To Terra or not to terra…

Something interesting is happening in the liverjournal-sphere (paradox, yes) to Vertical for the first time.

A categorization debate.

To me, heated discussions about categorization always stem from that immaculate academe called History. Is it positivist? Revisionist? Reactionist (sic)? Populist pedantry?

There’s a story floating out there about Kurt Vonnegut and Haruki Murakami (though I can’t source it so this might just be hearsay) and categorization. Something about how Murakami likened himself to Vonnegut but refused to call his own work Sci-Fi because it would get packaged and shelved with less delicacy, and likely not be treated as a permanent fixture in any canon.

Sometimes categorization is an accident, and sometimes it is a tactic.

I swear to Tezuka that when Vertical started marketing its upcoming manga classic “To Terra…” whatever we said about it being shojo was based very squarely on the fact that Keiko Takemiya is generally regarded as a shojo-master and that most of the old school Japanese fans are women. Why confuse the sales reps and booksellers with a treatise on the nebulosity of gendre and genre in the Japanese comics medium, when the target reader is a shojo audience anyway?

So you can imagine how unprepared I was for what this very upset blogger had this to say:

Color me disgusted.
It has just come to my attention that certain personages are under the most unfortunate misapprehension that Takemiya Keiko’s Tera e (shortly to be released by Vertical as To Terra) is a shoujo manga, and that Vertical, for God Only Knows what idiotic, self-serving reasons, is marketing it as such.

F*ck. I thought the manga world had grown out of this shit. Well, apparently I haven’t grown out of manga fandom enough not to be outraged when the tin gods try to pull it. Why don’t y’all go back to calling Inuyasha, Oh My Goddess!, and Love Hina “shoujo manga” while you’re at it?

Another blogger commented that:

Oh, this is ridiculous. Vertical are morons.
They probably think it’s shoujo because it has girls in it or something.

I can’t be called a moron and just take it. So then I responded.

Hi there.

Seriously,
Anne Ishii
Director of Marketing & Publicity
aka Moron Supreme
Vertical, Inc.

A friend who’s more savvy to the world of blogger manga criticism has informed me that responding is futile, as the counter-response will be assuredly swift and ruthless.

(finger in collar) History, we hardly knew ye.