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Category Archives: manga

Moe + Saki = Maki: A Genshiken/Love Live! Character Comparison

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On occasion I’ve had to explain to those unfamiliar with Love Live! the appeal of Nishikino Maki. While terms like “beautiful” or “cooldere” kind of get the point across to an extent to those who already know her, I’ve found that they still don’t quite do the trick for people outside the fandom. However, I’ve recently thought up a comparison that I think works well, provided that you have some experience with Genshiken. Maki, in esssence, is like Kasukabe Saki—or more specifically, the “moe” version of Saki that Madarame once envisioned.

In the extra at the very end of Volume 9 of Genshiken (the finale of the first series), the characters are discussing why Saki isn’t “moe.” They talk about how she essentially has no weaknesses, that she’s just an extremely capable person overall. Even her boyfriend agrees that Saki isn’t moe. Then, Madarame has an idea: the only way Saki would be moe is if she was a virgin.

While this might bring to mind the issue of “purity,” it’s more that being a virgin would be a chink in the armor of Saki’s all-powerful self. She would be this smart, no-nonsense woman who just knows how to get things done, but her relationship advice would come not from personal experience. By being a virgin, she’d have that essential vulnerability that would bring her into moe territory.

When it comes to Love Live!, being a virgin isn’t any more or less special from on character to the next, as it’s implied that all of the main girls don’t have sexual experience (no matter what fans think/hope). However, the idea of an overall intelligent, talented girl with a firm head on her shoulders who is also naive in certain respects and easily flustered by embarrassing things is right in the same territory as “Moe Saki.” Within Nishikino Maki exists both the girl who keeps Nico in check, and the girl who believes in Santa.

Side Note: While Maki is basically Moe Saki, I bet Madarame’s favorite Love Live! would be Nico. 2D is different from 3D, after all.

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And Yet the Town Concludes: Soredemo Machi wa Mawatteiru Final Chapter (and Other) Thoughts

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Soredemo Machi wa Mawatteiru (“And Yet the Town Moves”) recently concluded its 11-year manga run in Japan. Even to the very end Soremachi captures the souls of the town members who populate its setting, telling their stories with a kind of quirky levity.

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The premise of Soremachi is as follows: Arashiyama Hotori is a high school student, a clutz, an aspiring detective, and (ostensibly) a maid at a cafe. However, this is less a “maid cafe” and more a “cafe that happens to have waitresses dressed as maids.” With only the most nebulous notion of the maid cafe as the focal point of many of its stories, Soremachi proceeds to explore the lives of its characters. From occult mysteries to unrequited teenage love triangles to old men arguing about the past, the manga basically plays fast and loose with its narrative, but the consistent charms and personality traits of its eclectic cast always keep it a joy to read.

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So how does an open-ended manga such as Soremachi close the book on its story? The answer is that it finishes much as it began: frivolous and free-wheeling in its continuous portrayal of an occasionally bizarre “everyday,”

Warning: Ending Spoilers

In the penultimate chapter of Soremachi,  Hotori appears to be visited by a higher-dimensional being. This is not the first time that Hotori has seemingly encountered otherworldly entities. From angels to time travelers to aliens, somehow Hotori’s life has continued to remain fairly mundane. However, this time the visitor gives Kotori a challenge. The following day, there is going to be a typhoon, and Hotori has to choose between saving everyone in town but vanishing from history in the process, or stay alive but sacrifice 3,000 lives in her place.

In the final chapter, Hotori’s classmates are all discussing that there appears to be something wrong with their memories. For some reason, they all seem to remember a classmate, possibly a girl, who was cheerful and energetic. Suddenly, Sanada and Tatsuno, Hotori’s two closest friends, spot a girl on the other side of the building. They follow her, and…

It’s revealed that they were rehearsing a play. Hotori did not sacrifice the memory of her existence, and everything about the mysterious girl lingering in their minds was from the script, which Hotori wrote. They’re chasing her down because she hasn’t written the ending yet, to which Hotori replies that, essentially, if the climax was made dramatic enough, then an ending would naturally follow. The chapter, and the series, ends with Hotori as author-surrogate proclaiming:

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While the conclusion of Soremachi might feel at first to be a cop-out, given that there were plot threads that could have seen resolution, I think it’s all too appropriate for the series. Much like the lackadaisical attitude the manga and its characters took towards its own premise of a “maid cafe,” having a last chapter pretty much negate the gravitas of the previous one, and then turn into a “non-ending” is very indicative of a series about a town that keeps moving. Also, because many of the smaller subplots were able to resolve in the chapters leading up to the end, the series unwinds in a satisfying way.

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My only complaint in the end is not enough of my favorite Soremachi character, Kon Futaba. This is no fault of the manga itself, because she’s actually in it very often, even a couple of chapters from the finish. She’s just amazing, is all.

Further Reading:

And Yet the Digital Manga Moves: Soremachi is Back

Soremachi Creator Ishiguro and His Two Biggest Influences

 

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New Year, New Look: Ogiue Maniax Status Update for January 2017

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The Year of the Rooster has arrived, but given the tumultuous nature of 2016 it’s hard to be…cocksure.

Bad jokes aside, it’s time to look backwards and forwards. And as we enter this new year, I’d like to once again express my gratitude towards my Patreon sponsors.

General:

Johnny Trovato

Ko Ransom

Alex

Diogo Prado

Viga

Yoshitake Rika fans:

Elliot Page

Hato Kenjirou fans:

Elizabeth

Yajima Mirei fans:

Machi-Kurada

You might have noticed things being kind of different. Half on a whim, half as a result of ruminating on the dated look of Ogiue Maniax for the past year, I decided suddenly to change the look of the blog. While I think ultimately it’s the content that matters, I got the feeling that people were turned away by the fact that the site looks like it’s from a decade ago (which it pretty much is). This is actually the first aesthetic change I’ve made in a very long while. The last time was when I moved from Blogspot to WordPress back in 2007!

I’d like to know you think about the new look, so feel free to drop a comment. In fact, don’t be afraid to tell me what you’d like to see out of Ogiue Maniax. I can’t accommodate everyone, of course, but I’m still keen on finding out what my readers think.

Given that the end of the year just passed, the blog has been full of reflective articles and the like. Check out my picks for best anime characters of 2016, read my Anime Secret Santa review of Queen Millennia, and take a look at what’s in the final volume of Genshiken. I also took a picture showing off in part one of my Christmas gifts: Nendoroid Shidare Hotaru from Dagashi Kashi!

I also finally got around to reviewing the first volume of the fantastic Ojamajo Doremi16, the light novel sequel to the beloved early 2000s magical girl anime. And leading off from November’s post on the latter part of the original Aikatsu!, I wrote something about Aikatsu Stars!

And over at Apartment 507, I discuss both the end of Sabagebu! and what this bizarre survival game-themed manga brought to shoujo manga, as well as some of my favorite anime openings that came at the tail end of 2016.

The last article I’d like to mention is my very first of the new year, about the manipulation of time in adapting manga to anime. I think it’s a good way to start off 2017, personally.

 

 

The Transformation of Time from Manga to Anime

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How much does time pass when the mighty Star Platinum punches an enemy Stand in JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure? There are many factors to consider, such as how much time has passed in the show itself, as well as how time is being manipulated within the series’ universe itself. Another important element is the fact that the anime is an adaptation of a manga, where the flow of time is abstracted by manga’s existence as a 2-D paper medium.

As far back as Tetsuwan Atom, adaptations of manga have been a common mode of anime production. Manga act as a spring of new stories to present, and the jump from the comic book format to animation opens up many opportunities. An anime can try to forget its own path through interpretation or divergence from the manga (such as both the Ghost in the Shell films and Stand Alone Complex), or they can faithfully attempt to recreate what exists in the original. However, while the latter cases might often appear to be “direct transplants” of the manga to the screen, the act of having to take a physical and spatial image such as a panel and assign to it a finite amount of time can greatly change the impact of a given scene in spite of the desire for faithfulness to the source material.

In a general sense, having to time dramatic beats for an anime often requires playing around with the contents of the manga. For example, in an episode of Dragon Ball Z, filler sequences (such as the infamous minutes-long powering up spots) not only save budget, but can also be a way to make sure the episode ends on a cliffhanger. On a broader multi-episode scale, Initial D: Fourth Stage does something similar by reversing the order of the final two opponents. Originally, the manga has protagonist Takumi race against a man known as “God Hand,” while his teammate Keisuke races against “God Foot” afterward. In order to make sure the series ends with a climactic battle for its hero, the show has God Foot go first instead.

One consequence of this is that there can be moments when a series feels as if it’s dragging. Sometimes it’s successfully padded out or rearranged so that nothing feels particularly off, but in other instances it is possible to sense an uneven rhythm or pacing.

This notion also extends to the transform of panels into time. Consider that there is generally no specific amount of time that is said to pass in a given panel in manga, or indeed comics in general. What makes a panel feel “fast” or “slow” is partially about how long one’s eyes linger on a panel, and it’s dependent on the amount of content there and the flow of the page. But because time exists differently in manga, things that seemingly pass quickly on the page take much longer on the screen.

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A common example of this would be the frantic explanations of special moves in an action or sports series. Because we tend to read more quickly than we speak, it is possible to believe that an elaborate speech or thought is being made within the span of a ball being passed from one player to the next. However, commit that to concrete time in an anime, and suddenly you begin to wonder why no one is doing anything as they talk for 30 seconds. To appreciate those moments, it requires a viewer to understand that time portrayed is not literal. This is the case even with series not adapted from anime. It does not “really” take Voltes V two or three minutes to combine together, or for Erika to become Cure Marine.

So when what is a single, snappy panel in manga gets stretched out into an extended scene in an anime, it can dramatically effect how a person can feel about a particular title. I find this to especially be the case with comedy series. Take Azumanga Daioh, a four-panel series. In the manga, there will be a comedic moment that lasts for only one or two panels, such as Sakaki rolling on the floor while holding a wild Iriomote cat. In the anime, this becomes a full-on extended display of non-stop rolling with musical accompaniment. A small moment becomes a big one thanks to time. A more recent title would be Nichijou, where the staccato presentation of the manga’s gags are the equivalent of sharp, quick jabs. In anime form, however, the characters’ movements are exquisitely animated and exaggerated, and the result is a series that is in a way much more physical and almost “luscious” in a sense. While the Nichijou anime pretty much takes things directly from the manga, the two turn out to be pretty different experiences.

My belief is that the unusual handling of the (broadly speaking) space-to-time transition of manga to anime is a likely culprit of why someone might love a manga but hate its anime (or vice versa!) even if the adaptation process is largely faithful. It’s kind of like when an actor is cast in a movie based on a book; what was once a nebulous image reliant upon visual/mental interpretation becomes a little more solid and finite.

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Christmas Feast!

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The End of Sabagebu!: A Shoujo Manga of Girls, Guns, and Greed

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Sabagebu!: Survival Game Club ended this month, and it’s one of my favorite shoujo manga of the past few years. Check out my thoughts on this bizarre series at Apartment 507, and why I think it has a place in manga history.

America the Moeful: Genshiken Volume 21

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Chapter 127 may have been the end of Genshiken’s serialization, but that doesn’t mean it’s all over yet! As fine patrons of the Society for Modern Visual Culture know, the volume releases always come with extras. So, I’m going to give my thoughts on some highlights.

First and foremost, it is absolutely necessary to talk about the cover, which features Sue in a somewhat bizarre cosplay of Ritsuko from Kujibiki Unbalance. It certainly doesn’t look like any prior incarnation of Ritsuko from Genshiken, and that’s because…it isn’t.

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The cosplay actually comes from the thinly veiled alternate universe Kio Shimoku manga Spotted Flower. For those unfamiliar with it. The premise basically asks, what if a person very similar to Madarame married someone just like Kasukabe? In it, the unnamed wife, pregnant and sexually frustrated, winds up seducing get husband in that very same outfit.

In other words, Sue (who has become Madarame’s girlfriend) is cosplaying a cosplay worn by a parallel universe Madarame’s wife as a way to get some nerd boott, who is in turn a reference to Kasukabe and her Ritsuko cosplay from Genshiken, which is the defining moment when Madarame fell in love with her.

Talk about peak meta. And we haven’t even opened the book!

Inside, you have the standard comic strips between chapters. I won’t go through all of them, but I do want to draw attention to my favorites. genshiken21-ninjaslayer2First is one where Yoshitake mythbusts every idea that Sue has about ninjas. In reaction, Sue makes a Ninja Slayer reference: “Kill all ninjas! Yeeart! Guwah!”

Here we have Sue, an American otaku, referencing a book series that was supposedly created by Americans who love Japanese culture, which was then translated into Japanese, buy is actually a satirical look by Japanese creators at the American obsession with ninjas. Did I say we hit peak meta before? I might have been mistaken.

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The second is after Madarame and Sue start dating. Hato gives some helpful advice, just in case: “Sue lives next to me, and the walls are thin, so keep that in mind.”

This leads to the final post-chapter content, which caps off Genshiken Nidaime. In the last series, it revolved around a discussion of whether Kasukabe is moe. This time, it has to do with how pathetic Madarame and Kuchiki are in different ways.

At his graduation after-party, Kuchiki brags that he has taken Madarame’s first kiss. Ohno exclaims that surely Sue’s more than made up for that deficit, but this is far from the truth. Not a kiss (let alone anything else) has happened, and the members of Genshiken contemplate just how much of a wimp Madarame is. Kuchiki gets upset over the fact that he never got a girlfriend in college, and has the gall to ask Ohno once again if he can touch her boob, just once. Ohno, unfortunately, is very drunk (as tends to be the case with her at parties), and she actually agrees, going so far as to comply when he asks if she can remove her bra partway underneath her sweater. However, Kuchiki makes his attempt, Yajima gut checks Kuchiki. Sadly for Yajima, all this does is awaken a new fetish in Kuchiki. Everyone is happy that he’s graduating and going away.

I kind of wish that the last moments of Genshiken didn’t have Kuchiki at the center, but it isn’t all bad. In particular, I like the notion that Madarame still hasn’t quite gotten over his awkwardness with girls. In fact, the very idea of him having a girlfriend has probably short-circuited his brain. And if anything, it makes me very aware of just how dramatically Sasahara and Ogiue’s relationship escalated once it hit the threshold. The two of them literally starting having sex with each other once they got on the same page, which is probably not the image we ever had of otaku.

The last things I want to talk about are the extras I received with Volume 21.

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I ordered from the Japanese comic store Comic Zin, and with it came a 4-page bonus illustration featuring artists associated with the Genshiken universe. It has Koume Keito (artist of the Kujibiki Unbalance manga), Yagumo Kengou (artist of the Kujibiki Unbalance light novel), as well as Kio himself. It also features a message from Tamaru Hiroshi, creator of Rabuyan, a manga about a Madarame-esque loser.

First editions of Volume 21 also get a version of the “Thank You Messages” compilation that came with the final chapter in Monthly Afternoon. It also features brand new color art for its cover, featuring most of the now-gigantic cast of Genshiken. I love the drawing of Ogiue on here; she honestly looks so cool.

So that’s that. I’ll see you (hopefully) in January, as I start my look back on the first Genshiken. But before that, I still have another post to make, about Kasukabe Saki. Keep an eye out!

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New York Comic Con 2016 Essay #3: The Artist Alley vs. My Expectations

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For this year’s New York Comic Con (which is now months ago, whoops!), I’m doing something a bit different with my coverage. Instead of doing a standard con report, with overviews and opinions on panels, artist alley, etc., I’m going to be writing a series of essays based on things I saw at NYCC 2016. Think of it like extended thought exercises and musings inspired by the con.

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While manga is closest to my heart, I love comics in general. Even if individual titles aren’t my cup of tea at times, and even if I find myself going back to Japanese comics more often than not (for reasons both rational and irrational), I never want to stop giving different types of comics a chance. This is one of the reasons I’m generally eager to visit the Artist’s Alley at New York Comic Con. Though it’s been years since I looked forward to Wednesdays (the day when new comics in America come out), I still opened myself up to the artists of NYCC 2016 with a simple desire: I wanted to be wowed, to be drawn to them and convinced to read more.

Perhaps I set too unfair a standard for myself and for the artists there.

I want to emphasize that I think the New York Comic Con Artist’s Alley is full of incredible talent. These are hard-working artists, each of whom have their own stories when it comes to how they came to comics. Also, given that NYCC is built on American comics culture, a lot of it would be the things you’d expect: superheroes, graphic novels, and certain approaches to cartooning and anatomy that have grown out of the American tradition. I think all of these things are great and have their own unique strengths worth exploring, but when it came time to find something that, pardon the cliché, spoke to me, I just wasn’t able to.

I feel that the decision-making process I went through as I looked from booth to booth was vague, even to myself. It’s not that I had any specific criteria. For example, I enjoy seeing comics about cool girls doing cool things, but I’d find that the particular arrangements that existed in the Artist’s Alley fell into recurring categories that made them all blend together to a certain extent. If they weren’t female superheroes, they were girls who wanted to show how much they defy gender expectations. These are both very good things, but it’s as if, in the rush to seize these ideas and the momentum they carry (whether for profit, social consciousness, desire to create interesting stories, or something else entirely), they ended up collectively dulling the product in my eyes.

I believe that a lot of the problem lies with me. When you distance yourself from something as I have, you tend to look at it in broader strokes. The opposite is often true if you get too deep into something. For example, when it comes to anime I’m a long-time Gundam fan. I’ve seen nearly every series, and I appreciate the subtle nuances and varying approaches that they bring, for better or worse. To someone outside of Gundam fandom, it just all looks like robots fighting wars and characters giving speeches. Thus, when I looked at Artist’s Alley as this well of potential to bring me back into the fold, I think I was expecting it to have much more of a gravitational pull than it had any right to. After all, if you’re at an Artist’s Alley at New York Comic Con, it’s natural to assume that you should already be into the stuff. It’s not the responsibility of the artists there to “convince me” to give American comics more of a chance, only to convince me to check out their work.

I still plan on taking a similar approach to Artist’s Alley next year with some adjustments. Instead of hoping for something to call out to me and speak directly to my soul, I’ll drift towards anything that catches my fancy. I shouldn’t expect a revolution, but I should at the very least leave the door open for minor reforms.

The Fujoshi Files 164: Sugar

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Name: N/A
Alias: Sugar (シュガー)
Relationship Status: Single
Origin: Girls Saurus DX

Information:
A member of her high school’s Manga Study Club, she assists the club president Maria in creating BL manga, notably one of student Chiryuu Shingo, who has a reputation for avoiding women. When Maria nearly loses her ability to create yaoi due to a kiss from Chiryuu, Sugar actively removes Chiryuu and decides that they can no longer create manga of him, lest it taint Maria further.

Fujoshi Level:
Sugar at one point punches fellow club member Kitty, because Sugar believes in the “Mike x Keith” pairing instead of the “Keith x Mike” one.

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Ichigo x Rukia: The Victim of Soap Opera Tactics?

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Warning: Bleach Ending Spoilers

I’ll be upfront: I shipped Ichigo x Rukia.

From the very start of Bleach I loved their dynamic. The continuously growing friendship, the humorous arguments, and both the establishment and reinforcement that their bond was something special made me feel that, if anything was true about Bleach, it was that they would end up loving each other and being closer than anyone could possibly imagine.

While romantic love is not the only kind out there, it’s clear from the ending of Bleach that creator Kubo Tite had a different idea in mind. As seen in the final chapter, Ichigo ends up with childhood friend Orihime, and Rukia ends up with a childhood friend of her own, Renji. While those two relationship paths were certainly developed throughout the series, it still seemed jarring to me because I still found the connection between Ichigo and Rukia to be so much stronger and more profound. Because I wasn’t deeply invested in Bleach by the end, these canon pairings didn’t jar me into any sort of indignant fervor, but they nevertheless left me a bit puzzled.

In a conversation with Kate from the Reverse Thieves anime blog about when fans and creators disagree in terms of romance in particular fictional titles, she pointed towards the soap opera community. As love triangles and changing relationships are hallmarks of soap operas, they inevitably create strong groups of shippers for any and all combinations. However, when there is a particularly fervent fanbase that the creators disagree with greatly, one common tactic is to separate the two characters so that they are not allowed any on-screen time together. The hope (though often a futile one) is that it will quash the support base for that particular pairing and promote the ones that are being shown.

Upon first hearing about this, I laughed at it as an amusing quirk of soap operas, but the more I thought about it the more it started to sound like exactly what happened with Bleach. If you look at early chapters of the manga, Ichigo and Rukia are around each other often, and their interaction is the core of what what makes the series endearing. When Rukia gets taken to Soul Society and Ichigo follows to rescue her, there’s a sense that something has been kindled between them, even if it might not necessarily be romantic feelings. It’s no wonder so many fans (including myself) latched onto this idea.

However, when looking at later developments in Bleach, Ichigo and Rukia are rarely seen together. I might be mistaken, but I think the last time that they spent any significant time together is after Soul Society when Rukia is supposedly gone but shows up at Ichigo’s high school once more, new and improved. While seeing Ichigo’s reaction to Rukia’s return is another “evidence” moment, what’s more important here is that, in just about every arc after this, Ichigo and Rukia are usually fighting separately. More often than not, Ichigo is with Orihime, and Rukia is with Renji. While Rukia had her own arc of being taken away to another world, Orihime gets the same treatment in Hueco Mundo. Even in the final battle against the ultimate villain of the series, Yhwach, these combinations are perpetuated.

Of course, I don’t actually know what went into Kubo’s thinking, but it just plain stands out to me that Ichigo and Rukia have so little page time together after a certain point in Bleach. Although ultimately how a relationship develops in fiction is the product of how creators write the characters, it’s as if Kubo had ended up smothering any additional opportunities for fans to enjoy and revel in the Ichigo/Rukia dynamic which made the series so strong initially. It feels like the only time we see them together again is in that final chapter when the two are already happily married to others and with kids of their own. The other remnant of their bond is when their respective children meet, but that is only a fragment of a new potential beginning between two similar-yet-different characters.

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