I’ve just finished mainlining Monochrome Factor. (This is all Vathara’s fault.) I suspect I may actually get this one in the domestic release, to have them for rereads. I’m mildly agonized that the manga is progressing so slowly (only six volumes in several years), but it’s still worth the read.

Spoilers follow.

The plot is fairly standard “save the world by fighting monsters and the Other Side who is sending them” fare. Hung on the plot, however, are some very tasty character dynamics. We have the hero (kind of), Akira, who’s a pretty-boy slacker thug, kind of like Ichigo redrawn as a gen-x cliche, and the reincarnation of a high spiritual entity. Only he doesn’t remember a lick of it. We have his dippy boy sidekick, Kengo, who can get a bit annoying but is probably the nicest person in the whole cast. We have the amazingly non-token-like girl, Aya, a prefect, disciplinary committee, kendo club (I think Hibari would like her) who smacks sense into Akira because she’s the one who actually gets how important this all is and what fighting spirit is all about. We have Akira and Kengo’s older buddy Kou, the hentai who tries to grope Aya and gets righteously beaten up for it and who is, incidentally, the otherworldly liege man of Akira’s past self. We have our anti-hero (kind of) Shirogane, the counterpart high spiritual entity who drags Akira into all this, most likely has an agenda of his own, and really, really demonstrates the adage “it’s always the nice ones you have to watch out for”. Also with long, long silver hair, just to round off the tastiness.

While there are some bobbles starting out, as the characters are settling into their narrative relationships to one another, they develop very nicely. Akira and Kengo are unspeakably teenage boy like and have fist fights to show their affection. Aya is clearly not a romantic interest of anyone yet, which makes my heart sing even when she isn’t very competently slicing up the landscape with a sword. The tension between Akira and Shirogane, made up of the secrets Shirogane keeps, the way he cares for Akira, the almost-student-mentor bond they develop, and the yet unknown relationship Shirogane had with Ryuuko, Akira’s past self, is simply delicious. It’s garnished delightfully with the tension between Shirogane and Kou, neither of them trusting the other with Akira but both bound to a sort of alliance through Akira.

And there’s a totally psychotic villain and at least one character on his side whose allegiance and actions are shrouded in mystery, which always makes things interesting.

The anime, alas is utter trash. I say this with great woe, because Suwabe Junichi voices Shirogane, and I was hoping for better. But no, not only does it devolve into total crack (I mean, overtops tenipuri level crack), not only does it make Shirogane into a wuss and Aya into a wimp (unforgivable), it entirely reorganizes the storyline into dreadfully cliche sentai shenanigans and thereby surgically removes all the dramatic tension. It cranks up Akira and Shirogane’s relationship to bona fide BL, though without any real emotional or even eyecandy payoff, but after the delicate tension between them that the manga sustains it’s way too slapstick to do anything but roll one’s eye s over.

So read the manga, don’t touch the anime.

You know, the more I think about it, the more I think the second series Yuugi-ou anime is the truest to Takahashi’s eventual intent.

Well, minus the filler arcs that roll back character development.

But reading the latter two thirds of the manga, I’m convinced that Takahashi didn’t actually know where he wanted to go for the first third. That he hadn’t yet decided exactly who or what the puzzle spirit was. It wasn’t until he hit on the card game that he really locked in and started to create a coherent meta-story. That’s the point at which the games stop being so deadly a case of instant karma, the weighing-and-testing aspect of them becomes more a matter of trial by combat, and the whole story becomes less ambiguous-horror and more typical shounen-fight.

It shows in the drawing style, too. Styles always change over time, of course, but the early manga puzzle spirit is drawn scary. He looks like he’s absolutely psychotic. Once past the crossover of Death-T, he becomes far more classically shounen-heroic.

So when the second series anime starts with the cards, reduces the early games (and the grievousness of their results), skips Death-T and re-casts Kaiba’s entry into events in the “trial by combat” pattern that the later manga established, that may actually be the truest interpretation of Takahashi’s project.

I still wish, wistfully, that they had kept Ogata Megumi as the voice of the puzzle spirit, though.

There are times when I really wonder about Amano, and this issue was one of them.

Spoilers ahead, of course.

She had an opportunity to do some really good character interaction and development, here, and she made it about halfway. Bianchi, as the voice of older experience, provides a frame for the idiocy the boys have recently been displaying; through her eyes we see all the younger characters in perspective, with sympathy for their emotional dilemmas and uncertainties but also a clear understanding that they are acting foolishly and immaturely. Through Bianchi’s prodding, Tsuna actually gets his head out of his ass and realizes that he’s been very selfish in his attempts to ’shelter’ the girls, and tells Kyouko what’s going on. Kyouko, in her turn, provides some much needed insight into the relation between Tsuna and his box. This is all lovely, and pretty sophisticated narrative.

Unfortunately, it’s undercut by the other things going on this issue.

The most bizarre one is the juxtaposition of explicit fanservice, in The Bath Scene, with Bianchi’s mature-person explanation. The combination of the wound over Chrome’s back and the shot of her bare ass was especially peculiar. Through the whole thing, over against the emotional and psychological complications, we have the kind of deliberate full-body nudity shots one expects to find at the start of an ecchi manga. The text-subtext clash was weird and distracting, and I have to wonder why Amano chose that particular setting and emphasis. Bathing scenes can be done in a non-fanservice way easily enough. Why did this moment of wisdom and insight need to be so explicitly sexualized, hm?

Then there’s the girls’ reaction to Bianchi’s explanation, which boils down to “Yes, the boys are being selfish and immature, but they’re manly to do so; let’s not try to hold them accountable any more and instead continue to enable their domestic helplessness”. Once again, the girls’ actions get used as comedy and not to actually spur significant action or development. Bianchi has to lie about what’s really happening to spark Tsuna’s realizations, which has the structural effect of emphasizing only his emotional growth. This badly undercut Kyouko’s display of insight regarding the Vongola box; I was very disappointed, because her character deserves better than to be a two dimensional yamato nadeshiko.

I didn’t find the aforementioned domestic helplessness particularly amusing, either. The reinforcement of exclusive gendered spheres makes me gag. The events of this issue would make a perfect set-up for allowing both the boys and the girls to learn and contribute a little something across those lines, but I do not, for one instant, believe Amano will take the opportunity. The way she handled this issue indicates nothing but a desire to wear the main characters even deeper into their gendered segregation.

Amano, get a grip on your Issues, please.

I keep contemplating how the younger KHR characters got to their TYL selves, and what they are at that age and I think I want to jot this down.

Gokudera: Gokudera calms down as time goes on. This does not mean he becomes any less heart-bound to Tsuna, but as he becomes more confident of and secure in his place in the Family he stops needing to yell about it. The point at which Tsuna confirms that Gokudera is his right hand is the true turning point for this. As he calms, Gokudera becomes more efficient, his edge shows more clearly, and he starts to solidify a reputation quite separate from his old one of ‘feral punk’, one of absolute loyalty to Tsuna and his wishes and of complete incorruptibility–the Vongola’s feared right hand, as Gamma says. Given the ruthlessness we see in, for example, 61, I suspect that Gokudera becomes extremely dangerous as he becomes cooler and more effective, and that it is, in large part, only Tsuna’s kindness that restrains him.

I just recently read a post to one of the comms I browse, from someone who was a ways into the Fruits Basket manga and wanted to know whether Yuki ever gets to be less of an asshole (translating fairly freely) and whether the angst ever lets up. This reminded me of all my Issues with FB, and rather than burden the poor woman’s post with extraneous stuff, I went to write up a proper post of my own.

Spoilers ahead, of course.

Having finally slogged through to the end of the manga, I find that, yes, there really is a reason I left off two thirds of the way through, the first time around.

It isn’t the characters, who I quite like, by and large. It isn’t even the plot per se, though I do think that Yuki’s romantic plot was done a severe disservice. If his new romantic interest had received the same development as his new boy buddy I might well feel differently, but she didn’t.

No, the part that really gets my goat is twofold. One is the whirlwind of heteronormativity at the ned, foreclosing any possibility of expressing the homoeroticism that is waved in our faces all the way through, or even just continuing to dangle the possibility. Two is the lack of consequences.

One is made most obvious in the person of Akito, who is insane the whole way through until the very last moment but is miraculously restored to sanity by having one person offer friendship. Okay, that’s actually kind of par for the course, because Tohru is Kwan Yin. Squared. But as soon as she’s sane she is, well, she. All of her insane actions are paired with her male guise, and all of her sane ones are paired with a ‘return’ to femininity. Indeed, when she comes to apologize to the Juunishi, she is in a formal girl’s kimono, and they seem equally and equivalently stunned by both those things, which I find narratively significant. She isn’t the only representative, though. Every single ambiguously sexualized male is firmly paired off at the very end, one after another: Ayame with Mine, Shigure with feminized Akito, Hatori with Mayuko, Hatsuharu with Rin, Yuki with Machi, Ritsu with Mitsuru. Indeed, every single major character is paired off, sometimes resulting in bizarrely random happily-ever-afters such as Hanajima and Kazuma. It’s a downright heteronormative panic.

I find two more pernicious, actually, and two is the deeper reason I just can’t read Fruits Basket with pleasure. These characters do absolutely horrible things to each other, most especially Akito, but also others, notably Shigure and Yuki. And there are no consequences to this. The manga does make it clear that, in most cases, the characters are passing the buck, acting out of pain that they have endured previously. But they don’t act toward the authors of that pain, or even take constructive flight from its source; no, they take it out on the defenseless. Akito tortures Yuki. Yuki beats up and taunts Kyou. Shigure ‘teases’ anyone around him who isn’t fast enough to guard themselves, notably Ritsu, Tohru and his editor, and has absolutely zero care for the genuine distress he causes.

This might be very realistic, but frankly I find such realism exceedingly emotionally and ethically unsatisfying.

The theme is carried right through to the end, where we find that the Cat has been cursed for centuries on end for the dire sin of… being right. Being the only one with its head screwed on straight, the only one who has the wisdom to not want the co-dependent reincarnation cycle that the God offers.

And in the end, no one calls anyone on any of these actions. The God et al flit off into the spiritual beyond and we never even find whether they learned better. Yuki never gets a boot to the head over Kyou (or, more significantly, never has anyone whose opinion he cares for tell him that what he did was wrong). Akito winds up with Shigure, and while I admit they probably deserve each other, they are presented at the very end as a suddenly, miraculously happy couple. No one even apologizes for the wrong they do, aside from Akito’s blanket and somewhat token apology, but Poof! the magic wand of All Better descends anyway.

And I don’t believe it. I can’t. The narrative work hasn’t been done to convince me, to satisfy me. So it leaves a very nasty aftertaste instead.

Wherefore, I suppose my response to the initial post that got me thinking could be summed up as : not so much. Give me Utena and  Sailor Moon any day, or even Fushigi Yuugi and CLAMP for pity’s sake. Tohru in particular and FB in general are a classic example of the reactionary as it emerges from Japanese culture and I never get on well with that.

So there are a handful of posts lately about femslash and the technically conservative trends in that genre. It made me think about my own femslash stories (well, actually, it made me think about the western-media vs anime/manga fandom divide, and how never the twain shall meet even for the sake of being able to read more girl-on-girl stories, and how the western-media side is defining the whole genre of femslash as western-media over against yuri when the anime/manga side is more likely to want to use both, terms and conventions alike, and that this exclusion/division pisses me off personally, but after that it made me think about my own stories), and, indeed, I note a pattern. The ones that work with canon-possible pairings are little bits of fairly isolated fluff or smut. The ones I think are really kick-ass are the ones that do weird stuff like crossing canons. I still think the Une/Hawkeye was one of the best I’ve ever written.

I think part of the reason for this trend in my own writing is that the f/f pairings tend to have hidden stories. You have to dig for them, for the possibilities, for the way these two women might interact. Rukia/Orihime, for example, has marvelous possibilities, but none of them are obvious because the two of them don’t interact enough in canon to create a strong template. Most of my m/m, on the other hand, comes out of dynamics that are pretty much shoved up the viewer/reader’s nose.

Given this, you’d think that a fandom like Utena would be the one to produce reams of f/f, but… really not so much. And when I try to imagine Utena/Anthy stories, I have to admit, I get lost. I could write fluff, I could write smut, but how to write actual plot when I’m already drowning in glorious, glorious plot in the source? It’s like trying to write Julia/Spike. So there’s the other extreme: not hidden stories but huge, wide, deep stories. It’s hard to find a place to start with either.

Then, too, most of the hooks, the suggestive situations, the shoved-up-your nose, well canon doesn’t give us much of that for the girls. Fraught relationships, competition, saving each other, about the only place I find that is in some, not all, shoujo and it’s always accompanied by such relentless, centralized het romance that it’s hard to get a word in edgewise. Consider, for example, Sailor Moon or Fushigi Yuugi. We can step around the boys, the same way slash steps around the girls, but we have to step wider because they’re taking up more space.

And so I come back to the weird stuff: not the huge stories, not the hidden stories, but the stories that don’t exist at all yet, the hooks that can be created if you’re willing to ignore common sense. Utena/Anthy is hard, so what about Anthy/Lain instead? If Miaka is hard to separate from Tamahome, what about Yui and Shuurei? Orihime could probably do with a good lecture from Sakura about how the healer has a duty to guard herself.

A few of those get my brain loosened up, get me thinking about how, actually, if Daley just pounced Leon, then I bet Linna would take her opportunity, and Priss, with both hands. How Ami is really the best answer to Makoto’s constant boy trouble. How age seems to mean nothing to shinigami and therefore I could totally get something going with Unohana and Orihime.

Settling for the simple answers seem to be part of what hobbles femslash and/or yuri, at least for me–a weird sort of inverse of pairing wars, in which cleaving to the obvious pairings leads, not to war, but to silence. The odd possibilities seem much richer.

Reading Naruto, of late, I feel like I’m reading Death Note all over again. As Ohba did, Kishimoto has drastically altered the structure and themes of the story he is telling, halfway through. And, as with DN, I like the first part better.

The first part of Naruto dealt with personal growth and the formation of personal and communal bonds. It dealt with children learning their own strength and, perhaps even moreso, each other’s strength. It also had vivid characters with engaging stories, dramatic enough to be exciting and regular enough to relate to easily, who carried these themes. The team that we follow all through the first part has a wonderfully high-tension relationship in Naruto and Sasuke plus the balance wheel of Sakura, who made it possible for them to operate as a team and thus keep bouncing off each other. It had shifting relationships and growing bonds of love and loyalty between the three of them, plus, for a bonus, the Sardonic Teacher in the form of Kakashi to serve as a commentator on their development.

I’m inclined to call the breakup of the team the first in a series of sharks this story jumped, but on reflection I think that, while true, this was not inevitable.  The development of the above themes actually lasted a bit past Sasuke’s departure. It would have been possible to preserve the momentum. Alas, that is not what Kishimoto chose to do.

Instead, the second half not only breaks up the team (which could have been a perfectly valid narrative move to spur further character growth) but it takes the focus away from their development and their relationships. Instead Naruto finds himself largely in isolation again, this time with the support of adults, cultivating his power.  It’s like his friends have only served to help manifest his solitary destiny, which is totally counter to the early themes.  Sakura seems to have an interesting storyline, from what little we see of it, but that’s the sticking point right there–we see so little of it. As for Sasuke… he has interesting things happening around him, but they seem to have absolutely zero impact on his character; he appears to have actually regressed and, while that too could have been turned into a useful narrative point, nothing is made of the fact.  Instead he’s just been bumped back as if none of his early development happened at all.  He, and Naruto to a large extent, have ceased to grow as characters; instead they just get glitzy new powers. The dynamic tension of their relationship has lapsed, and with it most of the zing of the series.

By the same token, one of the deepest themes of the first part was friendship and rivalry and what they mean and how they interact. That theme has disappeared. We have lingering references to it, but the actions of the characters show no urgency or plot-energy invested in the theme at all. Instead we have the growth of an historical theme, one that steps back and looks at the philosophical issues of ninja-dom in this universe. That could be interesting, but it isn’t what I want while the plot and character threads from the first half are still dangling around unfulfilled!

Really, Kishimoto should just have kept writing Naruto the way he was and spun off a completely different manga, probably focusing on Itachi, if he wanted to address the historical thread. They might have been crossed again later, and that could have made a fascinating maturation opportunity for the youngsters as they got older, but trying to do both in the same narrative space clearly isn’t going to work. And if this is, as is rumored, the fault of the Jump editors… then may the fleas of a thousand camels infest their armpits and may an unclean yak back into their linen closets and may they always have papercuts when they go to prepare vinegared rice.