Looking at Tom’s post, he is certainly using it as a pejorative. The sentence prior is a negative statement on the art, the predicate clause following is a negative statement on the art. So why would you construe the subject clause between the two as positive? “The look turns me off. Further, its kindergarten feel makes it hard for me to believe worthwhile stories could be told using this stylization, or at least told to their advantage” I would be interested to see how you parse that quote to make kindergarten a positive adjective.

At least for me, “kindergardeny” really isn’t particularly pejorative. It’s descriptive — and moreover, descriptive of art I tend to appreciate. I like kids’ art and many of the modern art styles which reference it. I’d way rather look at a Paul Klee than at a Chuck Close. My own art (such as it is) in zines I’ve done is extremely kindergardeny (because I can’t draw…but thankfully that’s no barrier to being an artist these days.)

I don’t mind being mistaken for Tom, though.

This is the first time in several years I’ve skipped SDCC — and, IMHO it’s pretty welcoming to fans/geeks of the distaff persuasion. A large portion of the con hall is devoted to Manga/Manhwa/Anime, there are tons of cosplayers for girl-centric/friendly fandoms (Harry Potter, Naruto, etc.), and, unlike Robin Brenner, I’ve seen plenty of ‘glomping’ and tomfoolery with ‘yaoi paddles’ (if you don’t know, best not to ask) on the floor over the last few years.

Personally, I don’t care for shojo manga (though I used to like the Maison Ikokku anime way back in the day), but just like any other subgenre, it has it’s share of good and bad works.

I actually think most ‘adult male fans’ feel the same way: Shojo manga may not be their cup of tea, but no fanboy with an IQ above room temperature would deny that it has a rightful place at an event called ‘Comic-Con International.’

I think the reasons you’re seeing a backlash against ‘Twilight’, as opposed to other girl-centric fandoms boils down to the following:

1)Twilight is so aggressively mainstream that, in fact, many younger fanboys (and not a few fangirls) who have been ‘typically dismissed and marginalized’ are instinctively disdainful of it b/c a large portion of Twilight fandom is composed of the exact same folks who engaged in said dismissing and marginalizing. This is a fandom with a disproportionately large chunk of ‘mean girls’, not another group of geeks seeking common ground.

2)Along those lines, the majority of Twilight fans are openly contemptuous of anything not directly tied to Meyer, Pattinson, or Stewart. ‘I’m only here for Twilight,’ T-shirts were a frequent sight on the floor last year, which is one reason I’m very skeptical of the idea that Twihards represent a potential new comic/manga crossover audience. As fandoms go, it seems to be pretty monomaniacal.

3)Even relative to other hardcore fandoms, Twilight fans are notorious for their bad behavior, as even a brief perusal of Fandom Wank (or, really, any portion of the internet) will make clear.

Bottom line: Liking/respecting fangirls =/= not liking/respecting (extreme) Twilight fangirls — there’s a BIG difference.

Can you name a couple of series that do this sort of thing? It sounds amazing and i’d love to read it!

Not that I can’t sound moronic at times on many, many issues, though.

Lots of fans want to believe that there is an objective goodness or suckness to entertainment. They want to believe that their favorite things are inherently, undeniably, empirically better that other folks’ favorite things. It’s not enough that they simply like it for subjective or idiosyncratic reasons, it has to be objectively better. In this sense, they tear down other people’s faves in order to build up their own.

So here’s Twilight, outshining the complainers’ faves. That apparently threatens their idea that whatever they like is the Best. So they start to deride, to gripe, to try to “prove” that Twilight isn’t deserving of the spotlight.

One way to do that is to attack Twilight’s fans. If the fans are irrational, or only like the actors not the story, or whatever, that’s points against it. (And, by this twisted logic, points towards what the Complainers like.)

That’s not unusual. It happens in politics. “Oh, you have to be so uninformed to vote for the Purple party. Everyone who understands the issues votes for the Yellow party.” It happens in music fandom. “Only dumb people listen to Frog Rock. People who understand music, like me, listen to Turtle Rock.” It’s Us vs. Them thinking.

In this case, the Them, from the Complainers’ perspective, are teen girls. So they pick on them based on stereotypes about teen girls.

There’s that Robert Frost poem that says “something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” Well, something there is in geekdom that can’t get enough of them. Having attended various cons, and hung around with loads of geeks, i’ve noticed that we love to ghetto-ize ourselves. Tabletop RPGers think that LARPers are so weird. Boardgamers disdain Magic The Gathering players. Star Wars vs. Star Trek. Manga vs. American Comics. It’s not enough to get shoddy treatment from the larger culture, we have to treat each other like crap, too? It’s completely stupid and pointless, but it happens all the time. Maybe it happens a bit less with the younger generation. I want to hope so, anyway.

I’ve said this before, but I don’t mind repeating myself. I find shojo manga to be the most visually insteresting and exciting comics anywhere. Good shojo artists have thrown out all the old rules for page composition and started from scratch. They are looking to fine art instead of comics for inspiration. They approach the page like a blank canvas and are creating new ways of telling stories. The best shojo manga simply can’t be described in traditional comic language. You can’t use the stolen cinematic vocabulary to discuss what their doing, you have to go back to the language of painting and illustration just to describe what you see. At times it feels like your inside the mind of the artist seeing their vision directly. When you can look at a wordless two page composition and instantly intuit the story, then you realize this is next/higher level of comic writing. After an experience like that, reading a traditional superhero comic feels like going back to the stone age.

Noah & Tom if you haven’t encountered shojo comics like that, then you really don’t know what you’re talking about. Once you sampled all the genres within shojo can you make a blanket statement about shojo in general. You’re both intelligent men, but you’re statements on shojo come across as moronic at times. I suggest that you stick to critiquing specific examples of shojo that you’re reading and leave generalizations to more qualified readers. I think doing so will help avoid a lot of needless argumentation and talking pass each other. Also by sticking to specific works, we can have a constructive conversation with concrete examples to cite on both sides.