About six years ago, back before the house fire and my resultant return to college, I had started to really get into drawing manga. Those of you who've seen my drawings know that I never really got that good at it, but I did a lot better at it than I thought I ever could. I was actually working on drawing a couple of my friends at the time (and had some ideas for starting a manga loosely based on their lives) when I first realized the house was on fire, although it was a lack of time for drawing, more than any ties in my mind between drawing and the fire, that resulted in me not developing my drawing skills any more than I did.

Anyway, one of the things that I thought about doing, back when I was drawing on a regular basis, was an Oh My Goddess! doujinshi that retold the story, except with Megumi making the fateful call to the Goddess Relief Office instead of Keiichi. Before anyone gets any ideas, this wasn't just going to be an exercise in coming up with excuses for me to draw Megumi-Belldandy sex scenes or come up with a new incestuous relationship for Urd and Skuld. One of the reasons I love Oh My Goddess! so much is that it's able to tackle sexual themes in such a mature and responsible way, and I was going to maintain Fujishima Kosuke's standards -- nothing overtly sexual (except for Urd's teasing and prodding, and even that's PG-13 level at most), stories that focus much more on love than sex, maintaining a basic innocence in the main protagonists -- in my own work.

I suppose the reason why I thought about this so much was because it raised a lot of interesting questions for me. How would Fujishima's other characters react to a relationship between Megumi and Belldandy? Would Keiichi still be the lovable little klutz he is in the original series, or might he become jealous of his little sister? Given their hypermasculine characterization, would Tamiya and Ootaki be supportive of Megumi and Belldandy, or might they feel threatened by their relationship, or would they just become totally ecchi and try to catch the two of them being intimate with one another? How would an established villain like Marller or Aoshima change if I added a homophobic streak to their character?

These are questions that still fascinate me, and I haven't entirely ruled out exploring these questions in something like a fanfic. (Assuming I'd ever have the time to write something like that, that is.) I suppose the underlying problem, though, is that I feel like I'm approaching this idea with a distinctly Western mindset, trying to apply my knowledge of homosexuality and its public reception by how I've experienced and read about it as an American. I've never really studied how homosexuality is received and portrayed in Japanese culture, even though it seems like one of those things that I naturally would have picked up on given how much I've studied both Japanese culture and people's perceptions of homosexuality. I guess I just wouldn't feel comfortable trying to write something along these lines until I'd done a lot of studying about homosexuality in Japan, both in popular culture and in popular literature over the past 50 to 100 years, and felt like I could create a story that respected those conventions.

Comment by  joepet at 9/5/07 20:26:
Actually, given all the thousands of Aa Megamisama doujinshi that have sprung up over the years, I'm pretty confident that your idea has already been done by someone from a Japanese perspective. Your ideas would actually be fresher if done from a more Western perspective in Japanese.

 

Comment by  Sean at 10/5/07 14:19:
Ugh. The Western perspective isn't a problem, it's doing it in Japanese ... I just can't make the time to keep my Japanese knowledge fresh any more.

 

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