*howling with absolute disbelief*

AMANO, WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK, YOU GOATSUCKING HACK?!

*breathing hard*

I had already realized, well before this thank you, that Amano is dedicated to making her women useless frills, to handicapping even the few who are allowed to fight, to portraying the ones who are actually reasonably strong as absolute psychopaths, to making sure that they lose to the men every goddamn time. And I had realized, well before this also, that she has rolled back character development to nearly Issue 60 levels. And it was clear that Chrome was going to be the especial victim of both these trends, for the present arc.

BUT THIS! SHE HAS ACTUALLY CONTRADICTED HER OWN ESTABLISHED FACTS. HER OWN DAMN FACTS FROM THE LAST DAMN ARC WHERE THEY WERE REALLY DAMN CRITICAL TO THE PLOT! SHE CHANGED THE FACTS TO A DEGREE THAT IS FLATLY IMPOSSIBLE TO RECONCILE WITH PREVIOUS ACTION!

I don't believe this. Even though it's Amano I'm-a-flaming-misogynist Continuity-what's-that Akira, I still can't quite believe she actually just did that!

The only bright side I can wrest out of this pathetic clusterfuck is that the present arc is now clearly and canonically AU to the rest of the manga, and I therefore have a bulletproof reason to completely ignore it.

Right. There needs to be fic. Something where Chrome meets the first Mist, one way or another, and kicks his goddamn ass.


ETA: Spoilers for most recent issue in the comments.

Genre crossing, when done well, can be a very effective storytelling technique, allowing the author to hit the reader with unexpected plot turns and presentation that is sufficiently unusual that it will make the reader think twice about the scene. Alas, when not done well all we get is a hot mess.

Amano is currently demonstrating Not Well with Katekyou Hitman Reborn.

This is especially a shame considering that her first cross went off very well. When she had written sixty issues of a gag manga, full of underwear shenanigans, and suddenly decided she wanted to write a serious, indeed dark in places, battle manga, she made the transition quite smoothly. The underwear phased out and was replaced in a plausible way, the change presented as a moment of personal development for our main character, such as we might expect in a good battle manga. The initial premise, that our hero is slated to inherit a mafia family, offered plenty of material for a darker turn. So far so good. The next two and a half arcs were a marvelous sweep of fast-paced action with personal development and growth for the whole ensemble of characters.

And then we hit the bump. Possibly even the shark. Somewhere, for some reason, the decision was made to extend the Future arc with a new set of villains, and the storytelling fell apart. The pace jinked and faltered, new characters got no background or development, the fights were truncated and disappointing compared to the intense confrontations of previous arcs, and even the first half of the Future arc.

Worst of all, Amano turned back to the gag genre, and, at this juncture, failed to make it work.

This is most evident in our hero, Tsuna. Tsuna has always flailed a lot, to be sure, but less so as time went on; indeed, when he came to the future, the pressure of events and responsibility seemed to wash the flailing out of him and push him toward a more mature presentation even when he isn't wrapped up in Dying Will. With this latest turn, however, the flailing is suddenly back to early levels, to the extent that his weapon reflects it and allies comment on it. The plot provides us with no explanation for this.

This is characteristic of the gag genre: character development is neither necessary nor, in most cases, desired. The character quirks that are used for gags must remain constant, and the nature of the genre is such that readers are usually willing to suspend any disbelief and accept them, however implausible. It's part of the genre expectations.

The genre expectation of a battle manga, and especially a serious one, is that characters will develop, both technically and emotionally. Sudden backsliding of personal development needs some kind of cause or explanation.

As I said at the beginning, these expectations can be crossed, if it is done well. Many battle manga use brief gag moments to break tension; bathroom humor is a favorite. Even the development of the hero can be let to fail briefly, for the sake of increasing dramatic tension. But if the audience is not to reject that tactic, it must be framed, supported, explained in some way--it must be presented as a dramatic moment, in order to be accepted as such. Tsuna's reversion is not.

Hence my fear that Amano has no clue where she's going with the current sub-arc and has fallen back on her roots because she is at a complete loss. If this is due to editorial pressure, to draw out the Future arc more, I hope someone kicks that editor in the teeth soon. If it is due to Amano losing her grip on the story, paging editor!Reborn, please. In either case, the current issues are a fine example of how not to do it.

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.

Sounds like it should be the title of a children’s book.

At any rate, I’ve become increasingly convinced that Uni is the same person as her mother.

( The account of why contains spoilers, of course )

So, thinking about odd characters.

For one, we have Xanxus. He’s presented to us as completely selfish and more than a little psychotic, and never shows regret for any of it. Then comes his defeat, more by Fate than by Tsuna, and he gets a Revelation scene. Normally a Revelation scene gives the audience the backstory of a villain and explains to us why they have done whatever dreadful things they’ve done. This may or may not be accompanied by repentance and may or may not affect the character’s final fate, but it generally secures some sympathy for their motivations. Only, in Xanxus’ case, his backstory makes it clear that he’s always been a selfish bastard, that he was arrogant and carelessly cruel and full of exactly the kind of pride that goes before a justified fall. Just to drive the nail in further, at the end of the Revelation, Xanxus affirms once again that he has no noble motives at all, he just wanted to be praised and elevated, to have the prop of a high position.

What this suggests about his character is that he has no real sense of self-worth. The Revelation shows his pride in his (supposedly) birth-given position, and, when he realizes the position isn’t his by birth after all, shows Xanxus himself saying that he’s actually lower than all those people he scorned and abused. This makes his motivation blindingly clear; if he has no other source of worth, then of course he would go to whatever lengths it took to reclaim a “rightful” position as the Ninth’s heir. But it also suggests that Xanxus has no belief in his own abilities and his strength is less in rage than in desperation, which makes him… well, rather pitiful.

Pitiful, but stubborn, because he utterly refuses Tsuna’s empathy and any redemption that might come out of accepting a worldview in which the Ninth genuinely loves him as a son. Instead he is explicitly preserved as someone among the Vongola who, despite defeat, does not accept Tsuna and will undoubtedly be trouble for him one way or another.

And then we have Iemitsu. He stands in a long line of shounen genre dads who are genius weirdos and useless as actual parents. Some examples of this include HxH’s Jinn, PoT’s Nanjirou, GB’s Kaizer, Naruto’s Fourth, Ranma’s Saotome; occasionally we see genius weirdos who are decent parents, such as IniD’s Bunta, or who can be argued either way, such as Bleach’s Isshin, but they are far less common. Normally, if they have any excuse it’s that they’re dead. Unusually, Iemitsu is given a really good reason to be a deadbeat dad: he has an extremely dangerous job that could easily spill over onto his wife and child if he stays with them, and we are shown first-hand evidence of how dangerous both when Xanxus and the Varia show up and in the death toll of the Future arc.

Iemitsu is shown to be dedicated to his job, to the Family before his family. He doesn’t try to get Tsuna out of it, when the putative Ninth’s orders place his child in life or death competition with practiced killers. He is the one who returns to Italy during those battles, to rescue the Ninth, leaving Tsuna in Reborn’s care. This demonstrates his faith in Tsuna’s strength, to be sure, but also an iron commitment to his duty above the natural reactions we might expect a father to have. He is not the usual sort of useless-genius parent.

Indeed, the complexity of both these characters and how they are deployed in the narrative are far more typical of seinen than shounen, and I find myself wondering if post60, at least, more deserves the seinen genre classification.

*staring at the info book translations*

Okay. So, when the KHR info book came out, the timeline set ‘current time’ in the middle of Our Hero’s second year of Namimori Middle school, and their ages are given as (for the most part) 14.  To be more precise, 13/14, given Kyoko’s age.

This… actually does match up.  I kept seeing their ages set at 15, and was wondering how on earth they could be first and second years in middle school and still be 15; that’s the age for a high school first year.

But, no, it looks like the times are not screwed up, and, indeed, these characters are middle school students.

And, theoretically, Hibari’s age is unknown, but it doesn’t seem in character for him to stay in middle school when he should properly be in the high school range, so he’s probably only a year older than they are, if that, and this is going to make my futurefic for Dino/Hibari a bit more difficult to set.

*makes small ‘argh’ sounds*

Okay, first off, just because I have to get it out of the way: hot like fire.

Onward, then.

Yamamoto is another of those contradictory characters that’s so much fun. On the one hand he’s laid back and cheery. He smiles at everyone, including Hibari and his opponents. On the other, he has, starting in post60, a definite ferocious streak. The way it’s most often characterized is as a will not to lose, and when he’s in that mode he’s downright alarming–still smiling sometimes but in a very different way indeed.

Yamamoto’s fierce streak is paired with a protective streak, and sometimes protectiveness will bring out the fierceness. Consider Yamamoto’s fight with Ken, in the Mukuro arc. He looks fierce after his bat/sword gets broken, and engages readily with a strong and uncanny opponent, but he doesn’t fight all out. Not until Tsuna is in danger. That’s when he throws it all down, even to the point of sacrificing his arm to get his opponent in range. And in more general terms, a good half of Yamamoto’s entrances seem to involve rescuing someone, most often Tsuna but sometimes other family members as well.

All of this, however, is also matched up with a set reluctance to kill. Squalo, during their fight, asks several times if Yamamoto is screwing around or not taking him seriously enough because he keeps striking with the spine of his sword instead of the edge. It seems like quite a legitimate question, given that Iemitsu’s evaluation of Yamamoto, at the start of this arc, is that his fighting spirit lacks the harshness necessary to fight the likes of the Varia. I find it interesting that Yamamoto never actually answers Squalo; he simply keeps fighting his own way.

So Yamamoto’s intensity is consistently tempered. Going all-out, for him, I speculate, has little to do with bloodlust. Besides his protectiveness, I think what drives, and equally gentles, his ferocity may actually be the same things that make him so suited to athletics: a team spirit and a will to win on the gameplay level. Let us consider. On the one hand, I get increasingly suspicious of his apparent cluelessness about mafia doings as time goes on. If he’s serious, then either he’s stunningly, moronically oblivious to the stakes involved in these encounters, which sorts oddly with his general perceptiveness and ability to do things like redirect uncomfortable conversations, or else he’s psychotic enough to consider grievous bodily harm reasonable stakes for a game. I’m more inclined to think he has an arcane sense of humor and is enjoying the looks on people’s faces when he makes like he doesn’t quite get it. On the other, I think his tendency, even  post60, to interpret things as a game points to something significant: he’s that intense even over games. The flipside of this is, of course, that his understanding of fighting and winning is shaped by and bound up in forms that are not life and death.

I imagine this is why he drives people like Squalo, and possibly Hibari, to absolute fits. He doesn’t have the same scale of measurement they do for winning and losing.

I think this is also why his patience with Gokudera finally snaps. Yamamoto clearly understands team play, and the more dire the situation the more strongly he seems to return to that touchstone. Strongly enough, indeed, that he cannot just stand aside and let Gokudera’s stubbornness be its own punishment; instead he’s driven back to insist on the point.

This is not exactly to say he’s the sane one, because anyone who jumps that readily into the path of weaponry even before he’s trained and looks for training just to even up the score with explosive, sword-wielding maniacs doesn’t really qualify as sane. I do think, though, that he’s probably the most stable of Tsuna’s Guardians.

The difference between young Hibari and adult Hibari is an interesting one, to me. They’re both sublimely confident of winning, both prickly and short-tempered around most people, but adult Hibari seems to be somewhat calmer and more balanced.

Now it’s not difficult to get more balanced than young Hibari, because he strikes me very much as the shounen trope of the crazy-strong character. They’re all over the place. They’re the one who’s never been beaten, who never holds back, who loves to go all out with no holds barred and is a little insane with it. The classic method of dealing with this character is to have the hero defeat them, after which they get a lot saner (PoT’s Akutsu, RK’s Soujirou), or, sometimes, to just leave them as the crazy, ambiguous, dangerous one who’s never been beaten (HxH’s Hisoka).

My own framing of that particular dynamic is that the crazy-strong characters are as if running, down a hill. They’re full tilt and flat out, and they’re a breath away from falling, and nothing can stop it–and they know it. That’s what makes them crazy, that edge of almost-disaster, that lack of balance. When they find an equal opponent, then they have someone to lean on, someone who can push back; that way they can still go all out and not be in danger of falling over from lack of resistance. Having someone capable of standing against them balances them.

And I suspect this is, indeed, what happens to Hibari. The part that interests me is that he doesn’t quite follow the classic curve. We never see him being defeated by anyone except Mukuro, and that does not, of course, do anything to make him less volatile. It does, however, seem to focus him, witness the way Reborn uses the possibility of a rematch to lure Hibari into the family properly.

Immediately after that is the event that I think points toward another part of this equation. Yamamoto tries to talk Hibari down, as he is wont to do, and, when that fails, actually stops him. On the one hand is the physical move, which impresses pretty much everyone, and on the other is the psychological move; Yamamoto claims Squalo as his opponent, owning to an actual will to fight and win (to carnivore-hood, as it were). That, I suspect, fixes Hibari’s attention just as much as the way Yamamoto caught his strike.

This, incidentally, is one reason I think that Hibari’s character really changes between the first story and the second. There is a rather similar moment during the scrap for the sakura-viewing spot, in which Yamamoto interferes and catches Hibari’s strike. At that time, Hibari does not focus on him; indeed, he seems put out, perhaps even petulant. The difference in response on those two occasions is notable. Similarly, in the Mukuro arc, when Gokudera busts Hibari out, Hibari (of course) says he could have done it himself, but he then asks if he can/should get rid of Mukuro’s two henchmen. It’s remarkably polite, in comparison to Hibari pre-60, and indicates at least some awareness of obligation. Arrogantly, to be sure. He even hauls Gokudera up the stairs with him, something that the young Hibari does again when he comes forward in time, once again to discharge the obligation of having been helped out.  This suggests that he does acknowledge having been helped, which is very much not the same character we are shown in pre-60.

At any rate, I suspect it’s these two things together, falling invisibly in the ten year gap, that calm Hibari: being able to fight again with Mukuro, apparently his eternal opponent given what he says in the future about honing himself against illusionists, and having Yamamoto around, as irregularly intense as he is, to fight with as a friend and probably to puzzle over as a hobby given how often Yamamoto acts in ways Hibari classifies as herbivorous.

Of course, there’s a third element in here: Dino. I also find it very interesting that we barely see the fights/training between Dino and Hibari at all, even though Dino apparently persuades Hibari to not only keep training but to do it away from Hibari’s precious school. However Dino does it, and we don’t get to find that out, this may form the necessary bridge between the loss to Mukuro, which is both tempering and inflaming, and the theoretical sparring with Yamamoto, who I speculate both interests and frustrates Hibari because Yamamoto exists outside the rules of Hibari’s worldview (more on that later). Between these three points, and taking into account my theory that Hibari transfers his love for the institution of the school to the institution of the family, we have a possible explanation for future Hibari, who is calmer and  capable of cooperation–possibly even with Mukuro, witness Mukuro’s routing of information to Hibari.

Alternatively, of course, we could put it all down to Tsuna’s powers of redemption as the pure-hearted hero, but those haven’t been leaned on hard enough for me to call that the only reason.