I Have Held Back No Water In Its Season

*contemplative* I am unsure quite what I think.

The visual style is very similar but more… flexible? It definitely partakes more of the manga Arakawa-version superdeformed style, which I’m not really partial to. I’ll have to see if the animated style really takes with me or not. The detail of the motion is definitely a plus, though.

I can get used to Miki doing Musting. He and Ohkawa both have that flex to their voicing of Mustang, so there’s a reasonable continuity. The one major difference touches on the one thing I’m very unsure of, though.

The characters aren’t as sharp. At least in this pilot episode, neither Ed nor Roy have the edge that the first series provided. A big part of that is the script; there’s just more slapstick going on. And I loved that edge, it was probably the thing that topped the list of “why I totally love this show”.

So, while I think it will be absolutely fascinating to see the manga storyline animated (supposing that is the goal), I don’t know if I will be as wildly in love with this second series as I was the first. I will hope otherwise, but we shall just have to see.

(Note: this is a preliminary skim of the subject.  For the full account, after research, see this entry.)

This will make more sense later, after I post an actual review of Shounen Onmyouji, which everyone, incidentally, should go watch. Right now.

For now, though, research results and links (which may help for YnM, too).

The Juuni Shinshou (Twelve Heavenly Generals) are Buddhist and come to Japan from India via China. They are, variously, known as yaksha (nature spirits), devas (warrior spirits/gods-of-a-minor-sort), and tenbu (Japanese take on Devas). They are initially associated with Yakushi Nyorai, the Medicine Buddha, and healing.

However, twelve being a popular number in Buddhism, they have become associated and overlapped with the twelve cycles of time (hours of the day, years in a cycle, etc.) and the twelve animals associated therewith. These are the animals commonly known in the West as the Chinese zodiac (see also Fruits Basket). (Maybe. See eta.)

Because the animals have elemental associations from the Taoist system (which is different from the Buddhist elements but quite similar to Shinto, oh god don’t get me started on the elements), the twelve generals have picked up elemental associations to go with their animal associations.

Important! These associations are variable! There are several variations on which animals go with which generals. Which elements go with which animals varies on a larger cycle of years as well as each having a fixed element and a base association with yin or yang, and, when filtered through the creative license of anime/manga, the whole thing gets… complicated.

In any case, it appears that the zodiac filter is how the yaksha Sanchira, for example, becomes the Serpent of Destructive Fire. Certainly the personalities given to the characters in both SO and YnM have some good matches with the zodiac personality readings.

Where the particular names come from, apart from the elemental constellation names given to the strongest animal in each element (Dragon becomes Seiryuu, Horse becomes Suzaku, etc.), I’m still trying to figure out. Similarly how the notion was arrived at that Abe no Seimei’s generic plethora of shikigami should correlate with the Juuni Shinshou in particular. I have, as yet, found no source explaining that that is not clearly contaminated.

ETA: I have also come across some indications that the twelve guardians of the Medicine Buddha and the twelve elemental/time figures are, in fact, separate groups that have been confused because of the similar translation of their titles: 神 in the first place and 天 in the second, so that it might be more precise to say the Twelve Divine Generals and the Twelve Heavenly Generals, respectively. Results of this line of inquiry will appear in a later post, if it comes to anything.

So I’m rewatching the Fudoumine matches again, and listening, as opposed to reading the initial translations, a few things catch my attention.

One is that Nanjirou is referred to as “flawless” or “perfect”, that is ten’i muhou, repeatedly.

The other is that, at this point, both Nanjirou and Tezuka state that Ryouma will have to move beyond merely copying his father if he wants to progress in his spiritual journey tennis.

So… how, again, is it moving beyond merely copying his father if Ryouma’s Final Ultimate Supercalafragalistic move is Ten’i Muhou no Kiwami?

I do not expect this to be answered, having long since concluded that if Konomi ever had a clear idea of how he wanted to conclude this story he lost it round about the time he started the National arc.  But, as a fic writer who wishes to make some little sense out of canon for my own nefarious purposes, I fret.

I also note that, right from the first, there’s this pattern of players being willing to injure themselves to secure a team win.  Kawamura doesn’t notice what he did to himself immediately, but Ishida is knowingly courting injury after being told it could permanently impair him to use Hadoukyuu too often. I could see this being a commentary on the way it twists the game to play it for nothing but victory, if I believed that was Konomi’s moral from the start, except… Ryouma does it too, when his eyelid is cut.  And we’ve just been told, repeatedly, that he’s exactly like Nanjirou, our exemplar of Pure and Innocent Tennis, so that determination being negative doesn’t fit in nicely.  This is especially so seeing as Ryouma’s stubbornness is the occasion for a heart warming round of team bonding and mutual support, as per standard shounen sports practice.

So I suppose I will just continue to consider canon Nationals some kind of strange AU and accept the pre-Nationals story trends.  There’s more of them anyway.

So I finally got around to watching the last few eps of the Prince of Tennis semifinals OVA, and, seeing it all in one shot, suddenly something makes more sense.

(Not about Akaya, because nothing could make that make sense, Konomi, you bum.)

I’ve felt from the first reading of the last issue that the series’ “moral” was bizarrely out of place.  The whole notion that Fun Tennis Rules Them All seemed utterly unsupported in any part of the foregoing series.

And it is utterly unsupported… except for Kintarou.  Kintarou is the epitome of playing tennis for the sheer, crazy fun of it and, because of that innocence and purity, being the strongest thing on earth.

If we recall that Kin-chan was originally supposed to be the hero, all this starts to make a bit more sense.

Konomi let Ryouma have a draw because, well, Ryouma is the hero.  And then Kin-chan gets trounced by Yukimura, which completely undercuts the notion that Fun Tennis is the strongest. But Kintarou’s moral is still the one that wins, having been transplanted to Ryouma.  Ryouma even gets a dose of Kintarou’s innocence, via the go-round with amnesia.

This does not make the ending actually make sense inside the story-world.  This is an explanation we can only reach from outside.  But it does give me slightly more hope that Konomi was not actually hallucinating while he drew the whole Nationals arc.

Memory loss or sheer, howling, culpable carelessness in ignoring his own story to date, that he’s still tarred with.  But I no longer feel the serious urge to inquire about the contents of his medicine cabinet.

It seems to me that Avatar is actually two totally separate shows that just happen to be about the same characters.

On the one hand there is the Kiddie Show, consisting of episodic encounters with villains of the day, or possibly misguided-people-of-the-day, which teaches simple moral lessons. These episodes have a lot of slapstick humor and situational comedy.

On the other hand, there is the Young Adult Show, full of functional and dysfunctional families, feuding nations and siblings, knotty questions of spiritual and emotional maturity and actual plot. It’s very Greek-drama, really.

This double threading is not terribly unusual for US animation. Unfortunately, Avatar’s two shows are very distinct from each other all through the first two seasons. Any given episode is either one or the other, with very few exceptions. It’s only in the third season that they merge into each other. This means that the character development necessary to serve the Young Adult Show is frequently either very rushed or else completely invisible, motivations and histories left entirely up to the viewer to imagine because the time they would have needed is taken up with Kiddie Show episodes that do not generally advance either plot or characterization.

I like the show a lot, mind you. I’m eagerly waiting for the last handful of episodes, especially since season three has managed to combine the two threads fairly gracefully. But this particular narrative flaw places Avatar firmly in the mid-range, for me. If the writers had made up their minds to present either one or the other, or if they had understood their own agenda sooner and combined the threads early on, as it’s clear they are capable of doing, then I would probably have been willing to put Avatar up there with Card Captor Sakura or Saiunkoku Monogatari. As is, I’d have to say it’s a handful of pegs below Batman Beyond, around, say, King of Bandit Jing. Fun to watch, probably a benchmark in production terms, but not something I’ll put on the frequently-rewatch list.

So, upon considering the question of disability in anime, two things pop immediately to mind. One: portrayals are very limited. Two: they’re almost all symbolic.

For one thing, cognitive disabilities are pretty much non-existent unless it’s a case of dramatically going crazy or being Emotionally Wounded and, erm, deciding to destroy the world because of it. These are clearly not intended to be realistic; instead they are a highly dramatized acting out of common emotional patterns.

For another, physical injuries or illnesses are rarely as severe or lasting in effect as they should be. Anime and manga in general are not written for physical realism either–quite the reverse in most cases. They regularly disregard all laws of physics and biology, and injuries are no exception to this. When a character is injured, the results are either hop-scotched via magic or technology (eg Bleach, Getbackers), or else the healing period is skipped with, perhaps, a few scenes of the character dealing with a cast used as humor. The day-to-day issues of “I can’t use that arm” or “I can’t stand up” are rarely dealt with, certainly not by main characters.

Sometimes an illness or injury is used as a source of plot tension, something the protagonists must overcome during a critical situation (eg Card Captor Sakura), but that seems to be a one-episode sort of thing, done to emphasize the hero/ine’s sense of responsibility. The rest of the time it’s used for humor and then cured so the action which is the focus of the story can be got on with. When there is a lasting effect that must be dealt with or overcome it’s a secondary character who deals with it (eg Eyeshield 21‘s Torakichi), and therefore the process is not foregrounded.

The more adult-oriented the show, the more likely injuries are to be shown realistically (eg Cowboy Bebop), but even then the process of recovery is generally invisible. If the lasting nature of an injury is dealt with at all it is more likely to be in symbolic terms (eg CLAMP’s eye thing) than in terms of what a missing or inoperable body part actually does to a person’s life and experience.

This seems to be even more true of how chronic conditions are deployed, especially the most common one I’ve observed: tuberculosis. Japanese literature in general has a love affair with beautiful pathos, and TB offers writers an illness that is a) not unsightly, b) still allows the sufferer to be active in a pinch, c) is deadly, and d) has a great historical weight behind it. (For those interested, I highly recommend The Modern Epidemic: A History of Tuberculosis in Japan by William Johnston). So TB gets used as a lever to produce tropes like ‘impending fate’, ‘fragile beauty’, ‘vain struggle against the inevitable’ and so on. Okita Soujirou’s various animated incarnations make good examples.

The bit that really interests me, though, is that, while disability is almost never shown, the experience of social isolation that goes along with it is shown. Stories like Fruits Basket, X/1999 and Meine Liebe show characters who, despite any stated disability being either completely invisible or having no effect, are sequestered. The mental and emotional injury done to them by that sequestration is dealt with in these stories. So, even as the isolation and erasure of disability and difference continues on the screen, that isolation is critiqued. To be sure, social isolation is generally presented as a very bad thing in anime and manga, something to be overcome; consider Shoujo Kakumei Utena or Rurouni Kenshin. So, in those shows that state the presence of a disability but do not actually show it, it seems that two cultural imperatives are pitted against each other: that difference be erased and that social connection be paramount.

The subtext of those stories, that one must become somehow normative to be connected, is not exactly a hopeful one, but at least a few of these characters are making it out of the attic/basement.

(And have a couple interesting links that show a bit of the shape of how Japanese culture deals with disability.)

So I’m watching Avatar: The Last Airbender, now that there’s only one agonizing wait for the next part left. I just finished the first season and have some thoughts running around.

General reactions: Good show, lots of fun, excellent story and animation and music, interesting characters, going to watch this again.

I find my specific responses a bit more conflicted. Part of this is undoubtedly because I’ve gotten used to the way anime does it. According to that tradition, something with characters this old should be taking more time to work out the knotty emotional and social issues that come up. Avatar has a tendency to present Large Sociocultural Issue and resolve it prettily in twenty-two minutes. It reminds me a lot of Digimon or Pokemon, that way, which are directed at much younger children overall.

Remembering back to my Jem and She-ra days, however, I recall that, yes, this is how US cartoons do it, so I generally just ride with the occasional moments of “wait… that was an awfully quick life-altering epiphany”.

The other thing that trips me up, unfortunately, seems to be endemic to US cartoons, and that’s the voice acting. A few of the characters have VAs that hit their marks excellently from the start: Zoku (Basco) and Sokka (DeSena) are two of those. Katara (Whitman) improves significantly as the season goes on and her character picks up steam. Alas almost all the other characters suffer from That Problem.

You know. That problem. The one where you listen and think “s/he’s not acting; s/he’s just reading”.

This has, to the best of my recollection, always been a problem in US animation, sometimes even at the big budget feature film level. It doesn’t entirely surprise me; cartoon VA has far less cachet and visibility in this country than almost any other form of acting. And, of course, without concentrated practice it’s really hard to get any kind of expression into voice alone without the somatic feedback of motion and blocking. US actors don’t generally specialize in voice acting primarily. The result, alas, is that a whole lot of VAs sound exactly like stage actors transplanted to TV minus the cameras.  They’ve got beautiful diction and enunciation which, um, on a cartoon? Sounds like a kindergarten teacher reading aloud for story hour.

I know that I’ve been spoiled by anime. Animation has a broader viewer base in Japan, filling in both children’s programming and some of the soap-opera slot, with historical drama tossed in around the edges. On top of that, seiyuu are corporately groomed to be visible, to be idol-like. Accordingly, voice acting is a viable primary career, there, and a demanding one at that. I’m now used to actors who have been trained to get convincing expression into voice alone, to dramatize freely, to grunt and groan with absolute conviction. Wherefore I tend to wince when a lot of the Avatar characters open their mouths, especially the adult characters.

This is not to say Avatar isn’t excellent. It is. Nothing less could get me to keep watching, despite the background wincing. I especially like the way the writers open up the romantic field wide, offering lots of possibilities but no sureties. I love that kind of thing, even if it does tend to bring the rabid shippers out to each defend their personal preferred subtext.

So onward to Season Two!

Wandering back through Gundam Wing it strikes me that a lot of Our Heros’ problems can be explained by the fact that they’re all involved in special ops when most of them really aren’t suited to that.

Take Quatre, for example. He acts like a line officer, maybe one pretty fresh out of academy and still with all his shiny ideals about honorable, soldierly behavior, lawful surrender and so on. He even has a unit to command, one that seems far more involved in straightforward combat than anything else.

Wufei might have had a bit of an edge, psychologically, coming, allegedly, from a culture in which the collective good has primacy and whose history provides some damn pragmatic philosophy to serve the collective good. But he seems to ignore that in favor of very individual pride in his individual, one-on-one fighting skills. He’s just not sneaky enough, and won’t let himself be.

Trowa seems to be the best suited of all in some ways, and he surely has the skills, but he’s also pretty personally disconnected. That could simply be the mark of someone born to deep cover, but to be honest he doesn’t seem quite… quirky enough to survive.  This probably sounds dreadful, but he doesn’t have enough of a sense of humor about what he’s doing–or, perhaps a sense of the ridiculous.  Well, he is fifteen, after all.

As for Heero… well, my own interpretation of his weird moments is that J took someone who is totally unsuited to special ops and trained him in them intensively anyway. He’s far too in touch with conventional morality and the idea that Killing Is Wrong. He’s also straightforward as a bulldozer, and if he weren’t, to all appearances, bulletproof, that would have killed him many times over.

Duo, on the other hand, might actually have been trained to be a good spy and saboteur, given he’d already made mental peace with the whole breaking and entering thing. He displays both social connectedness and pragmatism, and personally I think he has the best chance of coming out of the experience both successful and sane.

Which opinion explains why there are small whimpering sounds coming from this corner whenever I try to go back and read most GW fic, but that’s an entry for another day.

*rubbing forehead* Konomi, you worthless hack, how am I supposed to make a coherent character for Kirihara out of this? This isn’t a plot twist, it’s a freaking mobius strip. I mean, the GB fixed by surgery was bad enough.

( But this is just ridiculous. )

Or maybe he’s just decided to finish the manga by destroying all of the teams, one way or another. He’s certainly well on his way to destroying Echizen with sheer pointlessness. At this rate, I’m kind of hoping he never does get around to Yukimura’s match, because the little demons of chaos only knows what he’ll do to that.

So when I get this far in the Translated arc, I’m rewriting the matches. In some way that does not pretend all the development of Regionals has somehow vanished into the ether.

Normally, when the anime is sketchier than the manga on details, I’d say to watch the anime first, so you can go on to the richer source and not be disappointed. This one is… kind of weird, though. The anime leaves out huge numbers of details and background action to focus exclusively on the game and training (which is very distressing, because we see so much less of Hiruma’s magnificent wickedness), but every now and then a detail crops up out of place, without the background action to explain it. Eg, the Apollo-chicken Hiruma’s holding at the start of the match in the anime, which does not appear at that point in the manga, but which makes no sense at all without the foregoing story about the chicken video, which the anime did not give us. It makes me think that maybe the anime was planned or drawn to cover everything the manga does, and then clipped later.

On the other hand, having a seiyuu to do Hiruma’s Ya-Ha! really adds something. And I think the anime artists went to some trouble to make both Hiruma and Shin sexier (though this took some serious work, with Shin).

So, curiously enough, I think this is a series where watching the anime and reading the manga work equally well in either order. And possibly best of all when you do both simultaneously.

Otome really does repeat Hime in a different register.

Again, the dancing maidens are the sacrifice; this is reinforced by the similarity the grave markers of the Otome who have fallen in battle bear to the pillars that appear for the defeated HiME and their MIPs. They are the few given up to destruction for the sake of the many; in order to control destructive technologies, the power is confined to the Otome, who are then indoctrinated as weapons that serve and act on the decisions of rulers rather than their own will. The people in power all have technology, in the person of their Otome, yet it is still limited. The only ones who fight and die with and of that technology are the Otome themselves and (in a little grace note of cosmic justice) their rulers, if the contest is to the death.

The repetition is not precise when it comes to evil, though. There are two loci of concentration for something that should, instead, be distributed: the harmonium and the Otome themselves. The harmonium parallels the Obsidian Prince as a center of destructive power and grief, but there is also a lot of plot that problematizes Guarderobe’s own concentration of technology. The Founder’s despair and her decision to centralize technology in the Otome are both strongly associated with the Harmonium. This, I think, is the change necessitated by playing the story out in the register of human, rather than mystical, evil. The Otome are, themselves, the creation of despair–that concentration of sacrifice and power, both, is one of the humanly evil acts that comes to a head in this story.

As if the symbolism of using the dead body of a virgin-mother as the source of power wasn’t enough of a brick over the head to tell us that. Of course, given that she produces all the GEMs, it’s pretty clear that she parallels the Crystal HiME.

The human basis of the Otome and their power is emphasized by their symbol. Instead of the stylized HiME star, the symbol of the Otome, seen on the floor of the Founder’s hall and on Guarderobe tents and banners, is the same one that we see on the Orphans that Alyssa calls for Searrs, in Mai HiME. Indeed, Arika, who seems to be of Alyssa’s bloodline, is the one with the greatest affinity for the Otome powers. The only one who still has the HiME symbol is Mikoto, and she is explicitly identified as not human–and, by implication, as the last HiME.

( Okay, total spoilers for the secret end of Dirge of Cerberus, but I just can't not say this, because… )

Also, Okiayu is the voice of Nero. A crime will be perpetrated when that’s dubbed over into English, nearly as great as the one done when Suwabe as Seymore The Sexy Villain in FFX was overdubbed. Nearly.

Implicit spoilers in here, most likely.

Merging is the negative in most cases, the pathological option. Vincent with monsters and Chaos; Cloud, mentally, with Zack; Aerith with Red XIII, at least that was the intention; Sephiroth with Jenova; the reactor prisoners with mako; all of these are, in some measure, uncontrolled, and result in psychosis.

The other end of the spectrum seems to be the gaia process–the Lifestream. This version of unity allows for individual integrity in its time, and for the individual to exist for a full span before returning to the collective.

DoC implies that the Lifestream itself is migratory in the sense that it reincarnates. That, when the planet has reached the end of it’s span and senesces, Chaos returns all form to energy and Omega encapsulates all life in a migratory form for the journey to another body/planet/incarnation. Alternate possibility: the sum of the Planet’s life/experience returns to the Universe at large (universal lifestream?) in the same way a terrestrial life returns to the planetary lifestream. Ah, yes, this is later confirmed. Note terminology: lifestream and sea or ocean of stars, and the rain/spring imagery associated with Aerith in AC. Rain into river. River into ocean.

And, again, the actions of the villains are focused on bringing about that end before its natural time.

Theme: evil = natural processes accelerated or forced rather than allowed to develop in their own time.

BC’s Fuhito and his intention to use the zirconiade summons to much the same ends as Chaos falls into this theme, but on a different level–the level of human action on which Meteor and Holy both exist. The existence of materia, as opposed to WEAPONs, that summon the death of all life, the destruction of the world/body and the cleansing of threat implies that humans, as the intelligence of the gaia process, are entrusted with or perhaps simply evolve the ability to affect the process according to their own judgement of what is necessary. As such, it may be the Fuhito is not acting out of time, but rather is acting in his part as a human/thinking element of gaia.

Of course, resistance to his goals by other humans must, equally, be part of that process of intelligent judgement. I think the actions centering around the summons cannot be said to be out of time. Rather, they are their own part of the natural process of humans regulating themselves.

ETA: Okay, so either Shinra was part of the group that became the Cetra after migration to the Planet, or the Cetra were indigenous and physiologically identical humans somehow coincidentally evolved in parallel on multiple worlds and Shinra was part of an additional colonial wave, or there were multiple waves of human settlers to the Planet. Neither of the latter two fit at all well with the implication that all humans on the Planet derive/descended from the Cetra group.

Occam’s razor suggests that the Cetra lifestyle was generated among the settlers after settlement, possibly based on pre-existing ethnic tendencies, and that the in-game references to migratory life apply to their evolved patterns on the Planet.

ETA2: Hojo spouts off, in MWTtP, about how alien life/substance becomes part of Planetary life, unbeknownst.

The G substance is variously described as contaminated mako and ‘stagnation of the lifestream’. This suggests that it (and the birthplace of Chaos in general) is the accretion of impurities that cannot be circulated within the life-cycle of the planet. Things that are incompatible with the continuing cycle and are expelled/encapsulated in this way. Presumably that is the nature of chaos’ evolution; when the amount of unassimilable impurities reaches critical, then clearly the system is can no longer maintain itself and is dying and it’s time for the last act.

What remains to be seen is whether or not Jenova will be this sort of thing or an e. coli sort of thing. Will she be rejected from the system as incompatible, in some manner of final confrontation? Or will she be absorbed into the system and the system continue with an infusion of new substance (viral dna?)?

If the former, then Genesis and Sephiroth are both competing expressions of substances the planet ultimately cannot assimilate. If the latter, however… well that could get interesting. That would place Sephiroth almost on the ‘good guys’ side, against Genesis.

*brain goes click*

Oh, right, ji. Diminutive, child, kind of like ko only generally masculine in deployment. As in:

Ryuuji (given name)
Ou-ji (prince)
and *drumroll*
Ji-touki, which is Lucrezia Noin’s rank when we meet her.

Kind of like Second Lieutenant, I’m thinking. You know, Second, then First: Ji-touki, then Touki. Or possibly Touki-san, since the -san/-sama seems to act as a rank denoter (Zechs and Une, specifically).

No idea if this is germane since I’ve never seen the pilot titles spelled anywhere, but it does hang together.

Apropos of discussion with Dan…

You know, I’ll be curious to see how Ouran handles Tamaki. Because from the shape of things so far, Haruhi’s femininity isn’t going to be the pivotal issue; what is getting focused on, instead, is her lack of amai. That is what looks likely to be the story’s target of change.

Tamaki is resoundingly amai, in every sense of the word. Astonishingly so. Childishly so. That’s what makes him the center of the group, the pure-hearted emotional center if not exactly the leader. Will this change, or will he remain as he is?

If there is to be romantic closure between him and Haruhi, it seems necessary that he change, as well as her. But I could very much see this story being open-ended, romantically speaking–making a point of that, in fact.

You know, I’m starting to wonder whether Konomi really doesn’t like heros. Or, at least, not shounen sports heros.

I mean, Our Hero started out as a villain, and seems to be going back to his origins, really.

And the Hero School, Seigaku, is getting no development whatsoever. It’s like Konomi doesn’t really know what to do with them, or how to do it.

Rikkai gets development. Fudoumine gets development. Kirihara and Tachibana have storylines that are far more like proper hero types. Or, more to the point, like proper samurai hero types, since that’s the kind of story tenipuri really is. They grow out of their total bastard-ness and insecurities and psychological hangups and gain…

…okay, the only way to put this precisely is to say they gain true swords. I’m sorry, but this just isn’t a sports manga.

Tezuka, well, as best we can tell, he’s already there. And Ryouma… for a while it looked like he was progressing in that direction, but Konomi seems to have lost track of that thread. Ryouma’s struggle is with his pre-existing talent, and that’s a totally different shape than any kind of standard shounen hero.

And this would be so much more explicable if Konomi had just given the boys swords! I mean, all the tropes and character types and lines of struggle would match then! As it is the fact that they’re in modern schools and fighting with tennis racquets runs severely against the grain of actual character action and development. It’s so totally against its own grain that it actually fascinates me for that reason. Tenipuri is one of those brilliantly, utterly flawed stories that makes case studies for future generations to ponder.

And for the life of me I can’t tell whether Konomi is at all aware of this. I’m inclined to doubt it, actually.

When you add the anime to the manga, and take into account the way the anime writers have made valiant attempts to turn the story into a shounen sports anime, it gets even more interesting. I do wonder a bit whether to descent into total crack, in the anime, is an expression of the anime team’s growing madness and despair at how the story itself is resisting them for reasons which might not be immediately obvious. It would be so much fun to see one of the arcs done over in proper, matching, samurai-story style; that would be an appropriate ‘revenge’.

*eyes the AU bunny sneaking around the underbrush with trepidation* Um… that wasn’t quite what I had in mind…

*blinks* Oh, of course. It makes perfect sense.

HiME/OTOME SPOILERS

At the end of HiME, the comet/Obsidian Prince/Miroku were dispersed. Not banished but dispersed. From that point, rather than the tri-century sacrifice of twelve HiME, it would be the actions of all people, every day, that kept darkness and despair in check.

The despair/hatred/fear that the Prince/comet embodied was then everywhere… but nowhere so concentrated that only the sacrifice of the Crystal Princess could stem it.

In Otome, Nagi says it himself. The Harmonium was built out of despair, fear and hatred, the same thing that stained the Pure White Diamond into the Ultimate Black Diamond. The darkness that was dispersed to be either defeated or succumbed to by humans was concentrated again in those two things. Not to the extent that the Prince concentrated it, but enough that the Otome who was possessed of/by both manifested Miroku as her elemental.

*thoughtful* You know, I think the one technical complaint I have about Otome is that they didn’t change the storytelling style enough to suit the new medium. HiME was about mystical stuff. As such, the viewers were willing to suspend a lot of disbelief and accept a lot of un-tied-up mysteries.

But Otome is about just-people. It has to be, precisely because it comes after HiME, and that was the whole point of the first season. To make matters a human, rather than mystical thing.

But just-human stories require a bit more in the way of detail and explanations, otherwise the audience get jarred out of the story. For example, the moment when Natsuki tells Arika all their hope is riding on her, I had a moment of “wait, what? But this is Clueless Girl. Okay, hang on while I winch my disbelief up a few more turns…” But all it would have taken was a single sentence, Natsuki saying that Arika and Mashiro are the only Otome-Master pair who can reach each other right now, there’s no choice, it has to be them. That would have smoothed everything nicely.

But they didn’t do that. *sighs*

And there are some blanks that a thoughtful viewer can fill in for herself. For example, why does Mashiro order Arika, as her Master, to destroy Rena’s body, when Mashiro has just finished making a big speech about how Otome need to think for themselves and not view themselves and only tools and weapons? Well, because this is Arika’s mother we’re talking about! Mashiro is offering to take the responsibility, the guilt, on herself and leave Arika’s hands clean. You note that Arika seems to understand this, and thanks Mashiro for it before she refuses.

Some are simply the sort of background mysteries that are typical of the Mai stories. For example, why does the harmonium need a song, a conductor and a protector? And where is the protector, anyway? My personal theory is that this was a safeguard. If we take the ‘song’ as a person, then the song, the Windbloom ruler, must authorize use of the harmonium, and the ruler’s Otome must be willing to use it, to be the conductor. By this reading, there should have been a protector, such as Makoto perhaps; someone who knows the dangers of using the Harmonium and can/will stop the conductor before she’s in danger of being consumed by the Harmonium. But the protector was not, of course, present, and so Nina was taken over. Alternatively, if the song represents the knowledge or authorization of the ruling line, then the conductor is the ruler and the Otome is the protector. We don’t really find out which is correct. I’m actually fine with this kind of thing, because it is typical of Mai, and I kind of like putting the puzzle together.

Some mysteries, like how the Black Valley moves around are also typical of Mai. We never do find out what’s up when HiME-Mashiro’s doll-body transforms into that ass-kicking babe form either. I’m not as happy with these gaps, but at least knew to expect one or two. How/why members of Aswad can call and use a Child is never answered either.

…though I suppose we can assume that Searrs and their spiritual brethren, being into the whole reproduction of mystical powers via technology, may have come up with those little ring-ball things used to call the Child. After all, Smith repeatedly says that “our ancestors” created the Otome, who are basically HiME without Child and with a contractually designated Most Important Person. This would be very much in keeping with the globalization of what was once extremely concentrated. It also seems likely that the Administar was located in lunar orbit, right where the HiME star was seen approaching when it existed, as a remembrance/reference/imitation of the HiME.

At any rate, all in all I quite liked Otome, though the oversight of leaving the story-telling mode stuck on mystical means it wasn’t quite as good as HiME, and the pervy-voyeur overtones made me twitch.

Interesting parallels between Otome and Hime.

One, of course, is the Crystal Hime. In MH, the Crystal Hime was the winner and the sacrifice. She entered the Otherworld and became its power source, the ordering principle in the chaos, and thus closed off the Otherworld from her own world.

In Otome we have Fumi and Rena who are sacrificed and turned into the source of Otome crystals. And Otome are, in this world, the source of order, and are themselves the sacrifices who must fight each other.

We also have the aspect of the wish. The Crystal Hime has the power to make her wishes true. So, apparently, does the Harmonium.

There’s also the extra. And extra Hime, which was, in the end, absolutely vital to the plot. The extra heir/otome, in the trio of Arika, Mashiro and Nina.

Given that the end of MH dispersed evil into something individuals had to each deal with for themselves, rather than one conglomeration that required the Hime power and sacrifice to contain, I wonder whether the end of MO won’t be the dismantling of the Otome to let the nations once again hash out their affairs without using that power and sacrifice.

SPOILERS FOR HUNTERXHUNTER

*prods at Killua’s characterization*

At the very start, I think it really is all about finding something interesting to do while he indulges in some mild rebellion against his family. And, at the very start, I think he sees Gon purely as something interesting, an attraction, in the amusement-park sense–especially seeing as Killua seems to regard the entire Hunter exam as one huge amusement park.

Very quickly, though, he responds to Gon personally. Gon shows an interest, shows warmth and openness, isn’t afraid of him, wants to know his name and talk to him like a regular person. That’s the lynchpin for everything that comes after, because we find over the next little while that Killua isn’t rebelling against the killing. He has no problems with killing. What he doesn’t like is the loneliness. During his confrontations with the girl whose father was killed, he reacts most poorly to the inevitability of her hate and his isolation. When Gon asks about his family, Killua reacts with the greatest relief to Gon’s lack of fear and lack of withdrawal.

Really, it’s no wonder he latches onto Gon so promptly. And, having found something he needs from Gon, having been gifted with this warmth and closeness in face of his background, all his priorities re-order themselves around Gon and Gon’s wishes. Killua wants to keep this, and so he’ll abide by Gon’s wishes in anything at all.

Up until Illumi’s arrival.

At that point Killua faces the dilemma of his desire for this new thing, friendship, on the one hand, and, on the other, his brother’s threat to kill Gon, the latter being tangled up with the fact that Killua knows, viscerally, that he can’t defeat Illumi. Can’t protect Gon. Can’t protect himself. Can’t prevent Illumi from destroying the only warmth he’s ever found. So he abandons friendship, which I think he knows, even as new to it as he is, isn’t how it should go. He’s been watching Gon’s example, after all, and Gon is absolutely unyielding about standing by his friends. Killua doesn’t think he can be, so he abandons the whole thing and trudges back to his isolated life.

And then Gon comes after him, which is the second major turning point. Gon refuses to be content with Killua protecting him by parting from him, and demands Killua himself, totally ignoring any danger to Gon himself. Which both affirms that Killua was right about how friendship is supposed to work, and also demonstrates that Gon will hold up his end of it and more–that Killua can lean on him, depend on him. I think this may be the point at which Killua decides he will follow Gon’s path, not just Gon personally–that he will cease to be an assassin and become a Hunter.

As if that weren’t enough, Gon takes Killua home, offers him a home and caring people, and shows him still more of how this being a normal human thing works. In the fight against Killua’s past, Mito is a knockout punch.

And Gon is the only one. The only one who truly isn’t ever afraid of Killua, who can keep up with him, who values not only what he can do but his simple company. The only true source of warmth that drives back Killua’s isolation. In light of that I don’t think it’s strange that, by the time of Green Island, Killua is totally devoted to Gon. He doesn’t quite accept Gon’s whims as natural law anymore; they argue more often, probably because they’re in more dangerous situations than they were during the exam, where it cost Killua nothing at all to acquiesce. But it’s nearly always Killua who capitulates, and when something is clearly important to Gon, Killua will follow without question.

What he doesn’t seem to be sure of, yet, is whether Gon is equally devoted to him. That doesn’t get answered until the match with Razor. When Gon says that it has to be Killua he works with, that he can only have perfect trust in Killua, Killua’s reaction just makes me wibble. It looks a lot like he’s been given something utterly precious that he never, ever expected to get.

It’s clear, during Killua’s scene with his father, that he isn’t indifferent to Silva. But I think Silva is going to be disappointed in his expectation that Killua won’t find anywhere in the world to rest. As long as he’s with Gon, he has somewhere. The killing isn’t the issue, and I doubt it ever will be; the real crux is that Gon breaks Killua’s isolation and doesn’t seem very good at letting go, once he has a hold of someone. I’ll be interested to see how Killua’s eventual confrontation with his family works out. The longer he’s left with Gon, the more of a non-event I think it will be. If Gon is somehow injured or threatened or taken out of the equation, that’s when it will get explosive.

So I just finished watching Whistle! (shounen sport anime, soccer in this case)

I liked it. And it left a bad aftertaste.

The heart of what most annoyed me was that this was a very plot-driven story, and I’m a character fan. So, for one, none of the Evil characters are properly redeemed–they just start mysteriously acting nice instead of like utter and complete assholes.

This also means that their behavior is never punished in any way, which I do not find satisfying in any story that goes to the trouble of having Evil characters in the first place.

For another thing, the plot around which the story revolves so strongly has a bunch of annoyingly unresolved parts. I mean, beyond the par for Japanese stories. Shou’s father is brought up and then dropped totally. Shige takes off to find himself, appears for the last episode and… then it ends. Kojima is changing her view of Shou, but we never quite find out how. There is forward momentum that is just left hanging, everywhere.

This could well be because the anime overshot the manga in midstream, and just ended rather than force it out of step. And, while I do like that option considerably better than the “my ending iz pastede on, yey!” effort that many anime choose *coughtenipuricough* it does not make the dangling plot dangle any less.

There was a great deal of tension and suspense racked up by the fact that we’re never sure whether Shou et al will win or not. Leaving that largely unresolved was very uncool.

And, bottom line, the characters themselves were a bit too flat to appeal to me. Only Shige had any kind of depth and we never find out what kind. Details of characters histories are never given, there are no introspective moments or flashbacks, outside of a very few small ones for Shou early on.

It was a good show. And it didn’t satisfy me at all.