Dear Julietta, I Have Thoughts On Your Manga

Spoiler alert: post contains spoilers for the Kamisama Hajimemashita manga up to volume 18/chapter 107.

Kamisama Kiss volume 18
Nanami’s journey to the past was a success! She found a way to break the curse and save Tomoe, and he even admitted that he has feelings for her. Now they’re both ready to enjoy life as a happy couple. Tomoe is hoping to spend some special alone time with Nanami, but instead they go on a school trip to Okinawa with the entire grade—and things go from tropical paradise to yokai nightmare in no time!

Dear Julietta Suzuki:

Julietta - do you mind if I call you Julietta? - I've been told that you will be attending Anime Expo 2015 this year, to take place July 2-5. Awesome! The company that publishes your manga in English, Viz Media, has been asking fans of your series for questions to ask you during the convention. It is no secret to anyone who reads Nagareboshi Reviews that I am a big big fan of Kamisama Kiss, especially Nanami and her relationship with Tomoe, the human kami and her protector/servant.

I would love to ask you a hundred questions on your creative process, how you draft every chapter, where the inspiration for each story arc came from . . . but after reading the most recent English graphic novel release of Kamisama Kiss, I'll have to make my questions a little more plot focused.

Fall Back Into The Spring: Nostalgia, Ranma, and Rumiko

Pictured above: a ridiculously small percentage of the Ranma 1/2 cast,
fulfilling the rule that a Takahashi manga has to have more characters than Game of Thrones.

There are few series that invoke a deep sense of fan-based nostalgia as Ranma ½, which could have easily gone down in history as Rumiko Takahashi's most popular and beloved series until Inuyasha came along and knocked it off its throne. It also helps that while Ranma and Inuyasha are both wacky fantasy-based romantic hijink programs, Inuyasha benefited from being more accessible to U.S. fans, airing on American TV, and appealing to young female viewers with its telenovela romance of Inuyasha and Kagome.

Ranma, however, is special and always will be to me. When I think Ranma, I think about renting the first VHS of Ranma 1/2's anime from the local Blockbuster, then watching it in my mom's room on her tiny television set and watching the martial arts madness fly across the screen. I never actually finished the anime – a lot of episodes plus films and movies made it a hard project to complete when the Blockbusters doesn't keep new tapes in stock – but I still have a great fondness for the animation and the opening/ending themes, which have become iconic in their own right.

Fujoshi O'Clock: The End, Except Not

What time is it? It's Fujoshi O'Clock, a regular feature at Nagareboshi Review, when I bring to you the latest fujoshi-related news and reviews and various shiny BL-flavored things. There is also a focus on trans and bisexual anime/manga. Why? Because 'rotten girls' need love too!

This week on Fujoshi O'Clock: I was ready to shut the whole thing down, until I realized that 1) I rather enjoy gathering yaoi/BL news for this feature and 2) I can't think of any other blog who does a semi-regular round-up of yaoi news and reviews. For yuri, there's Yuricon, For yaoi? I don't know. 

For now, Fujoshi O'Clock will be on break. When it returns, it will be a once-a-month feature that will hopefully be more encompassing and include more BL/yaoi news as well as news/reviews of manga that is friendly towards LGBT material aside from yuri (since I'd rather not step on Yuricon's turf and she's been doing it longer than I, natch).

FOC will probably return in August or July. Until then, for the boys' love thirsty among us, here's a quick and dirty list of blogs and websites to keep tabs on for the latest info/reviews/meta:

• Anime News Network
• Fandom Post
• Otaku Champloo
• the beautiful world
• MangaBlog
• Crunchyroll
• Hazukashii Kedo
• Slightly Biased Manga
• Ogiue Maniax

Am I missing your blog? Got some awesome fujoshi-related news and reviews you think deserve a shout-out? Poke me with a link and a bit of a description over at my Twitter: @theseventhl. I'm always on the look out for more BL love, even when the feature is on break.

In Which An Executive Decision Is Made

Let's be real, if we can, for one moment: I don't post very often. Nagareboshi Reviews has been sliding down my list of priorities over the past two months, and not because I hate it or want to quit writing about manga. It's that when stacked up against work, school, and paying for school, along with a variety of personal stress sources, blogging for fun and no profit loses a bit of its usual shimmer and shine. Therefore, a lot of neglect has led to a lot of no posts on this platform.

I think this newest decision of mine will change that. Starting next week, Nagareboshi Reviews will be updated once a week.

Yes, Ichigo, for real. Put those eyebrows back into place.
Also, awww, look at the early Bleach art I found while Googling 'serious anime face'!

Any future guest posts will be the only exception to this rule. I hope to acquire most guest posts for later this year. I'd really like to host people without blogs, mainly because I think their voices are, naturally, unrepresented in online fandom.

That also means Fujoshi O'Clock's next edition, which will be either next week or the following week, will be its last. I can't keep supporting a regular feature which hasn't been very regular lately. If you love FOC, I will include in the last edition the essential fujoshi links so you can keep track of yaoi/BL/LGBT manga news and reviews with your own tools and time.

I'm not upset at doing this. The more I think about it, the more it will give me time to craft better, in-depth articles and reviews. Suddenly, the manga in my to-read pile doesn't seem so daunting a task when I have more time to tackle them properly. I hope that if you still read Nagareboshi Reviews with its questionable current schedule, you will still read NR when it has a more reliable posting schedule. Maybe by the end of the year, I'll bump it up to two posts a week - but that depends on a lot of factors currently out of my control.

Feel free to let me know what you think about this in the comments. I am really looking for reader feedback on this admittedly significant shift in how the blog operates from now on.