Manga week

Well Manga Week kind of turned into three weeks of manga confusion. So I ended up reading a lot of Manga. At first I read a bunch of short stories by Junji Ito. All of Junji Ito stories are all horror stories. He uses very detailed grungy imagery to drive home the point that it is a horror story, and a bit of a shock factor. His stories are generally incredibly creepy, bizarre, and fun to read. I also feel like his stories are sometimes a bit lacking, and a bit shallow. In some stories he relies more on the images to scare the viewer, like "The Woman Next Door". Other stories like Uzumaki which is about the curse of the spiral, are very focused on all these supernatural events that  just keep getting worse. The scariness of the story is more of just a pure shock factor, instead of a more psychological factor.  Also Uzumaki's ending to me is unsatisfying because it just feels like this is how the world is, and there is nothing you can do about it.

After the guest lecture I wanted to contrast with some of my manga choices with some shoujo manga. Which is geared more for  a teenage female audience.  I read a pretty popular shojou manga called. Ouran High School Host Club. It takes place in a incredibly wealthy respected high school, and the main character has received a scholarship to attend. She is mistaken for a man by the school's host club. Due to a set of unfortunate events she is in debt to the host club, and is forced into joining the club to pay off her debt. It has the two most important elements in any shoujo manga teenage love, and mistaken identity. If I were 14 when reading this, I think I would be really into it. Pretty much any romantic story to me at that time would interest me. Most shoujo reminds me of the Shakespeare play Twelfth Night, because of the mistaken identities, a giant cast of people, and all the crazy love triangles.