Monthly Archives: December 2010

12 Days XII: Life sucks

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「punpun」/「m2」

「punpun」/「m2」

That’s what Asano Inio is trying to say. Well, okay, there’s a bit more to that: life sucks, but, you know, It’s going to be okay.

I’ve already talked about Solanin, but since then, I’ve been trying to read everything I can that’s by this guy. The bulk of it was various one-shots and short stories that weren’t more than a handful of chapters. Even though they’re short, he’s able to connect you with the characters and the hopelessness or boredom of their situation. Nijigahara Holograph is really his one step away from talking about peoples’ lives. It’s about some supernatural happenings, which when combined with his ability to write dark and realistic situations, make for a really creepy story.

But the one that stands out to me besides Solanin is also one of his strangest, Oyasumi Punpun.

Oyasumi Punpun is about a kid, Punpun, who is just a normal boy. It’s about him growing up. We start with him in elementary school. We see him play around with his friends. We see him wrestle with his feelings as he realizes he has his first crush on a girl. We see him deal with his family issues, with his abusive father and alcoholic mother. We see him move on to various stages of his life.

Except that to the reader, he and his entire immediate family are rendered as really weird, flat bird creatures.

Trust me, it works very well.

Oyasumi Punpun starts off sort of whimsically, with the crazy God character popping up once in a while and the surreal imagery that comes up in Punpun’s thoughts. Obviously, the family situation makes it pretty dark as well, but later on it gets fairly depressing. It’s a lot like Solanin, except that Solanin focused on a very, very short snapshot of time in Meiko’s life. In Punpun, we’re watching Punpun grow up and we can see how all of the stuff that he encounters earlier on in his life goes on to affect him later on.

What’s ultimately depressing about Punpun isn’t that it’s Punpun going through all of the crap that he goes through. It’s realizing that the things that he goes through are entirely believable, that real people go through what he has to go through.

And that’s what’s really so amazing about Asano Inio. It doesn’t matter whether or not the character is like you, which was the case for me with Solanin. Heck, it doesn’t even matter whether the character looks anything remotely close to a person. He’s still able to make what they’re going through and what they’re feeling uncomfortably real.

12 Days XI: Death sucks

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「セツミ」/「ごとP」

「セツミ」/「ごとP」

Narcissu is about people who are dying.

I read the first Narcissu last year during the summer. That was about a guy and a girl, both terminally ill and pretty much left to die. Faced with the choice of dying in the hospital or dying at home, they reject both and escape. Escape to where? Well, they figure that out along the way while we sit in the backseat and listen in.

Narcissu Side 2nd came out this year to everyone’s surprise and it offers another perspective on someone whose life is slowly draining away. This time, rather than following the journey of two people who are dying, we see how the waiting to die affects the person who’s about to die and everyone around them. Side 2nd takes place years before Narcissu, in which the protagonist, Himeko, meets Setsumi, the girl from the first Narcissu.

Side 2nd is interesting because it illuminates Setsumi’s character and leads into so many of the little details in Narcissu. It’s impressive how Side 2nd adds to the original Narcissu, even though it was already a pretty complete story. And after finishing Side 2nd, reading Narcissu again, and finishing with the new epilogue, I was amazed by how everything fit together.

Narcissu is fascinating because it shows us the end of a life without the usual drama that accompanies it in other fictional works. It’s not about people who are dying and are fighting to live. It’s not about people who are dying and decide to go out in a blaze of glory. It’s not about people who are dying after a life well lived. Narcissu is about people who have barely lived their lives and are resigned to the fact that it’ll be over shortly.

No shouting, no tears, no hope, just silence.

12 Days X: When the trolls cry

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「ベルンさま」/「ガガミング」

「ベルンさま」/「ガガミング」

No, it’s not quite over yet, but this year, I got to experience the joy of the six month waits that accompany each successive Comiket. Yes, after going through Umineko EP1-4, I was suddenly left with nothing to do but wait for the fine folks at The Witch Hunt do their stuff. It’s definitely different having about half a year in between each Episode. For one thing, it was a lot harder to hold the details of each Episode with months in between playthroughs. But now, there is only one left as the pieces of the game are almost set in place.

Chiru was something I was really looking forward to because it would mean the beginning of being able to make sense of the insane things that went down in the first four Episodes. Of course, I didn’t expect it to be as straightforward as Higurashi’s Answer arcs, but I don’t think I was quite prepared for Ryukishi07 to continue in the tradition of Umineko by throwing in even more characters and new reveals that add to the questions rather than answer them.

Well, that’s not entirely true. While the Core arcs doesn’t show us what “actually” happened (and it’s unlikely that it ever will), it does explain how the mechanics of the games work. Things like the role of the Detective and Knox’s Decalogue give us the framework and a direction from which to approach the stories of each Episode. Throughout Episodes 1-4, we were essentially flailing around, looking for any possible explanation for what was going on, but the Core arcs finally let us narrow down the search space for plausible theories.

Not only that, but we get a lot more Meta-world shenanigans. Somehow, there’s a lot more time spent in the Meta-world, away from the events on Rokkenjima. Like the entire game in general, a lot more of the time is spent on the mechanics of the games instead of the events that are occurring in the games. The various witches and furniture and demons are getting a lot more screentime than the original 18 are, which is fine with me, because they get some amazing scenes.

And that’s not to say that there’s no reveals that aren’t more direct. There are a ton of hints scattered throughout these arcs, but EP7, much like Higurashi’s Minagoroshi-hen, has some pretty huge reveals. No, the mystery isn’t explicitly solved, but it should be close enough that a bit of thinking should get you pretty close, if not right at the answer.

For all the focus on proof and logic in the Question arcs, the Core arcs shift the focus pretty bluntly in EP5, with the introduction of Furudo Erika. Why are things like the Decalogue and other rules of the games revealed now? The Core arcs are much more about the nature of the story and why things happen rather than what or how things happened. Somewhere along the way, we realize that denying the Witch won’t necessarily give us the good end, because it means there’s still someone running around on the island murdering people. So the question now becomes finding out why there’s someone on the island murdering people.

Umineko has been an insane ride and I’m definitely looking forward to finally finishing it and having my head explode one last time next year.

12 Days IX: WHAT IS THAT I DON’T UNDERSTAND BUT IT’S AWESOME

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「惑星のさみだれ」/「杜人」

「惑星のさみだれ」/「杜人」

That’s a line that one of the characters say that is the essence of The Lucifer and Biscuit Hammer.

The Lucifer and Biscuit Hammer combines the ‘what are you doing with your life?’ of Solanin with the FJDKLSA;FSAJ; AWESOME of Gurren Lagann. It’s about a disaffected university student who’s suddenly called upon by his newfound lizard familiar to help save the earth as a knight from a literal floating hammer in space that’s ready to crack the earth in half. Being the typical university student, he goes on and doesn’t give a crap.

And where there are knights, there’s a princess. This princess is a high school girl who’s dying, but is healthy until she saves the earth. She really likes the earth. She likes it so much that she won’t let anyone else destroy it. Or have it. So she decides she’s going to destroy the earth herself after she saves it. By punching it, which is her special power. This is what convinces our main character to get in on the adventure, because he doesn’t particularly like the earth that much either. So he ends up joining the princess in her clandestine scheme.

There’s a lot of great stuff in this manga. The animal familiars are pretty great because they’re just random animals. They don’t really have any special powers beyond talking and being tethered to their knight. There’s no real pattern to them, they’re just random animals. There’s a chicken. There’s a grasshopper. There’s a horse. It’s funny to see a horse talk about serious stuff.

The fights are a lot like FMA. Each knight really has one particular power that they end up honing over the course of the series. A lot of the fights involve using their powers in a lot of clever ways and a lot of punching. The big bad uses golems to fight the knights and those golems are usually destroyed by a well placed punch.

But one of the most enjoyable things was watching Yuuhi grow from being uninterested and apathetic to getting really into his role. Even when he says he’ll help Sami, he pretty much drags his feet around and remains as detached as he can. But he slowly builds up his powers and determination and eventually becomes Sami’s right hand man and acts as a knight would, genuflecting before Sami, standing tall before the other knights, and punching the hell out of golems.

This is how the world ends, not with a bang, but with a giant crack down the middle, caused by either a space hammer or a girl’s punch.

12 Days VIII: wts xmute pst

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「【鋼錬】光から成る」/「東雲たか」

「【鋼錬】光から成る」/「東雲たか」

I don’t even know where to begin with FMA. I’m sure like 95% of the population, my first exposure to Fullmetal Alchemist was through the first anime. That was pretty good! The ending did make me raise my eyebrows though, even though I was a dumb teenager. Ed living through WWI and the Great Depression was not my idea of a satisfying ending and his escapades in the Weimar Republic fighting the precursor to the Nazis from Wolfenstein even less so.

Luckily, that wasn’t the real story that the author had intended to write.

But even though the ending was incredibly dumb, FMA got me. It’s one of the shows I watched that wasn’t Naruto or Gundam when I was still in high school. And even though it wasn’t FMA proper, it had enough of its greatness still intact to draw me in.

Surprisingly, it’d be years before I got into real FMA. Once I got into it though, I found a fantastically well-crafted story. The pieces that were set in place at the beginning were put to much better use and made much more sense in this telling of the story. The vision of what the characters were facing and the size of the world were also a lot bigger and grander.

I don’t think there’s really ever a moment in the manga (and the eventual anime remake) that’s particularly dull. It keeps on chugging along, characters end up at places, and awesome things happen. The story flows really well in that it brings the characters to different places naturally, as opposed to TIME FOR TRAINING or something.

A lot of the first part of the story was pretty similar in tone and style to the first part of the first anime. So for me, where it really took off was at Briggs. It’s there where we’re in a new environment, meeting new characters, and fighting new mans. Yeah, I know the Xing characters were new, but they weren’t really as strikingly different to me as the Briggs crew.

And I suspect half the reason I enjoyed Briggs so much was because it’s where my favourite character of the series was introduced: Major General Olivier Mira Armstrong. She is an awesome lady who is arguably the best non-alchemist combatant. She’s practical, she’s competent, and she’s efficient. She doesn’t mess around with niceties. She’s values her subordinates, who reciprocate with unyielding loyalty. She’s one of the few top members of the military that’s actually deserving of the respect they command.

But where it’s most impressive is in its final act. It’s perfect. The buildup throughout the entire series is appropriate for what ends up going down. The final fights are amazing. The aftermath and resolution fits in the character of the series really well. It’s an incredibly satisfying ending to one of the best shounen manga of the last decade. If there was ever a series that was worth those agonizing month-long waits in between chapters, this was it.