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My problems with Takahashi Rumiko
Going from the sublime of Samurai Champloo (no really, anything that works in The Great Mirror of Manly Love, Mito Komon chanbara, real Dutchmen and classic ukiyo-e in the same episode deserves props) to the letussay unsublime, I'm also watching random Inuyasha to see what the fuss is about. I'm still unsure what the fuss is about but I suspect it's got to do with being 40 years beyond the target age group.
The style looks Sailor Moonish to me but the comparison is unfair. SM never gave me quite the kind of hives that Takahashi Rumiko gives me. They're unpindownable hives as well and may be Ranma specific. I don't know. It goes like this.
Someone somewhere (it may have been Tanizaki in In Praise of Shadows) said the trouble with cleanliness is that the dirt shows more clearly; and more: a cleanliness mentality automatically suggests that dirt is still there in places it can't get at. I'll agree with that and point to the NAmerican germ obsession as evidence. Expanding that idea to the arts, depictions of sweetness and light- or in the Japanese case, genkiness and 'akarui'-ness (which is still light, isn't it?)- suggest to me a nasty corruption below the surface. All that stuff you don't get to see, shut away and festering. (That sense is naturally absent in works where the darker side of the charas is also shown- umm, like Samurai Champloo.) I first encountered the idea when someone wrote about the original illustrations of Dickens' wee demure heroines and how they gave *him* the fantods, and had to agree. There's something dangerous and unnatural and slightly terrifying about those women: all sweet meekness and bland goodness to look at, and where has the humanity of them gone?
And I find the same with Takahashi. Everyone is so good and genki and normal, they must be practising coprophilia or bondage on the side. (Well, they're Japanese. You /know/ the guys are fantasizing bondage when they jerk off.) Something about her style automatically puts me in mind of hentai rape manga. It's the same kind of woman in both: wide eyed and innocent and asking for an introduction to the dark side of the human psyche.
Inuyasha may be different; after all, we've got the requisite dark side character given to us on an animus platter. Actually if Inuyasha the character goes on being the one-note unlikable dork he is (and no, Blue Seed has proven to me that 'otoko-rashii' doesn't /have/ to equate to 'socially challenged dweeb') what we have may be a bleak parable about the choices the average Japanese woman has to face: unlikable manly-male or destructive animus charm. No wonder they've stopped getting married.
(ETA: boo hiss VIZ. Doesn't give the names of the Japanese VAs. Dub-by-default thinking, I tell you.)
The style looks Sailor Moonish to me but the comparison is unfair. SM never gave me quite the kind of hives that Takahashi Rumiko gives me. They're unpindownable hives as well and may be Ranma specific. I don't know. It goes like this.
Someone somewhere (it may have been Tanizaki in In Praise of Shadows) said the trouble with cleanliness is that the dirt shows more clearly; and more: a cleanliness mentality automatically suggests that dirt is still there in places it can't get at. I'll agree with that and point to the NAmerican germ obsession as evidence. Expanding that idea to the arts, depictions of sweetness and light- or in the Japanese case, genkiness and 'akarui'-ness (which is still light, isn't it?)- suggest to me a nasty corruption below the surface. All that stuff you don't get to see, shut away and festering. (That sense is naturally absent in works where the darker side of the charas is also shown- umm, like Samurai Champloo.) I first encountered the idea when someone wrote about the original illustrations of Dickens' wee demure heroines and how they gave *him* the fantods, and had to agree. There's something dangerous and unnatural and slightly terrifying about those women: all sweet meekness and bland goodness to look at, and where has the humanity of them gone?
And I find the same with Takahashi. Everyone is so good and genki and normal, they must be practising coprophilia or bondage on the side. (Well, they're Japanese. You /know/ the guys are fantasizing bondage when they jerk off.) Something about her style automatically puts me in mind of hentai rape manga. It's the same kind of woman in both: wide eyed and innocent and asking for an introduction to the dark side of the human psyche.
Inuyasha may be different; after all, we've got the requisite dark side character given to us on an animus platter. Actually if Inuyasha the character goes on being the one-note unlikable dork he is (and no, Blue Seed has proven to me that 'otoko-rashii' doesn't /have/ to equate to 'socially challenged dweeb') what we have may be a bleak parable about the choices the average Japanese woman has to face: unlikable manly-male or destructive animus charm. No wonder they've stopped getting married.
(ETA: boo hiss VIZ. Doesn't give the names of the Japanese VAs. Dub-by-default thinking, I tell you.)
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To my untrained and uneducated eye, there's a certain sameness to the plots. Boy meets girl (or vice versa), boy likes girl, boy can't have girl due to some reason or other; boy pretends not to like girl and treats her like shit, girl reciprocates, and Wacky Romantic Teenage Comedy ensues.
And I'm really sorry, but I'm not a member of the lowest common denominator--as you observed, I too am way far out of the intended age-bracket--and Wacky Romantic Teenage Comedy just doesn't do anything for me.
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Though I don't discount the lowest common denominator factor. When BL became available fen here made a beeline for GW. Which is at least as puzzling as the beeline guys make for Takahashi's characters.
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Seems to me that the male/female ratio was about 50/50 at that time, although I could very well be wrong. I was pretty isolated back then (as I am now, although in a totally different part of the country). Thinking about it, it seems that the male/female ratio is pretty much the same now, at least from what I've seen at the couple of anime cons I've been to.
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The unspoken message seems to be "Aren't you glad for modernization, you spoiled and useless creature? Now you're free to be a ditz!" (Though she gets less ditzy over time.) There's a solid "Japan was better before Westernization" motif throughout the story.
Those two statements would seem to contradict each other unless the first is truly ironic. If the evil version of Kagome is what pre-western Japan produced, how can it be a better place?
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I used to read IY a long time ago, when Viz released it once a month in 30 pages comics. (Remember the mid-90's, when manga still came out as regular comics?) Ranma, and Urusei Yatsura, and Maison Ikkoku too. Gosh, it was one of the few things available. After 10 books of Ranma (and several seasons of the anime), it kinda sank in that these characters weren't changing anytime soon, and that took a lot of shine out. The Maison Ikkoku anime was reeeeeeeeeeeally, slower even than the manga. (I still have a soft spot for that manga. At least it went somewhere.)
IY, I read through the first several books, and about episode 8, and then...never got further. IY probably has more depth than say, Detective Conan, but some of these Shounen Jump shows just go on & on & on and maintain the status quo for a long time. Some more antogonists might be thrown in, but relationships often don't change that much, nor is there real loss. There's always fighting with the slight edge of liking each other, but it referts back to the fighting in the next moment. (Like would Saiyuki be interesting if it was just driving in the jeep and bickering, fight random youkai of the week, back in the jeep and bickering. That would be really boring, no matter how hot the guys were. ^^) Change, conflict, loss, and revelation make a story really powerful, and one that you want to keep watching/reading.
I think IY though is better than Ranma because it's more than a comedy. It has drama and action, and the shounen anime tropes that go along with drama and action. And that makes it less tiresome than watching the same joke every week.
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Uhh- I was in Japan then, where they still do.
But the weakness of Shounen Jump is to keep milking its cash cows until they dry up and die. I suppose all manga companies do this to some extent or another, but SJ was famous for ruining good mangaka that way, back when I followed its doings. Still, it would be a pity if IY fell into that rut when it has a certain... inherent possibility. OTOH mentions of vol 30 don't make me feel very confident.
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Now it's whole books that come out every couple months, a much better system.
It makes me really nostalgic to think of back then. Viz and Darkhorse really had the market, so a lot of what I read was Rumiko Takahashi stuff, and I liked it because it was funny and there wasn't really anything else like it. The alternative was American comics, which had the bonus of "color", but didn't tell stories of wacky romance and comedy, and Battle Angel Alita (Gunnm) (which is somewhat similar to an American story of an female anti-hero in a future world) did have a major difference from its American counterparts. It *ended*. It had a last page, which made it much more satisfying. (It also has, *cough*, a sequel called Last Order, which I haven't checked out.)
Neverending shounen manga reminds me of American comics. American comics aren't bad. I like(d) Strangers in Paradise and Bone, but I like how in Japanese comics, they'll tell stories more geared towards (boys-love-loving) woman, and also have stories that have a beginning, a middle, and an end. It's sad to see a story end, but there's something amazingly satisfying in it too. I never get that from the forever-going American comics.
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Yes, rather. Running forever on the same hamster wheel and, in my childhood, reaching for ever more unlikely AU scenarios to inject something new into the series. The difference is that manga can have an ending, it just gets postponed forever in the big companies, Jump and Asuka.
Me, I rebel at paying graphic novel prices for manga. CLAMP here costs $15 a hit before sales tax. This is supposing I want to read an English translation in the first place, though I'm definitely up for a French one. Which is only marginally better- maybe $12 all told for standard size tanks. But the pictorial quality is better, if nothing else.
Still... having no manga to read but Takahashi Rumiko strikes me as one of those versions of hell. No manga available but Dr Slump and DBZ. Eunh.
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Yeah, but remember, for this "new generation" of anime fans (in America/NA anyways), Sailor Moon and then DBZ were the first on TV. So a lot of people who were getting into anime would watch it, even if later this would not be their genre of choice at all.
Funnily enough, people were joking about DBZ last night. "Know what was good about Dragonball? You could get up and leave for ten minutes and then come back, and nothing had changed in the story."
A pause.
"...Wait, why is that good?"
Watching that show is like a weird rite of passage or bonding experience. Years later, you nod at each other and pat shoulders in this acknowledgement that "You too sat there for 30 episodes while nothing happened?" "I did! I did!"
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I have a nasty suspicion that if I ran into the series today, after experiencing series like Saiyuki and Bleach and GetBackers and One Piece and Utena and Read Or Die, I'd blink at them, go, "Mm, how nice," and put them back again. Maybe grab a load in bulk if I saw them secondhand so that I could get through a sizeable chunk of plot, but not really otherwise.
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As for the rest, the first manga I ever saw were the UY translations from Eclipse. The first tankoubans in Japanese I bought were Ranma. The first widebans were the MI set. The longest I've followed any series before giving up on it was IY (dropped out around volume 30 something). I've got her Mermaid and short story compilations as well. All of which . . . makes me utterly unqualified to comment in any rational manner on this subject. Checking out now. ^^;
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I _do_ like shounen gag/comedy-type manga in general. I always have. I wasn't reading these because nothing else was available or because that's what all the guys were reading. I'd have adored UY if the lead character, Ataru, hadn't been so unlikable (imho).
So Ranma was great, in that sense. It was cute, funny, plotless, with a horde of likeable characters. I still haul this one out once in a while and reread my way around it. (The SJ variation on the theme was "Futaba-kun Change," and the differences are worth noting.)
IY seemed as though it was going to have sufficient shounen gags to make me happy but with an actual storyline (a la MI, which had been seinen manga, technically). So I was hooked for about 30 volumes. By that point, the plot had reduced itself to monster of the week, and it clearly wasn't headed anywhere. In the unlikely event that this creature does end, p'haps I'll gather up back issues used and find out what I missed. I guess.
Incidentally, what ttg means by "regular comics" is that U.S. translations were published as single-issue, flopped, American-format comics, each containing two parts, 1-2 bucks a pop. It was 'accepted wisdom' that this was the only format Americans would ever buy. (Some may still be, for all I know. It's not something I keep up with.) Later they'd be collected as very expensive "graphic novels" (about US$15) with page-size reduced to make them look even muddier. This was one of the reasons, at that time, I'd been cheerleading for fan text translations of licensed manga. If people did an end-run around Viz and got the Japanese versions, they'd see exactly what sort of shoddy, overpriced junk Viz was dumping here. (Back when I cared about fannish welfare. I don't anymore.)
I was very surprised when I saw a Tokyo Pop manga -- the art in it hadn't been flopped. The printing still isn't half as nice as the tankoubons, but at least the artwork is semi-legible now.
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I liked Takahashi's mermaid series when I read it many, many years ago, but have been waffling on whether to get the latest installment.
I got a copy of Patlabor from Viz last or this year. It looked fine, so I guess there's been an improvement. Still overpriced, however.
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I never expected anything to happen in Ranma. (All someone has to do is sparkle, or wave a fish, or whatever, and I think it's hilarious. I am simple.) With IY, I got horribly impatient with the "Yes, something's happening now!" -- only to find it was nothing after all. I had no idea where it was going, and after umpteen disappointments of that sort, began to no longer care. I was only hanging in for the bishounen bad guys, and they weren't wafting through often enough anymore.
but have been waffling on whether to get the latest installment.
There's a new one? Oh, oh. These are still the *prettiest* manga on the shelf, in terms of printing.
(I've not seen anything from Viz in donkey's years. No idea.)
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I will also point out that Inuyasha is half dog-demon and has spent fifty years pinned to a tree. Why would you expect him to be properly socialised? =)
(but I agree with you on the Japanese men. Have only found one who's worth considering, and he's taken)