Lovely Complex English
Tony Phan
Ok, so first of all, this story is a shojo, shojo would be the opposite of a shounen which we discuss in Lesson 2. So, a shojo is a story targeted at girls having usually a girl or teenager as the main character and most commonly being romantic or romantic comedy type of stories.
So let's get into our story. Lovely Complex just as the name implies is a story where both our protagonists have a complex. Koizumi Risa is a high school student that is a bit too tall for a girl, at least in her surroundings, and our male protagonist Atsushi Otani is shorter than the average. The two of them are actually kind of similar in personality and they tend to make fun of each other or annoy each other regularly, especially referring to their height. So they are known as Alll Hansin Kiojin, a Japanese comical duo where one of them is tall and the other one is short. Since they have difficulties finding a couple due to their height issue, they decide to let their differences aside and cooperate with each other, because of this they start knowing each other better, and so they are gonna start getting closer, especially when Risa starts growing romantic feelings towards Otani.
Now in this story, as you might see, this story centers around two teenagers in their high school life, which is seen a lot in this category. Now, our story is actually pretty simple and in most cases, it might seem that the actual problem is not that big of a deal, but one of the things that I love the most about it is not only the romantic part but also the comedy. This story has one of the best comedy for me that I have seen, so is really easy to laugh almost every chapter. Also, the story is nice without heavy dramas but still with pretty romantic moments and warm moments and the story between our two protagonists is really nice and sweet. Another point to be noticed is that by the time I read this story most shojos the main characters start confessing their love or dating pretty much by the end while in this one we actually get to see them as strangers, friends, and as a couple as well. It is really cool to see both protagonists getting over their respective complex which gives us character development.
So, of course, we have more characters in the story may be like six or eight more characters that are important because they are friends, family, or somehow related to the main characters but talking just about our main characters I also have to say that here we do not have the opposite type of characters that complement each other rather they are really similar. Both of them are funny, extroverted, loud, and friendly. We also get to see their friends and their respective love relationships as well but of course, the main focus is on these two.
Now the manga was created by Aya Nakahara and was finished in 2006 and the animation was made by Toei Animation in 2007. I have to say that I loved both. The anime is 24 episodes and the manga of course is way longer since in the manga we do get to see their three years of high school together and beyond as it's normally done for most stories of this type. Both of them are great and the art style is really nice as well and well with pretty scenes and a lot of funny ones. And talking a little about the music, I think the songs go really well with the story, they have this happy and fun tune. I personally liked the second opening in terms of the visuals since they don't really show that many scenes from the anime, just a couple and they put them in a really nice and pretty way that gets more meaning after seeing the anime. And overall referring to the combination of a good song and nice visuals, I prefer the second ending which has a different art style like sketches type of images and the song Bon Bon by Hay! Say! which has more romantic feelings into it.
'That perspective is influenced by ideas about gender, color, and colonial relationships. Historians, such as Carolyn Merchant, have shown how Enlightenment thinkers like philosopher Francis Bacon and physicist Isaac Newton divided nature into a civilized, male part and a wild and attractive female part. The man is the subject who looks at the female nature object, which must sustain him. Thus, political and economic powers justified how they subjugated and colonized nature during the colonial period. Due to such thought patterns, Western powers moved natural resources to their own countries. Ethnicities and indigenous people not claimed by the West remain in a submissive position in these colonial gender hierarchies, often in poverty. And precisely because humans and nature are interconnected, you see the migration towards the wealth amassed by the West.'
'I've always been connected to nature. I grew up in Olympia, Washington, a volcanically active area. When I was eighteen, I experienced an earthquake. Authorities always advised us to stand under a doorframe, and when I stood there, I not only felt the earth's movement but also saw the waves in the ground, as if it were water. Volcanic eruptions were also part of life; nature was always present. I learned to love complex ecosystems of which people are a part and upon which they depend.
I didn't want to study; I hated school and signed up for a sailing ship, becoming a deckhand in the Caribbean. On one of the islands, inhabited by only 300 people, I saw a wealthy man putting a fence over half of the land. He was going to rent that part to cruise ships. Many of those relatively wealthy white people from the cruise ship wanted to sunbathe on the white beach, while mostly black women behind the fence sold them things like T-shirts. These women weren't even allowed on the beach. I saw how everything came together on that island: color, ethnicity, class, gender, and the environment. That's when I decided to go to university, to understand such situations, to see if we can do something about inequality.'
Huber heard about environmental studies and postcolonial ecocriticism and came to study in the Netherlands. She also worked in journalism and at corporate communication departments 'pushing the world in a direction I didn't want to go. I had many friends from Ireland, which also suffered from colonial and postcolonial developments. Because of that, I asked more questions, and eventually, I returned to the U.S. to pursue a PhD at the University of Oregon, known for its environmental research. Nature, colonialism, gender, and ethnicity also converge in Ireland, and that's the focus of my first book project.'
'My work is interdisciplinary. I essentially examine how colonial relationships with the environment reoccur in modernity by reproducing thought patterns to which people have become accustomed. This involves ideologies and neocolonial economic structures that determine parts of the world are natural, while another part is allowed to be ugly or uninhabitable, where the rich don't live. I also want to discover how media, art, and environmental movements can portray and create more just relationships.
While I use eco-feminist theories, I also use, for example, eco-media theory, which considers the materiality of media. Currently, I'm working on an article about an Irish hip-hop artist who manipulates iconic landscapes over Ireland by connecting them to mining, thus bringing about digitalization. This leads to the topic of environmental justice. All these movements can't be seen separately. Ecocriticism deals with that, and it's one of the fastest-growing disciplines in the humanities. Therefore, I want to share these interdisciplinary theories and disciplines with students.'
She received a TSHD Seed Grant for her research, collaborating with the law faculty on environmental justice and migration. The project is called 'Decolonizing Globalization: Reading Migration through an Environmental Justice Lens.' With the grant, Huber organized two guest lectures on art, activism, and environmental justice alongside a research colloquium for teachers and five workshops for students on climate justice and migration. Students who participated in the workshops created a video about it.
'Earlier in my life, of course, I wanted to solve all the inequalities stemming from colonial relationships with the earth, relationships that have been ongoing for hundreds of years and that we still deal with. I still want that, but I now realize that the past always stays with us. We must bear witness to histories and experiences that shape relationships between people, animals, and environments. I see my work more as a dialectic or dialogue with the cultural and material environments I study. Like our life with nature, research is a relationship, and it's never finished.
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It is also observed, irrespective of editor Gordon Lish's heavy modification, the story fires up the debate regarding the definition of love realized by it's four key characters, i.e., Terri, Mel, Laura and Nick.
Nick and Laura believe that they are too much in love to be torn apart by external circumstances. Mel tells a story about an elderly couple badly injured in a car crash that he attended in the hospital. They were still in love after many years and their sole wish was to see each other. The devotion of the husband and wife affects the group. After musing about the confusing and transitory nature of love, the two couples finish the gin and seem to arrive at a new understanding of their marriages (Champion). But all of them are still sitting there by questioning themselves what is really meant by love after sharing incidents of Terri-Ed, Terri-Mel, Nick-Laura and that old couple, as there are so many factors that may force anyone to rethink about the deeper philosophies of this complex emotion which is being tried to catch here at latter passages.
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