Sunday, December 9, 2007

Teenaged girls hate subtlety

If I'm very good in this life, hopefully I will be reborn in the next as the person who has to write copy for manga like All Nippon Airline:

ANAL – All Nippon Air Lines – is a unique airline company. All of its employees are beautiful gay men. On top of that, relationships between employees, or even between passengers and employees, are highly encouraged! This is of course the premise for many hilarious situations and strange adventures both for them and for their passengers.

Now that's classic. Admittedly, the art of yaoi manga copy is not an easy craft to learn. For example, if it were up to me, I would describe Author's Pet like so:

Poor, poor Yuta. He's a high school student who's about to be used for the hot erotic gratification of a chickenhawk desk jockey with a bum arm! Sexual abuse let's go-go funny!!

Whereas the actual description reads like this:

High school student Yuta bumps into a man outside the train station, injuring him. The man's name is Tsubaki Nishijima, occupation novelist. In exchange for crippling his arm, Tsubaki demands Yuta work like a slave every day! Today's job is to take exact dictation of Tsubaki's words. Whaaat? What's with this perverted depiction of "Come”...!!! Isn't this sexual harassment?

See? There's a lot of nuance that goes into that work.