themys2 - Tumblr blog

themys2 · 1 month ago

Text

Why Is CLAMP Like This

12 Days of Aniblogging 2020, Day 6

You ever watch, read, play, or listen to something that’s so good that you’re scared of looking at the artist’s other works? You get a hunch that everything else they’ve made will totally pale in comparison, and even if it’s alright, you’ll still walk away disappointed? For years, that’s been my relationship to CLAMP, the notoriously prolific all-women’s mangaka group. I’ve blogged incessantly about Cardcaptor Sakura since starting this blog because it really is one of the series that I hold dear to me. But outside of Magic Knight Rayearth and some of the xxxHolic anime, I was totally unfamiliar with the rest of Clamp’s work. Thus, about 3 months ago, I embarked on a quest to read as much Clamp manga as possible before this year’s anime blogging began. I read their series in a rough chronological order, so that’s how I’ll be presenting them here. The question you’re probably itching to ask at this point is “was this endeavor worth it?”.

Absolutely not. I had a surprisingly frustrating time with the most of Clamp’s works. But I’ve read enough that I can start to paint a picture of why they are the way they are, and I hope it makes for some good blogging, at least. I’ve conveniently rated each entry on two scales: an overall score and the Clamp Bullshit-o-Meter, for how much Clamp Bullshit there is in the work. You’ll see what I mean.

I’m inevitably going to spoil major story points in some of these writeups. Proceed with caution.

RG Veda

After a shitton of doujins, Clamp (at this point a group of seven people) started work on their first serialized manga. For a debut, RG Veda has a surprising amount going on. Readers are quickly dropped into an elaborate mythological world with many moving parts and countless characters with similar names or appearances. Right away it feels like Clamp are testing the waters for what they can get away with in a shoujo magazine – what unfolds is a grimdark quest for vengeance with plenty of gore, horny armor, and even some homoeroticism to boot.

At this point I’d like to highlight three story beats of RG Veda that will come in handy for our understanding of Clamp as a whole.

1. The obsession with destiny. RG Veda is constantly talking about prophecy and whether one’s destiny can really be changed, and if so, how much. This keeps happening in their more serious manga.

2. The genderless child. Ashura is cursed to be born genderless so they cannot propagate their cursed bloodline. This…. happens more than once in Clamp works. Plenty of less-than-ideal implications there.

3. The predatory lesbian. A woman falls in a deep, romantic love with her superior who seems to reciprocate, only for her superior to betray her at the 11th hour and claim that she never loved her and was only using her. This plot twist stings especially because it plays right into so many negative lesbian tropes, and guess what? It also shows up in other Clamp manga.

None of these themes do it for me! Which is kind of ominous this early on in their career. On the plus side, the art is absolutely gorgeous. It’s a shame that the fight scenes are so elaborate that it’s near impossible to follow what’s happening. The traveling party is also just a little too large, so my favorite character (Naga) really doesn’t get to do anything because the main character is always the one to resolve the right. At least his hair is really fluffy….

Clamp boys give me gender trouble sometimes and it’s one of the better parts of this ordeal

CLAMP BULLSHIT-O-METER: 4/5

OVERALL RATING: 3/5

Man of 20 Faces

It’s him, he does it

After a far-too-long fantasy epic that burned the core group down to four, Clamp shifts gears entirely and creates a realistic setting revolving around a gigantic kindergarten-through-college elite academy called…Clamp School. Man Of 20 Faces purports to be a phantom thief thriller, but it’s actually a romance manga between two elementary schoolers. And for whatever reason, these children and their friends and family are fascinated with the philosophy of love. Characters will monologue for pages on end about what true love really means, with the youthful thievery only an afterthought. This is all well and good, but the central ideas presented in this manga are just plain terrible. It screws up so badly that the very happy ending left me more cynical of love then when I started. Oops.

CLAMP BULLSHIT-O-METER: 3/5

OVERALL RATING: 1/5

Tokyo Babylon

After 3 volumes of scans that looked like this, I very nearly gave up on the whole project

A change of pace for the better! While I initially hated Tokyo Bablyon because my scans were beyond terrible, finding a better source and letting the manga unfold slowly and steadily really led me to appreciate it. At its core, Tokyo Babylon is a supernatural detective manga whose message is that having unlimited empathy can literally kill you if you’re not careful. Our main character is faced with genuinely interesting ethical dilemmas that keep ramping up as the series goes on, followed by a devastating ending. This is also the first published Clamp manga to bait at male homoeroticism, but it’s not great that the age gap is a high schooler and a 25-year old. Still, one of the better Clamp works, and carries the interesting vibe of post-bubble Japan in the mid-90s where people are worried that things are decaying and deeply anxious about the turn of the millenium.

It’s the 30th anniversary of Tokyo Babylon this year, and Clamp is celebrating by….letting Studio GoHands make an adaptation. They’re known primarily for Hand Shakers, one of the only anime series that is capable of delivering whiplash through its jarring camera angles and horrid 3DCG. It doesn’t even tonally fit, because GoHands exclusively makes battle shonens while Tokyo Babylon is a quiet and methodological slow-burner. My expectations are below the floor.

uh oh

CLAMP BULLSHIT-O-METER: 2/5

OVERALL RATING: 3/5

Clamp School Detectives

women respecters: the manga

Aaaand we’re back at Clamp School. Our protagonists this time are three prepubescent boys who run the Student Council and solve mysteries on the side. Well, it’s really only the main blonde boy who does anything, everyone else just sticks to the side and groans at him. You see, he respects women so much that he can’t turn down any request for help, no matter how unfeasible or seemingly malicious said requests are. But since he’s a supergenius, he solves all his mysteries without a single roadblock. It’s not particularly compelling, most of the comedy falls flat, and looking at the anime key visual I thought the detectives might be girls, but I was wrong.

CLAMP BULLSHIT-O-METER: 2/5

OVERALL RATING: 2/5

Dukylon: Clamp School Defenders

you’ll go to hell before you die

Here we’ve got a direct sequel. My opinion on Clamp School Detectives is that it sucks ass, so I went into School Defenders with the minimum of expectations. It’s still not *good*, but it’s miles better. School Detectives is ostensibly a comedy, but it has a hard time landing even ten percent of its jokes. School Defenders succeeds in being a little funnier by sheer virtue of being a gag manga. The tokusatsu bits run dry pretty quickly, and what emerges is an unfathomable romance followed by a bizarre third-act twist straight out of Rocky Horror. It’s weird, it’s stupid, and if I had bought a Toykopop volume of this as a kid I would have eaten it right up. Let’s be real here, I’m giving this manga a lot of pity points because one of the main characters repeatedly mentions how he’s in love with his superhero partner and just wants to be his tradwife. Sometimes a transsexual from thirty years ago successfully reaches through the pages and makes me feel something, anything, from reading a mediocre CLAMP manga.

CLAMP BULLSHIT-O-METER: 4/5

OVERALL RATING: 3/5

It’s at this point that I had a revelation. One of the often-praised parts of Cardcaptor Sakura is its casual LGBT relationships – homosexual and heterosexual feelings are treated with the same gravity. However, the sorest spot of CCS is related to this – a student-teacher relationship is treated with the exact same uncritical validity. After the male housewife jokes in Clamp School Defenders, the predatory lesbian in RG Veda, and the age gap shonen ai in Tokyo Bablylon, it hit me that Clamp isn’t trying to be socially progressive, as the internet may have you believe. Instead, they are doing all of this because they’re libertines. This reading squares away their cutesy LGBT stuff with their creepier relationship stuff – all of this is done for the purpose of being provocateurs. For better or for worse, my personal politics put me in line with plenty of libertine artists – hell, I listen to Momus. And one could easily make a case for boundary-pushing artists being a good thing in a relatively conservative publishing industry. But I think it’s the coy nature of Clamp that rubs me the wrong way – they never make it clear what you’re getting into, and it makes all of their cutesy representation a lot more sinister when you realize that they’re not doing it to garner support, but just to shock people and gain a reputation. They’re inauthentic perverts.

X/1999

Hell yes, now we��re in somewhat interesting territory again. X is a sequel to Tokyo Babylon, and as such it carries that apocalyptic millennial angst that I love so dearly. After 5 years, the anxieties of Tokyo Babylon have boiled over into a fight for the future, with the Dragons of Heaven fighting to save humanity and the Dragons of Earth fighting to end it. At 18 volumes, the plot is conveyed incredibly slowly, with world mechanics and story beats reexplained constantly, which is honestly pretty helpful. What follows is beautifully detailed artwork of Tokyo being destroyed building by building as opposing espers duke it out in more gorgeously drawn but impossible-to-follow fights, like RG Veda. Speaking of RG Veda, the theme of fate is codified in nearly the exact same way here. There’s also another punished genderless character, except this time they’re a lab-grown human who was born without emotions. :/. And to round things out, another ‘evil lesbian toys with her subordinate’s feelings’ supblot. ://. On the libertine side, plenty of baiting homoeroticism, beheadings, and destruction of landmark buildings here.

Why would anyone want to be a Dragon of Earth and cascade dominos one by one to destroy civilization? It’s mentioned surprisingly little over the course of this 18-volume manga, but the Dragons of Earth are following a prophet who dreamt into the future and saw that humanity was going to literally destroy the Earth with their total disregard and devastation of the environment. So it’s one of these kinds of stories where the villains are all Unabombers. The thing is, the Dragons of Heaven don’t even try to argue that this future is false, or that humanity can and will change to avoid world-splitting climate catastrophe. They accept this as inevitable but still fight for the already-unsustainable status quo. They’re presented as the protagonists, but I’m just not convinced, especially since we seem to be going through the same fatalistic motions twenty years later in the IRL.

X is definitely one of the better Clamp series, but it still never reaches greatness. The last third of the series has the Dragons of Heaven stuck in a rut with their prophet corrupted by her evil mirror demon who keeps giving them advice that gets them picked off and leaves Tokyo more wrecked, with few variations to shake things up. Especially for its length, the characters seem quite underdeveloped, perhaps because their motivations are formulaic and flimsy to begin with. And of course, X was notoriously cancelled by its magazine after a series of natural disasters and terrorist incidents occurred in Japan and made it less palatable. We’ll never know how they planned to end X, but if RG Veda is any indication of how they like to approach the concept of prophecy, I don’t think they would have stuck the landing.

CLAMP BULLSHIT-O-METER: 4/5

OVERALL RATING: 3/5

Shirahime-Syo: Snow Goddess Tales

I don’t have much to say about this one! It’s Clamp’s love letter to folk storytelling, with watercolor backgrounds and a more traditional artstyle. It’s over quick enough that it doesn’t leave a terribly deep impression, but it’s a nice diversion in their library.

CLAMP BULLSHIT-O-METER: 0/5

OVERALL RATING: 3/5

Magic Knight Rayearth I & II

I have very cozy memories of reading Magic Knight Rayearth while sitting in a Dunkin Donuts in Philly. Anyways, it’s a rather straightforward sword-and-sorcery affair, but does have the distinction of being one of the first isekais. A trio of plucky lasses get chucked into a verdant but fragile fantasy world and have to quickly gather their bearings and save the world before its goddess dies. The first part of Rayearth is a great example of an issue that pretty much all of Clamp’s fantasy mangas have: the plot starts off painfully slow and then accelerates to the finish line far too quickly, missing out on proper escalation and character development in the middle. That aside, it’s cute, it’s pretty, and it has magical mechas fuck yes.

The part that truly cements it as an RPG-inspired fantasy world is the halfway twist. As it turns out, the protagonists accidentally ushered in the destruction of the world instead of saving it, and the second half of Rayearth is them trying to pick up the pieces of a now-broken world. This is a midpoint twist that shows up in plenty of JRPGs, from Golden Sun to Digital Devil Saga to like a billion Final Fantasies, and honestly it’s one that I love. Magic Knight Rayearth doesn’t live up to its potential, but it’s pretty good, and once again, the art is beautiful.

CLAMP BULLSHIT-O-METER: 1/5

OVERALL RATING: 4/5

The One I Love

SONIC?????

If there’s one takeaway from the Man of 20 Faces section, it’s that I generally don’t trust Clamp to write romance. The One I Love is probably the most unconventional Clamp manga. It’s a dozen short stories describing the romantic feelings of women towards men, most of them semi-autobiographical in nature. If these are all based off of real experiences, then that’s really depressing. I don’t claim to understand the heterosexual woman experience (I dyked my way out), but the levels of anxiety, self-negation, and obsession at play here are truly depressing. Like Clamp’s previous romantic manga, I finished this manga with a more negative outlook on romance and heterosexuality than before. Someone hand Clamp a copy of The Second Sex, stat!

CLAMP BULLSHIT-O-METER: 1/5

OVERALL RATING: 1/5

Wish

Due to some shenanigans, the only way I could read this one with decent scans was to load a copy onto my e-reader. Bear with me on the picture quality.

Despite the apocalyptic themes that constantly show up in Clamp’s fantasy-oriented manga, up until now they hadn’t written a heaven-versus-hell plot. Wish swaps out the fighting for a relaxed slice of life romance about an angel who falls to earth and is rescued by a doctor. It’s got this fun contrast where the focus is on the cute central relationship, and then there’s also a holy war brewing in the background. As far as world-building goes, there’s a lot of fun details, such as angels being able to look at CDs and instantly knowing what kind of sounds and images are inside of them, and the manga’s scope stays small enough to be remain satisfying. A stable time loop is established in volume 2 and everyone is chill with it. Satan’s son, much like Naga in RG Veda, looks like a scruffy lesbian and I’m here for it. For a while, the story seems like it’s veering towards a wacky found family saga, but that doesn’t end up realized. Once again, Clamp does not pull off a particularly compelling ending, but it’s still one of the better series.

I am not immune to scruffy twinks and it’s starting to upset me

CLAMP BULLSHIT-O-METER: 2/5

OVERALL RATING: 3/5

Cardcaptor Sakura

gender…

Delicious, finally some good fucking manga! My gushpiece for Cardcaptor Sakura still stands, and my long-ass political lesbian writeup…exists. It’s obviously still their best manga by a long shot, and the anime is even more potent for me. But as I mentioned earlier, this comprehensive Clamp readthrough does shine a light on some of the more questionable aspects of Cardcaptor Sakura, and the parts that seemed progressive at first now just read as provocative. It’s still a charming story about how cool it is to be a girl, and even if it’s not ideal, it’s nice to have a framework that puts the controversial parts into perspective with the Way Clamp Is.

CLAMP BULLSHIT-O-METER: 2/5

OVERALL RATING: 5/5

______________

You’ve already sat through 2,500 words of crit, so let’s end this post on a high note. Substituting my entire manga diet with Clamp has not been the most worthwhile experience, but it certainly has been an experience nontheless. Join me tomorrow as I follow Clamp into the 21st century and see how they fuck up in new, more terrible ways.

88 notes · View notes