Maybe it is because Korean yuri stories seem to focus much more on adults, but after getting into this story I'm finding it hard to really enjoy regular Japanese manga again. It's always the same thing with school girls and high school kids, versus adult relationships. It is kind of boring for me now. Does anyone else feel the same way? I don't mean to knock on Japanese manga that people enjoy, but just wondering if others feel the same. I started to feel similar after reading the Beloved series as well (the one with good art, think it's Chinese).
Two things. First, I really love me a bit of vanilla schoolgirl/schoolgirl romance and I do not plan to start apologizing for that. Morinaga Milk, Morishima Akiko, Kase-san, all those . . . they're cute and sweet and they bring the doki-doki and I will never let go of them.
Second, I suspect this is to a fair degree a contrast between published manga in a settled industry on one hand, and webtoons, which are getting much more commercialized than when I first started reading a few but remain somewhat more artist-driven. In Japan, yuri is dominated by publishers. Not all of it is published manga, but it's generally written by people who want to become published mangaka or, even if not, they are operating in an ecosystem that is sort of built with published manga at the core. So the writers accept the assumptions and conventions of published manga to a fair degree. And published yuri tends to be demographically aimed younger, the girl/girl equivalent of shoujo, although certainly not always.
In Korea, there basically is still no such thing as a published yuri manhwa. So it's all webtoons, with artists (in the absence of publishers insisting otherwise) tending to "write what they know"--typically the world of young adults around the stage of college, finding their feet in terms of job/career, and in Korea military service, because that's who the artists generally are. If the manhwa publishing houses decided to start doing yuri . . . based on what I've seen of shoujo-type-stuff in published manhwa, it would be more formulaic than the Japanese stuff. And yet significantly less heartwarming.
last edited at Mar 6, 2017 2:09PM
