I read 19 volumes of it yesterday. It’s nice to revisit what I’ve been proclaiming (to anyone who’ll listen) as the “best shounen series ever”, and by “shounen series” I mean of the fighting type. I went off on a tangent on BATESZI’s poll in his blog about it until I realised he was talking about anime specifically, and I’ve only read the manga for that.

Also, some insight into Darker than Black 09 and 10 after the cut. Questions raised include “is sudo better than Shinsen in subbing?” (protip: the answer is No for quality, a half-hearted Yes for speed), and “what is Hei’s obeisance, anyway?” (the answer might be more obvious than previously thought).

hey guys, I think Lucky Star isn’t that great, yet I’m going to make deadpan posts week after week detailing how funny or unfunny this week’s episode was! and I’m cool that way! I’m also constantly sleep-deprived, and WUI- wait, wrong blog.

Re-reading Rurouni Kenshin has been a rewarding experience. I finished the Kyoto arc, teetering now into Jinchu arc territory, and it’s simply amazing how there really isn’t that much that you need to cover if you’re going to illustrate the struggle within a character: all you need is to get your protagonist to come to terms with that dark side (Kyoto) and how he finds subsequent redemption (Jinchu) from his past.

Now that I’ve begun to learn how to appreciate anime and manga from a critical point of view, the extent of RK’s merit is clear, for it’s free of all the bloat and money-making pretensions that come with shounen manga as we know it today. I’m thinking the first few series that come to people’s minds nowadays when they think of shounen from a very general, mainstream perspective, things like Naruto, Bleach, and One Piece.

What’s wrong with them? Nothing, in theory; it’s just that I stopped reading all of them after some time — Naruto at volume 10, Bleach at volume 12, and One Piece at volume 14 or so. They weren’t that inspiring. The cast continued to bloat. I had better alternatives at my disposal. This gut instinct I operated on, or what us common folk usually refer to as “it doesn’t feel right” proved me right later on, much to my glee.

A few hard numbers here for perspective’s sake: One Piece has been in circulation for roughly 10 years now since 1997, at 45 volumes currently; Naruto for 8 years since 1999, with 38 volumes so far; and finally, Bleach for 6 years since 2001, with 28 volumes and what looks like a hell lot more to come.

This is something that never made good sense to me at all — why would someone want to turn what is essentially a hobby, something read for enjoyment or pleasure, into a frighteningly obscene investment of time and money, assuming here that we’re talking about the target demographic over in Japan? Suddenly entertainment ceases to be, and in place you’ve got an ongoing pursuit for the latest chapter, or volume. To what point does it suddenly stop being that fun for the average person who doesn’t want all that?

It’s strange that even 13 years later RK continues to make its genre counterparts pale in comparison. The story is tight, with no filler, just pure story and breathtakingly illustrated battles throughout the 28 volumes (published in a shockingly short span of 5 years!). The usual bunch of characters introduced in droves die anywhere from a chapter to several volumes later, saving the reader the effort of remembering obscure character #42. But more on that later.

this was, by far, one of the most GAR lines ever uttered

sudo’s subs suck. Those of you who think Shinsen sucks fail in the highest degree for not using your brain even giving them a chance, but I doubt that actually matters at this point. A matter of stylistics for the most part; sudo’s subs are unpolished crap, with utterly unreadable fonts that make you squint, as opposed to Shinsen’s nice huge readable, easy-on-the-eye fonts.

In a moment of desperation I downloaded sudo’s DtB 09 & 10 to get my long overdue Hei fix, and one thing struck me about it as I began watching — the OP and ED were bad. One way to see how translator of any given group works is is to check out the translation of the OP and ED, because that’s a pretty good indicator of how they go about things, and sudo’s version read horribly.

There’s that whole debate about literal vs natural, but since this was never a PC blog and you don’t read this to watch me sit on the fence, I’ll have to go with literal translations being trash. The assumption that goes with literal subbing is that the viewer doesn’t care about the standard of English in fansubs, or has at least some vague knowledge of Japanese syntax that makes understanding the almost-Engrish subtitles easier, which, sadly, isn’t always the case for most people out there.

It’s an elitist matter, I’ll grant you that. Being a fansubber almost always puts a group in that “love us or leave us” mentality championed everywhere, which is fine if you churn out DVD-quality (Triad, doing a great job on Bokurano) subs, or almost-immediate releases that aren’t half bad (speaking of yesy, where’s my StrikerS?).

Yet we have sudo’s subtitles leaving ojou-sama untranslated, “I move around a lot” instead of “I exercise everyday” (because moving around is the same as exercising!), and a botched Chinese romanisation job that wasn’t as accurate, among others. This leaves me with the impression that sudo can’t be bothered to get a proper editor, or has shoddy quality control at the very least.

Then again I suppose those of you who are pro-sudo presumably watch them because they do a quick job, so I’ll just leave it at that. Have fun with your trashy version of DtB. Oh, and Asuka, if you’re reading this, up yours. I can’t be bothered to “be specific” like DarkMirage did this one time and post a ton of screenshots showing why sudo’s subs suck, so I’m just saying.

Now that I’m done insulting the five people affected by this, I’m quite convinced that we’ve got all we need to figure out what Hei’s contract, or lack of it, is. We already know that an obeisance (too big a word for sudo I reckon) can be permanently paid off, as is the case with Mao when he lost his original body. We also know now from Wei’s case that a Contractor can possess a power that also fulfils his or her obeisance at the same time.

These two facts, when coupled with the question that Carmine has posed previously, are adequate grounds for this inference of mine. Carmine has noted that Hei is unlike a typical Contractor, in the sense that he has emotions and no obeisance, which is in direct opposition to the norm. November 11 has also confirmed this during his faceoff with Hei, when he pressed Hei to “make the logical decision” while Hei was trapped, and got a dagger in the arm for his efforts instead.

The last piece of the puzzle lies in DtB’s OP. Pay attention to these two lines:

????????????
?????????????????

For the suckers watching sudo, it’s translated as

Between the gap of two embraced chests
This thirsty body is craving

and that totally makes sense, right? Shinsen, however, translates it as

Our two hearts, intertwined
Thirst only for this body

which makes far more sense than sudo’s, so I’ll be using this as part of the inference. Now, the concept of a human existence in DtB’s world is much unlike ours, in the sense that souls are transferable, as is the case with Mao mentioned previously. A person’s consciousness can be transferred from one body to another, something unique to Contractors.

Having said all that, here’s my thoughts on the matter: what if Hei’s obeisance was sharing bodies with a Contractor spirit, or consciousness? It’s been noted that his alter-ego, Li, is very unlike Hei in a lot of things, and re-watching DtB 09 & 10 brought this to my attention. Obvious mild-mannered characteristics aside, Li noticeably became short of breath when running away with Kirihara, and his kneejerk response to her remark about surveillance spectres is to ask what they are, without hesitation.

Of course, it could very well be that Hei is good at acting, so much so that he’s already trained himself to not recognise anything Contractor-related, in addition to pretending to be out of breath. But what about Hei’s identity? We’ve been following the assumption that Hei is his real name, and that Li is an alter-ego he invents in order to go about without attracting suspicion, but what if Li is indeed his real name, and Hei the alter-ego instead?

This supports my theory, for aside from explaining why Hei has no visible obeisance and still retains emotion, it also explain the mood shifts between the Hei and Li personalities respectively. The OP animation deserves mention here too, for it has the naked purple silhouette of a woman that whispers into Hei’s ears — could this be a hint as to Hei’s true nature? Only time will tell.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 21st, 2007 at 11:47 pm and is filed under Anime, Manga. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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