After School Nightmare

I just started reading After School Nightmare and the main character seems so strange--the upper half of his body is male but the lower half is female. What is the author trying to say by having such a character?

I thought gender-bending wasn't that odd in Japan. There's been genderqueer anime for over a decade now. (Don't watch anime enough to remember the names of the series though.)

Perhaps the author is trying to present the main character Mashiro as bisexual because he seems attracted to both of the other main characters Sou and Kureha. Someone told me of a manga in which a character touches hot water and becomes one gender and then cold water and becomes another gender. Is After School Nightmare just a fantasy or is the author trying to make a statement about sexual orientation?

I think I found a good term to describe Mashiro--it is intersexual, a person who has biological characteristics of both the male and female sexes. Does anyone agree or disagree or it doesn't make any difference and how do you think young readers react to this type of character? Or is it just fun and a fantasy?

Intersexual in the U.S. is a very specific term for someone who has mixed genitalia, like a teste and a uterus. So if he's male on the top and female on the bottom, I wouldn't use that term here, though I'm not sure how the Japanese would think about it.

The anime that I saw and the manga are the same. Ron-Ma or something like that.

The series you are talking about is Ranma 1/2. It is both available as a manga and an anime.

So can we just call Mashiro an androgyne?

6: Thanks.

7: That makes more sense in my cultural milieu.

I just finished reading After School Nightmare 2. In this volume Mashiro admits that he has never loved anyone, the reason being that he doesn't know what gender he is. Perhaps the author wants to say that love goes beyond gender-- "He who feels it knows it"--it isn't necessary to consider one's own gender or the gender of the person loved.

From the article in Wikipedia, it sounds like she's exploring various aspects of gender and sexuality in this series, more asking questions than making statements. I've been meaning to read some of the Japanese genderqueer stuff for a while now, so I'll put these on my list.

I don't know about the general feel of AfterSchoolNightmare but in Ranma 1/2 there is no question that he is a boy that likes girls. He does tend to say the wrong thing and upsets the love interest in the books as a running theme. The becoming a girl is a mistake from fighting training near a set of waters that the hot/ cold water change will turn you to whatever drowned there... Ranmas dad is a panda from the same springs whereas Ranma fell in the drowned girl pool. There is a running joke that in his girl form he gets chased by the class hero (and doesn't like it). It is quite a fun read but I don't think you will find anything particularly deep about gender in it.