shounen jump detour

[recognito]

Would you believe I picked up Scarry's The Body in Pain right before getting surgery and thought, "Sure, that's a great reading pairing?" Anyway, lol here are some thoughts on shounen manga I've read.

 

Kaiju no. 8 - Fascinating to me how this one never got off the ground. Everything about this feels like it falls on a spectrum of okay to bad: the characters, the stakes, the themes, and so on. Okay to bad isn't a death sentence for a shounen manga, but it never felt like it either got really serious or really fun. "Oohhh I can copy powers….. I just won't die!" Haven't we seen this before? And had a better time reading it then? But sdklfhn gotta remember that teenagers experiencing their first shounen manga are probably reading this and finding it formative… okay putting down the nice juice. I think it sucks

 

 

 

Akane no Banashi - I liked reading this one pretty wholeheartedly. Picked this up because I saw someone advertise it as "a shounen manga where the superpowers are 'reads a lot of books'."

It's a revenge story, though of a different flavor than usual: the conditions for "revenge" will be fulfilled when Akane earns legitimacy in the rakugo world and masters performing a story that defeated her master and his master's peer (Definitely Not Ex-Boyfriend), the one who expelled her father. The humiliation Akane's father experiences at the exam is mortifying, but lol I do like that he gets up and becomes a concrete salesman afterwards. And the revelation Akane has about her father's art and his weakness and what he made of that weakness is I think satisfying for how it quickly punctures any accusations that Akane's doing rakugo solely for her father. Her interest in rakugo and motive for continuing a career are not a result of hero worship or being "stuck" in the moment of her father's humiliation.

Brisk and speedy series. I guess I'm ultimately a sucker for stories about being dedicated to your art form but also try to give you a picture of the larger picture of what it's like to have a career within that art. I guess if it weren't a shounen manga there'd probably be a "and will you even have time to bone????" thread here, but lol, probably not given its place of publication.

 

 

 

Hunter x Hunter - See-saw experience of disliking it to liking it to really liking it to disliking it to liking it to really liking it on a chapter-by-chapter basis for the first 50 chapters or so. After we got past the Hunter exam, I wound up enjoying the series a lot more. I'm pretty much all caught up now with the current arc, and lol kind of looking at the release schedule and thinking, well, I guess it'll be done in 2030?

Really strange and unusual shounen manga. Super violent, super dense, super ambitious. I kind of hate tournaments as a shounen narrative structure—like, ultimately, they're kind of boring, right? Even when they're narratively justified by, say, the structure of high school sports clubs or whatever, I'm never thinking, "Great! A tournament!" I'm usually thinking, "Great, cannon fodder. Training arcs. Grit and perseverence. Power of friendship… Whatever."

As an aside, I think this is why Chihayafuru had a lot of success with its tournament arcs, since they were connected to Chihaya's desperate attempts to keep her karuta club alive (if you fail, the club is doomed!!! — the stakes of this feel real because who the fuck has a karuta club in their school); once her career took off, the tournaments felt less interesting until the series rammed a bunch of homoeroticism in and basically announced that the stakes had been upgraded from high school club → professionalization → can karuta save your polycule???? okay what about your soul, bitch????? Along with the general background anxiety of how to continue playing karuta even as your eyes lose power, your hearing gets weaker, your reflexes slow, and your super autism is not enough to help you beat your huge crush—winning and losing have to have value outside of the emotion of "I won!" or "I lost!" The asymmetry between the strong and the weak can be brutal and deeply unfair, but I do feel like Chihayafuru tried to point out that anyone with a decent enough grasp of Japanese can find a way to enjoy karuta, even if you're not casting super saiyan on the cards or speaking with the little card ghosts.

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed Hunter x Hunter, and especially how much I prefer the later arcs to the early ones. It's not a huge surprise to people that Mr. Snobsalot finds it hard to enjoy shounen manga that devolve into scenarios like, Mr. Laser Eyes gains the power to destroy entire cities with his eyeballs and fights Mr. Flamethrower Butthole, who has the power to destroy entire planets… I mean, come on. Who even cares at that point? The destruction of Tokyo or whatever is just an excuse to stop drawing city backgrounds and start setting fights in rubble. Hunter x Hunter does experience this creep into cruel grotesque: what if an entire nation became a farm for ants??? what if 10,000,000 million people DIED!!!!!!!! And I know the standard counterarguments: that's the poiiiiint, to show how the king learns compassion, etc. and there are some really stirring scenes at the end, and I acknowledge that part of the aesthetic of HxH is the ultraviolence and that Kurapika's move to reclaim his clan's eyes speaks directly to that theme: being careless with people's lives, purposefully cultivating and creating suffering, is fucking awful to do, but lol I don't think the series itself is immune from going, sure, let's kill a bunch of people to raise the stakes for the sake of Intensifying things.

All this makes the accomplishment of its latest arc, the exploration into the Dark Continent, really surprising and impressive. The tournament structure reappear, along with the sacrificial masses, but the tournament is now part of a war of succession, which is fought both in official events and backstage. It's complex with a lot of politics, factions, and motives. The scale of everything is grand and awful; you really sense the smallness and vulnerability of some characters, the meaning and meaninglessness of their deaths, and the genuine desperation for people to save themselves and their allies—rare things for a shounen manga 400 chapters into its run. A lot of great touches with character relationships, especially with Gon and Killua. Super remarkable series and kind of a similar A Song of Ice and Fire flavor… I am lol probably not going to bother catching up with this for another five years and will probably not reread it until then. This is absolutely not my preferred flavor of manga, but it's great.