Oh comics.
I just read a Japanese comic called Girl Friends. It's by Miruku (Milk) Morinaga. A pseudonym, I'm guessing.
It was about a high school girl who becomes friends with a girl, then best friends, then falls in love, and despairs as she realises her love can go unfulfilled and that her friendship with the girl cannot satisfy her carnal needs, only not in those words.
It was kind of bizarrely interesting, despite itself. The characters are teenagers living in modern times, yet most of the characters cannot seem to grasp with the idea that a girl could be attracted to another girl. There's an odd conversation where one girl says something along the lines of "a girl kissed a girl? What? That's crazy. Girls don't go with girls. Girls go with guys. That's weird." And the person she was speaking to agreed. And these characters were not supposed to be idiots. I don't know the general view of homosexuality in Japan, but I'm fairly sure they would at least acknowledge the existence of it.
It was interesting to read in order to contrast it with depictions of relationships in other Japanese comics. The comics that I have read largely centre around the awkwardness of the characters, but this one was a little bit different. It was entirely reading the internal monologue of a girl who is repressing her sexual identity to the break point while trying to act normal. I'm sure I could have found a comic that addressed this better but hey, I don't go and search this stuff out.
Anyway. For this post I decided to talk about some Japanese comic I read on the internet, just because it was different to other comics that I have read. I have read Western comics, and I have read better Japanese comics, but I wanted to talk about Girl Friends, an obscure comic that is being scanlated on the internet. Oh, and it was not a porn comic.
