Renaissance Josei

It’s hard to come up with a new twist on shoujo romance. We have over half a century’s worth of manga and anime on the subject, and often it feels like virtually every twist and concept possible has been explored at least once. Good creators can overcome this sense of fatigue through thoughtful writing and new perspectives. Bad creators overcome it by adding sensationalist elements to grab the public’s notice, and more often than not this trick is turned until the sensationalist part becomes normalized. We’ve seen this happen before with lolicon. We saw it happen more recently with incest, particularly where little sisters are concerned. In the case of First Love Monster , based on the manga by Akira Hiyoshimaru, we saw it attempted yet again with one of the few taboos left in the world of anime and manga: shotacon. Shotacon, like lolicon before it, is a Japanese slang term for the sexualized portrayal of pre-pubescent children. In this case it’s focused on boys, but unlike ...

There are a lot of vampires in shoujo manga.   This is just a simple fact.   Poke around your local Barnes & Noble or Books-a-Million and you’re bound to find titles like  Vampire Knight ,  He’s My Only Vampire ,  Honey Blood ,  Millennium Snow , and so many more.   They all tend to be populated by  beautiful and tormented young men who are all simply waiting for some lovely young thing to come wandering into their undead life to bring them the love and redemption they all seem to be seeking in various degrees.   It’s incredibly predictable, incredibly derivative, and it’s enough to make any seasoned manga reader cynical about vampires in manga in general.   Every once in a while, though, we get a manga series that manages to take an old idea like vampire romance and do something new and interesting with the idea. Amongst those select few titles is  Black Rose Alice , the latest series from  Afterschool Night...