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Ze
Aaargh. Man I really want to write some Ze fic now. There's even a Ze request up at yuletide's New Year's resolutions page. Trouble is, the requester is reading in scanlation, and googling suggests those are barely halfway through vol 2. She wants kamisama background? That comes in vol 4. It comes in vol 4 in spades, with a ceremony straight from the King's Blades, except that Shimizu, bless her, is of course fully alive to the overtones that yaoi-onchi Duncan utterly ignores.
I don't want to do one of the settled pairings either. The settled pairings are a yawn, there for the BL by the numbers. Far more interesting is the unpaired 'doll master' Waki, the guy who makes the shikigami, who lolls about in Japanese dress (ahh, men in kimono déshabillé) drinking and being needly and I suspect playing with people as if they were the paper dolls he creates in a distinctly Shinto ceremony crossed with a hint of necromancy. See, he's not a 'word master' who can change reality just by speaking the word. He doesn't have a shikigami created specially for him that's fanatically devoted and will protect him with its life. He minds, sort of, but only in soliloquy. Otherwise the word masters can threaten to kill him with, well, a word when he doesn't do what they want, and he laughs in their faces. (For 'they' read 'he', of course. The stock rambunctious seme from vol 3, natch.) The question of just where the power lies in Waki's relationship with the Mitou family is worth thinking about.
Then there's Asari, that third generation shikigami who wanders about the house invisible, as long as he wears his fox mask. Yes, yes, he's a stock ijiwaru uke, I get that, with a Kansai accent. That's vol 2. Vol 4 raises some interesting questions. Shikigami are created for a particular word master and theoretically go back to being paper when he dies; or possibly Waki turns them back to paper. Howcum Asari's been around since granddad's time? Howcum *he* can threaten rambunctious seme with death unless he cleans up his act, *and* pull a sword on him, and Waki does nothing? That's more than old family retainer privilege. Something's distinctly up with Asari.
There's Konoe, tall chin-bearded shikigami to young Sulky, the proper head of the house who's ducking his responsibilities and shoving them onto his older (I suspect half- and illegitimate) brother. I should reread vols 1&2 as well, because I sensed something up between Konoe and Waki. Possibly just the fact that they're the only two adults in the house to date, but also some hints that Konoe knows something about Waki's past that no one else does.
There is, as ever, the fascinating and non-intuitive (to a gaijin) way things are done in old Japanese families, or rather the manga version of same, or rather the fantasy manga version of same. Main houses, branch houses, main wives and mistresses and their kids and who inherits what when, and in particular the arbitrary authority exercised by the head of the family. Fruits Basket (I did say Ze reads like a BL remix of FB) and 100 Demons do this a lot; so does that film The Ceremony, that I need to re-view, because all I remember is a terrifying patriarch and his old wife who was the one person who didn't register him as terrifying at all. And so do yakuza manga, but one expects tradition and hierarchy in the Mob. In families, not so much.
And there's finally the little wrinkle in v.4 that shikigami are made from the bones and ashes of dead word masters, and given their names. Ah, yes. Konoe and Asari and the rest were once the masters. It makes no difference to them, because they don't remember, but I wonder if a word master ever gets a shikigami who embodies the physical features and (presumably) the DNA of oh say the grandfather who made oh say your mother's life a misery back in the day? And certainly it's practically said that depressive uke Kon is made from the ashes of somebody Waki knew personally. Ah. Um. Interesting, that.
I don't want to do one of the settled pairings either. The settled pairings are a yawn, there for the BL by the numbers. Far more interesting is the unpaired 'doll master' Waki, the guy who makes the shikigami, who lolls about in Japanese dress (ahh, men in kimono déshabillé) drinking and being needly and I suspect playing with people as if they were the paper dolls he creates in a distinctly Shinto ceremony crossed with a hint of necromancy. See, he's not a 'word master' who can change reality just by speaking the word. He doesn't have a shikigami created specially for him that's fanatically devoted and will protect him with its life. He minds, sort of, but only in soliloquy. Otherwise the word masters can threaten to kill him with, well, a word when he doesn't do what they want, and he laughs in their faces. (For 'they' read 'he', of course. The stock rambunctious seme from vol 3, natch.) The question of just where the power lies in Waki's relationship with the Mitou family is worth thinking about.
Then there's Asari, that third generation shikigami who wanders about the house invisible, as long as he wears his fox mask. Yes, yes, he's a stock ijiwaru uke, I get that, with a Kansai accent. That's vol 2. Vol 4 raises some interesting questions. Shikigami are created for a particular word master and theoretically go back to being paper when he dies; or possibly Waki turns them back to paper. Howcum Asari's been around since granddad's time? Howcum *he* can threaten rambunctious seme with death unless he cleans up his act, *and* pull a sword on him, and Waki does nothing? That's more than old family retainer privilege. Something's distinctly up with Asari.
There's Konoe, tall chin-bearded shikigami to young Sulky, the proper head of the house who's ducking his responsibilities and shoving them onto his older (I suspect half- and illegitimate) brother. I should reread vols 1&2 as well, because I sensed something up between Konoe and Waki. Possibly just the fact that they're the only two adults in the house to date, but also some hints that Konoe knows something about Waki's past that no one else does.
There is, as ever, the fascinating and non-intuitive (to a gaijin) way things are done in old Japanese families, or rather the manga version of same, or rather the fantasy manga version of same. Main houses, branch houses, main wives and mistresses and their kids and who inherits what when, and in particular the arbitrary authority exercised by the head of the family. Fruits Basket (I did say Ze reads like a BL remix of FB) and 100 Demons do this a lot; so does that film The Ceremony, that I need to re-view, because all I remember is a terrifying patriarch and his old wife who was the one person who didn't register him as terrifying at all. And so do yakuza manga, but one expects tradition and hierarchy in the Mob. In families, not so much.
And there's finally the little wrinkle in v.4 that shikigami are made from the bones and ashes of dead word masters, and given their names. Ah, yes. Konoe and Asari and the rest were once the masters. It makes no difference to them, because they don't remember, but I wonder if a word master ever gets a shikigami who embodies the physical features and (presumably) the DNA of oh say the grandfather who made oh say your mother's life a misery back in the day? And certainly it's practically said that depressive uke Kon is made from the ashes of somebody Waki knew personally. Ah. Um. Interesting, that.
sorry to disturb...but...
Re: sorry to disturb...but...
Re: sorry to disturb...but...
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Also, if you write a short lickle piece it would be a nice intoduction as to who/what people are like!
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With the amount of fodder remaining, I can't imagine that the series has even reached the halfway mark yet--as long as it continues to be popular, she could continue to devote 1-2 volumes per major character story arc. Given the number of characters, and the fact that she's constantly dragging new family members and indeed entire branches out of the woodwork...well, I'm bad at math. I just keep thinking of Love Mode, and how superfluous Love Mode fic written at vol. 4 or earlier would have been. At best one's doomed to get thoroughly jossed.
Possibly just the fact that they're the only two adults in the house to date
Token lesbian doesn't count as an adult? XD;
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Over there almost everyone was dealing with ongoing and hence open-ended series. Further, fannish speculation naturally got expressed via manga and fic. I don't know if over here is just so devoted to canonicity that it dare not chance being rendered A/U (the notion that a fic is spoiled if it's proven to diverge from the source looks really odd to my acquired-Japanese mindset, since most dj stories diverge from the get-go) and if it just finds non-fic speculation the more congenial mode, especially in these internet days of automatic chat, but to my tastes a basic kind of fic is lacking in English language fandoms.
Token lesbian doesn't count as an adult? XD;
Arrested adolescent cosplaying thinks with her gonads and has the gonads of a teenage boy token lesbian? *That* token lesbian? Ahhh....
No.
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Sorry, I wasn't clear: it's less a matter of Ze being ongoing than a matter of confidence in the author, I think. Of really wanting to hear what the author has to say, in this case, and assurance that she's going to say it. In my perspective, fanfic is interstitial. If I don't have a solid enough sense of the original work as a whole--the shape of it, where its holes are, which holes the author has flagged with a neon sticky note reading "TO BE FILLED LATER"--then I can't tell which intersticies are ripe for me to address. Sometimes there's no way of telling. When given the choice, though, if I'm 100% sure the author is going to plug a particular hole--and if I anticipate she'll do a good job of it--I'd just as soon sit back and let the professional do her work, even if it does mean waiting years. It's not that I'm scared stiff of being jossed, it's that I'm patient and too trusting, as well as lazy.
But I don't think this is a trait inherited from W-fandom or from any fandom, per se, and I'm not sure "over here" vs. "over there" typecasting applies. One of the few W-fandoms I've been acquainted with in the past is HP, which has for years featured rampant speculation of all sorts in fanfictional form. Ongoing TV series fandoms do likewise. Or did you mean to criticize a particular English-speaking anime/manga fandom? I'm not involved in any large ones at present, and many of the small ones suffer from lack of critical mass.
I expect you're right that Ouka is in fact a teenage boy.
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Mileage varies. If a plot point exercises me enough, particularly a back story point, I want to speculate right now on how it might have happened, not wait to find out in the author's own good time. (Also my experience with mangaka has been overwhelmingly one of dropped series, health problems, loss of the author's interest and editorial interference. This doesn't inspire me to be optimistic.) Fic is simply my way of speculating, but here I'm more likely to see people discussing possibilities than ficcing them. HP is maybe the exception because it's one of the few ongoing text-based western series around, sort of the equivalent of a manga except that years, not months, go by before there's any new input into 'what happens?' Aside from HP, in fact, are there any western book series that inspire speculation and fic? I can't think of any myself.
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Other (smaller) novel fandoms that produce fic, off the top of my head: Master & Commander series, The Dark is Rising, Good Omens, Temeraire, Vokosigan series, Valdemar series, Rice's vampire chronicles, Diana Wynne Jones YA novels including Howl's Moving Castle, Sherlock Holmes, Lord of the Rings. Not all of these are ongoing, and some have film versions, but I'm sure there are more. These are just the ones I've encountered. I don't read US comics, but I do know fic-writing fandoms exist for those, also.
Film fandoms can operate similarly: between releases of the three most recent Star Wars films, for instance, there were huge outpourings of fic. Maybe HP actually typifies the rule. It seems logical that any fandom for a series with extended lulls--several months or years--between installments might be more likely to produce in-depth speculative fic than fandoms for those serialized weekly or monthly. If nothing else, the fans are more likely to be driven to it by impatience.