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So I finished Angel Sanctuary. Go me?
I suppose if I'd been following the thing on a monthly basis I might be foaming at the mouth about it; though if I'd been following it on a monthly basis I'd have stopped following it on a monthly basis two or three years before it ended. If you follow. When one reads the tankoubon the momentary idiocies are ahh subsumed in the weight of narrative, and one scarce has leisure to realize that yes she did indeed just revive a character before bothering to tell us he was dead.
But this was the closest I'm ever likely to come to reading as a Japanese reads. In the earlier tanks I was careful to do a mental summary of What Had Happened at the end of each one, so that the action stayed at least linear and I didn't get too lost. I think that stopped around tank 18. After that I just read, a great wave of mixed dialogue and highish-level vocabulary washing over me with the pagewide artwork of battle and slaughter and falling-apart bodies and falling-down buildings and wings spreading and feathers falling through three volumes of apocalypse and apotheosis: which in the end results in a disarrayed flotsam of images and words bobbing around in one's head in no particular order before it all flows away. The Japanese do not read manga, they experience it.
Which is fine if you like sound and fury and thunderous emotions. If you're a fan of the 'manga recollected in tranquility' thingy you may be peeved, as I am, that the only clear memory of the work one has afterwards is that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then we must endure another ten pages of Rociel's puny inexhaustible narcissism, still wailing that he isn't beautiful.
I suppose if I'd been following the thing on a monthly basis I might be foaming at the mouth about it; though if I'd been following it on a monthly basis I'd have stopped following it on a monthly basis two or three years before it ended. If you follow. When one reads the tankoubon the momentary idiocies are ahh subsumed in the weight of narrative, and one scarce has leisure to realize that yes she did indeed just revive a character before bothering to tell us he was dead.
But this was the closest I'm ever likely to come to reading as a Japanese reads. In the earlier tanks I was careful to do a mental summary of What Had Happened at the end of each one, so that the action stayed at least linear and I didn't get too lost. I think that stopped around tank 18. After that I just read, a great wave of mixed dialogue and highish-level vocabulary washing over me with the pagewide artwork of battle and slaughter and falling-apart bodies and falling-down buildings and wings spreading and feathers falling through three volumes of apocalypse and apotheosis: which in the end results in a disarrayed flotsam of images and words bobbing around in one's head in no particular order before it all flows away. The Japanese do not read manga, they experience it.
Which is fine if you like sound and fury and thunderous emotions. If you're a fan of the 'manga recollected in tranquility' thingy you may be peeved, as I am, that the only clear memory of the work one has afterwards is that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then we must endure another ten pages of Rociel's puny inexhaustible narcissism, still wailing that he isn't beautiful.
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And there were particular characters I enjoyed (Katou, for example) that were interesting if focused on specifically.
But I know what you're saying about the emotions. There's a lot of books/manga I've read that... I enjoy the sentiment of what they're saying, or what they're trying to make me feel, but I don't really like the way they go about it. (Anne Rice does that to me a lot. Maybe it's a goth thing?)