#also yes I did download the scanlation font for this

[topquarkintown]

Ok but hear me out....The Secret History is a 1970s shojo manga

So I’m kinda joking here but actually I’m kinda not like The Secret History is actually structurally identical to a 1970s shojo manga, like:

- Takes place in an vaguely 20th century academic setting for rich people and is equal parts about aestheticizing the setting and exposing its dark side - Hapless and relatably dopey protagonist transfer student stumbles into a cool club of older, mysterious students and uncovers staggering levels of fucked-up interpersonal drama between them while also crushing on all of them?? This is literally just the plot of The Heart of Thomas - Hightly Internal psychodrama about murders happening at a school which snowballs tragically because of the absolutely heinous interpersonal dynamics of the main characters, as well as the individual psychological houses of cards they’ve built based on their impressions of each other - All characters except for the protagonist are either Darkly Handsome or Otherworldly And Blonde and dress in exceedingly sumptuous 1970s fashion - Obsessed with the question of Beauty, and exploring the dissonance of juxtaposing elegant Romantic aesthetics and the ugliness and violence of interpersonal relationships - Undeniably homoerotic in a female-gaze sort of way, but its queerness is never really unpacked (definitively queer characters end up dead and queer-in-subtext-only characters end up in straight relationships)

Like this book could straight up have been written by Moto Hagio or Riyoko Ikeda.

Idk what my point is here. Maybe it’s that the dark academia people and the shojo manga people should be talking to each other more and realize that they are actually on about the exact same shit. Maybe it’s that I want a shojo adaption of The Secret History. Actually, if I had a billion dollars, I would purchase the comic adaptation rights to The Secret History and give them to Moto Hagio just to see what she would do with them. I want to live in that world.