- shipperfags are.

>>17649014
What's the name of the book?

>>17653909
Boys Love Manga and Beyond: History, Culture, and Community in Japan

Freud talked about it long ago.

Women are subconsciously envious of dicks since theyre the inferior gender.
Nothing new.

>>17654046
I addressed this here

>>17649317

Penis envy is a shitty answer and if you looked over the textual excerpts you'd see it doesn't explain the full picture or even a very large slice of it.

>>17649357
Go back to /lit/ ""kudasai""

>>17649014
Why do you care so much about fag loving girls?

>>17654046
Penises are disgusting though. They should be banned.

>>17649424
Stop pulling facts out of your ass, the only term that's used in Japan is BL and if it contains sex it gets a R-18 note on the front cover. That's it. The other words were vague as fuck and died ages ago for a good reason.

>>17658863
Since I'm getting my information from a scholarly work, I'd like it if you could provide your own source that says the other terms are not in a use, rather than just pulling it out of your ass. You mentioned doujinshi but BL extends to a lot more than just that.

>>17658014
The psychology of them is very interesting, it relates to a larger questions for how people feel about sexuality and gender. One of the more interesting parts is the last excerpt on the list "The claim that both seme and uke in yaoi/BL are "reflections of the girl's self images,"... and the contrast it gives with shounen manga

Apart from that I have a lot of happy moments because of their culture so why not study it's history and practitioners?

>>17660063
>it relates to a larger questions for how people feel about sexuality and gender.
Why do you care about pointless shit like that? If you're gender confused, go to >>>/lgbt/. This is a board about otaku culture, not sexual roles and identity.

>Apart from that I have a lot of happy moments because of their culture
Why aren't you on /y/ instead then?

>>17660193
>>Apart from that I have a lot of happy moments because of their culture
>Why aren't you on /y/ instead then?

Maybe he meant he's fucked some smelly fujo pussy in some con's bathroom

>>17660193
>This is a board about otaku culture

BL is otaku culture. Scholarly work analyzing said culture is highly relevant.

>>17660193
What is your problem dude, how is BL not a part of Otaku culture? /jp/ could use more people who actually want to have interesting discussions, why don't you go back to one of the 30 image dump threads if you don't like it.

Some stuff on the early origin of BL.

This art is from Takabatake Kasho a famous pre-war illustrator important in the development of bishounen and probably bishoujo also. These images would have been featured in magazines or books meant for boys about adventure and bonding, the homoerotic nature is unintended.

The scholar suggests that women would become aware of these things from their brothers who might have read them.

The manga Heart of Thomas as well as The Song of the Wind and the Trees are the two first significant examples of BL as it is understood now, written by women for women. They were not the first published but were the first to be hits. Incidently the authors were room mates with each other. Both were also more in the direction of tragedy, which was the initial mode of BL. If anyone is interested Song of the Wind and Trees got an OVA adoption back during the 90s, it's pretty as far as Bl anime goes, especially the animation.

One thing that is interesting is this

>While she was a fan of manga as well, as she explains, her disappointment with shōjo manga instilled in her a desire to elevate shōjo manga from its lowly position as a frivolous distraction for girls into a more serious, literary art form

The plot and drama of those two first mangas I mentioned are much more serious and sophisticated than say Love Stage.

Influences on these two manga

>Beneath the Wheel (1906), Demian (1919), and Narcissus and Goldmund (1930). All three novels feature adolescent male protagonists in school environments in Germany. While none of the three depict overt homoeroticism—in fact, romantic or erotic relationships with female characters help drive their plots—their narratives all revolve around strong bonds between the protagonist and another youth

European boarding schools is a theme is still persistent in BL.

Death in Venice, an artsy looking European movie with homosexual subtext, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pxn49yWVJk was also an influence

More Takabatake Kasho

The real problem with getting any sort of active discussion in this thread is that this board is about 99% straight men (once you exclude a couple general threads) who have no interest in either BL media or the people who consume it beyond the purely academic.

>>17660950
I don't even know what you want to discuss about this. Psychoanalyzing huge fucking groups is pointless. If you really want to know about them, learn Japanese and talk to them.

>>17660966
>If you really want to know about them, learn Japanese and talk to them.
Buying a book and reading it: $30 and 4 hours
Learning Japanese, flying to Japan, and visiting various homo convention trying to survey a sufficiently wide representative range of fujoshi to understand the subculture: $3000+, 2000 hours, and gratuitous gaijin-related social anxiety

>>17661004
>a sufficiently wide representative range
So you understand this, yet still approach it as if they're a hive mind? You're not going to get anywhere in "understanding" them unless you get directly involved with them and their subculture and you know it. Sounds more like you want to selectively interpret and get butt pats and agreements.

>>17661023
>You're not going to get anywhere in "understanding" them unless you get directly involved with them and their subculture and you know it.
The notion that you cannot understand a subculture completely without talking to the people in it directly is sort of nice, but the notion that you can't get "anywhere" without it is idiotic. Modern trained historians work very hard to figure out what like was like in Meiji Japan despite the fact that 100% of Meiji Japanese are dead. They were also individuals and not a "hive mind" but the idea that you can't say anything collectively meaningful about the Meiji Japanese worldview, because humans are individuals, is also dumb.

I don't personally have to interview a hundred fujoshi if (for example) somebody wants to interview a hundred fujoshi and transcribe their responses into a book. Is it ideal? No, but it's a good fucking sight better than nothing.

>>17661023
>You're not going to get anywhere in "understanding" them unless you get directly involved with them and their subculture and you know it.

How do you thinks scholarly articles are written, baka?

Should we also add studying sociology, psycho-analysis, literary criticism, art history, and reading all the other scholarly articles about shoujo manga, otakus in general referenced in the book to the plane ticket price and and 2,000 hours of interview?

the fixation on fujoshi in particular is fucking weird

>>17661004
>>17661058
You know you can talk to people on the internet right
They're fairly accessible

>>17661279
I'd rather know how to CREAMPIE a fujo

>>17661279
It's just exotic. Seeing a female demographic rise rapidly in such a short period of time in a male dominant hobby is fascinating, nothing like the fake gamer girls video games have.

>>17669618
>in such a short period of time in a male dominant hobby
They've been relevant in otaku shit for a long time. Even just looking in Mandarake gives you shitloads of vintage Gundam 0079 BL doujins.

Nowhere better to study nerd trends than comiket.

>>17670373
What's interesting though is that it's a growing presense. Origenally BL was occupied a very small niche in Shoujo manga, having only one publishment dedicated to it (called June) and some doujinshi.

In about 15 years it exploded. First within it's own circle of shoujo manga and now occasionally in areas outside the shoujo bubble. This is partly due to them being hardcore otaku that are willing to fork over big bucks for their hobby.

The contrast with the West's fake gamer girl is a good one. These people do not actually spend much money.

>>17670394

Quote from the book on early comiket

>In the beginning, adolescent girls accounted for the vast majority of regular participants, with female participants comprising around 90 percent of those original 700 attendees at the first event, initially billed a “manga fanzine fair” (manga fanjin fea).53 These early attendees were predominantly middle and high school students enamored with works by Hagio, Takemiya, and fellow Fabulous Forty-Niner Ōshima Yumiko (1947–), with the former two artists outranking even Tezuka in a survey on favorite artists conducted that day

>In the first several years of the Comic Market, quite a number of shōjo manga-related circles participated, including those who were fans of a particular artist (figure 3.4), as well as those which displayed in their art an interest in glam and hard rock musicians associated with beauty and, in some cases, homosexuality, particularly those from the UK, such as David Bowie, T.Rex, Queen, and Led Zeppelin.

>>17649014

Does it say anything about fudanshi?

>>17673670

>>17651748

They have a devoted chapter.

An interesting excerpt

>Further, as another respondent remarks, “I should say that, in contemporary Japan, BL is the only manga medium which provides the reader with genuine love stories. BL makes me feel most romantically excited.”21In Interviewing Fudanshi and Interviewing Fudanshi 2, Yoshimoto lists his subjects’ favorite BL manga artists. As Yoshimoto indicates in his summaries of fudanshi surveys, fudanshi read a variety of BL works.22 However, one of the characteristics of the BL manga artists listed as fudanshi favorites—including artists such as Kojima Natsuki, Kyōyama Atsuki and Kuraō Taishi—is that they are primarily known for romantic stories featuring cute-looking characters, and they seldom draw sexually explicit scenes. In contrast, other popular BL manga artists, such as Nitta Youka and Shimizu Yuki, whose works contain hard-core sex scenes, are generally not well-liked by fudanshi readers.23

looks like they have good taste, one of the mangaki mention: https://www.mangaupdates.com/authors.html?id=1096

>>17669618
>male dominant hobby
Fanfiction is a female dominated hobby.

>>17674650
Indeed, and it's always been that way. In the west, it's been documented since at least the 70s with slash fiction that consumers and producers are almost exclusively female.