Coffee Spoons

So while some of my more refined colleagues over in the English department were raised on Shakespeare and Chaucer, I spent the better parts of my adolescence pouring over the goodies on fanfiction.net. Predictably, I started out in the Sailor Moon section and then quickly realized that it wasn’t exactly my crowd (poorly written yuri lemons). I then blitzkrieg right on through Pokemon (which turned out to be a hotbed of bestiality – though to be fair I should’ve seen that coming what with Misty having a tentacool and that X-rating…) until I finally arrived at what would hold me captive for the rest of my adventures in the world of fan fiction: Naruto.

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OKAZAKI Kyoko is a new favorite on my list of women authors for josei manga. River’s Edge is a stark look at contemporary Japan and the emptiness and unreality that characterizes life in the barren suburbs of modernity.

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Yoshihara Yuki‘s works differ from mainstream shoujo manga and bears its own distinctive style even within the josei genre due to the mangaka’s drunkenly blunt sense of humor and her clever manipulation of the gender dynamics between her female heroines and their love interests. Her protagonists are outspoken, aggressive, and unabashedly sexual in the pursuit of their romantic interests. They do not bother to put up a front of being docile or coy in their intentions. Their antics are hilarious. They steal their lover’s underwear, they talk dirty without being sexy about it, they are loud about wanting sex and can’t be bothered to beat around the bushes, they stalk their love interests and terrorize them with their monstrous libidos, and still they’re so much fun to read about that I can’t get through a chapter of any of her works without nearly bursting my gut from laughing so hard.

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