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Manga and the fallacy of pathetic tragedy

It is known that anime and manga are both released in ludicrous amounts in Japan. Weekly, monthly, bimonthly, whatever: there is a lot of manga being written. If I said most of them are trash, I wonder how many people would be inclined to disagree. Not only that most manga is trash, but that the same has been true historically. I don’t mean to disparage the genre; there certainly has been a significant number of beautiful, well-written comics coming out of Japan. The system of publishing just doesn’t reward quality. For one, weekly release schedules for certain manga mean that the author/illustrator (often one person) must come up with a continuing entry in an often years-long narrative. A natural casualty of this process is pacing, as it is almost impossible to present a story proportionally while attempting to both decide its direction while managing the minute story details in the scant few pages that are released.  Add on to the needs of weekly publishing the demands that editors and publishers place onto a manga for the purposes of creating a more profitable product (and note here that profit is by no means the same thing as value). Things like extraneous characters, fanservice, failed confessions, character death (and resurrection) are all largely results of the economic pressures of producing manga, and they all cheapen the medium.

The callous use of ‘tragedy’ in manga is perhaps the most egregious example of the way the art form suffers. For one, the tragedy is often under-cooked, becoming the worst kind of tragedy. In ancient Greece, these kinds of tragedies were called ‘pathetic’, and were called such because of an over-reliance on pathos. In pathetic tragedy, characters have no role in their fates. Something bad happens unexpectedly and everything breaks down-- someone is killed, their spouse commits suicide, their children are beggared, etc. There is no message, no theme, nothing but the badness of it. The more preferred form is tragedy is one in which a character’s downfall is closely linked with the decisions that they have made; when someone’s character traits and motivations have created a dangerous situation or else presented an element of irony about their fate. The tragedy in manga is all too often pathetic. Just question the over-reliance on trucks as an instrument of sudden death. Why is this character being killed? Why a truck? A truck is literally nothing other than part of a transportation system for commodities, and yet it becomes the faceless, faithless instrument of fate. What have the hundreds of slain women and children underneath the mangaka’s pen done to deserve such treatment? Some say pathetic tragedy is realistic. They would argue that automotive fatalities are one of the most common ways for lives to disappear off the face of the earth, second only to disease (and I do pity the victims of Sudden Anime Death Syndrome). I say realism is a bullshit value in art to begin with, and has nothing to do with the reason Sakura-chan from I Can’t Believe The Public Keeps Buying My Shitty Manga bought the farm.  In reality, the convenience of the truck is only that it is large, not that it is common on the streets of Japan. A middling-to-large truck is the perfect size to instantly kill its target, without all the brutality of a big rig (we cannot have the idealized facades of commercialized femininity broken under the wheels of commerce, after all). Trucks are used because when a mangaka wants a character dead, they must send in the only unit their creatively exhausted mind can conjure up: the truck. Too often, the reason for the character to die is also creatively bankrupt. Who knows what goes on behind closed doors between editors and mangaka, but I can definitely visualize some tired, browbeaten mangaka having to kill of a character because their readership numbers were dropping and the editor knows from experience that killing people off pumps those numbers back up. Framed this way, you could say that the external logic of capitalism kills off the internal logic of art. It is rare that character death is planned from the beginning of a manga. In Souji Seo’s manga ‘Fuuka’, he kills off the daughter of a couple from his earlier manga (in an especially sadistic turn, she is killed because she stopped to pick up a keepsake from her boyfriend). In Tanaka and Ashimoto’s ‘Shamo’, the main character’s training/rehabilitation arc is cut short when his martial arts teacher and his daughter are butchered. This goes on to not affect the story in any permanent way after the protagonist gets his revenge (never regaining dramatic significance, the protagonist is killed in an anticlimactic duel with a scissors-wielding madman). The fates of these characters is not attached to their actual being, let alone their ‘doing’. The result is wasted talent and artistry, pages upon pages wasted, stories twisted and abandoned, and an entire genre filled with the needlessly slaughtered.

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batshit crazy Code Geass X The Wire crossover idea

Lelouch is the youngest son of the sabotka family and thus wants his revenge after season 2. with no defined king on the corners in baltimore, Lelouch makes his play- unifying westside and eastside under the persona of ‘zero’, who conceals his identity with a hoodie and facemask he’ll do whatever it takes to break the Greeks and restore the stevedore’s union’s fortunes, whether it requires politics, hustlin, snitching, or just some good old fashioned fights and of course spinzaku will be there 

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A Bradford Pair

In the end, I can only say I chose it for myself. More than a decade back from now, earlier even than 2007. Back in the days of Bush, to be sure. Politics didn’t matter to me back then, not any more than the other public spectacles a schoolboy could be witness to.  The choice I made was the type of new tree we would plant in our front yard. W had some sort of evergreen there already, from the previous owners (maybe as old as the house itself) but we wanted something new to fill it out. In the frigid air of early spring, the family found itself at one of those hardware super-centers, the kind that stocks plants in addition to its aisles of light fixtures and home appliances. I chose the Bradford Pear. At the time I didn’t know much about it. It was ornamental, at least. It would never bear fruit. But there wasn’t much meaning to the choice. Like most groups, my family was indecisive when put together, so even the opinion of the middle child held sway, in lieu of any other input. I wanted a Bradford Pear, enough to remember the name of that particular species to this day, when I can scarcely claim any other arboreal knowledge. I chose the tree, but I didn’t choose anything that happened to it in the next ten years. In the interest of propriety, I’ll skip the details on what exactly prevented me from ever being happy. Suffice it to say that the young sapling I had picked out was not the only thing growing unnoticed in my youth. I picked the tree, and it grew. At first very slowly, as it set its main roots and fought its way through the brutal first winters. But then, of course, it adapted and fought its way into fully-fledged adulthood. At some point beyond recall, the little sapling became a tree to rival even its predecessor evergreen. The growth of a tree must be a lot like the growth of a younger sibling or some other child. One day, it is young and just as you first saw it-- the next day it has become older than you could ever have imagined it. The tree that I chose went unmanaged for a decade, a silent witness to a quiet street that changed little over the next ten years, even as the world continued to move. Its fledgling branches thickened and began sending offshoots of its own, crowding itself with aggressive greenery. The roots at its base began to dent the surface of the lawn, the plant thirsting for more and more-- swelling to extract and store more resources. The window of my bedroom faces out towards the front yard. I’ve always existed in the shade of that tree or its other, older brother. But the Bradford Pear became the larger obstacle for me. No longer can the sunlight wake me through the opened blinds. Every day is filled with the same level of shaded light. Clouded or clear skies alike, my room is filled with a weak glow that I had unwittingly selected for myself. The Bradford Pear cannot be taken down now. What good would trimming it do, when the wild tangle has become indispensably vital at every crook and bend? I am looking at an organism that grew to be like it is now, something that takes the light in my place. That stolen light and the Thing that consumes it are concepts that I believe I own now, inasmuch as any one person can lay claim to the photons of some impassive nuclear body or the superstructure of an organism that may very well outlive me. I will live in the shade of my Bradford Pear, taking whatever sunbeams it grants me. I will live in the shade of younger decisions, until the day I decide to move beyond this room and to some other, better-lit section of this Earth.

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why do I stick a final boss in every fanfic I write?

I’m a sellout to my own imagination

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I guess you could call the re-appearance of E7 in 2017 a...

Second Summer of Love

Cover of Bandai Visual’s V-Storage Magazine vol. 10 for Summer 2017 (lo-res only available currently)

https://v-storage.bandaivisual.co.jp/talk/67911/

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The Gekko-go from Eureka Seven has to be one of the fly-est ships in the history of animation. This is it at its most maneuverable.

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righteous anger is the most sublime feeling

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I would play the heck out of a Black Lagoon video game.

(fullscreen for best effect)

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shh

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