How Clamp ruined their story
May. 7th, 2010 12:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
branchandrootThree Weeks: Qem mentioned I haven't gone off on Clamp recently, and I've certainly been saving up for it.
Anyone who follows Clamp knows that they really cannot end a story to save their souls. This does not just extend to "eternally on hiatus" but to "we don't actually know what to do now" as well. First witness: Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle.
TSR started as a romp, a picaresque, a journey-story--as an opportunity to do overtly what Clamp constantly does anyway, which is to cross over their own characters and universes. Almost immediately, however, they included hints of angsty background, whereby connoisseurs were warned that this story would not be ending in a joyous love-love sort of way (CCS, 1/2 MKR, prospective Kobato), but in the other Clamp manner which is "rocks fall, everyone dies (except the focal cross-generation and/or same-sex couple)" (RGV, 1/2 MKR, prospective X).
I was, therefore, more than half expecting some death and fraughtness to make an appearance. In fact, Clamp did a complete 180, halfway in, and dove from fluffy-style into full on goreangst-style; the extent of it surprised me a bit, but the essential shift did not. Having done this, however, and brought everyone to some kind of final confrontation, Clamp proceeded to flail madly, issue after issue, to skip one and sometimes two weeks after each issue (during, I would remind my readers, the ultimate, high tension confrontation), introduce gordian, nay downright Escher-esque, knots of recursive time travel in order to give the CCS characters a fluffy (or at least non-permanently-fatal) ending directly counter to all the foregoing angst, completely abandoned their secondary couple's plotline, and generally made a hash of it. Finally they put the cherry on the whole mess by... wait for it... continuing the journey! Only without actually continuing it; they just sent their characters back off into the multiverse and dropped the curtain. Clamp ending strikes again!
This, however, was not the worst of it.
Simultaneous with TRC, Clamp was also writing Xxxholic. This story actually played to their strengths. It was very episodic and so could go on forever without leaving the readers feeling cheated of a climax. It featured weird creatures, some dangerous and some cute, giving Clamp the opportunity to exercise their favorite drawing styles to good effect. It featured a Classic Clamp Couple to satisfy everyone's pairing urges. It involved morally ambiguous morals, always a Clamp favorite.
Unfortunately, it was written to be a parallel for TRC, and so suffered alongside as the compact episodes wandered into pointless-recursion-land and a Mysterious Plot Point was introduced. Given how little detail accompanies that plot point, I think we can take it as a given that Clamp themselves don't know what the egg is actually for, yet. Hence the current hiatus, no doubt.
On top of that, Holic featured a confident, powerful, active and sexually mature woman.
Now, this sounds like a good thing, doesn't it? But not for Clamp! Because, in Clamp-worlds, to be a sexually mature woman who actually has something to do in the plot is to be marked for death. It never fails. (Well, possibly for Kaho, who probably survives solely because she's part of a cross-gen relationship and almost never in the plot.) I've written about this tendency before--that Clamp is all for the Girl Power and girls having agency, but only until they grow up. A grown up woman with agency has to die, sometimes, in the most egregiously blatant cases, right that very moment of maturation.
You may see why I was actually less than surprised that Clamp made the whole ending turn on the death of our young girl at the very moment of her sixteenth birthday ceremony and, even after that event had been circumvented, on separating the maturing girl from the continuing journey/adventure. Narratively? She's dead.
Some people pointed to Yuuko, the aforementioned Holic character, as a counter to this. She was present, alive and kicking, surely she disproved the trend! Me, I was just waiting for her to die. And, indeed, she did, revealing that, in fact, she was, in a way, already dead for the entire course of the series. Thank you, Clamp, you never fail to come through in the end, and display your truly alarming death wish for your own gender. And now Clamp continues (sort of, sporadically) the Holic story without her, and indeed without the previously-present girl character; she's grown up now, of course she must be absent.
All in all, TRC and Holic together managed to showcase almost every failing Clamp has. I really don't wonder that they've reverted, for their next try, to the proven formula of girl-power fluff with mouthy stuffed animals. Maybe they'll actually manage to finish that one.
Anyone who follows Clamp knows that they really cannot end a story to save their souls. This does not just extend to "eternally on hiatus" but to "we don't actually know what to do now" as well. First witness: Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle.
TSR started as a romp, a picaresque, a journey-story--as an opportunity to do overtly what Clamp constantly does anyway, which is to cross over their own characters and universes. Almost immediately, however, they included hints of angsty background, whereby connoisseurs were warned that this story would not be ending in a joyous love-love sort of way (CCS, 1/2 MKR, prospective Kobato), but in the other Clamp manner which is "rocks fall, everyone dies (except the focal cross-generation and/or same-sex couple)" (RGV, 1/2 MKR, prospective X).
I was, therefore, more than half expecting some death and fraughtness to make an appearance. In fact, Clamp did a complete 180, halfway in, and dove from fluffy-style into full on goreangst-style; the extent of it surprised me a bit, but the essential shift did not. Having done this, however, and brought everyone to some kind of final confrontation, Clamp proceeded to flail madly, issue after issue, to skip one and sometimes two weeks after each issue (during, I would remind my readers, the ultimate, high tension confrontation), introduce gordian, nay downright Escher-esque, knots of recursive time travel in order to give the CCS characters a fluffy (or at least non-permanently-fatal) ending directly counter to all the foregoing angst, completely abandoned their secondary couple's plotline, and generally made a hash of it. Finally they put the cherry on the whole mess by... wait for it... continuing the journey! Only without actually continuing it; they just sent their characters back off into the multiverse and dropped the curtain. Clamp ending strikes again!
This, however, was not the worst of it.
Simultaneous with TRC, Clamp was also writing Xxxholic. This story actually played to their strengths. It was very episodic and so could go on forever without leaving the readers feeling cheated of a climax. It featured weird creatures, some dangerous and some cute, giving Clamp the opportunity to exercise their favorite drawing styles to good effect. It featured a Classic Clamp Couple to satisfy everyone's pairing urges. It involved morally ambiguous morals, always a Clamp favorite.
Unfortunately, it was written to be a parallel for TRC, and so suffered alongside as the compact episodes wandered into pointless-recursion-land and a Mysterious Plot Point was introduced. Given how little detail accompanies that plot point, I think we can take it as a given that Clamp themselves don't know what the egg is actually for, yet. Hence the current hiatus, no doubt.
On top of that, Holic featured a confident, powerful, active and sexually mature woman.
Now, this sounds like a good thing, doesn't it? But not for Clamp! Because, in Clamp-worlds, to be a sexually mature woman who actually has something to do in the plot is to be marked for death. It never fails. (Well, possibly for Kaho, who probably survives solely because she's part of a cross-gen relationship and almost never in the plot.) I've written about this tendency before--that Clamp is all for the Girl Power and girls having agency, but only until they grow up. A grown up woman with agency has to die, sometimes, in the most egregiously blatant cases, right that very moment of maturation.
You may see why I was actually less than surprised that Clamp made the whole ending turn on the death of our young girl at the very moment of her sixteenth birthday ceremony and, even after that event had been circumvented, on separating the maturing girl from the continuing journey/adventure. Narratively? She's dead.
Some people pointed to Yuuko, the aforementioned Holic character, as a counter to this. She was present, alive and kicking, surely she disproved the trend! Me, I was just waiting for her to die. And, indeed, she did, revealing that, in fact, she was, in a way, already dead for the entire course of the series. Thank you, Clamp, you never fail to come through in the end, and display your truly alarming death wish for your own gender. And now Clamp continues (sort of, sporadically) the Holic story without her, and indeed without the previously-present girl character; she's grown up now, of course she must be absent.
All in all, TRC and Holic together managed to showcase almost every failing Clamp has. I really don't wonder that they've reverted, for their next try, to the proven formula of girl-power fluff with mouthy stuffed animals. Maybe they'll actually manage to finish that one.
