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This is a collection of comic essays by Kani Menma about her experiences and observations in the ヴィジュアル系 fandom from the late ‘90s to the early 2010s. In this first volume, it’s somewhere in between a personal memoir, a wildlife documentary, and a how-to guide. For VK fans, it’s hilarious and nostalgic and informative and a must-read. If you’re not a VK fan but hardcore into some other fandom, there’s probably some stuff in here that you’ll recognize as being universal across fandom. But this is really very specifically about the VK fandom, during a very specific time. I was a VK fan during the same period shown in this manga, and lived in Japan going to concerts for much of that time. These comic essays are spot-on. This is how it was — fun, reckless, geeky, embarrassing, and exhausting. I’m thankful to have this manga to remind me of all those little details from the world where I lived my youth.
(Note: This is a wholesome and funny book about the common experiences of normal geeky バンギャル。If you’re looking for an expose about the seedy underside of the scene, this isn’t it.)
It’s very text dense, with real sentences and a lot of explanations. In many ways, the writing is more similar to a blog or essay than a typical plot-based manga. I think a lot of pages may have more text than many A6 paperback novels. The author seems to have adapted her style over time to be more normally manga-like, so the very last chapter, and subsequent volumes, look more like what you’d normally expect from a “text-dense” manga. But this first volume is in a league of its own.
There’s almost no furigana, even when words use non-Jouyou kanji like 火蓋 and 煽り. N1 grammar expressions are frequently used.
There’s a lot of jargon, of course. I thought a lot about how to try to weight this in my grading, and decided to err on the side of “this probably makes it harder.” Honestly I don’t think anybody except serious VK fans will want to read this. However, even fans with knowledge of VK history will probably bump up against some unfamiliar stuff if they didn’t experience it IRL in Japan.
But actually much of the jargon is explained, which is helpful and also raises the difficulty level. There are whole-page or even double-page spreads with heavy text describing the types of bands, types of fans, common tropes in videos, how to do common VK choreography moves, etc. The end of each chapter even has encyclopedia-style pages with definitions of important terms. For the baby バンギャル, this is a chance to learn the Japanese words that are truly useful for you! There’s a fun vocabulary quiz too.