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fraylin · 6 months ago

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An Aeka Fictive's Guide to Watching "Tenchi Muyo!", part 1: the OVA continuity

Greetings, friends, mutuals, partners, metamours, and perfect strangers! Perhaps you are wondering what this anime franchise is in which I seem to be deeply invested? Well, worry not! I am here to rant at you about it.

Beginning in 1992, the Tenchi Muyo! franchise is one of the more sprawling and complex canons of anime. It was one of the first anime to make it big in the west among self-identified anime fans, while the market was stll struggling with popular appeal. It eventually aired on the Cartoon Network's Toonami block and became a nostalgic hit for viewers who were too removed from affordable rentals of the VHS cassettes and later DVD releases; a generation or two of fans now fondly remember the characters with adaptations for the American market like adding in a "Y" to the character Aeka's name under the assumption English speakers would read the "ae" as singular sound, instead of two distinct vowels.

From the OAVs (Original Animated Videos) that started it all, through the multiple TV shows, theatrical releases, spin-offs, video games, novels, and two distinct continuities of prose fiction, it can be a little overwhelming.

That, in a very literal sense, is why I am here. My name is Aidel Rayarvol-Spillbaum, and I am a fictive of Masaki Aeka Jurai. As someone whose identity is founded on the Tenchi Muyo! franchise (and a princess in particular) as a source, you can be assured that I have strong opinions that are rooted in being well-informed about the franchise's history and diverse incarnations.

The first thing you should know:

The majority of the Tenchi franchise as it stands at present is utter rubbish that I would only recommend as an example of "what not to do". The problem, you see, is rooted in that sprawling nature. Thus, here is your guide to what to watch and read, and what to avoid.

(For consistency's sake, all character and creators names will be given in the format of their country of origin; Family Name and then Given Name for the characters and Japanese crew, Given Name and then Family Name for the Canadian/American crew)

Tenchi Muyo: Ryo-Ohki

The series that started it all—unless you count a single-frame glimpse of a prototype design of Ryoko to be found in the midst of an episode of Ranma ½ Nettōhen.

Ah yes, that legendary Ranma fandom favorite, Ryoko from Tenchi Muyo!

But first, some wordplay: "Tenchi Muyo!" as a title is written 天地無用, more often seen on packaging as the Japanese equivalent of "This Side Up". It roughly means "Do Not Switch Top And Bottom", and is written with characters more often interprested as "Heaven and Earth" and "Useless", with the switch/reversal part being implied. It suggests the upheaval of the main character's lifestyle...while also giving us a secondary meaning: "Tenchi is Useless", or in the more canonized English translation No Need for Tenchi.

(via characterdesignreferences.com)

That, in four kanji, is the plot: a boy named Tenchi has his life flipped upside down and I'd like to take a minute just sit right there by the arrival of a seemingly ever-growing collection of beautiful alien women who squabble over him to the point that he might as well not even be present. It is what western anime fans think of as the standard of the "harem" genre: a seemingly unremarkable boy attracts improbable numbers of unusually attractive (and often just unusual) women who for some reason think he's the greatest thing to come out of Japan since miso paste.

Spoiling the plot beyond that is no more necessary than Tenchi himself, since the OAV series began as a mere six episodes, going from Ryoko Resurrected to We Need Tenchi, followed by the bonus The Night Before the Carnival. Featuring concepts by ThunderCats animator Hayashi Hiroki and the Okayama-born Kajishima Masaki , this first batch of canon had scripts written by Hasegawa Naoko and are highly recommended as an introduction to the franchise.

This is where things become immediately complicated.

Kajishima lent his given name to the series's protagonist Masaki Tenchi as a family name, and pushed for the action that didn't take in space to be set in a quiet rural part of the Okayama Prefecture. Kajishima claims that the ideas that came out of him working with Hayashi were based on ideas he'd been working on since he was a teenager...while Hayashi's account suggests that the concepts were more the result of his and Kajishima's original pitch having been a Bubblegum Crisis spin-off as a slice-of-life comedy.

What's evident is that Kajishima had some big ideas for the series that he wasn't clearly communicating to others; Hasegawa would later recount how often details of the vision he shared with her during her writing of the scripts for the first six episodes (and a later series of Tenchi Muyo! light novels she authored) were after-the-fact, shocking her with major character reveals that probably could have better informed characterization in those first few episodes.

The thing was, the fans wanted more. Tenchi Muyo! was a hit, and spun off into the aforementioned novels by Hasegawa. An author's note from the first novel (One Visitor After Another: Hexagram of Love) reveals just how complicated this became:

Well, y’see I’ve kinda just about finished my first novel. Are you absolutely sure...

(via Tenchi Muyo! FAQ)

Released starting in May of '93 when the fandom was still waiting for more, Hasegawa's light novel series offered development for which the fans were desperate, and established the first divergent reality, the "Hasegawa Canon" that was for a time considered by the Japanese fandom to be part of the official OAV continuity. The first novel introduced concepts like the connection between Tsunami and Washu...as well as a fan-favorite character that many western fans don't know got her start in this branch of the OAVs, Mihoshi's partner Makibi Kiyone.

(image via No Need to Review Tenchi)

The light novels have yet to get an official English translation of any sort, but for a time, these (and an assortment of audio-only CD dramas introducing new characters and plots) were enough for the Japanese fandom....

But only for a time. At the onset of 1994, a manga began to be released, with art and stories by a little-known mangaka, Okuda Hitoshi. Okuda's characteristic style (further developed in his original series Detatoko Princess) shines through in his interpretations of the character designs.

The writing and art has a much more "gag manga" feel to it, even when the story turns serious. Still, it was some of the earliest Tenchi content this system's previous host had available to her, and so I have a certain fondness for it and the new characters it introduced, like the nervous shipwright Asahi, and Ryoko's much more meek and kindly clone Minagi.

The official translation also dates back to when English language publishers would flip the art for an American audience. Check which version you've picked up: left to right, or right to left?

The different tone carries into jokes like the characters debating who would be who among the characters in a Mito Komon parody, pointing out sound effects as if they were physical objects, or referencing the relative density of the screentone used to render Mihoshi's comparatively darker skin.

The later run of the manga was able to take advantage of details communicated in the light novels (perhaps as well as Kajishima's self-published dōjinshi full of sketches and concepts), such as Aeka's hair being naturally a curly blue-green.

The manga assumes you watched the first six episodes of the OAV, and marks a second branching continuity from them...soon followed by a third:

The little-known Tenchi Muyo! Ryo-Ohki game for the PC Engine (and later remade with bonus material for the PC-FX) split off into its own short-lived continuity. The game borrowed Kiyone and introduced another Galaxy Police officer, the high-strung and intense Hakua, voiced by Suzuki Masami in a performance so identicaly to her portrayal of Amelia wil Tesla Saillune in the Slayers anime that you can effectively know everything you need to know about Hakua by thinking of her as "Amelia from Slayers, as a space cop".

Other characters made minor appearances in both the original and remake, including the little-known Earthling Makura from the drama CDs showing up here as a pizza delivery girl and martial artist...are we certain that Ranma 1/2 is not part of the Tenchi Muyo! franchise?

(Makura defends Aeka, via Legendaryanimefanjp1's playthrough)

But such a high degree of popularity meant that the OAV's creators could not leave well enough alone. Come the Fall of 1994, the next batch of six OAV episodes began, focused on a storyline about Ryoko being replaced by a duplicate...and then visits from the adults of the royal throuple family of Jurai.

The start of the second batch of episodes marks the departure of Hasegawa and Hayashi from the franchise; Hayashi expressed both a dissatisfaction with how the characters turned out compared to his vision, and a disinterest in getting involved in Tenchi as such a large-scale project. It is in these episodes and the following light novels more directly co-written by Kajishima that we start to see Kajishima's ideal for the franchise starting to take shape, with a deeply complicated family tree that unfortunately means every major cast member is somehow related to another.

For almost a decade, that was it for the OAV continuity. And, in my opinion...that's the limit of what you need to worry about.

2003 brought a third OAV series that introduced yet another member of the harem and Mihoshi's weird little brother, 2016 saw a fourth series that focused on Tenchi's father remarrying and the development of relationships and expectations placed on Tenchi and his multiple love interests, and ing 2020 a fifth series developed plot points from the spinoffs and Japan-only novels and firmly established that Tenchi would marry all of the girls. 2002 brought us Tenchi Muyo! GXP, a spin-off focused on a luckless childhood friend of Tenchi being effectively press-ganged into joining the Galaxy Police and given his own harem, while 2009 gave us War on Geminar, a spin-off focused on Tenchi's half-brother getting isekai'ed and becoming the protagonist of his own harem.

Are you noticing a pattern, there? Well, don't worry about it too much: it's all garbage. GXP is almost watchable, but Kajishima considered it a failure of his vision due to directorial interference, and wrote another series of light novels focused on making sure that protagonist Seina's harem got even bigger and more complicated—a plan eventually realized in last year's Paradise Starting OAV.

Don't recognize any of these characters? Well, you see, you'd need to have read the spinoff novels that were never translated into English...and be familiar with the prose-only untranslated alternate canon of another spinoff...and possibly a bit drunk because by that point I cannot imagine you wanting to be sober....

As I said, the OAV continuity beyond the second series is not recommended. The shift to digipaint weathered a lot of the charm of the visuals, while an excessive use of badly-integrated CG for vehicles (including poor Ryo-Ohki) took that weathered charm and tossed it in the garbage. Both the original Japanese and the English dub are affected by the death or departure of the original voice actors for major characters.

In summary: the only parts of the OAV continuity that I can really recommend to an audience that is not fluent in Japanese are the first two series, and the Okuda manga.

Join us next time, when I tackle the multiple TV series continuities...or at least, the only one worth watching.

#tenchi muyo!#tenchi muyo #An Aeka Fictive's Guide to Watching

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