Scary Girlfriends

I was debating how to introduce this post, and decided that the song that crystallized it for me was just too good an introduction to pass up. ZZ Top's Got Me Under Pressure:

She likes wearin' lipstick, she likes French cuisine
But she wont let me use my passion unless its in a limousine.

She got me under pressure.

She likes the art museum, she don't like pavlovs dog.
She fun at the mind museum, she likes it in a London fog.
She don't like other women, she likes whips and chains.
She likes cocaine and filppin' out with great danes.
Shes about all I can handle, its too much for my brain.

Its got me under pressure.

I'm gonna give her a message,
Heres what I'm gonna say:
Its all over.
She might get out a nightstick
And hurt me real real bad
By the roadside in a ditch.

Its got me under pressure.

Yeah. Scary girlfriends.

Female romantic interest lead character types in manga and anime for male readers are usually pretty generic. You've got your tsundere, you've got your yamato nadeshiko, you have the childhood friend (in both remembered and forgotten variations), you have the magical girlfriend - though sometimes (as in Chobits) she comes with scary fine print. There are a few variations on the theme, but they're rare, and usually they're just twists on the familiar.

It's not surprising. Japan was entirely a feudal, agrarian society until about 150 years ago. As in the Western feudal tradition, women were expected to keep the home fires burning and produce the next generation, and were valuable as bargaining chips in land and property negotiations. The difference between us and them is that all of this mostly came to a halt in Western societies about 300 years ago, but it was still going strong as an expected standard of behavior for Japanese women as late as the 1940s. Marriage for status is alive and well today in Japan, as is arranged marriage. Both are leftovers of the same feudal system.

When you're trying to wrap your mind around the dynamics of something like Minmei suddenly wanting to settle down with Hikaru at age 19 in Macross, Aoi at age 19 running away from home to latch onto her guy in Ai Yori Aoshi, or any of countless other similar cases in shounen/seinen mangaworld of the female lead aspiring to be the stay-at-home housewife (奥さん) as her highest goal, try to apply something like a 1930s-1950s USA mindset to it. They didn't have a women's liberation movement in the 1970s, and most Japanese women don't see the point of one now.

Because of changing demographics and economics, women in Japan are doing steadily more work outside the home to make the wheels go around and keep food on the table. This creates a strain with men's expectations. I believe that a lot of the doormat qualities of shounen/seinen romatic interests have to do with wish fulfillment - you can't find a real girl like this, but we can surely draw one for you in a manga.

The bad girl exists in male-oriented manga, but not normally as a romantic interest. Usually she's a spoiler in a harem story (as with Akemi in Maison Ikkoku, or Rin in Midori no Hibi) or sometimes she might be some sort of fairy godmother/hot landlady to the male lead (as with Haruka in Love Hina). Inevitably, she'll develop some side-plot that vaguely points to a happy ending for her at the end of the story after she has finally given up on messing up the primary relationship in the story.

But there has been, in recent years anyway, a small trend toward making the bad girl the female lead in a shounen romance. The results are generally interesting, as you would expect. Here then, are three examples of girlfriends who, to quote ZZ Top, just might hurt you real, real bad.


I've mentioned Mirai Nikki previously in my blog, but I hadn't really gone into much detail. Here, then, is a proper review.

1.
未来日記
Mirai Nikki
Future Diary
Serialized in Kadokawa's Shounen Ace

Amano Yukiteru, 'Yukki' to his friends, is a rather boring Japanese schoolboy who acts and dresses like someone growing up to be a hikkikomori like Satou from Welcome to the NHK. He's detatched from school, his classmates, and life in general. He has three noteworthy characteristics:

1. He compulsively diarises everything in his cell phone.
2. He is the coolest hand with darts and a dart board you've ever seen.
3. When bored, he imagines conversations with his imaginary friend, a super-powerful being named Deus Ex Machina.

At right: The inside cover to Vol 1.

One day, his imaginary friend declares that it's time to upset things, and so adds a special new feature to Yukki's cell-phone diary. It now shows entries from his near future. Yukki has the ability to alter his fate by changing his actions based on the cell phone's predictions.

Sounds like fun, right? The diary even provides the correct answers for school exams. Well, it is fun...for a while. Then Yukki meets Gasai Yuno. As he thinks to himself when checking her out in class, "Good grades, and beautiful. Our school's very own idol."

At left: Yuno at her cutest cluing Yukki in. This is a good example of the art at its best. Sorry for the resize artifacts - they're not in the scanslation original.

Seems like some variation on the magical girlfriend story, doesn't it? Well, it's true that Yuno very much wants to be Yukki's girlfriend. She wants to be Yukki's girlfriend so much that she also has a cellphone future diary...except hers tells the story of her relationship with Yukki with a ten-minute resolution. 'Stalker' is not too strong a word to describe her. Indeed, I'm not sure there's a word that is strong enough to describe her feelings toward Yukki. It's also true that she tends to have...violent tendencies toward people who get between her and whatever she wants. Did I mention that she seems to be quite talented with a variety of edged weapons?

There's more to the plot, of course. Yukki and Yuno are just two of many people who have been given some sort of prognosticating diary, and they're all trying to kill each other as rapidly and efficiently as possible so that they can get 'the prize.' Nothing especially original there (it was an old plot when The Highlander was made in the 1980s), although the treatment is good, and the manga's overall story telling ability isn't bad.

At left: Yuno and Yukki share a tender moment through Yukki's mail slot.

It's shounen, so don't expect a deep and complex plot. There is, however plenty of action, and it does a good job with varying things. So far (we're currently scanslated to vol. 5), plot is still fresh.

Because foretelling is such a big part of the plot, nearly every chapter starts off with something that would normally be called a spoiler. Truth is, though, that the 'spoilers' are missing context. As with a teaser for the next episode of a TV show, they serve to heighten the reader's interest, rather than actually spoil anything.

At right: Yuno definitely qualifies as a scary girlfriend.

2.
謎の彼女X
Nazo no Kanojo X
Mysterious Girlfriend X
Serialized in Kodansha's Afternoon monthly

For our second entry in the scary girlfriend sweepstakes, we're going to take a step into the seinen zone - the bizarre and quirky corner of the seinen zone, to be exact.

Tsubaki Akira was a typical Japanese second-year high-school student leading a completely unremarkable life. One day, mysterious Urabe Mikoto transferred into his class mid year and was seated beside him. Shortly after that, Akira's life became considerably more remarkable.

At left: Mikoto and Akira share a few words about drool early in Chapter 0 in their first private meeting.

It's not an accident that drool (and I agree with the translators' word choice here) figures in this page. Drool is, in fact, the vital lubricant that keeps the wheels of this manga turning. Mikoto and Akira do eventually become attached...sort of, but I'm not going to spoil the how and why.

Your art sample at left illustrates Ueshiba's character designs. Yes these are supposed to be high schoolers. If it makes you feel any better, Akira's older sister and his homeroom teacher both look young for their ages, too. I don't think he's aiming for the lolicon market - he draws males the same as females and when we see figures they're appropriately developed for the stated character age.

At right: Mikoto chastens Akira

Oh well, it's not jarring once you get used to it, anyway. From what little I've been able to find on his two prior mangas, Discommunication and Yume Tsukai (which was also made into an anime), he just draws people like this. Discommunication's plot, incidentally, sounds somewhat like Mysterious Girlfriend X's plot.

At left: Akira takes the hint.

About now, you might be wondering, "so what's so scary about Mikoto, anyway?" Well, Mikoto is pictured on the cover of volume one in an action stance holding a pair of scissors. Yes, scissors. Blunt-tipped ones with ergonomic plastic grips, to be exact. She's never separated from them. When Akira steps out of line, out come the scissors...

Who knew schoolgirls with scissors could be so scary?




3.
まほらば
Mahoraba
(difficult to translate. 'Mahora' is something like 'great and splendid place' in the ancient Yamato language).
Serialized in Square Enix's Gan Gan Wing monthly

Our third scary girlfriend story is a little different from the prior two. For one thing, no edged weapons are involved. The male lead, likewise, isn't cut from the same cloth as the prior two, either. Shiratori Ryuushi is not a shounen schoolboy. He's left his unspecified two-hours-from-Tokyo hometown for the big city to pursue his dream of being a children's book author at the Sumeragi School of Design. As you may already know, the hardest part of being a student in metro Tokyo is finding someplace affordable to live. Our young gentleman lucks out on this - distant relatives own the Narutaki-sou apartment house, which happens to be quite convenient to his school, for all that it's in the shadow of skyscrapers. He's determined, disciplined, very polite and soft-spoken, and, now that I think of it, is a little like Mr. Rogers must have been at age 19. He's also totally unprepared for what is about to befall him.

At left: ooyasan kawaii! Ryuushi discovers that Narutakisou's biggest attraction isn't its location, but its landlady.

Things start well enough, as you might expect. Indeed, the setup feels a little like a story from a Key bishoujo game. Bubbly, cute (and distantly-related) space-cadet schoolgirl landlady Aoba Kozue remembers Ryuushi, but he remembers neither Narutakisou nor her. We meet several of his fellow tennants, who look like the usual set of stock characters set on impeding the progress of love between the two obvious protagonists.

And here's where Kojima-sensei earns my admiration. He takes what could be the same plot we've seen with variations before in dozens of boarding-house harem romances (Maison Ikkoku, Love Hina, Ai Yori Aoshi, Chobits and Ai Kora all come to mind), and sets you up perfectly. You're expecting a cross between Ai Yori Aoshi and Maison Ikkoku full of the standard character tropes and well-worn gags, and what you get is something else entirely.

At right: the mysteriously capable Tachibana's tarot card. Yes, there was a complete set of them which I'd love to have. from here

None of the characters in Mahoraba (he wrote, loosely quoting G'Kar) is precisely what he seems. You'll see what appears to be a bottle fairy, a tsundere, a hot mamasan, the ditz, a genki girl, and an assortment of others. Indeed, when described, it sounds like a generic hack job like...say...Love Hina. But if you stick with it through the end of volume 1, you'll discover that appearances can be deceiving. By the end of the series, you'll know everybody's back story. Even some of the minor characters who are never assigned names get a little bit of a back story. And the back stories aren't generic. If you're like me (an unabashed Tachibana fanboy), you'll wish you had some more back story for some of the characters when the series ends.

At this point, you're bound to be wondering who the scary girlfriend is. No, she's not Tachibana, who is quite capable of being scary, but isn't, as far as we know, anybody's girlfriend. It's no spoiler (since it's the very first page of the manga) to say that a principal character has DID (also known as MPD).

Further, it's a very, very small spoiler to add that the afflicted character is the Kozue, the cute landlady. You may or may not know much about the pop culture or clinical theory of DID, but suffice it to say that the manga actually stays relatively close to the clinical expectations of such a case. Kojima-sensei again earns my respect by avoiding cheap gags relating to Kozue's condition. The diesase isn't the subject of humor, but its effects on the other inhabitants of Narutakisou are indeed played for laughs. At some point you realize that the carefully happy family of Narutakisou exists to both keep awareness of Kozue's condition from her, and also to protect her from the vicissitudes of the uncaring world beyond its walls.

The first of Kozue's alternate personas we meet is Akasaki Saki. Saki-chan is as aggressive and physical as Kozue is kind and polite. Shiratori meets her when Kozue retreats from an embarrasing situation and leaves Saki to manage things. Saki automatically assumes the worst about Ryuushi and then proceeds to abuse him both physically and mentally until even the nominal bottle-fairy character feels sorry for him and extricates him from the situation.

At left: Ryuushi meets Saki-chan...or at least her iron fist.

I won't spoil any more of the fun about Kozue's nature, except to say that at least one other persona is as tough on Shiratori's mental self-image as Saki-chan is on his body. It's a slow reveal that takes quite a few chapters to complete, because there's plenty of other plot going on in the meantime. We meet Ryuushi's memorable classmates and his even more memorable instructor. Likewise, a slow exploration of the stories of the other inhabitants of Narutakisou begins, and several of these subplots take up whole chapters as they work toward resolution. They're nicely interspersed with other chapters and help to fill out a mosaic image of the world of Mahoraba. This is one manga that definitely doesn't have the Fruits Basket floating world problem.

Another thing I like about this manga is that Ryuushi never has to go through the shounen rite of 'growing a pair,' as I call it. Usually, shounen leads in harem romances (and Mahoraba is nominally shounen, even though it has unusually complex characters), start off too weak-willed to deserve the love of their intended, and have to go through some painful rite of passage in which they suck it up and get a backbone to make them worthy of the female lead's love/able to provide for her/get her out of her predicament/blah blah blah.

At right: Ryuushi trying to come to terms with Saki's existence
At Left: Saki demonstrates that she doesn't need a fist to beat Ryuushi up.

For instance, in Maison Ikkoku (1980), Godai is a poor ronin student studying for his college entrance exams who has to get a direction to his life and a reliable income source in order to prove his worthiness to the female lead (the apartment house manager). Likewise, in In Love Hina (1998), Keitaro is (again) a hopeless ronin student who finally gets some traction with the love interest only when he gets into university with her after something like ten volumes of bad scholarship jokes and physical abuse by the female lead (yes, I thought about including Love Hina on the list of Scary Girlfriend manga, but I don't want people to think I'm recommending it). See also Suzuka, Video Girl Ai and Ai Yori Aoshi among many others.

Yes, it's a recurring theme, and frankly, it has been overdone. Male leads like Shiratori Ryuushi in Mahoraba and Motosuwa Hideki in Chobits are refreshingly different in that they're perfectly functional guys who don't have to better themselves to get on with the plot. Our first clue that Ryuushi is not quite the pushover he initially seems to be is in chapter 7, where he rewrites the rules of a game to improve his chances of winning and then plays to exhaustion because he has reached the limit of polite acceptance of his neighbors' loud partying. At that point, he clearly departs from the generic harem lead, and shows us that, in Mahoraba, at least, nice guys definitely don't finish last, and that he lives up to his given name's dual meaning (noble gentleman/noble samurai).

At right: Mahoraba Ch. 7: Mr White Swan lays down the law on the peach one. No directionless wuss he.

In closing on Mahoraba, I have to mention yet another rare and good thing about it: it has been entirely, excellently, and lovingly scanslated by only one very talented scanslation group. So far, Mahoraba is Hiyoko no Gao's only product. They obviously love the manga and try very hard to carry the meaning and semblance of the manga into the English scanslation. They also put out a translators' notes file with every chapter released - a wonderful practice that I wish more scanslation groups would adopt. There's not always room for a cultural note or a detailed explanation on the manga page, but that doesn't mean that I don't want to miss the information, especially if it deepens my insight into the culture or the story. The only other manga scanslation I can name that is consistently anywhere near as good and uniform over such a long run is Snoopycool's work on Midori no Hibi.

Fansubs vs. Commercial Subs, and Common Errors of Fansubbers and Scanslators

...and why commercial distro companies are doing a bad job of competing. To be fair, it's always hard to compete with people who do something for free out of love of the product, which is why Microsoft is so terrified by Linux (frankly, having produced a crapoplex like Vista, they should be terrified). It's also probably a lot of why fansubs/fan scanslations keep circulating long after the commercial subs/scans are out there, even if the commercial ones have been ripped off as well.

Put simply, fansubs are usually better. Here are my comments about it when psygremlin at Mangaforums asked about mangled fansubs. I honestly couldn't think of any I'd seen in recent memory that really butchered the dialog. Scanslations, yes, but not fansubs.

I know a little Japanese. I try to learn a little more every day. One easy way to do this is by osmosis from subbed anime. Here's what I've decided about subs:

1) Commercial subs are, at best, as good as average fansubs. Most of the time, they're worse. If you're really unlucky, they used the dub script for the subs, and so you have mangled meaning both from translation errors and from the dub director's edits to retime to mouth motion. If you're doubleplus-unlucky, you get something like the Disney sub track for Kiki's Delivery Service, which includes lots of annoying patter that doesn't even exist on the Japanese voice track and whose only purpose seems to be to distract from the beautiful pictures on the screen. (insert generic I-hate-Michael-Eisner rant here).

2) Fansubs (and manga scanslations) sometimes suffer because the source material for translation isn't a Japanese soundtrack, but a commercial or pirate Chinese or Korean dub or sub track. Nothing like two layers of translation to ruin your day. The problem, simply put, is that there are a lot more people who can, and choose to, translate Chinese or Korean into English than can translate Japanese.

3) Fansubs, most of the time, are labors of love, and fansubbers take them seriously. This may result in slow release schedules, but usually means good product. Generally speaking, the more widely popular the content, (consider Welcome to the NHK versus Slayers), the more care is taken in translation. Likewise, standards have gone up over the years. I have yet to find good subs of the Captain Harlock series, and the subs of Devil Hunter Yohko are pretty weak as well, but the average sub of last season's stuff is generally pretty good. I'm grateful there are groups out there like Central Anime who are currently doing a great job subbing stuff from my childhood like the Yamato series. (You guys rock!).

Likewise, there's talk now (mostly due to the strong underground fan support) of releasing a licensed R1 DVD set of Simoun. English-speaking Simoun fans are of two minds on this: On the upside, we'd get direct-to-DVD video quality. On the downside, it's unlikely at best that the subs that shipped on the DVD would be as careful, nuanced, and generally good as the ones done by Simoun-Fans (you guys rock, too!). So I guess I'd end up ripping the R1 DVDs to computer, building subs in from the Simoun-Fans subs, and then burning new viewing copies. Please, Simoun DVD people - if you're reading this - just use the Simoun-Fans subs - they'd license them for free I'm certain.

4) Fansubs, at their best are so full of otaku goodness that there's no way that a business would dare release shrink-wrapped DVDs with their content. Consider the detail in the Solar subs of Honey and Clover, where literally any piece of readable text in the frame is translated in a matching font. Sure, it takes three rewinds to read it all, but who cares? It's great, and adds a lot of meaning and depth to the scene. Oh, and yes, I did catch them in one translation error in all 41 (I think?) episodes of H&C they subbed, but it was minor. Careful sub work like this or Oyasumi's work on Welcome to the NHK (which translates the ads on the trains in Tokyo) just doesn't happen if somebody has to make a living from it. (You guys rock, too!)

Frankly, I've read a lot more creaky manga scanslations that creaky anime subs. Some of the chapters of Fruits Basket I have require considerable mental editing before a coherent English sentence emerges. Chobits was another one that I feel like deserves a best-possible scanslation and hasn't had one.

Originally Posted by psygremlin

I agree with the comments above. My intention wasn't to disparage the translators (who do a sterling effort!) but more to see if there are any classic examples of Engrish that crop up from time to time. Funnily enough, I've found the translations in scanlations to be better in some cases than in the licenced mangas - the latter often seem to suffer from mild censorship (*grumble*) that does then lose something in translation.

More often than not, I would say it's not Engrish you get as much as hybrid grammar. For instance, the Japanese equivalent of an indefinite third-person pronoun is "ano hito." This translates literally as "that person." Sure enough, you see "that person" a lot in scanslated manga, and it's often used as an indefinite, rather than a reference to a particular person. English, of course, has a perfectly good indefinite third-person pronoun as well - "one." Example: "One should be neither a debtor nor a lender." It's sexless (remember, words have gender, people have sex, and personal pronouns refer to people), and is therefore a perfect synonym.

Most of the time when 'ano hito' is used in an indefinite sense, 'one' is the only grammatically correct and logically consistent translation. But nobody ever seems to use it.

A lot of times I'll see someone's sentence stretch across two bubbles, and the grammar won't make good sense in English, because predicate phrases and verbs usually need to be switched around. This is a case of translating the bubbles correctly, but not the sentence.

And then there are sound effects. Some, like the 'gacha' a sliding door makes opening or closing are great and should be left alone or just rendered in the roman alphabet. I've actually gotten used to doki doki and dokun for heartbeats (in either katakana or romaji), and never have liked translations to 'ba-dum' or 'thump' because neither is specifically an onomatopoeia that only a heart makes like 'doki doki' is, and it can sometimes confuse the reader instead of explaining something.

Another area of complaint: Japanese uses a number of ritual set phrases. These are always the same, and carry a certain formality simply because they're rituals. Accordingly, they logically should be translated the same, and in a way that makes sense. 'Hajimemashite' generally does OK ('nice to/pleased to meet you'), but 'yoroshiku onegai shimasu' is frankly difficult to literally translate into English, because we don't use such formalisms in English any more. Perhaps the closest real English phrase would be something like "Hail and well met," or "May the sun shine upon the hour of our meeting." but they're both medieval. It'd be nice to see these used in a sword-and-sandals manga, though, since they're usually set in Japan's feudal period - using feudal English would be a good fit. Perhaps something like 'I hope we'll be friends' might not be out of place most of the time.

A common mistake is with 'onegai shimasu' and its variants. This phrase is usually translated as 'please.' But a bunch of different words and phrases can be translated into 'please,' and don't mean the same thing. 'Onegai shimasu' has overtones of humbly beseeching (it's what you say at the shrine when praying for something from a god). Just translating it as 'please' often isn't strong enough.

A lot of times its these ritual phrases that trip up translators who aren't native speakers of Japanese. They get mistakenly literally translated, so unless the reader knows that it's a ritual phrase, he don't understand that there's probably more gravity and formality to the situation than the literal meaning of the words suggests. The phrases used for "lets go steady/let's get engaged" are frequent victims.

A last example is poor modeling of degrees of completeness and politeness. You've probably noticed that girls generally say 'gomen nasai' when they are making heartfelt apologies. Guys, being in a more dominant position in society, generally get by with a bowed head and 'gomen...' A 'gomen...' from a girl means she either is not as worried about appeasing the recipient of the apology or she doesn't take the offense all that seriously. Frequently, the translators will miss one or the other case. A guy actually saying all of 'gomen nasai' while bowing is really profoundly apologizing (sometimes in a comic over-the-top way). A female needing the same degree of apology would probably have to raise her voice, repeat it several times, or abase herself to get the same level of intensity. Insults work the same way...

So that's the sort of thing I see most often wrong with fan translations. All of this said, they're still generally drastically better than some of the evil things that commercial firms have done to manga and anime to supposedly dumb down/broaden appeal to the western market. You know, if you take all the seasoning out of something, it becomes bland, and nobody likes bland. Tokyopop's earlier efforts on Fruits Basket (de-pervifying Shigure, among other things) as pointed out by Sephiroth's Samurai Girl (hard working translator) are a great example why I won't be buying the Tokyopop tanks of Furuba ever.

May 07 - What's On My Mind Right Now

Just a quick update because I'm in the middle of a big post on character archetypes and I don't know when it'll be done. Anime and Manga reading has contracted some as the weather has improved and Real Life (tm) has intervened.

Anime first:

We're four shows into the most recent adaptation (13 episode series) of Takahashi's Mermaid Saga (titled Mermaid Forest). It's quite faithful to the manga, and to the earlier OVAs, and milady generally likes it. I've always liked this story best of Takahashi's work (but haven't yet read Maison Ikkoku, so it's possible my opinion will change). My one complaint so far is that while there's gore and violence as there should be, I'm distinctly missing Yuta's melancholy. Likewise, Mana's character seems to have lost some genki somewhere along the way. The OVAs had a genki (and younger-looking) Mana playing against a melancholy (but cheered by Mana) Yuta, and it worked pretty well. We'll see.

Hataraki Man has been on hiatus because milady has been requesting Simoun every night. I must admit that this development pleases me. The last Hataraki Man we saw featured Hiro's masseuse and dealt with themes of compromise with corporate goals while still managing to have a sense of worth and accomplishment. I rather liked it. As I've said before, I think we in the west suffer from not getting more workaday anime and manga here. The Japanese spend a lot of their lives at work, and their fiction that touches on this is usually worth attending. That said, Simoun is just plain deeper and more complex.

Before e-chan goes to bed we often give him some anime for a half-hour or so. Since we haven't started Uchuu Senkan Yamato 2 yet, he's been getting Binchou-tan. He loves it. I like it. Even milady, who is a hardened cynic where kawaii is concerned is affected. This show may just be the ultimate weapon of chibi-kawaii. Drop it on an al-qaeda hideout and listen to the simultaneous 'awwwww!' (or whatever they say in Arabic).

And that leads us to the meat and drink of evening anime lately: Simoun. I'm probably going to burn some more electrons on this later, but we're over halfway through the show now, and I have to say that I'm siding with the rabid fans on this one. That said, it's like a shinkansen - the pace gets fast and furious, but it needs a few kilometers of straight track to really get moving.

One thing that milady noticed that hurts the momentum early on is the show length. She commented that the shows seem to come in pairs. I agree. We started watching two a night, and it flows a lot better. The plotting suggests that this was meant to be 13 one-hour shows instead of 26 half-hour shows. If you watch the first two hours of Simoun in two sittings instead of four, everything makes sense a lot faster, less forgetting happens, you learn the cast faster, and you get into the real meat of the plot faster. All good. It also makes Neviril seem like a lot less of a whiner.

By this metric, the plot really starts doing stuff during hour three, and you probably are going to be surprised by your first plot development around hour four.

Oh well, if the only slot they could get was a season of 1/2 hour showtimes, I'm still profoundly glad they made it.

Another thing that hurts the early shows: it has a Fruits Basket problem. By which I mean that there's a large cast of characters, they all have distinct personalities (good character design - they're all visually distinct, and are credible as people), and they all advance the plot in their own ways, so it behooves you to pay attention to them all. Yes, the guys in the hats, too. This means you're going to be confusing people for a while. Don't worry too much about it - as long as you pay attention, you'll have everybody straight in your head by the time it becomes really important to understand who's motivated by what. I'll warn you of this, though: Download and print this spoiler-free character list (from Hashime's blog) for reference in the first few eps. It'll make your life better. Also: stay away from the wikipedia article which is pure spoilers, and will reduce your viewing pleasure. Once you're about six eps in, you can check out this amusing Simoun Relationship Chart, from Kurogane's Blog. I may be sounding fanboyish here, but I think I'm in good company...

Good thing: They don't waste recap time. There's a little recap when they jump right back into the plot, but it usually contains a little new dialog along with the old, and maybe a reverse-angle shot (often with useful information in it) of the conversation you saw at the end of the last show. It's a great idea, and it works well at keeping you glued to the screen even though you just saw that conversation.

Another good thing: The soundtrack. I like the OP song OK, (but wish they'd kept the mournful a-capella sound instead of going with the drum-machine overlay), and like the ED song a little better (milady likes it less). The actual soundtrack music (all composed specifically for the show) is a wonderfully eclectic mix of orchestral music, dance music (including a very tasty tango), some synth work, and even a couple of pretty 'traditional' tunes (one a hymn, one a lullaby sung by Rodoreamon). It's just all so good. Sahashi's work is as good as any I've heard in anime for any sized screen (and that's high praise from a music snob like me).

We watched the, um, 'trip to the ruins' show (ep 17 and 18) last night (he said, carefully avoiding spoilers), and I'm here to tell you that I was honestly surprised by two plot developments in that 46 minutes of TV. I don't remember the last time that anything on TV really surprised me - thought I'd seen every 'creative' plot twist that had been tried. Heh. Y'all can keep Lost. I'll stick with Simoun, thanks.

It's going so fast and furious right now that I think the wheels are about to come off. But then I thought the wheels were going to come off at ep 10, and again at ep 14, and the train just kept going faster. It's masterful plotting. Now I'm wondering how they're going to wrap it all up neatly in the remaining four hours (which are actually about 46 minutes each).

My greatest sadness is that it's only 26 episodes. My greatest fear is that they'll try to do a sequel and ruin it. I think it's like Serial Experiments Lain in (only) one way - it is about something, and when it finishes talking about that something, it will be done and will exist as a perfect thing in itself.

Manga:

Pretty short list right now - I've been reading Ai Kora/Love Collage (by Inoue, who did Midori no Hibi, which remains my all-time-favorite shounen romance). Ai Kora isn't as good, frankly, but it's not terrible, either, and I'm hoping that he has an idea how to wrap it up neatly when the time comes. Right now (I've just finished vol 4) we're kind of stuck in character non-development limbo, but there are signs that this might change. I'll say this - Inoue-sensee is willing to do anything to get a laugh, and I still like his page design, plotting, and character design as much as ever.

His and hers bedtime reading is still Fruits Basket. Now that we've (finally) introduced all the juunishi, the plot is (finally) pleasantly humming along. We're into Tooru's second year in HS, and this is when all the fun starts to happen. Probably the last big plot hurdle is developing the student council characters, but these are vital to Yuki's plot arc, so I'm trying to keep milady from getting too annoyed at having yet more characters show up to be distinguished from each other. I've done a great job concealing the crucial spoiler about Akito from milady, so I hope it'll bop her right between the eyes just like it did me when I read the manga. She has developed an appropriate loathing for him, so all's going well so far. I have not yet read the last chapter (Sephie published it) but I have a pretty good idea where it is going, since I read through about chapter 128. Oh, and BTW, it appears that Tokyopop rethought their butchery of the US release and hired new translation staff for the manga. So the last few volumes should be good - just all the earlier ones will suck. Sadly another case where fan scanslation is better than commercial scanslation.

I did read the last two chapters of Kare Kano. Ha! the gag in the last chapter got an actual laugh out of me. Completely in character and exactly the sort of puckish humor a mature Yukinon would pull on Arima. I still found myself completely unmoved by the whole pop band story arc, and regarded it as being sillier and more marginal at +16 years than it was originally. Oh, and does this mean that love is fated, or just that Asaba was always a latent lolicon? Oh well, after the whole Maho-and-her-dentist plot, we know that Tsuda-sensee doesn't have problems with playing ball if there's any grass on the field at all. I can't say that anything surprised me, but it was a pleasant ride. Overall, Kare Kano gets a B+, which ain't bad for a shoujo romance manga that runs over 100 chapters. I'd give Furuba a B by comparison, mostly because the art and page layout aren't as good, but also because the character development isn't as detailed as in Kare Kano.

Other stuff in the can: Got hold of the Japanese raws for Chobits finally, so can at last check out some translation questions I had. Re-read Ai-Ren. Got teary-eyed again. I have some one-shots in the can suggested by smart people over at mangaforums. Maybe this weekend.

[post-weekend update]

I read up through the currently-translated chapter of Ai Kora (no big changes, except that we now know how many parts Hachibe can obsess over thanks to a diagram of his brain) and we watched up through ep 22 of Simoun, which finally had its first schmaltzy moment, but was bearable. I think I see where the big arc is going now, and I suspect that the plotting-ignorant fanboys/fangirls generally don't like it at this point, but it's necessary to slow the train down before it pulls into the station. Of course, there may be another huge plot twist yet (I'd write one in, and I see a couple of possible ones). I think Checkov's gun is still hanging on the wall from about ep 6 (in the form of something that used to belong to Aaeru's Oji-chan), and I suspect that it's about to be taken off the wall.

The bulk of Sunday's post-yard-work TV watching was the Elsa arc in Gunslinger Girl. I admired the job they did with it. That manga chapter brought tears to my eyes and I was both dreading and looking forward to seeing it in the anime. Apparently I wasn't the only one so affected - the Anime production staff did a beautiful job on it and stretched it into a three-episode arc. Milady kept justifiably admiring the scenery. Among other things, the anime is a fine tourism advertisement for Italy both urban and rural. Certainly Sicily never appealed to me as strongly as a destination before Giuseppe and Henrietta visited it, even with the purse-snatching scooter bandit. I'm sad to say I was completely oblivious to the "Roman Holiday" references in the earlier Henrietta episode, and only twigged to them when I read it in a blog entry somewhere.

I felt like the plotting and pacing on the whole arc was pretty close to perfect. Certainly the payoff scene (which I was dreading, and stone-facedly refused to spoil in spite of all of Milady's questions and conjectures) had all the emotional freight of the manga. It sparked an interesting conversation between milady and me about Giuse's burden because of the the metric ton of emotional anvils that 'Etta dropped on his shoulders when she smilingly uttered her "but I wouldn't do that because you treat me so well!" line.

I twitched and shuddered at the thought of being Giuseppe. He's simply never allowed to have a bad day around Henrietta - he's the totality of her universe, and her happy little applecart stays upright every day only because he's nice to her. Rico is happy to be alive and whole, Triela wants a supportive friend more than an obsessive onii-chan. Henrietta, however, is incapable of being happy unless she thinks Giuse is pleased with her. And we see just what are the consequences of an unhappy Henrietta in Elsa's story. The episode works even better because they immediately preceded this scene with the conversation between 'Etta and the female section 1 agent about how being a little girl cyborg assassin just isn't 'normal.'

Milady had a...less cheerful childhood than mine. She simply can't imagine why anybody would sign up for Giuse's job with its inevitable painful emotional freight. My response was obvious (to me) both because I'd read the manga (which includes Giuse's back-story) and because I think I'm more than a little like his character: "Because you know that somebody's going to do it, and probably wouldn't do it as well (as compassionately, in this case) as you could. These girls have such a terrible, brief existence that there's a moral imperative to palliate it as much as one can." She completed my sentence for me (some days, I think she really does understand me). And then said that she just doesn't emotionally understand noblesse oblige, which is how she defined my reaction.

Behold the power of good anime made from good manga. It causes people whose brains have not yet been rotted by US network TV pablum to have interesting conversations about relevant topics. How different might the current Battlestar Galactica have turned out if the writing staff had been forced to sit down and watch Gunslinger Girl instead of Desperate Housewives, or whatever dreck caused them to come up with season 3.

Manga Markets and Genres defined, or how not to confuse Seinen and Sword-and-Sandals

I've found myself answering this question repeatedly in different places, so that must mean it needs a proper treatment.

Here are the four major (and two minor) markets of readers for which manga are written:

Shounen
Shoujo
Seinen
Josei
Yaoi
Yuri


And here are some of the genres:

Magical Girlfriend
Magical Girl
Harem Comedy
Historical Adventure
Slice of Life
Romance
Comedy
Sports
Science Fiction
Fantasy
Giant Mecha
Sword and Sandals (my term, from hollywood movie genres. Maybe it should be 'katana and geta?')


Note that these two groups don't look anything alike. It behooves you not to confuse them.

OK, so I've thrown out these words, now I'll define them. First some background: The manga market in Japan is huge. Everybody in Japan reads manga of some kind or other, even if it's only Azumanga Daioh (vaguely analogous to Peanuts in its heyday) or Tonari no Yamada-kun (which is kind of the Japanese Blondie). Because there's so much money to be made in manga, there are a lot of manga out there, and it's a big business. Manga are published in all kinds of magazines, from newspapery rags all the way up to slick, fat monthlies like Kodansha's Afternoon.

Because so many manga are published, categories (based upon the demographics that read a particular magazine - their markets, if you will) have arisen. There are four big markets defined (five if we count small children):

Shounen Means "young men," refers to male readers between about 10 and 17 years old.
Shoujo Means "young women," refers to girls the same age as shounen above
Seinen Means "mature men," refers to readers 18+.
Josei Means "mature women," as above.

There are also some marginalized markets that nonetheless get magazines and (lots of) doujinshi printings:

Shounen-ai is male-male romance stories (think shoujo romance with all guys)
Yaoi = male homosexual stories
Yuri = female homosexual stories

Differences: If it's meant for underage readers, it'll be short on nudity, short on adult themes, and (if you're looking at the Japanese original) there will be teeny-tiny 'helper hiragana' beside the kanji (Chinese characters) that much of Japanese writing uses, because school kids haven't really learned all the standard kanji until they hit age 15 or so.

I include shounen-ai, yaoi and yuri under markets and not genres because they seem to be in their own 'mauve ghetto' just as in the west, are written for distinct readerships, and don't much cross over into the mainstream, although the lines are definitely starting to blur, especially with more anime being derived from (more thematically complex) light novels instead of manga. Simoun and Strawberry Panic are two examples of non-marginal anime that definitely have some yuri going on in them. Shounen-ai and Yaoi, by comparison, still seem to be relatively marginalized except as a source of humor.

How to tell what it is if you don't already know:

Shounen: usually has adolescent male hero, friendly, possibly romantic but not sexual opposite-sex relationships, mild fan-service, action but not gore, and plots that would appeal to a boy in junior high - lots of aliens, espers, time travelers, strange monsters, and saving the world, or at least winning the big game and getting noticed by the desired girl because of it. Girls (and usually adult women) will be unusually busty for their age and (these days) beyond the realm of anatomical possibility. There are also often female character archetypes like meganekko (glasses girl), klutzy girl, brash girl (uses boku), etc. Bishounen (pretty-boy) character designs never occur in shounen or seinen manga except as a source of humor (cf the "Seiji in Kouta-Vision" scene in Midori no Hibi).

Examples: Naruto, Midori no Hibi, Great Teacher Onizuka, Eyeshield 21, Ruroni Kenshin.

Shoujo: Hearts and flowers. Adolescent female heroine. Heroine often chibi (unusually small even for a Japanese schoolgirl) Real, hardcore shoujo usually involves lots of romantic yearning and melodramatic situations (dead/absent parents, etc.) Nothing even vaguely resembling fanservice; girls are drawn as flat-chested as real Japanese girls are. If you see a girl in a swimsuit, it's arranged like a fashion show, rather than eye candy. Males are often drawn unrealistically 'pretty' (bishounen, as in Fruits Basket). Heroine is usually striving for some unattainable standard of goodness/moral perfection often in hopes that if she tries just a little harder Mr. Right will notice her/want to be romantically involved with her, or she'll fix everybody's emotional problems, or some combination of the two. Often spends ink on the relationships between heroine and her posse of female friends. Even when Shoujo wanders into more adult themes, lots has to happen offstage to keep things G rated, so we tend to hear about violence and sex rather than see them.

Examples: Kareshi Kanojo no Jijou, Fruits Basket, Bokura ga Ita, Revolutionary Girl Utena, Alice 19th, Fushigi Yuugi, Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon, Jigoku Shoujo

Seinen: Hard to define because so broad a classification. Some seinen manga are basically shounen manga with more violence/blood and gore/heavy fanservice/sex. These are meant to appeal to high-school and older males who want more of that Drifting Classroom feeling in an R-rated package.

Other seinen manga are basically adult light novels with pictures. The most thematically complex seinen manga fall into this category: things like Ai-Ren. Still others are simple escapism (usually in the slice-of-life or school life genres), because being a salaryman in Japan is hard and exhausting, and there's a steady market for simple, comforting stories that soothe. Most of the genres available in shounen are also done in seinen manga, although some are much rarer - sports manga, for instance.

By comparison, comedy romance and romance manga seem to be commoner as seinen manga than shounen manga (though I suspect they draw a certain amount of older nominally-shounen readers). Likewise, the slice-of-life category doesn't much exist as shounen (with the exception of general-interest manga like Today in Class 5-2 and Azumanga Daioh).

Real hardcore slice-of-life like Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou seems to be a uniquely seinen thing. Harem romance comedies tend to have a different spin, with the male lead having sexual relationships with more than one of his female companions, as in Honeymoon Salad. Generally, if it's R rated for sex, or sex forms a significant plot element, or there's gory violence, or lots of bare busts, it's probably seinen. If it is strangely plot-free and is slice-of-life, it's probably seinen.

The last seinen category that comes to mind is wistful nostalgia. You have something like a magical girl story but with deliberate anachronistic touches which is designed to appeal to older family men who want a simple story with happy endings that reminds them of the notionally simpler and happier days of their youth. Things like Kamichu! and Binchou-tan fall in this category.

Examples of seinen: Honeymoon Salad, Futari Ecchi, Vagabond, Ghost in the Shell, Kamichu!, Onegai Teacher, Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou.

Josei: Shoujo aged up for women. Most often grown-up shoujo stories (romances like Honey and Clover) along with workaday stories like Hataraki Man. You can spot a josei story pretty easily - there'll usually be at least one flat-chested chibi adult female in the female posse, and these never occur in seinen or shounen stories. Likewise, the shoujo drawing convention of creepy-big round eyes seems to show up in Josei as well. Again, the material looks superficially like what you find in shoujo, but with more adult plot elements and themes. If it's older-themed material, but the women are mostly flat-chested with big round eyes, it's josei. As in shoujo, the focus is on interpersonal dynamics and relationships rather than saving the world, blowing stuff up, or winning the big game.

Examples: Hataraki Man, Honey and Clover, Nodame Cantabile, Gokusen

That said, there is obviously a lot of crossover between josei and seinen. Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou could easily be called josei, except that it's published in the largest seinen monthly, and the character designs don't quite fit the standard shoujo/josei model. I think it's pretty obvious that there's a lot of female readership of Afternoon, so the mangaka deliberately avoided alienating the woman reader with a more male-oriented set of character designs. Likewise Hataraki Man, which has a busty female lead. It's josei, but there's supposed to be some crossover appeal to the seinen reader as well. Similarly, Ayu in Honey and Clover has more eye-candy value than she needs to in the shoujo/josei mold. Bishounen designs seem not to occur as often in josei, probably because of the desired market crossover.

Shounen-ai: boys love boys, but don't actually do much about it. Tends to use a lot of bishounen character designs, and has its own iconography involving guys lying on beds of roses, etc.

Yaoi: boys (and men) love boys (and men). See above about shounen-ai, but add in more (ahem) mature content. My understanding is that the biggest consumers (and producers) of shounen-ai and yaoi material in Japan are women.

Yuri: girls/women loving girls/women. Tends to look like shoujo romances, but with all females.

Examples: I don't read this stuff, so know it more by joking mention in mainstream material than anything else. I could go to mangaupdates and look stuff up, but then so can you, and I'm not interested.

I won't spend a lot of time on genres - these should be pretty self-explanatory once you've actually read a few manga. One note worth mentioning: A magical girl story is about a girl (typically under age 15) who has some supernatural power and uses it do to good. A magical girlfriend story is a romance about a guy who gets a girlfriend via some unlikely/impossible/magical means. The girlfriend frequently has magical qualities or abilities. Probably the perfect example is Aa Megama-sami/Ah! My Goddess.

Genres mix and match - you can have a science fiction magical girlfriend romance (Chobits), or a fantasy magical girlfriend romance (Ah My Goddess). Likewise, nearly anything can be highly plotted or not. If it's not highly plotted, it probably qualfies as slice-of-life regardless of its other attributes. So yes, you could have a slice-of-life historical adventure romance-comedy. I can't name one like that, but there are some that need that many compounds to be adequately explained.

Fruits basket: "Really All That?"

Well, on the upside, it's on the hairy edge of being too bishonen pretty, but stays on the "I can stand to look at this" side of that edge. Panel and page composition is pretty good, the supporting characters are adequately interesting, and Tohru, while not exactly as 3d as some shoujo manga leads is a lot more believable than, say a Watase Yuu character.

And there are plenty of characters! If you don't like one, you're sure to like two or three others...

On the downside is that there is a big cast of characters (the whole Sohma family) and they're all drawn pretty much alike. And Tohru (to look at) is the same almost-generic pale-chibi-heroine character we see all over in shoujo lately (Tsubasa in Kare Kano, Hagu in Honey and Clover). And, because there's so much ink spent on the Sohmas arguing over what biscuits they'll have with tea today, we never learn all that much about Tohru's friends.

Then there's place: the whole story happens in three locations...well, maybe five, but there's a very definite ukiyo-e (floating world) feeling about it because nobody ever goes to a noodle shop, gets a bag of taiyaki, or watches a movie. Compare to KKNJ, where they go to Kyoto on a class trip and visit the temples, or Mahoraba, where several shop owners have recurring roles in the manga.

Oh, and can we have establishing shots when we switch scenes between these three places, please? The inside of Shigure's house looks a whole lot like the inside of the Sohmas' house...

I've got to say that I like the character development in Kare Kano better, for all that I was bored by the Tsubasa/stepbrother arc in the middle. Both of the leads in KKNJ seem to be reasonably close to fully human. I'm not sure I could say the same of anybody in Furuba but maybe Shigure and Yuki. I don't think it's possible for a real human to be as happy about housework as Tohru seems to be through all 23 volumes...

And, while it's early in the scanslation process, I'd have to say that, unless the animators invented the depth we see in Honey and Clover, it's got to be significantly better than either KKNJ or Furuba. Of course, it's josei, so it'd likely be more complex anyway.

All that said, I put Furuba on the cuddle-with-milady and read manga list instead of KKNJ because it's a more interesting plot than yet-another-teen-romance and we'd just finished up Midori no Hibi and are working our way through Chobits.