The Newspaper Run By Dreams

I recently returned from Japan with a bunch of doujins, and I, by and large, am enjoying reading (through MTL) basically everything that I bought. This isn't so much "stuff I wish that I knew" (except for one thing), but it's stuff that was helpful for me. (Also, all the doujins I bought were M/M, so this might be of limited usefulness if your particular proclivities lie elsewhere.)

My tips are largely based around three differences that doujin purchasing has from the Ao3 browsing that English speakers might be used to:

1: You Have To Pay Money For This Shit (which means that the cost of picking up something you aren't as into or hate isn't just a time cost, it's an actual money cost)

2: There Are No Tags (which means that you have to get good at reading what the unspoken cues of the front and back pages are telling you)

and 3: Basically Everything Is Shrinkwrapped (which means you can't read a few pages and go DANGER WILL ROBINSON if you don't like it, and put it back on the shelf.)

And now, on with the tips!

- Do Market Research: I'd really recommend, before your trip, going on Pixiv and looking around the tags for your fandom. What stuff is popular? What stuff is unpopular? Are there any artists who you really like? Are there any doujin being advertised for sale that seem interesting? (Or, best-case-scenario, the creator reuploaded an out-of-print doujin to their Pixiv and you wind up loving it.) Just kind of soak up the whole vibe, so that you can more easily filter, filter, filter baby. You won't have Ao3 tags to help you and most doujin are plastic-wrapped in store (to prevent people from ruining them by flipping through them), so what's on the front and back covers are basically all the information you're going to get. Maybe there's a trend of drawing X character as Y, and you've discovered in your market research that typically that means they're portrayed as more dominant, or more submissive, or more X, and you don't like that, so you can filter filter filter baby and not come home with something you hate.

- Do Some Deep Internalization About T/B Stuff: This basically only applies to you if you're looking for BL, but in Japanese BL fandom, top/bottom dynamics are Vry Srz Bznz. X/Y is considered a different ship from Y/X. Name order indicates who's topping who- left is top, right is bottom. (If you're dealing with an X/Y/X tag, that means they switch or it's ambiguous. If you're dealing with X/Y/Z, then, confusingly, it usually means that X and Z are topping Y.) Now, I would like you to think about the BL pairing that you really really like. The one that you're going to be looking for stuff for. I would then like you to search deeply within yourself and ask yourself this one question. "Do I have any sort of preference regarding who tops and who bottoms in my favorite pairing?"

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