branchandroot

I find this interesting because KHR is really kind of two manga.

The first one, which runs for the first sixty issues, is basically an extended gag manga. There’s slapstick, in place of plot, and zero in the way of character development. The characters are presented full-formed with about three identifying characteristics each, which are used for recurring gags. Gokudera 1) sparkles for the Tenth, 2) has bad attitude for everyone else, 3) passes out when he sees his sister. Bianchi 1) loves Reborn, 2) is the anti-cook. Yamamoto 1) is endlessly athletic, 2) has a habitual problem-causing fast pitch, 3) thinks the mafia thing is a game. Haru 1) loves children, 2) crushes on Tsuna 2) leaps to conclusions. Tsuna is 1) unskilled, 2) apathetic, 3) nice. Hibari is 1) bloodthirsty, 2) a dictator, 3) a thug/extortionist. Ryouhei 1) is boxing obsessed, 2) shouts all the time, 3) is extremely straightforward/gullible. Dino is 1) a caring boss/anideshi, 2) a klutz in isolation. And so on.

Let us not even speak of Longchamp, except to note that he is symptomatic of this first manga.

The plot is episodic in the extreme and there is no character development for anyone but Tsuna, who only gets just enough to make him a bit more cheerful about daily life.

And then, around issue sixty, Amano Had A Better Idea, and decided to start writing the second manga. This one is pretty classic shounen fight manga, which means a plot manifests involving increasingly difficult rounds of fighting, complete with overpowered opponents and weird weapons, and the characters start to develop. This is the point at which we start to hear Tsuna valuing his friendships to the point of acting to defend them, when we find out that Hibari loves the school and is kind to animals, when we see Yamamoto having real focus that can be applied to fighting instead of just ad hoc athleticism. This is the point at which I, for one, start to wonder whether Yamamoto’s comments about mafia cosplay are some kind of arcane joke he’s playing on absolutely everyone. The bonds of silly friendship are suddenly bonds of true loyalty.

This is not, of course, a seamless transformation. The characters’ backgrounds remain sketchy, as a legacy of how they were presented. Their motivations are left to the reader to interpolate, in most cases. I suspect that Amano initially intended to play the Arcabaleno straight as actual babies, otherwise the shot of an adult Shamal delivering Reborn makes no sense, and this was simply retconned. Nevertheless, it isn’t nearly as rough as it might have been, and that’s fairly impressive. The characters are still recognizably themselves; the only one I think really transforms into someone else is Hibari, who suddenly has depth and motivations and becomes a great deal less arbitrary in his violence. More on that later.

The two different parts involve very different deployment of the characters, though. While most of the initial caricature characteristics are carried through, sometimes in fading degree, they are no longer used for gags. Instead they are part of the character’s place in the plot and serve as elements in a progression of events rather than a circling in place.

So, despite the general continuity between the first and second manga, I think that attempting to construct consistent characterization across both is a mistake. To the extent that it can be done, Amano has done it, but the characters in the first manga were not written with any kind of depth, and attempting to find depth in those issues is likely futile. We might, instead, consider them first drafts of the characters in the second manga.