What I learned from manga: an un-manifesto

When I was a teenager, the genre that cracked my world open and made me wonderfully happy was science fiction and fantasy. Later, there were American superhero comic books. Then, late in high school, there was theatre. Then nothing: a long, long spell during which I became bored with American comics (except for those written by Neil Gaiman or Alan Moore), I burned out on theatre, and I had a hard time finding science fiction and fantasy that I liked. I could find books that I knew I would have loved when I was a teenager-- books filled with magic, women warriors, and beautiful men with jewel-colored eyes-- but they just didn't do it for me any more.

Then came manga and anime. More than anything else, these returned me to the state of delicious obsession I experienced when I was sixteen and discovering urban fantasy. Suddenly, not only did I have a new fandom, but the part of me that still loves characters with great power and great angst and jewel-colored eyes, the part that loves capitalized Doom (and the brave struggle against it) and Apocalypse and First Love found a genre that was writing about those things in a way that didn't jar my critical sensibilities and went straight to my inner teenager. Who promptly fell in love.

Part of this is that the sensibility of manga is sufficiently alien-- an entirely new set of symbols and cultural assumptions and mythology-- that the cliches are not cliches to me.

Part of it is that jewel-colored eyes are obnoxious in writing, but pretty on TV.

But the biggest part is the lack of shame. If a writer is very ashamed of his or her fantasies and fetishes and fondnesses, they will not appear in their work at all, or only in deep disguise. If they are a little ashamed, they will write about them glancingly, teasingly, always leaving the reader frustrated and maybe even ashamed themselves. But if they have no shame-- if they put everything they love reading about and writing about and drawing and looking at in, the jewel-eyed pretty boys with wings, the esoteric angel lore, the Great Tragedy, the Mad Passion, the psychic kids, the sex scene between two spies who have to disable their surveillance equipment first, the fetish for dark-haired men with glasses, the thing for women in tennis shoes, and all the totally on-crack ideas: the love of a gay boy band singer for a romance novelist with a Dark Past, the Mad Hatter setting up Lucifer, a female angel reincarnated as a boy in love with his sister, and so forth-- if they do that, WITHOUT abandoning their writerly skills of plotting and characterization and page layout and so forth-- they will end up with something crazy and wonderful.

So what I have learned, which I think is similar to the Scribblies "write what you love" manifesto, is not to be ashamed of my fetishes. I don't mean just sexual ones, but things and plot elements and even cliches that I love. Dark-haired men with glasses and tragic pasts, flower symbolism, accurate depictions of martial arts, food description, passion, despair, redemption, training sequences, men's hands, women's breasts, good hair, Fedoras and trenchcoats, best friends forced to compete for a single prize, uniforms, honorable antagonists rather than villains, weapons that are part of the wielder's body, and cute animal mascots-- when I write a manga, I'm putting in as many of those as I can jam in, and many, many more. And plot, of course, since I like plot.

The line between embarassing self-indulgence and glorious self-indulgence is a fine one, but of writers who have editors who edit and who care about their craft and are not insane, I see more whose writing suffers from too much restraint rather than too little. I think-- if this isn't too much like a manifesto-- that even as an experiment, some of us should try, if we haven't yet, writing without any sense of shame.

What I learned from manga: an un-manifesto

When I was a teenager, the genre that cracked my world open and made me wonderfully happy was science fiction and fantasy. Later, there were American superhero comic books. Then, late in high school, there was theatre. Then nothing: a long, long spell during which I became bored with American comics (except for those written by Neil Gaiman or Alan Moore), I burned out on theatre, and I had a hard time finding science fiction and fantasy that I liked. I could find books that I knew I would have loved when I was a teenager-- books filled with magic, women warriors, and beautiful men with jewel-colored eyes-- but they just didn't do it for me any more.

Then came manga and anime. More than anything else, these returned me to the state of delicious obsession I experienced when I was sixteen and discovering urban fantasy. Suddenly, not only did I have a new fandom, but the part of me that still loves characters with great power and great angst and jewel-colored eyes, the part that loves capitalized Doom (and the brave struggle against it) and Apocalypse and First Love found a genre that was writing about those things in a way that didn't jar my critical sensibilities and went straight to my inner teenager. Who promptly fell in love.

Part of this is that the sensibility of manga is sufficiently alien-- an entirely new set of symbols and cultural assumptions and mythology-- that the cliches are not cliches to me.

Part of it is that jewel-colored eyes are obnoxious in writing, but pretty on TV.

But the biggest part is the lack of shame. If a writer is very ashamed of his or her fantasies and fetishes and fondnesses, they will not appear in their work at all, or only in deep disguise. If they are a little ashamed, they will write about them glancingly, teasingly, always leaving the reader frustrated and maybe even ashamed themselves. But if they have no shame-- if they put everything they love reading about and writing about and drawing and looking at in, the jewel-eyed pretty boys with wings, the esoteric angel lore, the Great Tragedy, the Mad Passion, the psychic kids, the sex scene between two spies who have to disable their surveillance equipment first, the fetish for dark-haired men with glasses, the thing for women in tennis shoes, and all the totally on-crack ideas: the love of a gay boy band singer for a romance novelist with a Dark Past, the Mad Hatter setting up Lucifer, a female angel reincarnated as a boy in love with his sister, and so forth-- if they do that, WITHOUT abandoning their writerly skills of plotting and characterization and page layout and so forth-- they will end up with something crazy and wonderful.

So what I have learned, which I think is similar to the Scribblies "write what you love" manifesto, is not to be ashamed of my fetishes. I don't mean just sexual ones, but things and plot elements and even cliches that I love. Dark-haired men with glasses and tragic pasts, flower symbolism, accurate depictions of martial arts, food description, passion, despair, redemption, training sequences, men's hands, women's breasts, good hair, Fedoras and trenchcoats, best friends forced to compete for a single prize, uniforms, honorable antagonists rather than villains, weapons that are part of the wielder's body, and cute animal mascots-- when I write a manga, I'm putting in as many of those as I can jam in, and many, many more. And plot, of course, since I like plot.

The line between embarassing self-indulgence and glorious self-indulgence is a fine one, but of writers who have editors who edit and who care about their craft and are not insane, I see more whose writing suffers from too much restraint rather than too little. I think-- if this isn't too much like a manifesto-- that even as an experiment, some of us should try, if we haven't yet, writing without any sense of shame.