#berserk as a Shōjo manga

[swallowerofdharma]

So, what is Berserk about after all?

Please be considerate to me, don’t repost this, don’t share it outside of tumblr, don’t copy parts of it, thank you.

I have read really funny critiques and reviews of Berserk. Often they would refer to Miura supposedly saying that he didn’t plan everything out and they would use this statement to support their argument that after the Golden Age arc the story just looked like it dragged on. One, don’t ever fully believe what artists and writers say about their work. Second, without a proper conclusion it is impossible to make that kind of judgement and the story is ongoing. Then, not having a plan or having just vague ideas and taking inspiration here and there isn’t how manga works or how it gets published. When asked in an interview why he started creating Haibane Renmei as a doujinshi, Yoshitoshi Abe replied: “With mainstream publishing, it would've been difficult to do it with that avenue because of this particular approach with everything being adlibbed. I don't know how the story will be developed, how it's going to end up, or what the ending's going to be. If you go to a mainstream publisher, by their general approach, they have to know what the characters are, who they are, what the story's going to be, and how the story's going to develop so they know if there's going to be a serial, continuing storyline. They need to know how it's going to go”. Even though plans can be renewed and renegotiated, Miura still needed to make solid advanced plans and decisions and respect deadlines and page quotas. Even without considering this, the world building of Berserk seems too intentional and coherent to me to think that he didn’t really know how the story would go. Granted he created a reality that could be changed and bent by the human imagination and psyche, from the inside. This happened to be a brilliant choice for a long project like the Berserk manga.

I once read a review that pointed out the weakness of the later arcs and episodes, making the hypothesis that Miura was influenced by the success of stories like One Piece and Pirates of the Caribbean. I can’t really say that I share this opinion, either. Reviews like these make me smile, because they reveal how people missed a very big clue that Miura never really hid. Berserk was inspired by the story of Peter Pan as told by J.M. Barrie and reinterpreted in several different ways, not only visually. He went as far as dedicating to it the Lost Children chapters, immediately after the Eclipse, when the tension of the story was higher than it ever had been. We should read the Lost Children as an homage to the story of Peter Pan and Wendy that plays into the already disquieting themes of the original in darker tones and with much more horrifying elements; but we should also pay great attention to the Lost Children chapters as an important recontextualization of the events of the Golden Age arc. While I want to dedicate proper analysis and attention to this, I am going to add here that in Peter Pan we already had the pirates, the islands with hidden caves and the mermaids. The journey to Skellig island and Elfhelm had to be long enough for Moonlight Boy to make an appearance at least twice before the big reveal of his full identity the third time, and since he can only appear on nights of a full moon, Miura had to make the readers feel that time had passed. But Guts had always belonged in Neverland.

In my rudimentary outline of various elements that contributed greatly in building the world and story of Berserk, I actually ran out of space. And I want to properly address the various points and develop them more. For the moment I just really wanted to show that Miura had a very strong grip over the story and that he was really attentive to nuances. I said to myself, if I want to criticize the writing in Berserk at least I have to make sure I understand it to a sufficient extent.

Also I really wanted to at least give an idea of how important a role Shōjo manga had to Berserk. I hope to be able to fully explore this element soon.

[bthump]

lol I was asked not too long ago if Guts is feminine, and my answer was basically no, and I stand by that, but I'm reading an article about lesbianism in Shojo manga rn and this paragraph leapt out at me:

For the last thirty years, I have absorbed shōjo manga at about the same rate as I absorb oxygen, and what preoccupies me deeply is the extreme degree to which girls cannot help but want their own identities to be confirmed by another. The girls keep shouting “Somebody love me. Someone tell me that it is alright for me to be alive!” While much of this desire takes the form of a longing for heterosexual love, sometimes it is voiced directly to parents. It is no exaggeration to say that the words “Where is my place in the world?” may be used to represent the theme of nearly every shōjo manga. And the wonder drug that resolves this anxiety about the existence and acceptance of sexuality is a member of the opposite sex, someone you love telling you that he loves you and affirming your own existence. It is at that moment that the negative marker “woman” is changed dramatically into a positive one, and, it seems, the moment the woman begins to shine.

Where is My Place in the World - Early Shojo Manga Portrayals of Lesbianism (Fujimoto Yukari) [found here]

And considering Miura described Berserk as like half Shojo I gotta wonder if this is a theme he absorbed and reproduced, divorced from misogyny, with both Guts and Griffith's (and Casca's) characters, because it's pretty on the nose.

So yk, I wouldn't describe Guts as feminine, but to an extent I wonder if his narrative role might be in terms of genre signifiers in manga.

(relevant disclaimer: I am not an expert in manga genre conventions at all, it's entirely possible and maybe plausible that griffguts follow a more masculine template that has surface similarities to this shojo dynamic that i'm just not well-versed enough in seinen or shonen to identify. i'm just having fun drawing connections to things i'm reading.)

[canmom]

read about 40 chapters of One Piece (up until they get their ship), inspired by all the One Piece fever in the air.

[actually the impetus for this was my boss talking about Netflix One Piece being very successful, to which I thought, it's against my religion to watch a Netflix live action adaptation of a manga without first reading the manga. so I guess I finally read some One Piece.]

it would be absurd to judge it on <0.5% of the run, but my general impression is that so far... it's solid but conventional, kinda old-school shōnen. each arc so far has mostly seemed to set up... some characters for Luffy's party to protect, a new party member, and some suitably wacky antagonist with a gimmick worthy of a weekly toku show. which, to be fair, is completely fine - I love Berserk, but it sure has a lot of chapters that are just 'a scary guy shows up and Guts fights him'.

it feels very confident - it's kind of hard to believe it's so early in Oda's career, actually! there are a lot of manga storytelling devices that by now feel like old friends - ah, you have a 'treasure' that's precious to you, a place or object that stands as a material symbol of your connection to someone? ah, you're a wacky and weak guy but you're willing to die in a futile battle to defend your home, inspiring our nigh-invincible protagonists into action? lo, a flashback to the definitive moment that lays out your motivation? and i'm not complaining, this stuff works, it is used over and over for a reason! but I sometimes feel like I can hear the Final Fantasy XIV 'a flashback is happening now' music kicking in and it's like hehe, here we go...

I guess this feeling is sort of like the people who watch Citizen Kane and don't see what's so special about it. but then, One Piece began mid-90s - I haven't read enough old shōnen to have a sense of what was new in its formula. if you wanted to be very reductive, you could say Berserk's big trick was to mix a heavy dash of shōjo storytelling into a gritty seinen battle manga, so you have affects of tragedy, wistful longing, even light BL to ground the action chapters. as yet I don't have a sense of how to sum up One Piece's 'thing'.

mostly what i feel like it's missing for me is perhaps a certain level of bleakness and nihilism to counterbalance all these classic romantic devices. it feels kind of like a panto - indeed some of the villains feel like they could launch into an oh no you didn't/oh yes you did routine at any moment. but then as far as shōnen goes, I have perhaps been a little spoiled by Tatsuki Fujimoto! I'm not sure at what point you would say One Piece 'really gets going', its 'Golden Age arc' if you will.

honestly it could just be that I don't super get on with Oda's art style lol. it's definitely not bad on any technical level (well ok there are some funky arm proportions in places) - he's got a clear set of artistic focuses, like big grins and very rounded character shapes, that gives it an instantly recognisable identity - but it's just not my thing. although I still like it a lot more than the later style seen in e.g. One Piece Film Gold.

[swallowerofdharma]

Yes, this is exactly why I have been collecting these quotes here, in a blog mostly dedicated to the analysis of two different manga, two different visual stories, that have something in common: the depiction - in images and words, of states of mind and actions - of trauma: from the event/events that caused the wound or fracture to the condition of living with it and through it, dramatically changed by it. Because these aren’t real people, it is possible for me to look at this pain without feeling that I am prying on someone else’s, someone too real. Where the writers took the inspiration I can’t know and don’t need to know, but through their sensibilities they show that they have access to an understanding of pain and trauma and through art they transform reality into representations and narratives accessible to me to look at. How these manga are created, with a primary author that has to work within margins of freedom of expression - very limited censorship for example - yet within the reason of readability by people who belong to niche cultures - can lead to a particular kind of language in which expressions of pain and discomfort haven’t yet been suppressed or absorbed into various current ideologies that surround and influence our understanding of pain and trauma.

Casca is someone who doesn’t exist yet I can read about her, see her, because an artist imagined her and used her to express a number of things: how to live in a female body and be part of a group of mercenary men, how to fight for more than survival and how to become used to violence and war, how to trust and dream and how to be betrayed, how to get to have a little glimpse of the possibility of being accepted and loved both in mind and body, only to have that experience used against her. The types of horror and fear she experiences, the exploitation of her vulnerabilities are especially crude, but I don’t detect a form of misogyny in her representation, rather a form of exploration of the horror and fear of bodily harm, of sexual assault, of loss of autonomy or loss of self equally experienced by all of us, women or young men quite similarly. Reading yaoi to understand the context of the production of other stories within the same medium, and going back to Shōjo manga during transformative times like the 1960s and 1970s, I have noticed that many women mangaka would rather use male bodies to explore that type of narratives around trauma and/or sexuality. In some of the stories that followed, that we indicate as yaoi manga - the exploitation of male bodies - in the complete absence of representation of female bodies - can became gratuitous the more they try to replicate a model that sold well but without the same authenticity or inspiration, if you want. But this is an open world of possibilities.

What I have observed about Casca and other female characters in Berserk is the tenacity of the author to have characters who represent experiences differently and cooperate with the main character, a wounded man, and offer him insight into a world that isn’t exclusively male and made of fights and violence, of prevarication and conflict. Guts and Casca both survived the graphic violence of the Eclipse: rather than only seeing Casca as a disempowered victim, rather than understanding the choices about her characterization as bad writing, bad choices or an attack or general misogyny, I am looking harder to maybe find out if Miura was doing something that women mangaka showed him: the representation of horror and fear and in this case the representation of the fractured self and regression and loss of autonomy that the main character can’t have, because he needs to continue the story, and at the same time the impossibility of being able to fully represent the trauma in a body that is our own, so we use the “other”. Guts needs to understand how to stop the cycle of violence to have some form of success in the economy of the story and Miura surrounded him with women and girls like Schierke and Farnese and men and boys like Rickert, Serpico and Isidro and bright magical creatures, and a changed Casca, a woman that can’t give him any reward, especially of sexual nature, can’t give him something back nor can have his back in violence anymore, although they would reminisce about the past. Casca has been given a different role as a child herself and mother to a lost child, a woman who finds comfort in the company of other women, so different from when she was the only one, alone in a world of men. She was the one who had to adapt, now Guts has to adapt to her. How that will go? we can only hope that Miura left a solid indication to work with, now the story is told by someone else. And this can be disappointing to women who read the story and see a representation of gender roles that appear to be backwards, when in fact the story wants Guts to learn to be more of a person than a beast, to learn from the experience of others who are different from the people he grew used to, violent mercenary men who will always have the same response to trauma: more violence. Men that can’t fathom the possibility of showing the effects of debilitating trauma through silence or insanity or withdrawal or unconventional but non violent behavior and the need for compassionate people who won’t reject you and still value you.

Casca and Guts to me in various moments are the same character, what Miura couldn’t show through Guts he showed through Casca. A male writer, addressing a mostly male readership as his primary audience and mostly picturing themselves in the story, artist and readers: he isn’t catering to the wishes and psychological needs of a female readership. That’s freedom of expression too. Women can write and have written fictional characters and stories that have been using male bodies to show, understand and exorcise their fears and desires, often times completely disregarding the possibility of representing themselves or their physical bodies in the story. I am just fascinated by these forms of expression and I want to treat them as sources for reflection rather than for some intended or unintended recreational purposes. Misunderstandings and recriminations or manifestations of anger or disappointment, complaints and insults are just part of those recreational practices when we talk about media, visual media especially. I can occasionally see the point of that, but mostly I want to be able to understand artists and their expressions better, when they caught my attention like this.

Virtually every survivor of trauma, whether or not they experience diagnosable post-traumatic stress, returns to the regular world and quickly recognizes that things are not as they were. People behave differently. There is an element of strangeness, a sense, often uncommunicated, of being marked by a kind of scarlet letter, even if one has not violated any moral code. In fact, in these situations, one’s degree of innocence or complicity in events can seem almost beside the point, as if one’s luck or simple fate is what is at stake. Often this change of perception is expressed in physical, spatial terms, as if the scope of what has transpired is so vast that it serves to alter one’s material position in the world.

David J. Morris, The Evil Hours

[rare-drop]

Look me in the eye, & try to tell me that Berserk isn’t a Shōjo Manga.

[aquariusdeanw]

The thing that I hate the most about this new weave of anime fans is that they’ve generalized anime like other people do with other types of media.

For example, now people only watch “S tier seinen” because they’re the best, they’re peak fiction, the only thing worth watching.

You can bet your ass that they limit their watching/reading to berserk, vagabond, vinland saga, oyasumi pun pun, monster, etc.

Now, there is nothing wrong with liking seinen, I love seinen. It’s just that “weebs” discard every other genre of anime because for them dark seinens are superior.

Otakus weren’t like that. The thing I liked about our fandom, was that there was no shame in enjoying other genre of anime.

Film bros would hate to watch romcoms, romance movies; for them there is a certain embarrassment around watching “girl movies”. But otakus? They didn’t care about that. Your lie in April? Good. Ano Hana? Good. Clannad? They’d call you and say that was the best and saddest thing they’ve ever watched.

The whole “the big three aren’t that good, these seinen should be called that”. Completely disregard the impact that those shonen had on the manga/anime of the time. Not to talk about the complete obsession over proving that your favorite shonen is better than another. I swear to you IT WASN’T LIKE THIS BEFORE. Yeah there may have been some rivalry between like one piece fans and naruto fans, but it was never this toxic.

The complete abandonment of “slice of life” anime because for them the episodes feel like filler, expecting shonen to act like seinen and getting mad when notorious shonen trope is used, and the absolute lack of patience when it comes to slightly slow pacing. I could go on and on, and I just wish that things could go back to the way they were before. We were all fucking bullied for liking cartoons at “our big age” and the fandom made us feel not alone.

There was no “You like demon slayer? MID. it’s just the animation that carries the story. My hero academia? BORING, it follows the same shonen tropes that all the other shonen have, just read aot at this point.”

I’m not claiming there should be the death of personal opinions, quite the opposite in fact. Lately it seems that everybody’s taste is the same. if you ask 5 people their top 5 anime, 3 of those anime will be the same for these 5 people.

We used to share our different interests, now it’s like everyone is locked in the same echo chamber.

Go watch your slice of life anime! Talk about that shōjo! Watch that weird horror with only 4 episodes and 1 OVA! Recommend the super predictable shonen that makes you laugh! Drop that seinen that you’re not enjoying even if everyone says it’s peak fiction! Read that sport manga with impossible moves to replicate in real life!

BRING DIVERSE GENRE OF ANIME AND MANGA BACK

[amangould]

Apuntes sobre Manga y Anime

Significado de manga y anime

"Manga" es un término japonés para referirse a los cómics en general en Japón.

Para el pueblo japonés, el manga desempeña un papel intelectual y económico muy importante, y se considera un medio artístico y expresivo no menos digno que la literatura, el cine u otros medios de comunicación de masas.

El anime, palabra derivada del inglés "animation", no es otra cosa que los dibujos animados japoneses y suele estar basado en historias de manga.

Tipos de manga y anime

El manga y el anime pueden distinguirse en función de su público objetivo y sus categorías.

A quién va dirigido el manga

Basándonos en el público objetivo, encontramos un género de manga dirigido a los niños, llamado Kodomo. Ejemplos de Kodomo son Doraemon, Hamtaro, Magica Doremi.

En cuanto a un target de adolescentes, podemos distinguir entre el manga para chicas, llamado shōjo (aproximadamente de 10 a 18 años) y el manga para chicos, llamado shōnen.

El manga Shōjotrata principalmente de temas románticos y suele tener un personaje femenino principal. Hay muchos ejemplos de manga shōjo, sólo mencionaré algunos de los más famosos: Lady Oscar, Candy Candy, Marmalade Girl, Video Girl Ai.

Los shōnen, en cambio, suelen tratar sobre deportes, especialmente el fútbol o el béisbol, o se encuadran en el género de la ciencia ficción, con un héroe-robot o un héroe-piloto que lucha por salvar la Tierra de la invasión alienígena de turno, o personajes heroicos o fantásticos que, a base de duros combates, cumplen su misión.

Entre los shōnen más populares recuerdo a Saint Seiya, Dragon ball, Naruto y Bleach.

Para un público adulto, mayor de 18 años, existe un género llamado seinen y que trata temas complejos, con gráficos a menudo refinados: Es - sabbat eterno, 3×3 ojos, 20th century boys, Berserk, Akira, Bokurano, Vagabond.

Los mangas para mujeres adultas se llaman Josei o Ladies (ex - Honey and Clover, Paradise Kiss, Kimi wa petto - You are my pet).

También existe el yaoi manga que indica el manga centrado en las relaciones sexuales homosexuales entre protagonistas masculinos y se diferencian del shōnen'ai porque se centran en el aspecto explícito del acto sexual, mientras que los shōnen'ai se basan en la relación amorosa y se hace poco hincapié en la parte física.

Entre los shōnen'ai: Fake de Sanami Matoh, Gravitation de Maki Murakami.

Manga yaoi: Kizuna de Kazuma Kodaka, HEN, Afterschool Nightmare.

Los mangas Yuri (también llamados shōjo-ai) se centran en las relaciones homosexuales entre mujeres o chicas, donde se destaca tanto la parte sexual como la romántica-emocional de las relaciones entre mujeres.

Algunos mangas yuri: Maria-sama ga Miteru, Kashimashi, HEN, Love my life.

Actualmente, en Occidente hay mucha desinformación sobre el yuri. A diferencia del yaoi, no es muy conocido y las pocas series que presentan parejas femeninas homosexuales llegadas a Europa, han sido objeto de amplia censura. El ejemplo más eficaz es seguramente el de la versión italiana del anime de Sailor Moon.

Categorías de manga

Los mangas también se dividen por categorías:

Maho-shojo: manga y anime que tratan de historias de brujas y luchadores superpoderosos y extremadamente buenos a los que se les encarga salvar la Tierra de un desastre inminente. Es un tipo de lectura predominantemente femenina, aunque esto no excluye la posibilidad de que haya lectores masculinos.

Hentai: es un género de manga (pero también de anime, videojuegos y revistas de cómic) que contiene referencias sexuales o pornográficas explícitas. La palabra hentai en japonés significa "pervertido" y, por lo tanto, es utilizada por los japoneses de forma negativa, sólo que en Occidente el término hentai se asocia con el manga y el anime erótico, por lo que no es inusual que se realicen a menudo búsquedas de hentai online y hentai en español. En Occidente no tiene las mismas connotaciones negativas, y de hecho se ve como una excentricidad oriental más, que no suele tomarse muy en serio.

Luego están las categorías clásicas que no necesitan más explicaciones: aventura, ciencia ficción, terror/oscuridad (recuerdo claymore, devilman), magos/magia (enchanting creamy, Magica Emi, Rensie the witch), historias de detectives (Detective Conan, Inspector Gadget), psicológicas (Death Note, Es), escolares (la mayoría del shojo), deportivas (Oliver y Benji, Bateadores, Mila y Shiro). Algunos pueden encajar en varias categorías, por lo que no siempre es fácil catalogar un manga o anime.

El problema del manga y el anime

Durante muchos años el gran problema del manga y el anime fue que en Occidente no se concebía la posibilidad de que existiera este tipo de contenido enfocado a público adulto. Cualquier cosa que estuviese dibujada iba, indefectiblemente, dirigida a niños, por lo que muy a menudo se pusieron al alcance de los niños obras que no eran para nada aptas para ese público infantil.

Por suerte esta mentalidad está cambiando. Cada vez son más quienes comprenden que la animación no es exclusiva de niños, aunque posiblemente se trate de esa generación que creció viendo animes y leyendo mangas poco aptos para su edad, los que ahora, ya adultos, continúen consumiendo este tipo de productos, siendo ahora conscientes de que no son lo más adecuado para sus hijos y sobrinos, con quienes sí comparten animes y mangas hechos para niños, como por ejemplo Pokemon o Digimon.

En este mundo global, las tendencias y localismos serán cada vez más comprendidos en las distintas partes del globo, y niños y adultos de Japón, España o USA podrán disfrutar de las mismas historias se encuentren donde se encuentren, siendo capaces de ponerlas en contexto mucho mejor que antes.

[canmom]

[K6BD]

mm. Tom/Abaddon said in the alt-text that this is an eight-year-old storyline from the early days of the comic, and I think unfortunately it really shows - I wish he’d had the sense to leave this one on the cutting room floor.

What really gets me about these pages is how much it resembles a recurring archetype in early Berserk, particularly with the visual characterisation of the ‘despicable rapist’ character. It’s designed to evoke a feeling of special disgust by using signifiers like fat, skin blemishes and especially thick black body hair, the bushy eyebrows and a thick beard but bald head, and a massive emphasis on the lips. Which, you know what associations all that invokes! I don’t think there’s some sort of conscious intent to invoke Nazi propaganda imagery, but it’s crude and thoughtless.

This archetype of character is supposed to represent an extreme form of ‘bad’ masculinity; someone who is driven only by ‘base desires’ to a toxic degree, as opposed to the more sophisticated/civilised motivations of the protagonists. They’re there to perform a function in the story, i.e. to set up a traumatic backstory, and then die.

(below cut: visual comparison, further discussion)

Compare the guy who raped Griffith:

against the guy in this new K6BD update:

Essentially the same design with a bit of an oni spin on it, with the mouth pulled back in a perma-scowl/grimace like that.

And for good measure, another rapist guy from Made in Abyss who fits the template (here’s the anime ver, he looks about the same in the manga):

I could take a bit longer to compare other ‘despicable rapist’ character designs in Berserk, since Miura manages to hit just about all the imaginable variants sooner or later, but that probably suffices for illustrating this point.

In all these cases, these are very minor characters - paper-thin narrative tools. I'm sure K6BD will follow the same route and this guy will die at Maya’s hand. Their visual design is to help sell the sense of disgust and violation; their physical size signifies overwhelming power over their victim. Here in K6BD for example, Maya here is not a child unlike the other two cases, but the rapist character is made enormous compared to her all the same.

We could contrast the portrayal of other, more central (explicit or implied) rapist characters in both works, antagonists such as Griffith (straight up bishōnen, representing his allure and ‘perfection’) and Bondrewd (never seen without bulky armour, a truly extreme version of the Elfen Lied-esque ‘evil science dad’ who never lets up the paternal affect). For both those ero-guro-adjacent fantasy horror series, the pervasive [sexual] violence creates a really powerful sense of complete vulnerability. And a lot of that has to do with the feeling of excess, of pushing it too far. But their horror is most effective when they avoid such crude and stereotypical kinds of design/characterisation as the above.

And like, sexual violence and attendant trauma is definitely one of the central themes of Berserk, as paradoxically as it flips between erotic fascination and shōjo tragedy at whiplash speeds. The same isn’t really true of K6BD; it’s certainly all about violence, but it broadly steered well clear of sexual violence after vaguely gesturing at like ‘look sexual slavery is a thing in this world, nasty’ in the first book.

So as you say in the tags, throwing this in for some edge in the middle of this silly training arc is such a sour note. It’s trying to be grand and mythological as always, but it ends up deflating it with an off note from a different subgenre and like, taking on a topic way thornier than it can handle without seeming to realise it’s doing that. Kind of to be expected in this incredibly chuuni comic but still, big sigh.

i uh. see this is the sexual violence volume

[gintamajustaway]

Do you have a favorite type of manga Aero? Now that Gintama is over I'm looking for something new to read. I'm a long time follower and I know you won't read anything if it doesn't meet your criteria so I knew you'd be the best person to ask. Thanks! (Love your blog you're the sweetest mod)

I am incredibly picky with what I read, that’s true LOLOLOL As far as genres go, I’m open to anything so long as the story is solid. The only genre I tend to avoid is shōjo, so if you’re looking for any recs for that genre, this is not the right place. Note: I have absolutely nothing against that genre and I don’t care if other people enjoy it, it’s just not for me.

There honestly haven’t been too many manga that I loved so much I had to read them. Gintama was special, it was the only one I followed week to week. I own the entire Fullmetal Alchemist set and if you haven’t read that one, I highly recommend it. I haven’t started Berserk yet, but my brother is one of my best friends and we have similar tastes, so if he sings such high praise for that series, then I feel comfortable recommending it to you. Hunter x Hunter is a good read, but that one now has sporadic updates and I don’t know if you want to get into something where the next chapter doesn’t have a formal release date. ((The creator is super talented and wonderfully kind, but he’s ill and that’s why the next update isn’t always confirmed. He has a brilliant mind and has created some truly unique characters, so I’d recommend getting into Hunter x Hunter regardless.)) This isn’t a manga, but I like 19 Days and I really respect the creator. Last, I can recommend Mushishi. This one is a bit different, but it packs a punch and I really enjoyed it.

Of written books, I can always and without hesitation recommend The Song of Ice and Fire series by George R.R. Martin. The show was a sorry excuse and was horrible representation for this series, so if you’ve seen the show, please delete it from your brain. The books are well thought out, plot/character driven, and while there is some sexual content, it is nowhere near the level of over-sexualization the show presented. 

Two podcasts I can recommend are The Adventure Zone and My Brother, My Brother, and Me -- both created by the McElroy brothers. If you like to laugh as much as I do, these will definitely be for you. If you’re sitting there thinking, “I’ve never listened to podcasts before I’m not sure I like the idea of them,” then know this: I was the exact same way. I didn’t want anything to do with podcasts and then @taichichuwhat suggested The Adventure Zone and now I can’t imagine my life without it. 

It might not be much, but hopefully at least one of these will stick out and you’ll find enjoyment in them! I’m sure I’m forgetting some too since I wrote this really fast, but these were the ones that came immediately to mind, so you know they left enough of an impression to be remembered instantly. Best of luck! <3

[its-naruto-universe]

Sad/Tragedy anime to watch

Tragedy anime are my drug so those are some of my favorites that almost a must watch

Read it like the manga sequence

AnoHana

Natsuyuki rendezvous

Tokyo magnitude 8.0

Clannad  after story

Little busters Refrain

Akame ga kill 

Bokurano

Wolf’s rain

Kamisama no Inai Nichiyoubi

Zankyou no terror

Natsume Yuujinchou

Mawaru penguidrum

Donten ni Warau 

kanojo no neko

Hotarubi no mori e

Toki wo Kakeru Shoujo 

Orange

Puella Magi Madoka Magica

Gakkou gurashi

 Mahō Shōjo Ikusei Keikaku

Berserk

Basilisk 

Grave of the fireflies

Phantom: Requiem for the Phantom

Hal

Millennium Actress

Assassination Classroom.

Hanbun no Tsuki ga Noboru Sora

Elfen Lied

@saku-rawr

[swallowerofdharma]

Kentarō Miura, ~1991-92

Moto Hagio, ~1992-93

[coykouchou]

Other ANN news for today:

Manga/anime/light novels-

Vampire Princess Miyu, Vampire Yui Both Get New Manga Series

Beatless Anime Casts Takuto Yoshinaga, Kaito Ishikawa, Daiki Yamashita

1st 6 Minutes of LayereD Stories 0 Anime's 2nd Episode Streamed

Yasuhiro Irie's 'Halloween Pajama in Seattle' Anime Kickstarter Fails to Meet Goal

Attack on Titan: Lost Girls Anime DVD's Trailer Highlights 'Wall Sina, Goodbye' Story

March comes in like a lion Manga Tops Da Vinci Magazine's Rankings for 3rd Straight Year

Crunchyroll Adds Black Butler II, UFO Ultramaiden Valkyrie, Excel Saga to Catalog

Hakata Tonkotsu Ramens Anime's 2nd Promo Video Previews Opening Theme

Mahō Shōjo Ore Manga Gets TV Anime Starring Kaito Ishikawa, Wataru Hatano

Discotek Posts The Adventures of the Little Prince Anime's 1st Episode With English Subtitles

'When Supernatural Battles Became Commonplace' Light Novel Series Ends in 13th Volume

Bushiroad's Revue Starlight Franchise Gets 2 Manga

Karada Sagashi Horror Manga Ends, New Series Launches

Aggretsuko Netflix Anime's English-Subtitled Announcement Video Posted

Video games-

Captain Tsubasa: Dream Team Mobile Game Launches

Fate/Grand Order Arcade Game's 2nd Promo Video Reveals 6 Playable Characters

Amazing Katamari Damacy Mobile Game's Trailer Streamed

Otome Yūsha Smartphone Game Slated for Mid-December in Japan

ufotable Animates Code Vein Game's Opening Cinematic

A Certain Magical Virtual-On Game's Video Previews Game Modes, Theme Song

Live action and etc-

Actually, I Am… Theme's Rap Duo Hilchryme Goes on Hiatus After Member's Arrest

Late Manga Creator Jiro Taniguchi's Final Works Published

2 Men Found Guilty in Trial for Posting Yowamushi Pedal, Other Manga Online

Hayao Miyazaki's New Ghibli Museum Anime Short Now Planned for 2018

Live-Action Impossibility Defense Mini-Series' Trailer Previews Theme Song

[canmom]

assorted manga comments

Berserk is back! I imagine that will inspire some complicated feelings for Kouji Mori, but I’m glad he has the means to continue his friend’s life’s work. It is something I very much want to do for Fall - I can’t become a translator like her, although I am now making progress in Japanese, but I wish to try and keep alive her love of languages and attitude towards life. If any of my friends left an unfinished work, and I thought they’d trust me to finish it, I would want to do the same.

Anyway, these new chapters don’t really move things forward too much, but they do show that Mori et al. can hit the same incredible visual complexity that they were under Miura. Not surprising because I’m sure they were drawing a lot of the manga even before Miura died. I just hope that they’re getting to work at a reasonable pace, because one person dying of likely overwork is already far, far too many.

I started reading Fire Punch, the earlier manga by Chainsaw Man author Tatsuki Fujimoto. I also read his one-shot Goodbye, Eri. It’s very interesting seeing multiple works by the same author like this: you get a sense of what motifs they find especially interesting, which in Fujimoto’s case seems to be getting dommed by a girl who’s obsessed with movies, and characters with healing factors.

Fire Punch is a big step up in grimdark compared to Chainsaw Man - it’s rare to go a chapter without at least one of attempted (sometimes actual) rape, slavery or dismemberment. It is an amoral world where human life has become very cheap and those with power are unafraid to treat people entirely instrumentally - where people with superpowers are common but likely to be used as human batteries or sources of meat. In many ways it reminds me of the earlier chapters of Berserk, but there is a certain harsh dryness to it, in contrast to Berserk’s shōjo-influenced emphasis on emotion; characters state their desires and intentions plainly, and it focuses often on characters who treat violence dispassionately. It doesn’t yet have the dash of humour that came in with Chainsaw Man, and its action compositions haven’t quite reached the same unbelievable level, but you can see the ingredients of Chainsaw Man.

I think Fujimoto is a very interesting author; he has a deep fascination with the structures of domination and cruelty, but also a very interesting eye towards narrative structure and especially cinema. Much like the film nerd guy in Paprika, characters will talk about filmmaking in ways that will be reflected in the design of the comic itself. Both Fire Punch and Goodbye Eri feature the device of a movie-obsessed character wanting to make someone’s life into a movie by filming everything that happens; in Fire Punch she’s much more determined to direct and edit, while Eri is more of a critic bringing out the art in the main character, and it does some fun things blurring the lines of what’s ‘real’.

The visual style of all three of these manga - especially Goodbye Eri with its motion blur, and most of the panels diegetically being shot from the POV of a camera - also makes heavy reference to cinema. Fujimoto’s ‘camera’ is very cinematic: he’s very good at drawing faces in perspective from a variety of angles, which allows quite subtle body language to be conveyed. And he loves his huge special effects panels of a huge building getting smashed to pieces. But despite this, his drawings of characters - typically with minimal shading - tend to feel like they have an appealing simplicity with the very even, neat lines. He has a particular way of drawing eyes which is very characteristic, I think. I should do some studies of it. His fire effects in Fire Punch meanwhile are absolutely fantastic - incredible use of value and texture in a black and white medium.

Made in Abyss also updated - plus we have a continuation of the anime to look forward to soon so that’s exciting. It’s the start of a new arc, which seems to mean a really massive update of something like 90 pages, which bring a bunch of new characters, including a really big girl which is fun... the new guys seem surprisingly sympathetic at first glance, which means Tsukishi probably has something really horrifying waiting round the corner. That man can do some crazy things with tone and rounded shapes - the sense of depth in some of his backgrounds! The MCs are getting really close to the bottom of the Abyss, so I imagine some of those long running plot arcs might come to a head - if not in this arc then maybe in the next. Honestly I’m kind of looking forward of the anime treating the previous arc just because there were so many characters to keep track of, so a second run through would probably be good lmao.

And... It’s not manga, but also read a few pages of Finder by Carla Speed McNeill. I really want to get a physical copy, but oof, £40 per collected volume is a lot of money. I think this is definitely a series I want to be able to fully concentrate on, so expect detailed commentary on that later haha...

[swallowerofdharma]

1 and 18 for Isidro from Berserk?

1. Why do you like or dislike this character?

To be entirely honest with you, at the beginning, when Isidro was introduced, I didn’t like him very much or better, I didn’t see the need to have him around. I was eager to see Guts’s progress in reconnecting with Casca, and to solve the mysteries surrounding the prophecy, the dreams of a White Hawk and the Tower of Conviction, a place where various characters were converging together. I could feel the anticipation of something big happening and I was a bit impatient. And since Guts was repeatedly leaving people behind, Casca herself, Jill just recently, Rickert especially - although I like how he inherited Godo’s legacy and who he becomes - I felt like Isidro following Guts was an odd choice at that time. He seemed to me a type of shōnen protagonist that Berserk could do without, although I understood that lighter tones and comedic moments were something that maybe Miura wanted to experiment with, too, and surprisingly his way of making things exaggerated or over the top or abruptly changing the tone and then go back and reconnect with the overall themes and more dark and somber moods somehow still worked for me. What I like then, after giving Isidro his chance, is that in his fascination with the “Hundred Man Slayer” of the mythical band of the Hawk, he never recognized Guts as that idealized figure in his head, nor Guts has any interest in revealing his past, because he knows what a negative example would that be. Begrudgingly he let Isidro tag along, and as more people came alongside Guts and Casca, this young boy in the background has a chance to grow and learn and trust in himself, to become his own person. Such a contrast with Guts’s boyhood, told more in the style of a shōjo manga, with little if any comedy or lighthearted moments, so I say to myself let Isidro be like this and let this story show the possibilities of what manga can do in terms of range.

18. How about a relationship they have in canon with another character that you admire?

Isidro is a bit of an outsider, I don’t think even his relationship with Guts is very deep and maybe it’s good that he is learning different things from everyone in their little group. But there is a scene the comes to my mind and surpasses all the other Isidro moments and interactions and that is the brief moment when Casca trains with him in Elfhelm. He seems genuinely happy to be able to talk to her, and I had never put much thought into the fact that he was instrumental in rescuing her in the Tower of Conviction, and when he gets to know her fully it is a very nice moment.

And it is significant, until other memories come back, but Casca’s first words to Guts after such a long time are about Isidro. Considering that she grew up alongside boys a lot like him, that feeling of familiarity and nostalgia mixed together are very bitter sweet. Thank you for this very interesting ask!

[canmom]

Toku Tuesday 40: Seinen Manga

みんなさん、今晩は！

Good evening everyone! We’re going to continue another week of ‘actual tokusatsu’: tonight on Toku Tuesday, our theme is, movies based on seinen manga...

In the notional demographic system of manga, 青年 seinen means ‘adult men’, in contrast to the other major demographic categories of 少年 shōnen (teenage boys), 女性 josei (adult women), and 少女 shōjo (teenage girls). In practice these categories, defined at the magazine level, are very porous; a series can move between different magazines of different demographics, and they often serve more as genre classifications than ‘only x demographic will be interested in y kind of story’.

We can maybe see all four demographics as successors to the legacy of the gekiga movement of more adult-oriented comics; once, gekiga was conceived of as a different type of thing entirely than manga, but now it’s all conceived of as different types of manga and the oldschool Tezuka-style comics have almost completely vanished. I’m not exactly sure how or when that shift happened...

So, what exactly does seinen manga mean? I am nowhere near widely read enough to give a full overview, but the manga that I’ve read that falls into this category tends to include heavy psychological dramas, historical fiction, horror, nihilism, and of course (probably goes without saying) usually quite a bit of sex and gore. Many of Tumblr’s favourite mangaka, like Junji Ito and Kentaro Miura, fall into this demographic, but so too do works like Houseki no Kuni.

I think there may also be a visual component, in that the works I think of often show an emphasis on high detail, anatomical realism and very refined linework, although inevitably that depends a lot on the artist, and to a fair extent is shared with manga at large. Even within those trends, there is of course considerable diversity. Here, take a look at a few examples, all classified under seinen...

Homunculus, illus. Hideo Yamamoto.

Made in Abyss, illus. Akihito Tsukishi:

Vagabond (coloured version), illus. Takehiko Inoue

Uzumaki, illus. Junji Ito:

Berserk, illus. Kentaro Miura:

Houseki no Kuni, illus. Haruko Ichikawa:

Ghost in the Shell/Koukaku Kidoutai, illus. Masamune Shirow:

Gantz, illus. Oku Hiruya

Insofar as a lot of such manga depends on the specific qualities of illustration and comics, adapting them to film - whether animation or live action - can be a tricky challenge for a director. But there have been plenty of attempts! So tonight what I have for you are adaptations of two manga series I enjoyed. Which is mostly an excuse to talk about some manga I find interesting! To not keep you in suspense, that’s Gantz and Homunculus change of plans, Ichi the Killer.

Lets start with Gantz. This was perhaps the first really edgy manga I read, back at the age of... I want to say 17? It was a big shock at the time, but also was still pretty early in its run. I came back to it much later to read with adult eyes.

Gantz starts on a relatively small scale: a group of people who recently died wake up in a room, where a large shiny black orb containing a bald man on life support mocks them and equips them with strange weapons and suits before dispatching them to assassinate an ‘onion alien’. The series is deeply fascinated with gore, from the gradual ‘printing’ of people in space by the Gantz orb to the delayed, splattery dismemberment of the sci-fi guns. The protagonists soon discover the many dangers of their missions: they’ll get their heads blown off if they stray too far from the mission area, their superstrength suits can be overloaded, and their enemies become increasingly overwhelming. In between battles, Kei returns to his civilian life at school, unable to speak about what’s happening in the strange pocket dimension where the battles take place, but soon the violence spills out to threaten him at home as well.

But what of the actual thematic arc of the series, beyond the moment to moment action? This centres at first on the dynamic between Kei Kurono and Masaru Kato, reunited when they are killed by a train attempting to rescue someone who fell onto the tracks. Kei was once a very prosocial upstanding young man, but by the outset of the series becomes increasingly embittered; Masaru on the other hand looked up to Kei’s example when they were younger and tries desperately to save the people teleported by the orb. Spoilers, Masaru dies, and Kei - who survives enough missions to become confident navigating the battles - starts to attempt to live up to what Masaru saw in him and earn enough points to bring him back, along with everyone else who died, all contrasted against the nihilistic views of other successful survivors and the slaughter of the various groups pulled into the sphere.

It’s also a story of... a lot of love triangles! Kei falls into relationships with various girls, from a popular idol who’s part of the Gantz team, to a shy schoolgirl. Sounds like wish fulfilment? No doubt, but as the series goes on, it turns into a story of an alien invasion by enormous giants who start to gather the humans as pets. It turns out the Gantz system was somehow a means to train humans to resist the aliens, put in place by a third alien power. The series splits into a number of different narrative strands, following humans trapped in the alien spaceship - Kei’s girlfriend Tae in particular - and the resistance on the ground.

Eventually, the humans win and start committing war crimes against the giants, and the third party reveals themselves to tell everyone that they are omnipotent, everyone’s suffering is pointless, and there is no god, and to demonstrate this point, they summon back various deceased characters and then kill them off again. But also reincarnation is in fact real! The series ends with Kei, finally reunited with Tae, going back into space to fight a duel with one of the surviving alien giants to protect the Earth from a last-ditch attack by the aliens.

A word must surely be said of Gantz’s attitude to girls. It’s undoubtedly horny as all hell; the camera loves to linger on nude shots and nearly every issue of the manga will have a cheesecake version of the suit at the start or end. It’s not unable to afford girls subjectivity or give them a place in the battles, even if the centre of the narrative is always Kei. The relationship between Tae and the alien giant woman who initially takes her as a pet but later starts talking to her is interesting, with definite shades of Fantastic Planet. But ultimately, all the girls desires are rather limited by the heterosexual imagination - a very frustrating limitation.

It’s quite a thing. It is a very chaotic story, with a keen sense for impactful and disturbing visuals. Although I know Hiruya intended from the start to slaughter most of the cast, I feel like the overall arc of the story can’t have been planned; rather what unites it is perhaps an overall attitude. The ideas it’s dealing with - hope, despair, nihilism and meaning - are perhaps familiar, and Kei is very much an anime protagonist boy not too far afield from his shōnen counterparts, but the underlying brutality helps give them a bit of weight.

As a highly popular manga, Gantz has seen a few adaptations, although none attempt to cover the whole work. None other than Ichirō Itano, inventor of the Itano Circus shot in which dozens of missiles scatter across the screen (c.f. Animation Night 64) took it on in 2004, carrying on the ethos of his bloody 80s OVAs like Battle Royal High School. Maybe at some point we’ll take a look at that on Animation Night?

Five years later, a second attempt would begin: Shinsuke Sato’s live action film adaptation, consisting of three films (one made for TV), the first released in 2009 and seemingly fairly closely following the early parts of the manga, the second diverging with a plot in which there are two Masarus, one good and one evil. This project seems to have been reasonably successful, praised for the special effects, and would set Sato on a path to adapt more manga to film, including one of Bleach. Whether it can capture the sense of desperation that the manga expresses remains to be seen, but I’ll definitely be curious.

My plan for the second film was to take last year’s adaptation of Hideo Yamamoto’s manga Homunculus by Ju-On creator Takashi Shimizu. Unfortunately I hear it sucks, both as an adaptation and a film in its own right, stripping the manga of the complexity that is so vital, particularly in e.g. the rape scene where an exceptionally careful touch would be needed. I haven’t found even one good review of it, from fans or critics of the manga alike; fans are in particular unhappy that it substantially changed the second half of the story and removed a lot of character complexity.

So let’s abandon that plan and go for another gorefest, based on a different Hideo Yamamoto work: Ichi the Killer.

Now, to be clear, I have not read Ichi the Killer, and I can’t comment on whether Miike’s adaptation is close or not. Regardless of its origin, the film garned immense controversy for being really hyper-gory (trust Miike!), portraying a spiral of yakuza violence surrounding an extremely unsympathetic main character. Critics say things like

"It's a paradox, but Ichi the Killer, a film that sets new boundaries in the portrayal of violence and bloodshed, takes a strongly critical stance towards the portrayal and the consumption of the violent image. However, it does so without ever taking a moral stance towards either the portrayal or the consumption, thus circumventing any accusations of hypocrisy on the part of the director. Miike does not moralise or chastise, but provokes the audience into questioning their own attitudes towards viewing images of violence. He steers them into a direction but leaves it up to them to draw their own conclusion".[5]

I suppose we’ll see for ourselves what that means. Miike is someone we have seen on many a previous Toku Tuesday, albeit more in the softer end with films like The Happiness of the Katakuris and Zebraman. So this is perhaps an opportunity to dive into the other side of Miike, the one who is known for his splattery films and pushing boundaries to breaking point. (Some of which we saw in his take on Jojo).

Ichi the Killer follows an unstable, sadistic man who loves to get off on watching other people commit sexual violence. He is manipulated by a man named Jijii who, acting behind the scenes, wants to kill off various factions of yakuza. Under Jijii’s hand, Ichi is given a number of false memories, convincing him in particular that he raped someone in high school, which shapes him into a horny murderer that Jijii can turn on whoever he wants removed. The plan, inevitably, goes to shit and the escalating violence soon reaches back towards Jijii himself. The whole affair sounds reminiscent of something like the Vengeance Trilogy (TT#29), and it has similar moments of ‘ooohhhhhh gross’ like skewers in ears.

From reading this film’s synopsis, it seems very few people walk away from this bloodbath intact, but sex workers seem to have both a fairly major role (almost all the women mentioned in the synopsis are sex workers) and don’t tend to live very long in this film. I feel like there is probably a lot to critically analyse here, especially placed alongside the other works of Hideo Yamamoto, but I should hold off until I have seen the film and also read the original manga.

So to summarise, tonight the plan is to watch Gantz (2011), and Ichi the Killer (2001)! In whichever order they first get onto my hard drive.

Unfortunately due to a paucity of seeds, I am still waiting for the films to download. Expect Toku Tuesday to begin in maybe an hour and a half, around 9pm UK time, and I’ll be sure to announce it here when we’re ready.