flemmings | Saiyuubito

The editors of Saiyuubito, in their infinite wisdom, have printed the thing in small type, and half of it in white on black. To quote a long-ago friend of mine: "'Ah youth! Youth!' as Conrad said once too often." Glad *they* can read it- and the Readers' Questions, which is in type half as small again. Equally if anyone can find what kind of order the dictionary is compiled in, please tell me. I think it's 'in order of whatever we think is most important.' This makes finding things a touch ahh dodgy, shall we say.

The book says 'text by Minekura Kazuya', and while I doubt she wrote all of it one may assume it had her approval. This makes it pretty much the decisive word on canon. So I went and squinted at the Goujun passages:

On the vexed question of Is Jiip Goujun's reincarnation? the main entries for Jiip and for Goujun say not a word about them being related to each other. The entry for Jiip gives the novel version of his creation as canon, which annoys me for various reasons, not least of which is that the novels are truly execrable. Things get a bit better in the Comparative Analysis section- which compares the Chinese version to the Minekuran redaction, as well as mentioning various divergences among the manga, anime and novels. I'm assuming she wrote this part, if only from the colloquial tone and the number of (grins) in the text.

Under Jiip, we have "the Saiyuuki novels divulged the settei that 'Jiip too was an itan being, produced from the mixing of magic and science' but if you think about it the manga hasn't yet (said one way or the other)..." The bracketted part is my interpretation of the text's laconic and typically Japanese 'the manga hasn't yet.'

In the Goujun section she touches on the Chinese story of how Gokuu gave Goujun a hard time and how it was the dragons who gave Gokuu his nyoibou in order to get rid of him, then continues: "In the manga there's a nuance that this Goujun is the previous incarnation of Jiip, but in the novel the 'dragon horse' Sanzou rides on is Goujun's son."

Nuance, you say. Mhh. Crumbs, yes, but I shall make do. The problematic part is the main section description of Goujun:

The person in top control of the army of the west, Tenpou and Kenren's commanding officer. Soldierly and a stickler for the rules, he considers the orders of Heaven to be absolute and unquestionable. Possesses an exact precise nature which dispenses with nonessentials. While holding Tenpou in high estimation, when Tenpou suddenly begins to associate with Gokuu and the others, Goujun grasps very early on that the four of them are a dangerous element. After getting involved in their conspiracy he can see where their paths will take them even though he is unable to understand their motivation.

Physically: two horns protrude from his head amidst silver hair. Porcelain-white skin with scales here and there; eyes red and gold. His unusual physiognomy is much closer to a youkai's than a kami's.

That 'regards Heaven's commands as absolute' depressed me for a bit: OK fine *my* Goujun is AU now-go-away. However what becomes clear from translating is that this section reads different from the analysis section and the Q&A sections. I think it was written by a staff writer in the good bland Animage tradition of stating only the obvious facts contained in the manga/ anime itself. This is how Goujun looks to an uncritical eye. Any suspicions about unreliable narrators or possible hidden depths won't get treated here. Now doubtless westerners and yaoistas have a bad habit of thinking too precisely on the character and interpreting in possibly fanciful ways. No matter. I see depths in Goujun (I can come up with five explanations as to exactly *why* he springs Kenren in the first place) and I shall go on assuming he has unstated doubts about the whole of Heaven.

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You don't give the link to the web pages!

Extremely depressing canon. (I don't believe a word of it, she mutters in private.)

(blank) What web pages?

Nor I, she responds cheerfully. But I've had a feeling all along that that pencilled notation 'Jiip's former existence' was a stray idea she had early on that's been abandoned now that she's writing the actual story. Alas that it's rock solid fanon, at least over here.

Besides, just because Jiipu's body (in the novel continuity) is a "itan being produced by the mixing of magic and science" doesn't mean that his spirit can't be older. (She states determinedly.)

But those are the novels. The novels Do Not Count except in the mind of the comprehensive editor of Saiyuubito who wrote the main entries and of course s/he had to put in everything germane. (Novel characters do not rate a mention, I notice. Thank god.)

And exactly as you say. Wherever the body came from- and it's a good question where it came from because y'know, miniature dragons, there aren't too many of them- the soul came from somewhere else. In fact, if I didn't have a kneejerk No Way response to the novels, Jiip as result of forbidden scienti-magical experiment ('We were trying for tanks!') works just fine.

I can to some extent sympathise with the Comprehensive Editor who gets handed a massive tangled slew of continuity and has to sort it all out and get it to make sense. I just wish the novels weren't so darn bad, as I've heard them described. (RPGs have the same problem. Especially when it comes to badly written novels for the line.)

Ah fooey - am sad about the now apparently canonical canon re Jiip's origins, but I shall console myself with the random hope that perhaps we'll get to see the nyoibou acquisition as a side story. I confess to liking the "regards Heaven's commands as absolute" bit however, since that tension between duty and one's own convictions has always been fun to read (if not to write ^_^;;). Thank you so much for summarizing!

Some scans of the color pages of Saiyuubito (http://sfusion.spymac.com/image/).

It's just that the other sections- the ones I think were written by Minekura- take a more neutral view. 'The anime says Jiip can breathe fire but that isn't in the manga.' Where one might expect authoratative pronouncement as to Is it or isn't it? one gets non-committal just-the-facts. I'm taking that as permission to rely only on manga for my canon, since IME non-committal in Japan is more likely to indicate deep reservations about something than it does a simple lack of interest or reticent approval.

Of course that might be wishful thinking on my part: 'Surely Minekura rolls her eyes whenever she thinks of the novels.' But she may think they're perfectly splendid.

How do incompetent writers get handed these jobs anyway? It has to be connections, surely, because it's an editor's job to know howlingly bad when he sees it, and why else would an editor ask a howlingly bad writer to write the series novel?

Ah, I see. Right. Yes, that does sound more . . . careful.

About incompetent writers -- not sure. Sometimes it's because they're good rpg-writers (in this part of the field), though this turns out not necesarily equating to being good novel-writers. Sometimes they're good novel-writers who haven't bothered to read the series bible as closely as they might have done. Sometimes you get the worst of both worlds and god knows how they got the job.

See, I'm still reserving judgment on the canonicity of that because the manga 'hasn't yet.' It's just a bit too-- well, fanficcy (and the novels are fanficcy) that gee Gyuumaoh's supporters aren't the only one with the unprecedented notion of combining magic and science, see, Hyakugan Maoh's mob did it *too* three years earlier, only somehow when they did no Minus Waves were released. Unh-hunh. Sure.

I get the feeling the writer here doesn't believe that Goujun's own convictions are any different from his duty. Very much 'what you see is what you get': Goujun acts like an unquestioning army man therefore he /is/ an unquestioning army man. Not for this person to wonder why punctilious Goujun thinks so highly of sloppy, eccentric, non-spit and polish Tenpou.

(See, *this* is why I should have my lj comments mailed to me.)

which are so vivid and deep that I sometimes confuse it with canon on a gut level anyway

(grin) Thank you for the vote of confidence. I'm chronically dissatisfied with my Goujun fics because of a long-standing and nagging feeling that I'm missing some basic aspect of the canon character's. Too much projection, not enough analysis. Add of course the frustrating fact that there isn't much Minekuran canon to analyse in the first place. 'Data, Watson, data! I cannot make bricks without straw!' as

incandescens is wont to quote.

But there *is* the original novel which must have filtered itself through Minekura's brain to produce the character she draws. Thanks for reminding me of that story about the river king. It reinforces a Chinese folk tradition I get hints of here and there, that dragons and the Jade Emperor have an adversarial relationship, with the dragons being on what we'd think of as the side of virtue/ the common people/ the general good. Put another way, the Jade Emperor comes off as a capricious tyrant-- and that certainly isn't contradicted by anything in the Gaiden.

(Of course there's another tradition of the fearsome and careless dragons who drown vast numbers of people when they lose their temper- which makes sense in terms of what flooding rivers do. But in those stories the deaths are an unintended side-effect of rash and unthinking dragon temperament, and the dragon is at least sorry afterwards.)

So yes, it's reassuring to have some novel-canon support for the idea that Goujun's position isn't ideal and he mustn't step too far out of line. I mean, there's the question of what an ocean king and a member of 'an elite tribe of battle gods' is doing running a heavenly army in the first place, especially when the army does very little in the army way of things. It's odd just on the face of it.

as if he wants to understand what would make it worth it for someone to risk everything with no hope of changing things.

Ohhh. Now isn't that an interesting suggestion. Not just pragmatic Goujun unable to understand the idealistic gesture, but Goujun who knows he mustn't buck the established order because of the consequences faced with someone who did just that. And possibly trying to reassure *himself* that of course it's a fatally stupid thing to do, nothing can come of it but disaster, why would anyone act like that? = there's no reason why he himself should consider doing the same.

There was a thread somewhere here about the extent to which Goujun's and Kenren's attitudes are alike, a similarity that Goujun doesn't want to acknowledge and that might partly explain why he dislikes Kenren as excessively as he does. He always phrases it as dislike of Kenren's casual unmilitary attitude, but Tenpou is equally as casual and unmilitary and goujun thinks he's the bee's knees. Maybe Goujun has a bad conscience after all.

Saiyuubito

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