flemmings | (no subject)

Youkai. Not the Saiyuuki youkai, but the trad bogles with the horns and the bulging brows and the six feet long necks. I can't see the fascination at all. There's... no there there. The one characteristic they possess is gluttony. They want to eat humans. Or each other. Or anything. But whatever it is, they want to eat. I mean, what can you do with people like that? It's irritating enough when manga characters are gluttonous as their main characteristic- that annoying squirt in Kou Josei, or Luffy or Gokuu or you name it. They at least occasionally have some other character facet. But youkai have none. Makes one think that Gramps must have been mad. Why would anyone devote their lives to anything as one-dimensional as that?

I might have thought this distinguishing feature of Japanese youkai comes from the marginal existence of most people through Japanese history (see The Ballad of Narayama for a notion of how marginal Japan could get- and that was set in Meiji.) But China has had famines since time immemorial and they don't do the grotesque glutton thing. I conclude, disapprovingly, that people who only want to EEEEEEAATTTTT!!! is just something that tickles the Japanese fancy, like bathroom humour.

The only intriguing youkai I know of is somewhere in Yumemakura, a toss-away story of Hiromasa's about how someone saw a horse-headed youkai, tall as a house, walking down a street in the moonlight reciting a Buddhist mantra. Hiromasa was quite admiring of the youkai's devotion, as he should have been. If there were more youkai like that around I might be able to write 100 Demons fanfic. As it is, it's like writing about orcs or kobolds: no story there at all unless it's about How Wonderful Us Defeats Disgusting Them. And whenever a Them crops up in a story alarm bells sound. Who are They *really* meant to be, hm? If you can't take the pov of all your characters, at least theoretically, there's something wrong with your story, say I. And I can't take a youkai's pov at all.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Well, I suppose the fasination would be with characters like that creature with the red hair, what's his name (ghost light or something like?). But my sense has always been that you generally don't have a choice. If you can see them, then you have to deal with them somehow, either by commanding them and asserting mastery, or otherwise as the grandfather taught Ritsu, to try to ignore them to the best of your abilities. I think the grandfather learned later that you can deal with them the Ritsu way later, and also learned that the price is less, and which is why he disliked his younger son dabbling in it the way he did.

Did he ever really understand the price Ritsu paid for being surrounded by menacing Things that he had to pretend not to notice? I read Ritsu, in the childhood stories, as having had a hell of a childhood that turned him into the passive, vaguely hostile character he so often is. (Being in HS in Japan doesn't help. At all. Being the only male, effectively, in that household doesn't help either, with the warm demanding coccoon of female Japaneseness all around him.)

Manipulating the youkai at least lets him begin to assert some control over his environment and become a person. But Tsukasa and Akira both, with their touches of psychic ability, develop Ritsu's kind of passive negativity or their own sort of despair from that fact, depending. Yeah, it's just one more thing you have to deal with if you have the gift, but. There has to be a better way that Grandpa wouldn't have thought of for himself, being Grandpa.

And we could discuss just how sensitive Ritsu's mother is, cause I think she knows more than she lets on. Where'd that trick come from? Ritsu's grandmother is supposedly without ability entirely but in the early volumes she *does* in fact see stuff. She just dismisses their importance ('I'll never get used to finding these things in the house tsk tsk') and probably finds the best defence in full-going mundanity.