Posts Tagged ‘History of Jump and Fujoshis’
I’m sure many of you are reading through Strangerataru’s Illustrated Guide to Weekly Shounen Jump. It briefly looks into the rich history of popular and significant titles in Shounen Jump. Upon reading it, I cannot help but feel completely nostalgic. Particularly even more nostalgic with regards to how Jump has ‘nurtured’ a fujoshi culture throughout the years. A lot of the titles mentioned in the article have been been important breeding grounds for fujoshis. Whether young or old, they all started somewhere. And many of these fujoshis would start their first doujins out of inspiration from a Jump title.
Feeling inspired, I’m writing a series of posts that looks into the relation of Jump’s top titles and how this magazines have helped culture a demographic that fantasizes their heroes as lovers. We’ll look at how Jump has unknowingly set fire unto the hearts of girls and made them grab their pens and wrote page upon page of parodies of their favorite Jump titles. Just like Strangerataru, we’ll look at it through the periods and see how they stumbled upon fujoshis, their nonchalance towards the culture, and eventually how they embraced and acknowledge their following. So, let’s look at it this way.
1. 1968-1979: Innocent Beginnings
2. 1980-1984: The Captain Tsubasa Fantasy
3. 1985-1989: Men and their poses and cosmos
4. 1990-1994: Move aside Son Goku, it’s all about Rukawa x Hiei x Kenshin. TOTALLY!
5. 1995-1999: You can’t shake them down.
6. 2000-present: Giving it up to fujoshis
To start things off, we’ll look at the beginnings of Jump and the beginnings of Fujoshi culture. And so our story begins in 1968 until 1979.
1980 to 1984 marked great development and diversity in Jump. The second part of the WSJ Illustrated Guide would probably tell you more about the growth of the magazine and the rise of its future mangaka superstars.
On our end, this period is monumental. Why? It is in this period that a bond was established between the fans of Shounen-Ai and Shounen Jump. As the authors of shounen-ai experimented with more mature themes and story lines, their fans started to starve for the genre. Unlike today wherein you have tons of mangakas for BL, there were only a select number of authors who tried to write shounen-ai. Later on, their fascination for boy stories led them on a quest to find other tales that exhibited the same potential as those that have been written by shounen-ai mangakas.
Their search ended with a tale of a young boy named Oozora Tsubasa and his journey to achieve his goal of representing becoming a world class football (soccer, for Americans) player.
For this round, we have to remember something: the girls follow where the pretty boys are. By the time our dear Fujoshi’s have been hooked line and sinker with Captain Tsubasa, they found themselves regularly reading Jump. During Jump’s heroic age, wherein most heroes had bulky bodies, serious manly faces, and crazy poses, some fangirls focused their attention on the Masami Kurumada’s epic tale of astrological proportions, Saint Seiya.
The mythical backdrop of Saint Seiya provided the perfect setting for every fujoshi’s fantasy.
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1990 to 1994 can be considered by many as one of the strongest periods of Jump. The title that carried this period was an epic intergalactic superhuman masterpiece named Dragon Ball Z. It was so popular that no one in this world could not have encountered this anime. However, despite its popularity, the fujoshis focused their attention towards the other titles that were also great but somehow fell under the cloud of Dragon Ball Z.
For the Fujoshi, Goku and his dragon balls did not spark a fire to their fragile fangirl hearts. Instead, they looked at the bishounens from other Jump titles. The era of androgynous men have come to an end. In this era, it was all about the handsome boys of Jump.
Guest on 
d4rkn on 
Ash on 
