Cruel Angel Theses

Re-reading your favourite manga that you haven’t touched in almost 7 years is like meeting an ex-classmate, or ex-classmates of yours that you haven’t seen for twice or half that time. One part of you wonders if they’ve stayed the same, one part wonders if you’ll recognise them, one part wonders if you’ll be able to talk as casually as you did all those years back, and one part, if you’re thinking about a particular female classmate, wonders if she’s grown up from that adorable girl you had a big crush on back then. My reunion with Love Hina was like that, only with less stiflingly dapper outfit and more pleasant recollection of memories.

softly dreaming, never drunk

And what a bunch of memories it’s been. While Asuka might have been the earliest example of the now-ubiquitious tsundere, I like to pride myself on recognising Naru as being the catalyst, the girl whose impact on manga and anime can still be felt in 2008, 10 whole years after Love Hina began serialisation in Shounen Magazine. Despite the futility of arguing about the influence of fictional people in present-day character archetypes, Naru represents everything about that eight-letter word we’ve come to hate to love: the “I’m in love with you but I’m denying it bigtime”, the profuse blushing, the “Don’t get me wrong, I’m not doing this because I like you or anything but…”, the hot-cold mannerisms — all of it.

As One Piece slowly inches its way up to the 500-chapter and 50-volume mark this year, with two other equally well-known franchises (the word “series” seemed to have lost its meaning years ago) poised to do the same, it’s hard to forget that manga has, and will always be, a business. The telling of a story becomes secondary to most manga-kas when a work of theirs reaches a certain level of mainstream success, and prolonging the work in order to milk the cash cow becomes more of an inevitability than a necessity.

Now, before the respective fans start howling about the way in which I’m phrasing what happens to be their all-time favourite manga (only until the manga-ka in question ends said franchise and begins another, of course), it’s not like I’m saying that the current tripartite reign of shounen is worth any less, nope. It’s just that my views on this one scream to differ when someone tells me that the length is absolutely necessary in order to realise the manga-ka’s vision for instance — this when Oda has admitted in an interview that One Piece was originally meant to last for 2 years, only for him to drag it out to what makes this his 11th year in serialisation (with it only being halfway done!).

The stark reality of manga publishing is this: unless you’re an established manga-ka that has the storyline all planned out (as Akamatsu’s doing for Negima right now), you basically start drawing for one of those weekly manga magazines with no idea if your series is going to last for as long as you want it to — not before you get the publisher’s approval, at any rate. It’s common for an unsuccessful series to be pulled within a month or two if sales numbers or polls aren’t achieving satisfactory results, so the idea of “making it up as you go” isn’t all that removed from reality.

I’m more inclined towards the “Quantity almost never equates quality” school of thought myself, a belief reinforced by many a manga I’ve read that concluded around the 30+ volume mark at most. That that many manga-kas have managed to flesh out a unforgettable cast of characters alongside an equally gripping plot in so “few” volumes by comparison only goes to show what the age of crass commercialisation has done for the medium, by turning it into a product with an ultimate goal of reader numbers and long-term sustainability over a story’s inherent value, and disfiguring a solid narrative into nothing more than a bunch of pages published ever so often in a magazine for the sake of its diehard fans.

But precedents have shown that it is indeed possible to drag a manga past its best-before date, and even further past its expiry one, if you’ve got the clout of a bigwig to negotiate with. I can recollect two instances in which this worked: Akira Toriyama was one such victim to this phenomenon, apparently being forced to continue Dragon Ball past the final Freeza arc in order to fulfil the demands of his publisher (in addition to licensing Dragon Ball GT, which was anime-only and meant to cash in on the success of Dragon Ball); secondly, Ken Akamatsu, was ordered by his publishers to extend LH’s run by two volumes, resulting in a final volume count of 14.

It’s one of those blue moons where matching the supply to the demand actually turned out for the better, and LH in its final incarnation seems to have aged like the proverbial wine, or maybe an ancient cheese of some sort that usually accompanies said wine, if you’re a teetotaller. There’s nothing cheesy about the way in which it plays that tightrope-balancing act between character and plot, and instead of taking it like the mindless-yet-entertaining fluff I expected it to me, I was amazed to find myself appreciating it in a critical manner much unlike all those years ago.

and God’s in his Heaven…

I like to look at LH as the harem model that never was — partially because beneath its veneer of fanservice that people were quick to judge lay a potent combination of slice-of-life, romance, and comedy that few works have managed to capture without coming off as yet another carbon copy. For lack of a better word, “epic”. As amused as I am at finding it to be a breath of fresh air for the genre a decade later, the fact remains that Akamatsu was way before his time and still is; someone with a vision of the genre like no other, constantly looking to reinvent what would’ve otherwise been a stale and lacklustre reiteration of stories past.

It’s rather unfortunate that what subsequently transpired within the harem genre (with the definition here being derived more or less from its refreshingly simple Wikipedia entry) was a divide between the standard adaptation procedure of most eroges when it came to anime, and what looked like pale imitators of LH. The premise of “If you can’t beat them, join them” is flawed in that regard — it doesn’t lend for much creativity, and despite its good intentions, what usually transpires is nothing more than a glorified imitation of the original, which makes for much

The problem with visual novel fans who claim that an adaptation of their favourite work “isn’t harem” is that they couldn’t be further from the truth, this being a debate verging on semantics — while the source work is technically exempt from such a classification if a girl’s path doesn’t overlap with another, taking place in an alternate reality as it were, what takes place in the anime adaptation is far from that. For obvious reasons, all the girls have individual “arcs” (see Clannad for a recent example) that take place in the same world with a single continuity, as opposed to the original game’s multiple continuity which ensures that each girls’ arc takes place independently of each other.

This is, of course, the inherent problem that lies with every adaptation of a visual novel work in the ren’ai/eroge/dating sim field. Trying — and I say trying here because not every adaptation has succeeded in this aspect — to cram various alternate realities into the same setting, while maintaining that veneer of realism and attempting to placate each and every fan whose favourite character may or may not get shafted as a result of the juggling has seemed like a needless ordeal to me. It goes without saying that this problem is genetic in origin and is easier criticised than solved, but if Clannad and and kimikiss are anything to go by, all hope isn’t lost for that approach just yet.

Which brings me to LH, a series way ahead of its time in how it handled that delicate balance of character and plot. While LH obviously doesn’t suffer from the problems that its visual novel counterparts had by means of adaptation problems, it also worked for other reasons, one of them being that character development was done in a manner so realistic that this wasn’t so much conventional harem as it was slice-of-life, a well-rounded view of an adorable cast that grew with the years; a bunch of girls with your typical adolescent pains and insecurities about the future set alongside a guy who finds his place in the world, attaining a spine and an admirable drive for life in the process.

So there’s growth, alright, and it’s this very growth that sets it apart from contemporary ideas of harem, if only because you have a feeling that there’s more to this than just the 14 volumes, or 25 episodes and 3 specials — that instead of showing you an interesting plot and characters added as an afterthought, what Akamatsu wanted to do instead was to demonstrate how, by means of his idiosyncratic style, he had these wonderful people that he wanted you to be acquainted with, and what better way than to illustrate it by means of a manga? It was a story of growing up that went beyond and above your conventional narrative, and this was demonstrated in the long-awaited finale where Naru and Keitaro finally get married in a glamorous wedding years later — how fitting that the end of the story for us is but just the beginning for them.

beneath the cherry blossoms in full bloom

One scene that deserves particular mention takes place in volume 10, more specifically the 86th chapter, a short but nevertheless significant one that has Keitaro returning to his parents’ house for a spell. It’s a mere absence of four days, yet in that small timespan the inhabitants of Hinata Inn come to realise how much Keitaro’s become a part of their lives, a far cry from the days of wanting him out in the very first volume. They “just can’t seem to get in the mood” without him around, and while they try to keep themselves occupied initially, by the time the four days over and two more pass, everyone’s dying to see him, Naru especially; the tears she sheds upon seeing him again are equal parts realistic and ironic, considering that she was the one most opposed initially to having him stay.

Speaking of which, Naru’s another character of whose likeness we will probably never see again. It’s annoying to see many a character aspire to her depth and range of emotions in anime and manga nowadays, for the sum of what she was couldn’t be summed up by merely evoking that T-word, a connotation that implies nothing more than a tendency towards swaying between two emotions — to reduce her to modern archetypal standards displays nothing but an ignorance of the text, an unwillingness to look beyond the easily-ignored fanservice aspect to what makes her tick. Little by little, she becomes less of an intimidating, emasculating, violent figure and blooms into a sympathetic person with her own vulnerabilities, of which we’re made painfully aware of.

It’s apparent in the way in which she talks about her doubts and fears, those seemingly unimportant things that humanise her to the reader in tandem with Keitaro’s understanding, ensuring that when he finally gets her to ‘fess up to her own feelings after a long and harrowing adventure-cum-roadtrip that spans across half of Japan, you cheer for them; not because the pages preceding the confession were great entertainment, action, or fanservice, but because you’re genuinely happy for them, like you would be for any friend of yours in real life.

Keitaro isn’t just another drop in the sea of harem protagonists either, and this is never clearer than in my favourite volume, volume 9, where Motoko and Shinobu (with some Kitsune on the side) get their long-deserved focus. The breadth in which these girls are developed in a single volume is staggering, and it’s made even better by how Keitaro’s set apart from your regular spineless Joe. His presence isn’t a cure-all panacea or the typical knight in shining armour role that we’ve become accustomed to see — he isn’t there to help solve a given girl’s problems, but to give her the strength to face it, and that’s ultimately what sets LH apart from the rest, even by today’s standards.

Martin in his review last year brought up one significant criticism that just didn’t sit right with me: LH’s apparent simplicity. On hindsight, despite agreeing with most of his review, re-reading the manga didn’t make me all that comfortable with what he said, and why so? Naru, to me, is more complex and deep a character at 21 than she was to me at 15. That says a lot about her character, for one, but more importantly, what I’d like to suggest here is that LH works on two levels; the juvenile, where you look for the action, the gags, and the romance, and the mature, where you look at the rich development, complex characters, and jaw-dropping moments that punctuate the otherwise easy-going and light-hearted plot.

This is, in my opinion, Akamatsu’s greatest strength: he knows how to bring both mainstream marketability and a story worthy of even the most high-brow of critics together in the same package. Think of it this way — it’s like running a high-end Mac with Windows installed alongside OS X. On one hand you have the aesthetics that appeals to many, and on the other, actual functionality that goes beyond a pretty GUI. There’s depth in LH if the reader gets bored of all the tantalising eye candy and gorgeous character designs that adorn its pages, and in a way I’m proud that my teenage self got to look at one aspect before my adult self did the other.

The title of this post came up by means of wishful thinking about how it would have been nice had harem taken a significant step in the direction that Akamatsu carefully paved away from the methodology of visual novel adaptations, but after writing this post I’d have to say that it’s just that — wishful thinking. We see attempts at trying to capture what Akamatsu had down pat all those years ago every time a new season of anime comes around, of course, but it rarely comes close to the vision that he built all those years back. At the end of the day what he did was unmistakably unique in how he mixed genres and subverted numerous plot devices, and I guess there’s no substitute for originality.

Next: Negima explained, and why “Akamatised shounen” is the best thing since sliced bread.