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branchandroot) wrote2007-05-01 02:40 pm
branchandroot) wrote2007-05-01 02:40 pm
Entry tags:
In love with perpetuation
So, there's some meta running around my head, now, and it's all ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
p_zeitgeist's fault.
You see, I've been wandering through her Yami no Matsuei material, and some of her perspective on Hisoka crystalized something that I've found weird about YnM for a long time. I think this weird thing is actually a pattern that's common to Japanese literature in general, but anime and manga certainly, and it is the pattern of somehow valuing the perpetuation of pain and/or shame.
Let me start with Love Mode, actually, since that's one of the places I see it most clearly, explicitly and unvarnished-ly presented. There's a character, in LM, who suffered violent rape, was taken to the hospital and patched up, but did not have the funds to pay for his treatment. The Benevolent Doctor who treated him is sympathetic and gets the boy a job, so he can pay his bills.
A job in as a whore.
Let's not faff around with "escort" or any of that. The boy is placed in a whorehouse (the one that the doctor's brother runs, incidentally). Now, the doctor, while explaining his actions to another character, says that this is the perfect situation for the boy because those who have been raped/abused often suffer it again. As, in fact, the boy does, by clients of the house in question.
And that was when I put down the volume and only restrained myself with difficulty from actually burning it.
This is presented as a positive thing, you understand. The narrative structure and voice would clearly have us believe that the doctor is right to get the boy a job that has the greatest possible similarity to the trauma he initially suffered.
This strikes me as exactly what has twisted my brain about the situation of shinigami, in YnM. It is, if I recall correctly, explicitly stated that only restless spirits become shinigami, only those with some trauma or suffering that will not let them rest or move on to the next stop or whatever it is the dead should be doing next.
In other words, because they have suffered shame or pain or despair, they are somehow naturally drawn to a job in which they will continue to suffer shame and pain and despair.
I am still somewhat unclear on what cultural or emotional logic may be behind this. Perhaps this is Tragedy, in which one mishap Fates the poor victim to keep on being a victim for the rest of his/her existence. Perhaps it's supposed to work as some form of expiation or cleansing--there are sometimes overtones that suggest this. Perhaps it's even both, with the victim thinking there can be some expiation, when, in fact, there can't, and that just adds to the Tragic aspect. There is definitely a downright masochistic tendency to revel in the melancholy of Tragedy that shows up a whole lot in Japanese literature of every kind I've seen so far. It's even a standard phrase: shou ga nai, nothing can be done. From what I can tell, this is considered the mature response to any tribulation one might suffer, from overcrowded subways to one's house burning down.
This does not give me great hopes for where the story might go/have been going. It suggests that neither Hisoka nor Tsuzuki will be able to break free from their pasts/problems/issues by any means short of the destruction of their souls. After all, they're already dead, they can't get out that way. It further suggests that Muraki's downward spiral will continue--that, in fact, he was already fated to devolve from the start, that his attempt to do something was doomed from the start. The shikigami are probably also screwed.
And this makes me really want some fanfic that rationalizes the characters' screwed up existence in some less Tragic and more useful way.
p_zeitgeist's fault.You see, I've been wandering through her Yami no Matsuei material, and some of her perspective on Hisoka crystalized something that I've found weird about YnM for a long time. I think this weird thing is actually a pattern that's common to Japanese literature in general, but anime and manga certainly, and it is the pattern of somehow valuing the perpetuation of pain and/or shame.
Let me start with Love Mode, actually, since that's one of the places I see it most clearly, explicitly and unvarnished-ly presented. There's a character, in LM, who suffered violent rape, was taken to the hospital and patched up, but did not have the funds to pay for his treatment. The Benevolent Doctor who treated him is sympathetic and gets the boy a job, so he can pay his bills.
A job in as a whore.
Let's not faff around with "escort" or any of that. The boy is placed in a whorehouse (the one that the doctor's brother runs, incidentally). Now, the doctor, while explaining his actions to another character, says that this is the perfect situation for the boy because those who have been raped/abused often suffer it again. As, in fact, the boy does, by clients of the house in question.
And that was when I put down the volume and only restrained myself with difficulty from actually burning it.
This is presented as a positive thing, you understand. The narrative structure and voice would clearly have us believe that the doctor is right to get the boy a job that has the greatest possible similarity to the trauma he initially suffered.
This strikes me as exactly what has twisted my brain about the situation of shinigami, in YnM. It is, if I recall correctly, explicitly stated that only restless spirits become shinigami, only those with some trauma or suffering that will not let them rest or move on to the next stop or whatever it is the dead should be doing next.
In other words, because they have suffered shame or pain or despair, they are somehow naturally drawn to a job in which they will continue to suffer shame and pain and despair.
I am still somewhat unclear on what cultural or emotional logic may be behind this. Perhaps this is Tragedy, in which one mishap Fates the poor victim to keep on being a victim for the rest of his/her existence. Perhaps it's supposed to work as some form of expiation or cleansing--there are sometimes overtones that suggest this. Perhaps it's even both, with the victim thinking there can be some expiation, when, in fact, there can't, and that just adds to the Tragic aspect. There is definitely a downright masochistic tendency to revel in the melancholy of Tragedy that shows up a whole lot in Japanese literature of every kind I've seen so far. It's even a standard phrase: shou ga nai, nothing can be done. From what I can tell, this is considered the mature response to any tribulation one might suffer, from overcrowded subways to one's house burning down.
This does not give me great hopes for where the story might go/have been going. It suggests that neither Hisoka nor Tsuzuki will be able to break free from their pasts/problems/issues by any means short of the destruction of their souls. After all, they're already dead, they can't get out that way. It further suggests that Muraki's downward spiral will continue--that, in fact, he was already fated to devolve from the start, that his attempt to do something was doomed from the start. The shikigami are probably also screwed.
And this makes me really want some fanfic that rationalizes the characters' screwed up existence in some less Tragic and more useful way.
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Oh my God, Love Mode. Never heard of it, but to justify the continued suffering of that character sounds really disgusting, so I don't think I'll be picking that one up anytime soon.
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I know this is a staple of Japanese yaoi. And that's why I don't read it.
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To be sure, that's gonna be a long row to hoe what with the demonicity and all.
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I haven't read manga in a long, long time, I just realized. I've been too bured under Isreali/Palestinian history. Which, ironically or perhaps not, has a lot of the same bloody themes.
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Hence the plotbunnies currently nibbling my toes. ^_^;
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Actually, I don't understand the allure of hooker-fic in general. I suspect I have too much general awareness to be able to gloss over the skeeviness of it.
*taps chin* I wonder if it's this perpetuation that has so many people writing broken Tezuka&Fuji that never resolves into fixed Tezuka&Fuji...?
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Cf. Twelve Kingdoms' anime-only subplot of the bullied loner Sugimoto, who readily accepts the students' presence in a new strange world and rallies to the false destiny presented to her by Kou; on reflection, I think that may've been intended to make her *less* palatable to the Japanese audience (like Asuka's brashness in NGE), since Youko clearly remains the protagonist despite mostly crawling around and being bucketed.
("Bucketed": a shorthand description that evolved between the wombat-consort and me to describe stories that are devoted to making the main character suffer repeatedly, for long periods of time and in loving detail. I can't remember whether it initially referred to Stephen King's Carrie having a bucket of pigs' blood dumped on her at the prom, or to a generic scenario of dragging the protags around to be repeatedly plunged head-first into increasingly larger and more revolting buckets of filth, giving them just enough time to painfully crawl out of the first one before being introduced to the next.)
In the original 12K book, Sugimoto barely exists, which makes the entire story pretty much Anozzer Bucket For Mamselle.
It's probably all about the gaman (http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/11/11/DDGAPMADJ81.DTL&type=art). (Didn't actually see this exhbition while it was in town, though did get to go through the catalog in a bookstore somewhere.)
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I console myself that at least Shuurei was pissed off, instead of meekly accepting, even if she didn't do anything about it. *makes face* I'd much have preferred that she throw cleaning rags down people's robes.
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I quite like the usage bucketing. Especially since it seems to be such a popular authorial sport, both in the originals and in fic.
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As well, I think there's some buddhist influence in the set up; the shinigami guys can't be the only ones to have sufferred during their life times - in fact we are shown again and again thoughout the manga that they quite patently are not. So I read them as the ones who suffered but who were unable to let go of that suffering, and the attachment to the world that implies, after their deaths. In which case a lot of what Tsuzuki's doing during the cases can be seen as beating the system: ensuring that those who die have no regrets, and thus no reason to become shinigami. And thus being able to let go off their suffering would equal being able to let go of being shinigami - and so if Enma wants to keep them, of course the whole system is working against them ever being able to do that.
*Wry* It's been ages since I read the manga so I've no idea how much of this is textually based and how much of it my mind's added on as time's gone by to make it more platable.
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I recall some heavy hints that Enma wants Tsuzuki's power, but I don't recall that applying to the shinigami as a class. Hm. So we have something of a split view, there; Tsuzuki, one of the most messed up, may not be there entirely of his own will. But most of the rest of them seem to be.
YnM definitely isn't as... disgustingly explicit about it as the yaoi genre tends to be, but this whole love-affair with the Tragic Beauty of Their Doomed Fates just kind of makes me twitch.
Maybe I really will write the damn story forward, and let them all kick some psychological butt.
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Hmm, that's true; I think I was generalising from Tsuzuki's situation. There's definite reference to the others applying for their positions.
It reminds me of studying Tess of the D'Urbervilles at A Level, and Thomas Hardy's 'tragedy is goodness encompassed by the inevitable.' A lot of class discussion over whether it actually qualified as tragic or just sentimental.
Yaoi really makes me twitch. It makes me think of the Chinese thing, I'm pretty sure it's true in Japan as well, in which it was culturally required for women to act reluctant in marriage and sexual partnerships; that in order to be 'good' she has to be 'unwilling.' I'm pretty sure the same trope is being transferred over to yaoi fiction as well, with the added burden of having to code homosexuality as 'acceptable' within the confines of the story.
Oh please please do! That would be so very, very awesome. :D
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It's almost as if semen were a tangible form of bad mana that's intensely pleasurable and virtuous to get rid of, but sullies its recipients whatever their identity. (Blah blah bukkake blah squish.) Or at least at the moment I don't recall any cultural taboos about men (not) enjoying the active sexual role, with the dubious exception of the movie adaptation of The Handmaid's Tale (can't recall whether that element was also present in the book); there are short periods of ritual uncleanliness after the release of semen, but not nearly as long as the same religions' time-outs for menstruation.