Been reading it lately, and it helps reduce my scrolling time. I’ve hardly read any, so you can recommend really popular stuff, too.

I’ve read Vagabond, 20th Century Boys, Claymore (years ago), and some berserk. I just finished reading Teppu, which I thought was an interesting subversion of a lot of anime tropes. I also liked that it was a short run (only 8 volumes). I guess I like seinen, but I’ve also enjoyed josei like She Loves to Cook, and She Loves to Eat.

Anyway, no shonen please. Hard mode: please nothing about high school

  • MelianPretext [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    12·
    26 days ago

    Since this is being asked on Hexbear and not r/manga, I’d recommend “Sensou wa Onna no Kao wo Shiteinai,” the manga adaptation of Alexievich’s “The Unwomanly Face of War.” That book is a collection of interviews with female soldiers of the Red Army that fought in the Eastern Front of WWII. As with all things USSR that see the light of day in the English speaking world, the author is an anti-communist, which is why she won the Nobel Prize for Literature for this book. However, the work is still worth reading because the interviewees are all Soviet war heroes and their deeply personal stories are the focus. Alexievich’s “capital T Truth” fetishist shtick means that she doesn’t often editorialize or interject, for example, every time Stalin is mentioned with “By the way, dear reader, remember that he ate all the grain” like Western accounts of socialist history do (though there are a billion footnotes crammed in the book version that “clarify” the interviewees’ narratives with the anticommunist correct-think “fact checks”). The illustrations really bring to life the stories of the interviewees in a vivid way and so it’s worth checking out.

    Some great historical fiction include “A Bride’s Story,” set in 19th century Central and West Asia, with a great cultural anthropology-lite style narrative, and “Song of the Long March,” which is set in Tang China and has a great portrayal of the deeply interwoven relationships between Han Chinese and Uyghurs in that historical period. I actually came across that work before all the Western atrocity propaganda started clogging the airwaves in the late 2010s and I’m personal grateful to it for pre-emptively being my first impression to the Uyghur Chinese people rather than having some shoddy copycat Holodomor 2.0 plagiarized slop become the introduction to that culture.

    As a purely personal aside favorite, I’d also recommend “Fire Punch.” It has a lot of the typical anime genre nonsense and really, the only reason I’d recommend it is that it has one of the best portrayals of an LGBT character in manga and anime. I was deeply struck by it personally and I’ve also seen heteronormative responses to the manga remark that the character humanized “LGBT individuals” as something beyond a “concept” for them.

    • Thallo [love/loves]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
      3·
      26 days ago

      “Song of the Long March,” which is set in Tang China and has a great portrayal of the deeply interwoven relationships between Han Chinese and Uyghurs in that historical period

      Interesting. Any reason it’s named after the long march despite being in a wildly different historical period?

      • MelianPretext [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        3·
        26 days ago

        I wanted to make a joke about that, but in seriousness, I would guess that the term “Long March” in contemporary Chinese culture, through the legendary status of that heroic campaign, has become rhetorically synonymous with a personal journey of perseverance and struggle basically akin to how Western cultures use the term “odyssey” from “The Odyssey.” It’s (justifiably) become one of those culturally enmeshed figurative terms, like how TERF island likes to append Dunkirk to the end of everything: “financial Dunkirk, political Dunkirk, etc.”

        The title likely is an allusion to that or maybe laconically pointing out just that the protagonist absolutely gets their daily steps in because they’ve meandered all around Tang China.

    • Thallo [love/loves]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
      6·
      26 days ago

      Set in a world inhabited by “jewel people”, it chronicles their efforts to find the place where they belong and defend their way of life

      Sounds like Steven Universe anime? O.o

      Seriously, this might be it, tho. Seinen, slick art, fighting girls, and it’s complete. Pretty much checking all my boxes.

  • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    11·
    26 days ago

    Dungeon Meshi. It’s the best thing in anime/manga in a long time. The anime’s only halfway through the story, so I hear, though. izutsumi-idea

  • thelastaxolotl [he/him]@hexbear.netMEnglish
    10·
    26 days ago

    Monster is pretty good and Pluto both by the same mangaka as 20th century boys, my favorite ongoing manga is Chainsawman which is a bit of a shonene but it has no high school stuff in part 1.

  • notthenameiwant [he/him]@hexbear.netMEnglish
    9·
    26 days ago

    Obligatory “Goodnight Punpun” recommendation. Also, the original Akira manga is a masterpiece, the movie doesn’t do it justice (even though it’s still pretty good).

      • notthenameiwant [he/him]@hexbear.netMEnglish
        7·
        26 days ago

        The movie covers a third of the actual story. It was made while the Manga was being published, so it left a ton out out of necessity. The biker gangs are more fleshed out, and there’s a good amount of post apocalypse story telling. It is long as hell (2000+ pages), but there’s still nothing like it.

  • Aquilae [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    6·
    26 days ago

    I will always take the opportunity to recommend How Do We Relationship?. It’s got some of the most realistic depiction of relationships I’ve seen in japanese media. Keep reading after the heartbreaks; that’s when it gets really good.

    Idk why it’s labelled shonen; people I know who’ve enjoyed it the most are women. Ig shonen’s become a more abstract label these days.

  • KobaCumTribute [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    6·
    26 days ago

    Let’s see, I’ll just go through my ComicRack library and see what I’d actually recommend…

    For non-highschool yuri manga:

    • How Do We Relationship, which is great and was something someone on here recommended to me in the first place. It’s both sweet and soul crushing at times, and seems to finally be heading towards a conclusion after 122 chapters. Horny, but in a subdued and very queer way.
    • Octave is very similar, but much shorter. Slightly horny, also in a queer way.
    • Catch These Hands is a very short, very dumb story about a couple of former delinquents starting to date for contrived reasons, both of whom may actually be ace for how completely and utterly not horny at all this is.

    Non-yuri manga:

    • Dungeon Meshi starts off strong and has a lot of neat worldbuilding, but starts going downhill around volume 5 and jumps the shark somewhere around volume 10 or 11 in a way that completely ruins all the cool worldbuilding and earlier themes. Still recommend it, though. Not horny at all.
    • Akumetsu is basically “what if Death Note was about Deadpool instead a whiny fascist dipshit and also it was specifically about that knockoff Deadpool killing expies of actual Japanese politicians over their corruption scandals?” and although I’ve only gotten through 5 of its 18 volumes so far it’s pretty decent if politically incoherent. Not particularly horny, just some gross Eyes Wide Shut stuff in the beginning.
    • ZOM 100: Bucket List of the Dead is amazing and manages to be a hopeful, class-conscious, pro-social zombie story about a couple of burnt out wage slaves setting out to do everything they’d never gotten to do because they were too busy working before it’s too late, in the face of a zombie apocalypse. Somewhat horny.
    • Booty Royale: Never Go Down Without a Fight is incredibly horny, problematic trash that’s way better than it has any right to be and it actually manages to handle its subject matter somewhat appropriately. Still goes to very gross places and is fundamentally a story about exploitation, but it’s also aware that what’s happening is bad, actually and has its moral compass characters around to sort of offset that. Several times it stops the story dead to drily talk about actual, real world issues including railing against the Japanese government for its refugee policies being inhumane and racist and the abhorrent conditions in the refugee camps/detainment centers. I cannot in good conscience recommend it in general because of how gross and problematic it is, but it does deserve an honorable mention for how it actually has redeemable qualities and somehow handles its absurdly trashy subject material somewhat appropriately.
    • Thallo [love/loves]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
      3·
      26 days ago

      Hm, maybe I’ll check out Octave because it’s shorter.

      what if Death Note was about Deadpool

      What do you mean by this? I generally find Deadpool’s memey internet bait humor persona to be incredibly grating, but the premise of the manga seems interesting.

      ZOM 100: Bucket List of the Dead is amazing and manages to be a hopeful, class-conscious, pro-social zombie story

      This sounds really interesting, too, considering how reactionary the genre is.

      Booty Royale: Never Go Down Without a Fight

      This just sounds like Queen’s Blade lol

      • KobaCumTribute [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
        3·
        26 days ago

        What do you mean by this?

        The concept of a basically invincible lone lunatic antihero, mostly, though his power is more something weird about duplicating to create ablative versions of himself or something? I’m still unclear on what he’s doing or what his power is even though it’s halfway explained pretty early on. He’s kind of silly, but not in Deadpool’s particular style.

        This sounds really interesting, too, considering how reactionary the genre is.

        I was absolutely blown away by how it’s both incredibly absurd but also positive and good. I’ve just started watching the anime adaptation and that’s also very slick so far, and is actually colorful and vibrant to the point of absurdity as a reflection of the main character shaking off his depression and noticing how vibrant and colorful the world really is even as that world is ending around him.

        This just sounds like Queen’s Blade lol

        Oh Booty Royale is absolutely trash, it’s just also fascinating because as much of a cumbrained weirdo as its author is he’s also clearly at least somewhat leftist and is constantly interjecting like actual stories about real things into his silly borderline-hentai manga that’s like 50% slice of life stories about how shitty and exploitative the idol industry and its skeevier adjacent industries are and 50% weird martial arts nerd stuff, and then trying to also handle queer issues as respectfully as a fundamentally exploitative story can and in a way that’s also an explicit condemnation of real-world bigotry. It’s too weird and gross to like actually recommend to anyone ever, but it’s also an absolutely fascinating spectacle because of how it vacillates between horny weirdness and stuff like stopping the story to educate its readers about the Rohingya genocide.

          • KobaCumTribute [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
            6·
            26 days ago

            I’m not even joking, that’s an actual thing that happens towards the end of IIRC volume 12, it just stops the story completely to talk about that and then follows it up with what is basically “and fuck the Japanese government for putting refugees in inhumane camps and having fucked up racist immigration laws, btw two of the characters go on to become international human rights advocates working for the UN in subsequent decades,” because writing these random epilogues about characters going on to be great people is also a frequent thing it does, like it making some creepy little sexpest kid in the earlier chapters go on (50 years later) to be a prominent judge with an unshakeable moral compass because of how good and merciful the protagonist was towards him that one time.

            It’s absolutely unhinged and I don’t know whether to be impressed or disgusted by it.

            • Thallo [love/loves]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
              3·
              26 days ago

              Kinda reminds of a sequence in the middle of Animal Man where the story kind of just stops dead and the author looks to the reader and says “slaughtering dolphins is bad”