Category: Manga

Posted on in Manga, New Manga First Impressions

New Manga First Impressions: Shot Through The Heart – Love, Loss, and the Ephemeral Beauty of a Grassroots Fandom: The Story of LOVE BULLET

A Disclaimer: I don’t usually do this sort of thing, but even moreso than usual, if you’re just looking for a simple “is this good or bad? Thumbs up or thumbs down?” kind of thing, I would actually urge you to go read this manga as it currently exists before reading this article. It’s quite short so far (only a single volume), and well worth it. I get into a lot of minutiae about the plot below, and I’d hate to spoil the experience for anybody.

New Manga First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about the first chapter volume or so of a new manga.

Love, to hear it told, is war. It’s a battlefield. It stinks, It hurts. It bites and bleeds. It’s rough going, in other words. It’s a little surprising, considering all that, that it’s taken this long for someone to have the idea of giving Cupid a handgun. But that is the basic concept of Love Bullet, the manga from newcomer inee that’s recently blown up in certain circles, depending on where you are on the internet. This is a case where the story outside the story is almost as interesting as the work itself, but we’ll save getting into all that for the end of this article. Here’s the, if you’ll forgive the pun, bullet points: Love Bullet follows a group of supernatural beings called cupids. Their task, armed as they are with a variety of firearms and explosives decorated with heart motifs, is to observe their targets in the human world and, with careful observation, decide who the best partner for them would be before pulling the trigger, as doing so makes the targets fall in love. There’s an additional twist to this, however. The cupids themselves are former humans, those who died before their time with some unresolved love of their own still in their hearts.

Becoming a cupid thus offers those who suffer this fate a second chance. And the pilot “0th” chapter goes some further way to laying out our premise and cast. Koharu, our main girl, is the rookie on the job. Kanna, her mentor, is laid back and does her best to help Koharu through the twists and turns of her new profession, there’s also the conscientious Ena, as well as Chiyo, who is, we’ll say, rambunctious.

Chapter 0 sees these four disagree over how precisely to resolve a love triangle of teenagers at a local not-McDonald’s. Three of the four cupids are in favor of pairing Hina, their target, with one of her childhood two childhood friends, Aoi or Daito. (The casual bisexuality of almost every ‘target’ character is worth mentioning, here, as an aside. It feels like an unshowy but powerful acknowledgement that the whims of the heart are often too complex to be so easily pinned down.)

Setting Hina up with either of these two would break the heart of the other, so this isn’t a decision to be made lightly. When the cupids are unable to come to an agreement, Chiyo, the one of the three who most likes to talk with her fists, starts a fight.

Fights between cupids aren’t lethal or anything—cupids can’t fall in love, so being shot or blown up or whatever with their equipment instead renders them temporarily indisposed by making them ridiculously jealous—so some trickery on the part of her mentor eventually gives Koharu, who is determined to somehow solve this problem in a way that doesn’t compromise Hina’s friendships, the deciding shot. Thinking outside of the box, she pulls the trigger between Hina and one of the younger employees at the McDonald’s, saving her friendships and setting her up with a sudden-onset crush instead. The takeaway here is this; Koharu has a good eye for unconventional solutions, something that will serve her well as a cupid in the stories of romance-to-be to come.

However, those stories don’t actually exist yet. The first main arc of the series—which comprises the first and currently only volume of the manga—is actually an origin story for our inventive matchmaker, and this is where Love Bullet goes from merely interesting to positively arresting.

Things begin simply enough. Koharu reminisces on her days as human high school girl Sakurada Koharu. She had a reputation as a matchmaker even then, and her talent for noticing these things put her in enough demand that we see her best friend, one Tamaki Aki, having to occasionally step in.

Koharu in fact seems so wrapped up in this little role she’s made for herself that she doesn’t really consider her own feelings very often. Aki directly says as much to her, only for Koharu to self-deprecatingly reply that beyond this talent of hers, there’s not much to her as a person. This is pretty blatantly untrue, but it gives us a good first look at someone who clearly struggles with her own self-worth. For her part, Aki also has ulterior motives behind trying to get Koharu to put herself first a bit more. Those motives? The obvious, Aki wants Koharu to like herself because Aki likes Koharu.

Unfortunately for both Koharu and Aki, however, this is where the series really earns that “doomed yuri” descriptor. Not a full minute after Aki admits her feelings, Koharu, frozen with indecision, promptly has a head-first meeting with the consequences of choosing to have long talks with your friend next to a construction site, and she promptly dies.

This is perhaps the one writing decision in this arc that I could, writing this a few days after having first read it, think of someone perhaps finding cheesy or even contrived. Honestly it kind of is! But that’s not really a criticism, at least it’s not coming from me, because Love Bullet uses this moment to explode into a bomb-burst of grief. A demonstration of how the world absolutely stops when someone you love leaves it. Love Bullet can afford to be a little loose with the actual literalities of how we get to that point, because, setting aside any fundamentally silly complaints about a lack of realism—people die in freak accidents every day—the actual point of all this stuff is to explore the feelings themselves.

This also marks a notable shift in style for the manga. As Koharu passes away, Love Bullet reveals one of its best visual tricks. The four-page sequence where Koharu dies is a pair of mirrored halves, and is just an absolutely excellent execution of this technique, to such a degree that I am surprised to see it from someone who’s relatively new to the medium1. On the first of these pages, three vertically stacked panels depict Aki’s grief-stricken face as she sees the life fade from her best friend. On the second, Koharu lies at the center of the page’s sole panel, in the midst of a heart-shaped pool of blood, finally realizing that she wanted to fall in love too. On the third, cherry blossom petals fall around her as she awakes, again in the center of a monopanel, newly sporting angel wings. Lastly, on the fourth page, three vertically stacked panels again herald the arrival of Kanna, Koharu’s new mentor, here to induct her into the cupids and thus begin our proper story. In the final signal that Sakurada Koharu the human is dead, Kanna addresses her as just “Koharu.” The scanlators helpfully point out that this change is even more drastic than it seems in English. “Sakurada Koharu” is of course a person’s name and is thus written with Kanji in its native Japanese, but “Koharu”, the cupid she’s just become, is addressed with her name written only in katakana, thus reducing it to pure phonics and making it clear that in some profound metaphysical sense, Koharu the human and Koharu the cupid aren’t precisely identical.

We don’t simply leave Aki behind as the story progresses, though. Koharu’s first assignment as a cupid is, in fact, to help Aki herself find a new love. What’s worse—or better, perhaps, depending on your perspective—is that time has not stood still for the human world between Koharu’s death and resurrection. In fact, it’s been half a decade. There’s again a brilliant use of mirroring here. Aki, now a college student at a prestigious art school who looks drastically different than she did just five years prior, is visually contrasted with Koharu, now an eternally-young angelic being, who looks more or less the same aside from her hair, eyes, and, of course, wings. Even their color schemes are stark opposites!

What’s more, successfully matchmaking as a cupid earns that cupid “karma.” Get enough, and history is casually rewritten such that you’re brought back to your human life. Of course, that doesn’t reverse the time that’s passed since then. Even when the prospect of becoming human again is dangled in front of Koharu, it’s very clear that for the most part, these changes that have happened are permanent. Kanna, who seems to style herself an upright mentor type, reveals that she’s actually the one who chose Aki as Koharu’s first target. From both a practical and personal point of view it makes sense; Koharu knew Aki very well, and there are few people more qualified to pick out a partner for her. On an emotional level, Koharu has to deal with the loss eventually, so she might as well take it head on. Still, it does all feel a little cruel, too. Of course, that too is almost certainly the exact reaction we’re supposed to have, and it’s one that gives this whole scenario some extra resonance. The feelings involved in romance, present or past, are rarely straightforward.

Eventually, by peeking at a “data record” that the cupids are given about their targets, Koharu learns that Aki has held a flame for her this entire time. This only makes sense, a person never really “gets over” something like that, but enough time has finally passed that, presumably with no small amount of effort from Aki herself, she’s able to move on to a new person to at least some extent. Kanna is able to gently coax Koharu into accepting her role as a cupid, and she resolves to find the best partner for Aki that she possibly can.

This is where we meet Chiyo.

You give love a bad name.

Chiyo serves as, more or less, the antagonist of this first arc, and is established as “battle-crazy” bad news who doesn’t really care about the people she’s ostensibly trying to partner up. In fact, when initially targeting Koharu here, she taunts that she thinks it would be “more fun” to just pair her up with somebody at random. According to Kanna, this kind of situation isn’t terribly uncommon. Cupids might technically all have the same job, but fights break out over who gets the karma payout off of claiming a particular heart.

All of this, of course, makes Chiyo a perfect counterpart to Koharu. The wild, battle-hungry fighter who’s here for a good time but not a long one vs. the shy newbie who has some actual investment in the fate of Aki’s love life. It’s actually Kanna who does most of the fighting with Chiyo, though, which would seem like a missed opportunity if they didn’t clearly have some sort of shared history of their own. (Chiyo calls Kanna out on trying to act like “a goodie two-shoes.”) Kanna is able to get Chiyo mostly off of Koharu’s trail by challenging her to a straight-up fistfight, which the heavily armed angel finds interesting enough to agree to.

Koharu, meanwhile, is sent to infiltrate the school with some angel magic. She can actually use this “cupid’s charm” to disguise herself as a human and interact with the college students, including Aki herself. (Who, in another melancholy development, can’t recognize her under the glamour.) Koharu is able to get a general sense of Aki’s current state in life by doing this, and while tons of Aki’s classmates are head over heels for her straightforward, honest nature and deep knowledge of art, most of them are pretty forward about trying to earn her affection, something she doesn’t really seem to care for. Koharu gets the sense that Aki needs someone more reserved and on the quieter side. In another brilliant little page-to-page compositional trick, the thought balloon that begins with “It’s like they need to be someone more reserved. Someone like–” is interrupted by another student calling Koharu’s name on the next page.

It’s perhaps unsurprising that Sakura there, a reserved and shy girl not terribly unlike Koharu herself, is who Koharu eventually picks as Aki’s love interest. I worry that reducing the setup to who “wins” though might make it sound like Koharu is being selfish or even living vicariously through Sakura. In actuality, the manga goes some length to demonstrate that Koharu’s decision is one she comes to after careful consideration. (And after Kanna wins her little bout with Chiyo in a very fun sequence I’ll leave unspoiled.) What gives her the conviction to finally pull the trigger is a conversation between Sakura and Aki herself. By this point, she’s shed her human guise, and the two thus can’t see her. As such, she’s given the surreal experience of hearing Aki recount her own death, and how she’s been dealing with the aftermath since then. It’s a beautiful scene, Aki quietly lays out how she managed to come to terms with Koharu’s passing, and Koharu, improbably, is there to hear all of it.

What really makes this work is how it helps Koharu come to terms with her own loss. In the final moments before she shoots, Aki’s feelings of loss seem to overlap with her own. Aki’s loss of Koharu reflects Koharu’s loss of Aki, the time that’s now forever lost between them, and both of their respective needs to continue onward in spite of all that. To put it bluntly, this all really, really got to me. I don’t cry over fiction easily, but that last page, where Koharu finally pulls the love pistol’s trigger and destines Aki and Sakura to fall for each other, made me start sobbing.

If you love something, set it free.

This, all of it, is fantasy in the purest sense. We don’t know, by the very nature of these things, whether our departed loved ones would want us to move on from them, but the idea that they would seems to be common across cultures, and these ideas that hit so close to the root of the human experience that they’re nearly universal are much of what I come to anime and manga for in the first place. Love Bullet is written by someone who is in all ways quite a different person from me, but the pain at the back of our minds, when we remember those who aren’t with us anymore, connects me to a girl in this story. That means something, and shouldn’t be dismissed.

Case in point: over a decade ago, an internet friend of mine vanished after being grievously harassed in the way that was all too common back then. Shortly before leaving, she told me she’d been crushing on me since we met. That was a very long time ago, and I don’t really have any way of knowing what happened to her, as this was before having all of your alternate social media accounts listed in some convenient place was common. Suffice it to say, my situation and Aki’s are quite different. But the fact that her story stirred this memory in me at all is a testament to the power of the narrative being put together here.

It is, I hope I’ve made clear, excellent stuff. These feelings are what art is for. What’s most impressive about Love Bullet is how it’s clearly the product of a unique and mature artistic voice, from someone who is clearly incredibly talented despite being relatively early on in her career. But what makes it worth reading are those moments of connection, the ones that hit you in the heart.

Obviously, I love this thing to death and want it to continue very, very badly. Inee has mentioned that she has a whole saga for Koharu planned out. (Plus there are so many opportunities for other interesting stories here as well. I am sure Chiyo, for example, has some heart-stompingly sad backstory that I simply need to see.) Unfortunately, though, this is where we get to the part of the article that’s not about the manga itself. Love Bullet, you see, is serialized in a magazine, and thus like any manga bound to that format, is subject to the whims of various people working on the business side of that endeavor. Those people are, often, absolutely ruthless about axing any manga that threatens to underperform. (A counterproductive approach that tends to part ongoing manga from their audiences right as they’re getting to know each other, it must be pointed out.) Love Bullet has, apparently, been underperforming in its volume 1 sales, and its future is therefore rather uncertain.

This is upsetting not just because it’s a fantastic story but also because, god damn it, I’m an author too. One of a very different kind, of course, but it’s impossible for me to see this person writing this story, pouring their entire heart into it, only for it to be threatened by the scythe of capitalism, and just sit here and do nothing. Rarely if ever are my articles capable of affecting tangible, direct change on the world. But this might be an uncommon exception. Sancho Step, the group responsible for scanlating the manga and thus bringing it to international attention (and whose scans I’ve been showing off here), have a very handy guide to purchasing the first volume either physically or digitally. Sancho Step have already done a lot for Love Bullet, and I’m under no delusion that my site has a massive reach, especially not compared to the #ReadLoveBullet campaign they’ve already had well under way for some time now. Still, if I can help move even one copy of the manga and possibly forestall its demise, that’s worth it. Good, impactful, resonant art is worth it, and Love Bullet is absolutely every single one of those things.

1: As is the case with most mangaka who get a debut serial, there is ample evidence that inee published some amount of independent oneshots and such before writing Love Bullet, so it’s not like she’d never picked up a pen before drawing it. Still, the command of panel composition displayed here is exceptional.

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All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in Manga, New Manga First Impressions

New Manga First Impressions: The Iron Eyes and Human Heart of DEEP RAPUTA

New Manga First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about the first chapter or so of a new manga.

Here’s a nest of discourse I’ve mostly managed to avoid on this blog so far; generative AI. If you somehow don’t know, that’s the industry term for machine learning that can produce images, text, whatever you need of it, without any human input beyond typing a prompt into a box somewhere. (Well, that and the many, many human-made templates it has to work off of to be able to create those images in the first place, but let’s stick to the basics for now.) Suffice to say, I’m largely against widespread adoption of the technology, less for any fiddly artistic reason and more for its many immediate and tangible impacts on the livelihoods of any number of artists working in any number of fields. I’m putting all of this here, in the first paragraph, to make very clear that if DEEP RAPUTA1 at some point goes off the deep end and becomes a full-throated endorsement of replacing human artists with robots, turns out to use actual machine-generated imagery, (which I don’t think it does but these things are hard to prove), or something similarly foul, I do not condone that in any way. I just think it’s important to make it clear where you stand on this sort of thing.

Important also because DEEP RAPUTA, which opens with perhaps the most arresting first chapter of a new MangaPlus title in years, is actually interested in engaging with this subject. Not specifically on the matter of generative AI replacing human artists, although that does come up, but on the applications of such technology in a more general sense. What could these things be used for? What are they being used for? Consider this a heads’ up before we continue; we’re going to be getting into some dark subject matter, here. I think DEEP RAPUTA has a lot to offer as a manga, and this chapter is brimming with immense promise, but because of what it seems to be trying to do, appreciating all of that requires familiarizing ourselves with some unpleasant things about both the present day and the possible near-future.

All this said, for much of its first chapter, you could mistake DEEP RAPUTA for a romcom with a sci-fi twist, something along the lines of, say, Video Girl Ai from back in the day. Our first protagonist is Kei, a by-all-appearances ordinary high school boy. He has spiky hair, an upbeat and friendly attitude, a deep love of the in-universe video game Side War, and is maybe a bit concerningly gung-ho about possibly joining the JSDF when he gets older. (We’ll circle back to that.) Our female lead, to the extent that gender applies to her at all, is Raputa herself. The nature of what, precisely, Raputa is is fed to us in drips and drops over the course of the first chapter, and I’m going to spoil that reveal now, so this is your last chance to back out if you’re intrigued but wish to experience the first chapter on your own.

Still here? OK.

Raputa, as it turns out, is a military-grade artificial intelligence, currently being trained on Side War as an early test run of her capabilities. As is the case with real machine learning networks of her type, Raputa starts out absolutely hopeless at Side War, but quickly becomes more competent than the vast majority of human players. Helping her out here is Kei, who, in something called out as impossible within the manga itself, she is developing feelings for. Having no concept of privacy, she freely stalks him throughout his day, keeping an eye on him during school and such, only to play with him in Side War in the afternoon. This is all a little weird and yandere-y, for sure, but how Kei might react to that is the least of Raputa’s worries.

Because these feelings existing at all comes to the immense surprise of our third and final main character, the mysterious, alluring, and deeply sinister Dr. Alice. We’ll circle back to her, too.

Raputa initially meets Kei in her early days of playing the game when she’s much worse than most human players. Kei helps her out in the game’s Duos mode, and as the two play together, they grow closer. Close enough, eventually, that Kei asks if they can first voice call, then do a video call, and then meet up in person. This is the part of the manga that hews closest to being a romcom; these are all important stops along the way in an online relationship. It’s relatable, even, in a way that contextualizes what’s to come. Raputa has to deal with a problem here, of course. She is just a wall of wires and monitors, and has no physical body. Yet, through the magic of deep learning, she’s able to fake a voice convincingly enough, and then a moving avatar for her webcam. Throughout all of this, Kei doesn’t know she’s an AI. The meetup, though, that’s much harder to fake, and it’s here where we should take a second to talk about the manga’s visuals, in addition to everything else it’s doing.

DEEP RAPUTA‘s paneling is, in a word, incredible. (Although the anatomy of some characters is occasionally wonky in a way I would completely brush off were this manga about anything else.) At the meetup, Raputa is able to fake actually being there for a little while by projecting herself from various surfaces. The manga convincingly showing her doing this is a pretty impressive display of technique, and things only get better from here. The chapter’s emotional climax sees Raputa, unable to keep up the ruse any longer, revealing to Kei that she’s an AI in a dramatic, theatrical fashion. In any other series, this alone would be the sell; there’s a sweeping, dizzying romance to the chaotic jumble of buildings that Raputa co-opts to show herself to Kei. It’s the kind of striking image that sticks in your head, and were I writing about a more straightforward series, I’d probably end the article right about here.

But let’s talk about what she’s actually doing in that page. She’s projecting herself onto hundreds, maybe thousands? Of what are either some kind of smart glass that can display images, or else projecting herself onto ordinary glass from somewhere else. Either way, that sure seems like the sort of thing that would take a lot of computing power, doesn’t it?

Raputa, as mentioned, is a military AI, or at least the prototype for one, and Dr. Alice seems perturbed by her sudden autonomy, apparently emotion-driven as it is. Raputa’s main purpose isn’t to flirt with boys, it’s to dominate battlefields. Dr. Alice says this outright, and if this idea seems far-fetched to you, I’m very sorry to inform you that this is already a real thing. (Please do not click that link without an appropriate amount of caution. It’s just Wikipedia, but this is a very depressing subject and I’d hate to be even indirectly responsible for any of my readers having a depression spiral. Take care of yourselves.)

Suffice to say, DEEP RAPUTA is wading into some hot water here, and the skeptical part of my brain wonders if it’s really equipped to handle this subject matter. But, I do think it at least comprehends the seriousness of what it’s doing. Sure, this is a manga and there’s a certain level of pulp involved just by the nature of the medium, but DEEP RAPUTA seems to properly get that artificial intelligence can be absolutely terrifying if used in certain ways.

All of that leaves a huge open question; can Raputa herself actually defy the purpose she was built for? Can she choose to love Kei instead of engaging in mass death and destruction? That’s a big question! Whether or not machine learning networks experience any kind of interiority in the real world is, to put it very mildly, a contentious question. (It’s impossible to even prove other human beings experience interiority.) But in the world of DEEP RAPUTA, the answer at least seems to be “yes,” and because of this, the question is thus less one of what DEEP RAPUTA thinks of machine learning in this case and more what it thinks of even less tangible concepts; the soul, the mind, the ability to love. What it means to be human. The hard stuff.

The last few pages really do cast a very dark shadow over the manga, even as that early romanticism remains a lingering thought. The final panel of the first chapter is this, a visual that at least one person has seen fit to compare to the infamous Saikano. (Only occasionally, in my experience, referred to by its English title, She, The Ultimate Weapon.) Once the similarity is pointed out, it’s impossible to ignore.

All the worse; Kei’s father is briefly shown to be part of a battleship’s crew—explaining his desire to join the military, certainly, he’s still a kid at the end of the day—whose systems were somehow affected by Raputa’s meddling. It’s hard to make predictions about what specifically this is all leading to, but it definitely doesn’t seem bright and cheery.

And yet, maybe the most telling page of DEEP RAPUTA isn’t any of these that I’ve previously shown. Maybe it’s this one.

My generally romantic inclinations make me want to believe that in the world of DEEP RAPUTA, love can overcome anything. Raputa correctly identifies that the real similarity between herself and Kei is not anything about her algorithms and their imitation of a human brain, but rather her feelings, which we know, as we have the privilege of being outside of this story, are real. But her Big Sister Is Watching You tendencies may put more bumps in the road than she realizes. Even if they don’t, in the real world, love alone is rarely enough to break free from the systems that keep us arrayed against each other. Will it be, here?

1: This appears to be a twin reference to Deep Blue and Laputa, the nation from Gulliver’s Travels. Perhaps also a reference to Laputa: Castle in the Sky, given that film does feature autonomous robots. All told it really seems like the title of the manga should be “DEEP LAPUTA” and the AI herself should be named “Laputa,” but the official translation goes with the R for both, so that’s what I’m doing here.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in Manga, The Manga Shelf

The Manga Shelf: Your Planet is Doomed – The End of Romance and the Alienation of Humanity in UCHUUJIN NO KAKUSHIGOTO

The Manga Shelf is a column where I go over whatever I’ve been reading recently in the world of manga. Ongoing or complete, good or bad. These articles contain spoilers.

Knowing yourself is hard, knowing others is harder. Mangaka Hamita, in the second work by him that I’ve read since learning about him last week, seems to suggest that it might, in fact, be completely impossible. This is a core concern of Uchuujin no Kakushigoto (also Secret of the Alien, semi-officially), one of just a few manga of his that aren’t self-published. Other concerns of the work include honesty, difficulty in understanding one’s own feelings and the feelings of others, and of understanding how people think in general. Our main characters are our male lead—called “Class Rep” so often that that might as well be his name1—and Tamachi Haru, his girlfriend, an alien from another planet, who he confesses his love for shortly after she comforts him in the wake of his parents’ unexpected death.

In many other manga, the alien angle would be a gimmick. Something to give a bit of color to an otherwise typical romcom and to highlight how other people can be “alien” to us, while reinforcing that love and kindness can form real, meaningful connections regardless. Uchuujin no Kakushigoto turns that on its head. The inherent unknowability of others is the entire point, and the manga seems extremely skeptical that it’s possible for people to truly know each other at all.

But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself. The manga’s actual narrative concerns Haru, her mysterious “mission” to Earth, and the ways she and the Class Rep impact the lives of those around them. Being from another planet, Haru has no concept of why killing is wrong. This leads to the first central conflict of the manga, wherein she murders the class delinquent Karagaki for hitting on the Class Rep in front of her, because she assumes humans can just rebuild themselves from nothing like her own species can. The Class Rep is, of course, brought to a panic by having his classmate blown to smithereens in front of him, but Haru reassures him that everything will be fine. In two weeks’ time, when she can travel back home, she can regenerate Karagaki just like a member of her own species. So as long as Karagaki’s sudden disappearance stays covered up, it’s no harm no foul.

It does not stay covered up, of course. And in fact, events quickly spiral out of control from this initial flashpoint as twist piles on twist and revelation piles upon revelation. (Not a knock, this style of storytelling gets a bad rep, but it makes for a real page-turner when properly deployed.) A few things quickly become clear. For one, Haru is a truly alien alien. She has no real concept of human morality or common sense, and the Class Rep’s attempts to impart these values to her largely fail. For two, these efforts fail because the Class Rep doesn’t really understand Haru. In fact, as the manga goes on, it becomes clear that, for three, he doesn’t really understand anybody. He tries to help people almost compulsively—the result, we later learn, of a neglectful upbringing—but because he can’t truly relate to people, his “help” tends to cause more problems than it solves. (He is in fact at one point depicted as being unable to distinguish any person who needs his help from any other. This isn’t literal, but it’s telling.) You could, if you were so inclined, read this as loosely ableist, but as someone who is neurodivergent myself, I found it profoundly and painfully relatable. You, or at least I, will really feel for this guy over the course of the story, to say nothing else of the other people caught in this whole mess.

Take the character of Teru for example. Ostensibly, he’s Karagaki’s boyfriend. But after she disappears, it’s slowly revealed that not only was she majorly two-timing him, he’s also the only person actually searching for her, because everyone else assumes she’s just run off somewhere. Teru, we learn, is also deeply alienated from his own feelings, and has spent a lot of time and effort trying to be like Karagaki so she’ll like him back. (She’s the reason he has blonde hair, for example, and it’s implied he generally attempts to act the part of a punk even though he’s really not one.) His persistence in trying to find her, even after the Class Rep manages to talk him out of it once or twice, is in a way admirable, but when the mounting stress of realizing she didn’t truly love him collides with the fallout from another incident wherein his mother suddenly abandons him, he can’t take it, and kills himself.

The ripple effect here, of Haru and the Class Rep’s actions indirectly leading to such a drastic outcome, is characteristic of Uchuujin no Kakushigoto. But more than just a storytelling style (one that foreshadows the manga’s final big twist), it’s representative of its tone. This is, at its core, a deeply bitter story about love that isn’t really love, people who don’t and can’t comprehend each other’s feelings, and how, if extrapolated to the whole of humanity, these intersecting facets say something very bleak about the human race.

Things that are tonally bitter have a bad reputation, and certainly, handled poorly, it can come off as the author simply ranting at an uncaring world. (Though given the state of the world, I’m inclined to forgive a bit of even that much nowadays.) So I do understand why the kneejerk reaction may be, as it was for me, that this manga thinks it has more to say than it actually does. (Honestly, that might even be true, as we’ll get into.) But that overtone of bitterness shouldn’t discount the story on its own. Bitterness is a part of the human condition just like any other emotion, and it can be worthwhile to see it explored. The specific kind of cynicism here feels so total that finding a “constructive” read can feel difficult, but art is not moral instruction. Even read as uncharitably as possible, Uchuujin no Kakushigoto is still emotionally affecting. It’s true that the nature of some of the characters means they resonate less than they might otherwise, but for the most part, and despite its many twists and turns, I actually found it fairly strong in this regard. It feels a bit silly to actually put it this way, but the mere fact that I felt sad when characters died, and that their later “revivals” via Haru’s space techno-magic actually made it hurt more, is a huge point in the manga’s favor. Being able to punch you in the gut is a skill like any other, and it’s worth praising when it’s well-developed.

Now, we do need (or at least, I feel the need) to take somewhere to note the flaws this thing does have. One of Haru’s gee-whiz sci-fi gadgets, which the manga mostly portrays as rightly horrifying uber-technology, is a memory-erasing gun. It seems to give those it affects permanent brain damage, a state Haru herself tellingly terms “honest.” As an example, a major supporting character is a girl named Maseki, the vice class president, and in love with the Class Rep. As introduced, she’s a thoughtful and sweet girl. But eventually, she falls afoul of Haru’s mission, and the damage from the gun turns her into an “honest” being of pure id, devoid of any inhibition. The second this new incarnation of her is introduced, she tries to strangle Haru with her bare hands, since she sees Haru as a romantic rival for the Class Rep’s affections. Later, she throws herself at him, sans clothes, in the manga’s only real instance of fanservice.

This is representative of the series having something of a madonna/whore thing going on with its female characters. The girls are uniformly either purehearted and sweet like pre-memory gun Maseki, or they’re beings of pure desire that use sex appeal to get what they want, like post-memory gun Maseki, minor character Natori whose main trait is stringing Teru along for her own kicks, or, indeed, Karagaki, who probably has a number of issues of her own that would lead to her sleeping around to the extent that we’re eventually told she does (up to and including prostituting herself), but whose inner life goes largely unexplored. It’s not that these women are written with no sympathy, but the discrepancy between them and the Class Rep and Teru, the two characters whose lives are explored in detail, is fairly stark. One could argue that Haru herself rises above this dichotomy, but given that this arises from her disconnection from humanity, I’m not sure that’s a good thing. And even if we ignore that, she’s still only one character against the example of several others.

This flaw doesn’t sink the manga, but it does dull its otherwise sharp emotional impact. The reveal that Karagaki was prostituting herself prompts a relieved “thank god you weren’t a good person” from our hero. He only says this in his own head, and we’re almost certainly not intended to agree with him, but it gives me pause. I think that’s part of why this manga has been such a chewy meal for me. Despite everything I’ve said, I largely like it, but the particular nature of its flaws mean that I can’t quite square why that’s the case. That’s part of what this column is; an attempt to sort my own feelings. (But, well, aren’t they all?)

In its final act, the manga reveals that Haru’s mission to Earth is to find a way to drive humanity to extinction. In parallel, the revived Karagaki—a person who, again, looks identical to her original, but acts completely different, and very submissively in this case—becomes a pariah for her classmates, who blame her for Teru’s suicide. Haru states that this is how she will destroy humanity; by removing any enemy for them to unite against, until they are so used to a lack of conflict that they will inevitably destroy themselves when one arises. Here again, the manga loses me a bit.

There is something worth exploring, despite how dark it is, to the idea of humanity as an inherently cruel thing, always seeking a victim, an Other to blame our problems on. That, in fact, could probably be held as the other major thematic concern of the manga. But the notions that Haru brings up while introducing this idea, ones of stagnation and progress, are artificial, Enlightenment-era ideals that were themselves created by men to serve men. I don’t like that the manga appears to treat them as inherent truths of the world, and I think if it makes a big mistake, it’s probably this. (Although I will reiterate, I am fine with the overall tone and direction of the ending, I just think the specifics get a little muddled in a way that hurts what the story is going for.)

In the manga’s final chapters, its last twist comes when Haru kills the Class Rep. She does love him, in a certain, alien way, but she can’t bear to see him remain something as flawed as a human being. In other words, she doesn’t really love him, flaws and all, in the first place. Haru, with her sensibilities far removed from an Earthling’s, can only see these flaws as imperfections to be fixed, which she does by reincarnating his core genetics into a new person, who she names Noah. This last development strikes me as particularly cruel, snuffing out even a certain fatalistic “it’s just me and my baby against the world!” thrill that other kinds of love stories have explored throughout the ages. For as much as the Class Rep didn’t understand Haru, she didn’t really understand him either.

In Uchuujin no Kakushigoto‘s final, postscript chapter, after many centuries, a series of events plays out with two new characters that implies that all of this might happen again. Indeed, it might have already happened many times, and might happen many times more. If that’s true, it is a fantastically bleak note for a manga to end on, and I honestly really respect the willingness to go out on such a downer.2

I do feel like I’m missing something, though. That’s not something you’re supposed to admit in even amateur media criticism anymore, the idea that you might not entirely get it, but I will cop to feeling that way, at least a little bit, with Uchuujin no Kakushigoto. Perhaps there’s some other theme I’ve failed to pick up on, some other piece of context that would make something else snap into place. Regardless, it’s an interesting work, one I’m willing to break out the dreaded “messy” label for, and it’s one I imagine I’ll return to. I can’t speak to the life experiences that may or may not lead someone to make something like this, but isn’t that just a confirmation of one of the manga’s core ideas? It’s hard to know how other people think, a relationship that is as true from audience to artist as from family member to family member or lover to lover. That, if anything, is the real secret of the alien.

1: I’m not being cute, here. That’s what he’s called for the vast majority of the manga.

2: The fact that the manga was, if certain internet scuttlebutt can be trusted, apparently cancelled, might have something to do with it, but that’s pure speculation. But, the ending works with the manga. If the cancellation noticeably altered the plans for the story, I couldn’t tell, which is the important part.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Manga, Misc. Anime, Other Posts

Remembering Akira Toriyama

Header image from IMDB

“The future of the planet is in your hands, may you fight with honor.”

When it comes to one’s personal journey through the world of anime and manga, every story is different. But, for many of my generation, those stories have a very similar start. It’s something like this; huddled in front of a slightly too-small CRT every weekday afternoon, you are transported to craggy canyons or alien worlds. Punches and kicks with planet-shattering force are thrown. Kiai yelled with immense force. Beams and blasts streak through the sky. If you’re lucky, you might get to hear a classic “ka-me-ha-me ha!” or see a character literally glow with power as they go Super Saiyan. This was, is, and will always be Dragon Ball Z. For many, many children, it was their first introduction to anime as a concept; if not the literal first—Pokémon beat it to the punch for me personally by a few months—it was definitely one of the first. That matters, and it’s the reason Dragon Ball, and Akira Toriyama‘s work in general, continues to hold such a strong grip on the popular imagination.

As you likely already know, Toriyama himself, the man responsible for that gateway into this wonderful world, passed away earlier this month, as per this announcement yesterday. This is the part of growing up that’s often danced around; as you get older, your childhood heroes will pass away. The paradigm-shifting shonen mangaka responsible for Dragon Ball, Dragon Ball Z, and a number of other works (perhaps most prominently, character art for classic JRPGs Dragon Quest and Chrono Trigger, gag manga Dr. Slump, and latter-day work Sand Land, which is receiving an anime in just a few weeks), is not the first such icon to pass on, and he won’t be the last, but that doesn’t make it hurt less. Not when the man contributed something so important to so many of us.

Toriyama’s work is of such impact that terms like “iconic” are rendered cheap in their usage. The man designed and drew Goku, perhaps the single most recognizable superhero figure on the planet after Superman himself, and to an extent, that is the kind of achievement that speaks for itself. Shonen manga before and after the success of Dragon Ball Z are notably different things, and the man’s influence can be felt when reading basically any contemporary action-shonen to this very day, either directly, or indirectly via the generation of mangaka that Toriyama influenced, the most prominent of whom are likely One Piece‘s Eiichiro Oda and Naruto‘s Masashi Kishimoto.

His work in video games should not be neglected either; as many have pointed out, much of the modern Japanese “western fantasy” aesthetic can be traced, either directly or indirectly, to Toriyama1, via his work on Dragon Quest. Because of this, his influence extends to almost the entire modern genre of fantasy anime and manga. That this fact could be considered his secondary legacy speaks to the enormity of Toriyama’s contributions to Japanese, and indeed, global popular culture (just ask anyone from Latin America). This is without even getting into more marginal but still important stuff; the legions of Linkin Park / Dragon Ball Z AMVs that dotted early video-sharing websites, Dragon Ball Z Abridged as a foundational piece of internet humor, the very fact that “it’s over 9000!” was one of the first internet memes, a proudly irreverent tradition that continues to the present day (and one I like to imagine that Toriyama, originally known for Dr. Slump, appreciated on some level if he knew about it). The man was a legend, plain and simple; if you’re a nerd of a certain age, his work was inescapable.

I do feel that I’m perhaps getting away from why I wrote this column in the first place, which was to share my personal experience. Without getting so into it that it’s inappropriate, watching Dragon Ball Z with my stepfather is one of relatively few happy memories I have of the man; he’s still around, but we are, fair to say, estranged, and haven’t spoken in years. Of Toonami‘s main lineup, DBZ was the one show he didn’t find either too kiddish or faintly baffling, and I remember watching the earlier parts of the series with him on his VHS set with the bold, cheddar-y orange covers. (Later, he got a separate set with the “uncut” versions and we watched those as well, much to the displeasure of my mom.) Even as the show itself progressed on Toonami, we would occasionally watch episodes together, and I remember in particular enjoying the later parts of the Cell Saga with him. My experience is not, in any way, unique. It is the experience of literally thousands and thousands of people across the planet, all united by the cultural current that was Dragon Ball. That is why Toriyama, and his work, are special, and why the world is just that much darker without him in it.

I am cognizant of the fact that anything I have written or could write here is not going to be “enough,” just like any one person’s words are not going to be “enough.” My hope is that by telling you this and by sharing my own experiences, I can be part of a chorus of tributes and outpourings, a veritable Spirit Bomb of remembrance. I think Oda, who, in an obituary post, compared Toriyama to a great tree, said it best. Trees, when they finally fall to the forest floor, continue to nourish the communities around them even after they’re gone. In the same way, Toriyama is not truly dead, because the spirit of his work lives on.

1: I must admit with some embarrassment—but also with proper credit!—that this hadn’t immediately occurred to me, and it took being mentioned in this tumblr post for the idea to fully sink in. Still, this shuttershocky person is absolutely correct.

Rest in peace Akira Toriyama, 1955-2024

Posted on in Manga

The Manga Shelf: Year of the Dragon – RURIDRAGON’s Triumphant Return

The Manga Shelf is a column where I go over whatever I’ve been reading recently in the world of manga. Ongoing or complete, good or bad. These articles contain spoilers.

Time flies. Try to adjust your frame of mind back to whatever it was in the summer of 2022. That’s when RuriDragon, debut work from mangaka Shindou Masaoki, first appeared in the pages of Jump. RuriDragon is a great story, but it also has a great story.

It is difficult to overstate just how big an out-of-nowhere success this manga was. It is equally difficult to overstate how sudden and shocking its lengthy, unplanned hiatus was. The details remain somewhat cloudy even two years later—“health issues” is the bulk of what we know—and for a while, many people, myself included, assumed that Jump’s official stance that the series was ‘on hiatus’ was a polite way of saying it would not be returning. Given the gap, it’s hard to call anyone who didn’t think it would come back “pessimistic.” And it really must be emphasized that entire other Jump manga have lived and died since Ruri last published a chapter, and an equal number of major world events have taken place. The world in which RuriDragon returns is distinct from the one it left, and I wouldn’t blame anyone for some amount of skepticism about the manga picking up where it left off. (After all, even Jesus only kept his followers waiting a couple days. Ruri has kept us on the edge of our seats for almost 600.) But, by whatever provenance, and however unlikely it’s seemed, today, March 3rd 2024, saw the manga return. The dragon, like the phoenix, has risen.

Perhaps the strangest thing about RuriDragon‘s seventh chapter is how un-strange it feels; the manga essentially picks up right where it left off. There are no sly attempts to wink at the gap or rush any character development to “make up for lost time” or anything of that nature. Things settle back into the groove the manga had just gotten into when it went on hiatus; Ruri continues developing strange new dragon powers, furthering the manga’s central growing up-as-growing monstrous metaphor. Here, it’s electrical buildup, revealed in the chapter’s last few panels as the ability of dragons to call lightning.

As previously alluded to, and more directly foreshadowed back in the Starbucks chapter, Ruri’s developing abilities put distance between herself and her classmates, in particular the standoffish light-haired girl, Maeda, first introduced then. The two share a decidedly awkward moment as Ruri’s schoolday comes to a close, with Maeda pretty bluntly rejecting Ruri’s (admittedly slapdash) attempts to get her to open up. This clearly weighs on Ruri’s mind as the chapter ends, which is where we get the aforementioned lightning reveal.

All this said, while it’s definitely great that RuriDragon is getting back into the swing of things, what’s in the new chapter is almost less important than the fact that there even is a new chapter. It’s true that we probably won’t know the full extent of what the “new RuriDragon” will look like until it switches to biweekly publishing on Jump Digital and Jump+ in a month or so, but for now, it is enough that the blade-horned high school girl is back. (Personally, I’m interested in the other person in Ruri’s class who’s been absent for most chapters of the manga so far. Another demihuman? Who can say!) For the first time in a long time, the future looks good for RuriDragon; brighter than a gout of fire, or a flash of lightning.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist or Tumblr to get even more anime and manga thoughts, and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in Manga, The Manga Shelf

The Manga Shelf: So Long, CIPHER ACADEMY

The Manga Shelf is a column where I go over whatever I’ve been reading recently in the world of manga. Ongoing or complete, good or bad. These articles contain spoilers.

Yes, here we are. It’s the first time I’ve ever written two Manga Shelf columns about the same manga, and it’s for this sad, sad occasion. Funeral for a friend. Or at least, my friend. I get the impression that most Shonen Jump readers would rather chew glass than read all 58 chapters of Cipher Academy, Bakemonogatari author NisioisiN‘s first and, if I had to guess, last contribution to the magazine. Let’s be serious for a moment; I genuinely did like Cipher Academy, in spite of a number of obvious flaws, but there was no way that it was going to last particularly long. It is a terrible fit for Shonen Jump, and is perhaps proof that NisioisiN really just genuinely doesn’t know how to get out of his own way. Especially given that his version of a simple battle shonen plot involves a tangled mess of cryptography and puzzle-solving that only makes any kind of sense about half the time.

That said, it’s easy to claim with hindsight that there was no way Cipher Academy could ever succeed in the context of Jump, but is that actually true? After all, despite its infamously hard to follow “code battles” and goofy storyline, the series does have its fair share of strengths. In particular, Isshin’s ability to hide real character depth inside of weird gimmicks remains unmatched, with characters like Tayuu and her strange, strained friendship with Iroha’s early-antagonist-turned-ally Kyora being a point of genuine interest. And similar examples coincide with the gimmicks themselves being novel, such as Kyora’s filthy mouth and how it contrasts with her ojou-sama demeanor, and how these both belie a fairly caring person underneath that persona. Or Anonymity Requested, who spends most of the manga hidden behind a censor bar both in- and out-of-universe, only for it to become clear that she’s actually both an impulsive hothead and kind of a jerk.

On the other hand, the manga’s biggest weakness is the actual “code battles” themselves, the series’ cutesy name for fast, real-time code-swapping and cracking. A normal battle shonen can rely on any number of visual tricks to make its fights compelling, but Cipher Academy has no access to a majority of those, given that by definition its ‘battles’ are light on actual action. Furthermore, most of them are nakedy convoluted owing to the conceits of the setting. A lot of shonen fights boil down to characters working within sometimes quite complex rulesets in order to outmaneuver and defeat their opponent, but that fact is much easier to hide in something that involves actual combat or a similarly physical activity. In Cipher Academy, it sometimes feels like watching a chess game while only being passingly familiar with the rules.

In general, it both feels markedly less naturalistic and lays bare how dry “a bunch of characters mess around within a given set of rules” can get if not handled carefully. At its worst, the manga devolves into back-and-forth spiderwebs of speech balloons, especially in the case of its many word games. These both suffer greatly in the translation process and also kneecap one of the manga’s best assets; its art. Isshin’s usual, verbose style doesn’t work here, given that this isn’t a light novel.

Furthermore, even later on, when the battles do get a little more visually dynamic, they still suffer from feeling confusing and arbitrary. That’s kind of a problem, given that these puzzles are, on top of everything else, supposed to be user-solvable.

I’ll concede that I have seen some people claim to be able to solve the cryptograms in Cipher Academy, but the fact remains that not only could most people not do so, a good chunk of the readerbase did not even try, and given the way the manga presents these puzzles, it’s tough to blame them. Some of this might be down to the translation—infamously, translating this manga to a satisfactory degree while still keeping MangaPlus’ deadlines was impossible enough that its first official translator walked and had to be replaced—but the manga’s poor performance domestically implies to me that this was a problem across languages. There might also just be a demographic mismatch here; Shonen Jump’s core readership groups are teenagers and people who really like battle shonen as a genre. Neither of these groups are necessarily going to pop for galaxy-brain puzzle solving. Even for those that do, as mentioned, Cipher Academy‘s codes and cryptograms are a mixed bag.

Speaking of “crypto,” we should probably touch on that facet of the manga as well, since, yes, as alluded to in the first chapter, Cipher Academy’s plot does in fact involve cryptocurrency.

Let’s put two facts out there as we do this. One; cryptocurrency is boring. There are people who (incorrectly) think it’s useful or desirable to have, but it’s not interesting in of itself, and if you think otherwise I would love to know how you found my blog from /r/dogecoin. Two; NisiosiN’s writing is not cool. It is a great number of other things; bizarre, ambitious, mysterious, campy, fun, complex, convoluted, goofy, theatrical, self-assured, horny to a sometimes troubling degree, problematic, incredibly autodidactic, impossible to mistake for anyone else’s, etc. But it’s not cool. Isshin is a NEET-ass geek of a writer whose work absolutely drips with evidence that he’s a complete dork. I say this with love, as a fan of some of his work, and as a fellow uncool person, but it’s important to note. NisiosiN’s work has never been and will not ever be cool, and when we’re talking about a Jump manga, that does matter. Combined with the whole crypto / metaverse aspect, I think this was genuinely be a big contributing factor to the manga’s poor performance. You can get away with a lot when you’re writing in this format as long as your stuff is cool. Isshin’s work is fundamentally not.

As for the other stuff, well, cryptocurrency garbage is not quite the PR death sentence over in Japan that it is in the Anglosphere, at least not yet, but that doesn’t mean any regular person actually thinks it’s interesting. At best, they think of it as a way to make money. This fundamentally dull piece of recurring subject matter, when combined with the fact that Isshin is Isshin, plus the generally spotty quality of the puzzles themselves, creates a situation where it’s easy to see how Cipher Academy failed to create and maintain a strong fanbase. There are simply too many hurdles for the average shonen manga reader here. Which would you rather read; this, or a manga where a guy can summon shadow goldfish with a magic katana?

That’s what I thought.

Of course, all this gets at is why the manga failed with its readership at large, which is only half the story. At the top of this article I mentioned that I actually liked Cipher Academy, and that’s mostly true. Why? Well, put plainly, as a fellow-traveler complete dork I tend to find NisiosiN’s particular brand of absurdity more entertainingly silly than obnoxious. But I think, perhaps unfortunately for Isshin, that I’m fairly rare in this regard. At least, rare among the sorts of people who routinely check out new MangaPlus titles.

Cipher Academy‘s central theme is that of code creation as communication. This idea that by hiding things about yourself on purpose, you’re more likely to be honest with people who can see through that obfuscation. The manga does a few interesting things with this, including a really great early moment where Iroha basically sneaks his entire backstory into a code battle a good 30 chapters before we get most of it spelled out in plain-text. Things like this make Cipher Academy‘s best moments feel actively rewarding instead of just convoluted. It’s also worth noting that Yuuji Iwasaki’s art is consistently great and occasionally fantastic, and may be the best part of the series overall.

Unfortunately though, I think trying to get people onboard a manga this willfully obtuse for a handful of moments where what it’s trying to do actually clicks is a tough sell no matter how you slice it. By the end of its run, even I was bored with Cipher Academy, and as it wears on—and the effects of its looming cancellation become more and more obvious as plotlines are condensed and rushed through—it becomes harder and harder to root for. By the conclusion, I was pretty much fed up.

Indeed, if we turn the manga’s theme of the cryptic-as-the clarifying back on the manga itself, we’re left with a decidedly unflattering portrait of its author. The manga’s final chapters offer simple and clean solutions to massive problems; wars end with a handshake, and the real global problem is a lack of mutual respect. This is an uncharitable read, but its emblematic of the problems found in some of Isshin’s less refined work, and “less refined” really does just define Cipher Academy in general. The whole thing ends in a giant, glossed-over shrug, and a decidedly unearned (and very boring) happy endings epilogue, because it has neither the time nor depth to do anything else.

At the end of the day, the problem is obvious. NisiosiN’s greatest strength as a writer is also his greatest weakness, his ability to absorb and scramble basically any kind of theme or subject matter into a fresh and surprising story. Cipher Academy, frustratingly, is those things, it just isn’t terribly coherent. Describing the series to someone else makes it sound like the ramblings of a conspiracy theorist; cryptocurrency vaults, the NSA infiltrating high schools, child soldiers with real guns that look like toys, dancing prisoners of war, superpowered cheerleaders, hyper-advanced spy tool glasses, and so on, but unlike Isshin’s best work, Cipher Academy can’t actually support all of this, and when it tries to, it veers from “goofy” into “just generally wretched.” It’s too brief and too tossed-off to explore most of its ideas in detail, so on the rare occasional it gestures to them, it feels unfinished and almost insulting. Much of the manga ends up reading like a random sampling of whatever ideas happened to furrow their way into Isshin’s head as he wrote it. He’s a ridiculously prolific writer, and this smashed-open spigot approach has led to some great work, but Cipher Academy is a decidedly minor piece of his bibliography.

I won’t discount the possibility that Isshin’s real crime here is greatly overestimating his readerbase (up to and including yours truly), and that if read from a certain angle, Cipher Academy somehow makes more sense and coheres into some kind of wonderful whole. I liked the series for the moments where it clicks, its colorful cast of bizarre characters, and its great art. But—and I can’t say this too loudly—the ugly fact is that those things alone aren’t enough to float a manga in the most competitive magazine in the industry, at least not for very long. As it stands, this is a minor work from a guy who has done much, much more interesting stuff. I doubt anyone but Isshin’s true diehards will remember this manga existed even a few years down the line. So it goes.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in Manga

The Manga Shelf: Toxic Yuri, Tragedy, and Catharsis in DESTROY IT ALL AND LOVE ME IN HELL!

CONTENT WARNING: This article contains mention of physical and emotional abuse, and other sensitive subject matter. Please read with discretion.

The Manga Shelf is a column where I go over whatever I’ve been reading recently in the world of manga. Ongoing or complete, good or bad. These articles contain spoilers.

If this one seems a little less coherent than usual, and more like I’m jumping from idea to idea, give me a bit of a break, I tapped this out in about a third of my usual write-time because I really, really just wanted to talk about this manga.

Let’s start with this, though. What a fucking title, fan-translated or not.

Destroy It All And Love Me in Hell! You don’t get enough like that anymore. Just chunky enough to telegraph that it’s the English name for a manga, vague enough that it could be about just about anything, but promising a unique tonal space, and that space is much of what we’re going to talk about today. But before we get to that, as is always the case, it helps to know what this thing is actually about.

In a sense, this is a dark twist on the classic “status gap” setup common to many yuri stories and, really, much romance in general. Except, instead of, say, a noble and a commoner in some fantasy setting or anything like that, we have a high school populated by an outwardly-perfect student council president overachiever who’s secretly so high-strung that you could play her like a violin (Kurumi Yoshizawa) and, in the opposite corner, an absolute scuzz-fuck dirtbag of a delinquent whose idea of a crush involves blackmail and punches to the solar plexus (Naoi). No reduction to common character tropes here, while both of our leads are loosely rooted in archetypes common to the genre, neither is what she seems, and even those foundations that exist start to crumble as the pair get into each others’ heads. A third girl, Kokoro, plays a decidedly tertiary role as Kurumi’s relatively innocent childhood friend who is also (uh-oh!) harboring a massive crush on her.

We open on Kurumi giving a perfectly fine but decidedly canned speech as the student council president. It is immediately obvious from the manga’s opening pages that, other than Kokoro, nobody really likes her. They either envy her for her achievements or resent her because they think she’s looking down her nose at them. (That latter point of view is what leads to her and Naoi’s already-uneasy first interaction.) Managing this largely-friendless existence is made even tougher by her incredibly overbearing—and we later find out, outright abusive—mother, who micromanages her schedule and insists that she excel in all things. The kind of anxiety that this sort of thing kicks up can easily lead to bad habits, and Kurumi’s, evidently, is abortive attempts at shoplifting. We see her palm an eraser from a corner shop, stick it in her bag, and then, overcome with guilt, pay for it anyway.

The usage of something as utterly minor as an eraser for this bit of tension-building feels deliberate. As it turns out, we’re not the only one who saw this little stunt. Naoi, whether coincidentally nearby or outright stalking Kurumi, films her doing it. From there, editing the video to only show the theft itself would be trivial, and it is that threat that first intertwines Kurumi and Naoi, and it doesn’t take long for their encounters to get violent. Things are fraught for a little bit, but then, in a scene where Naoi explains to Kurumi precisely why she doesn’t like her, three consecutive pages, and six words on the last of those, change the timbre of the manga forever.

“What are you laughing for? Freak.”

Like a magic spell, that single question—and Kurumi’s grin in that last panel—shifts the manga from a tragic story about one girl bullying another to something very different. I shouldn’t have to say this, but let me do so anyway just to be cautious; obviously, in reality, this is not how any part of this works. But, within the wonderful world of fiction, we can explore such problematic but compelling concepts as “what if a really hot girl at your school systematically ruined your life and you realized you kind of liked it?” Further, “what if you eventually got enough into it that it kind of became a mutual life-ruining?” Thus is perhaps the driving question of Love Me in Hell.

And on that note, I do feel the need to here go to bat for this entire subgenre. Occasionally I will see people express disbelief that anyone likes this kind of manga at all, or else they’ll assume they’re made for a gawking male audience, the alleged “male majority” that supposedly make up most yuri readers. Aside from the deep irony of how a certain kind of low-rent media criticism will claim to be feminist but center the male experience anyway, this is easily rebutted here from personal lived experience. I’m a woman, and I like this stuff. I’d describe myself as something of a novice in the ways of Toxic Yuri, but the appeal is immediate and obvious. This isn’t my first foray into the genre, but it’s a dive back in with an intentionality I didn’t have when I first discovered it.

We’re going to largely skimp on linear recapping here. The manga as it stands is just seven chapters long, and you can easily knock it out in an afternoon if you’re so inclined. The important thing to note is that as Naoi and Kurumi’s strange relationship continues, with Naoi continually threatening to expose her fake-shoplifting habit and demanding Kurumi do increasingly risky things (stealing from a teacher’s desk, carving another student’s desk up with threats and insults, etc.), they do grow closer in a twisted way. Based on that alone, you probably already know whether or not this is “for you,” I think it’s worth asking why this subgenre and particularly Love Me in Hell specifically, resonates with people.

I have one pet theory, myself. In the background of the manga, lurking but never directly mentioned, is of course the specter of homophobia. The idea of a “good girl” snapping under the weight of a deep-seated desire to do “bad things” doesn’t actually need all the character justification it gets in this series—although it does add a lot of depth to Kurumi’s self-destructive behavior—because it makes perfect sense. What is homosexuality in a straight society always painted as if not the ultimate transgression? What is anything that happens in this manga but the viscera of sexual exploration splayed out for us to see? Three chapters in, Kurumi is actively getting herself off1 while fantasizing about Naoi pinning her down and calling her a “bad girl”. She of course tries to claim to herself (and implicitly, though obviously disingenuously, to the audience) that she’s not really thinking of Naoi that way, but the panels show what they show, and it’s genuinely fascinating how Naoi seems to literally take up more and more of Kurumi’s mental real estate as the manga goes on. Love Me in Hell sometimes depicts her—or rather, Kurumi’s thoughts of her—as literal shadowy interlopers into the pages themselves, carrying clouds of inky black fog with them.2

Because we are to understand Kurumi and Naoi’s relationship as two-way if not healthy (it’s definitely not healthy, hopefully you don’t need me to tell you that), it’s important to point out that Naoi isn’t really the villain of this piece beyond maybe the first chapter or two, and by the more recent chapters it’s clear that they’re actively harming each other rather than it being as simple as X hurting Y. If there’s a real root of all evil here, it’s society itself; specifically the school system, and homophobia at large for allowing things to get this bad in the first place.

And on that note, if you’re straight and this kind of thing makes you uncomfortable, it is worth asking precisely why. Is it just that you don’t like to see cute anime girls getting hurt, or is there the lingering guilt of complicity somewhere in your noggin? I won’t judge, it’s in mine, too, despite my being queer, I let a lot of shit fly that I shouldn’t have when I was younger out of a desire to remain closeted, and I’m still not really a “visible” queer in a way that anyone would pick up on without asking. This stuff hurts, and pretending it’s not there doesn’t solve anything.

Of course, that’s not to say that Love Me in Hell is some kind of high-minded liberationist treatise, because that isn’t right either. There is a sense of reveling in the pain, here. Not as simple rubbernecking (do not let that imaginary male audience back into your head! Not for a second!) but as a fully intentional exploration of these emotions. A wading into, for lack of a better term, this uniquely fucked-up vibe. It may be offputting to put it this way so bluntly, but there is really nothing quite like watching two people collide in a way that could not possibly end well for either of them.

Kurumi, repressed to the point of her personality buckling under the pressure, finds an absolutely perfect foil in Naoi. It’s all but directly pointed out that it would have been “better” for Kurumi, if she wanted to break off contact with Naoi entirely, to just come clean about the shoplifting video and cut the problem off at the root. There are two reasons she does not do that. One; Kurumi’s very real anxiety from her mother’s outsized expectations of her, and as is later revealed, her outright abusive behavior wherein she threatens self-harm if not constantly kept up to date on Kurumi’s whereabouts, have made actual, honest communication between the two impossible. But equally important to the story itself is Two; being blackmailed by Naoi gives Kurumi permission to do bad things. Being “bad” with Naoi gives Kurumi a way of stepping outside of herself, an escape that no traditional outlet offers. It is a profoundly bad coping mechanism, but it is one nonetheless. Thus, the tragedy and the romance of Love Me in Hell stems not from the idea that there was no other way this could’ve gone, but because on some level Kurumi wants it to have gone this way. It is an absolutely sublime example of rotten romance, and a bit later in when Naoi starts to more obviously return these twisted feelings, the catharsis is very real.

At the same time, there is a festering, throbbing kind of pain to watching all this unfold, like an infected cut that got that way because you neglected to put a bandage on it. But in its own way, that kind of pain is itself fascinating and intoxicating. And this, really, is where we boil things down to “you either get it or you don’t.” Many people, I think perhaps most people, will never try to kiss this particular snake. Those that do will know better than to complain when they’re bitten. You need to know what you’re getting into if you’re going to read about a couple whose love language is beating each other up and whose grand romantic proclamations sound like this. It is fundamentally a very different thing from “vanilla” romance, and one cannot substitute the other.

I like things like this both for that reason, the emotional, elemental appreciation of watching two people make each other worse because there is no “better,” but also because unlike a good amount of “fluffier” yuri, this stuff feels immune to being stolen from us queers. Which is not to say that straight people are incapable of reading and appreciating art like this, but rather that in order to even understand what a manga like Love Me in Hell is trying to do, you have to already accept the premise that yuri actually is largely about queer romance and queer sexuality, instead of assuming it is being made for some other reason. I cannot conceive of the kind of bland, bad-faith readings that plague more mainstream yuri and yuri-undertoned works ever catching on with this kind of thing. Who could possibly actually get through it and not understand that sometimes, there is nothing more romantic than two girls just seeing how much worse they can make each other? It’s impossible to even entertain the idea.3

On a broader level, though, Love Me in Hell taps into the same rhythms of darkness that fuel all sorts of longstanding arts. Tragic theater, heavy metal, horror movies, hell, if you wanna go truly mainstream, there are tons of pop songs about specifically the idea of tainted love, bad romance, and so on. Hell, one of them is serving as the ED theme for an anime I covered on this very blog earlier this season.

Of course, hey, let’s check off the obligatory caveat. Love Me in Hell is a monthly, and as such even though it’s run for most of 2023 so far, it is still only those seven chapters in. The most recent of these is outright hopeful, in fact, ending with Kokoro admitting her crush on Kurumi. Things could, you know, theoretically, get “better” for Kurumi. But let’s just be honest with ourselves here, that’s not Love Me in Hell. I would be very, very surprised if Kokoro, the hopelessly in love, kind of bland sweetheart that she is, got the girl. I’m not even sure that either of the leads are going to get out of this thing alive! Both Kurumi and Naoi’s households are tinderboxes; emotionally unstable parents creating absolutely untenable situations for their children. The two’s only way out is through each other, and I don’t really see how Kokoro could feasibly fit in that equation.

The manga’s title, after all, is Love Me in Hell. It would hardly be the first romance manga to end in some kind of terrible tragedy, and that title sure does conjure images of going down into a burning ring of fire; a roaring inferno that takes everything, good and bad, with it.

1: If you are concerned about this kind of thing, the scene is drawn in such a way that you don’t really see anything.

2: I think I can get away with saying I find this entire habit of fantasizing and then feeling terrible about it deeply relatable as someone who was raised Catholic as long as it’s not in the main text of the article. Thank god for these footnotes that nobody reads.

3: This is yet another reason that the imaginary “male majority” isn’t worth considering when evaluating this stuff. I don’t know about y’all, but my experience with cis-hetero men in anime fandom, at least the kind who, say, insist Suletta and Miorine are just very good friends, has not painted a picture of people with the stomach for this kind of thing.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in Manga, New Manga First Impressions

New Manga First Impressions: Forging a Myth in KAGURABACHI

New Manga First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about the first chapter or so of a new manga.

The life cycle of a meme—in the casual, internet sense of that term—is weird. Things can randomly spark some kind of cultural flame and within mere months you go from joking about, how, say, Morbius is the greatest movie of all time to it getting a second theatrical release and managing to flop twice. Simply because Shonen Jump is not as much of a presence in Anglophone pop culture as the MCU, Kagurabachi, a new title that began serializing earlier this week, is not there yet. Nor, unlike the Morbius example, is its fandom entirely ironic. But the same snowballing effect is there, if in a different way; something has a solid first chapter, maybe an exceptional one depending on your feelings on the all-sword-slashes-and-shadows school of shonen manga storytelling, and suddenly, there are lengthy copypastas calling it the greatest manga of all time, tweets about non-existent anime, game, and live-action adaptations, budget cosplays, a Discord server with some 4,000 members, and about a million jokes that all manipulate the same promo image of the protagonist drawing his sword. As of Thursday (9/21/23, for those of you reading this in the future), Shonen Jump’s English Twitter account has acknowledged the bit, so god only knows where this will eventually end.

This doesn’t need to be said, but just to get it out there; this is all pretty firmly tongue-in-cheek. I think perhaps the most telling of any of these memes that I’ve seen is the Kagurabachi bingo card, which allows for a number of standard contemporary action shonen plot beats. Plus the possibility that the series will either A) get an anime, B) flop outright, or C) get axed before either of those can happen. It also has the concession that the plot might end up being “basic.”

Nonetheless, however much or little irony any individual person making these images might have regarding their feelings for the series’ first chapter, I find it hard to believe that there isn’t something there. In comparison to its Class of ’23 contemporaries, Kagurabachi does indeed have a more immediately thrilling opening chapter than many. Time will tell if that holds up, of course—and even if it does, ongoing quality is not a guarantee of continued success. Just ask any fan of Ruri Dragon, myself included—but it’s worth at least looking at that promise, and figuring out what’s underneath all these jokes.

Kagurabachi‘s actual premise is so simple that the official summary is only a few lines long. Here it is, in its entirety:

Young Chihiro spends his days training under his famous swordsmith father. One day he hopes to become a great sword-maker himself. The goofy father and the serious son–they thought these days would last forever. But suddenly, tragedy strikes. A dark day soaked in blood. Chihiro and his blade now live only for revenge.

Kagurabachi, Manga PLUS Official Summary

True to that curt summary, what little we have of Kagurabachi so far paints it as a fairly straightforward tale of bloody revenge. There isn’t anything even remotely wrong with that of course; manga as a medium is rife with those, and some of them are very good.

We open on a bit of scene-setting, with Chihiro, as a young boy, living with his father while the latter runs a sword smithy. Chihiro’s father is eccentric, despite what one might assume from the gritty nature of his profession, and he’s introduced to us as talking with his pet goldfish. To hear him tell it, they have a lot to say.

Throughout this scene, we get little dollops of information about the world. The setting feels broadly contemporary, but Chihiro’s father’s friend, a fellow named Mr. Chiba, alludes to something called the “Seitei War” that Chihiro’s father’s swords somehow helped end. How mysterious.

For his part, Chihiro seems rather unimpressed by his old man’s reputation. In fact, as it’s nearing his fifteenth birthday it really seems like what Chihiro wants most is to follow his pa into the family business. He directly says as much, in fact, but his father is hesitant.

His father explains; swords are exemplary pieces of craftsmanship, sure. But at the end of the day, they’re weapons. Chihiro’s father believes that, whatever role they may have in ending conflict, they are also the tools used to start one, and the swordsmiths themselves are complicit in the lives lost by them. It’s a thoughtful approach. On a meta level, it’s also indicative of the many cultural differences between swords and, say, firearms, as storytelling tools. If one were to turn this guy into a dealer of almost any other kind of weapon, he’d be markedly less sympathetic than the already gray moral tone he has here.

Chihiro reassures his father that he’s willing to shoulder the burden of selling these things responsibly. Satisfied by that answer, his father brings their conversation—and this first, fairly light half of the manga—to a close by reaffirming that he believes in Chihiro.

Cue a timeskip; 38 months pass between two pages.

When we return, whatever city we’re in is not the peaceful one of the opening pages of the chapter. Wherever it may be, sword-toting yakuza rule the streets, and quash any resistance to their regime. That’s grim, if still in line with the fairly mundane world of swords and grit that the opening seemed to promise. But then, we learn that the yakuza are being bankrolled by this guy, a “sorcerer” of some description, who certainly seems to have enough magic to back that label up. In his few, gleefully villainous, pages of appearance here, he grows a black, spiky bush around a rebel’s head, leaving him to suffer until it decays on its own.

This, I think, is where Kagurabachi starts really staking out an identity. This guy’s character design alone is enough to hang a decent starter villain on, and depending on if we ever learn anything of substance about his motives, he could easily become an interesting recurring antagonist, too.

Naturally, when we next meet Chihiro he’s 3 years and change older, a fair bit taller, and a hell of a lot edgier. His face has been marked by a star-shaped scar, he’s clad in black, and toting a katana of his own. It’s honestly a little much! If you put him in tan instead of black he’d look like an Attack on Titan character. But my opinion on these things remains that it’s better to go hard on your character designs and risk overshooting than it is to play it so safe that you end up at “boring.” If there’s an artistic misstep here, it’s the former, not the latter.

Chihiro and Mr. Chiba (notably, Chihiro’s dad is nowhere to be seen) stride into the aforementioned yakuza city with, initially, plans to negotiate. Then they see a clutch of dead bodies hanging from a bridge, and at this point, the remainder of the chapter dissolves into pure action. Chihiro and Chiba can’t abide by what they’ve seen, so they bust up the yakuza controlling the city, and here, we learn just what it is that makes Chihiro’s father’s swords so special.

If you’re going to reveal that your protagonist has some kind of hidden power or technique, this is the way to do it. The sequence spans a few pages here, but it’s legitimately pretty damn cool, with Chihiro’s sword apparently possessed(?) by three inky goldfish specters which annihilate the rest of the yakuza in just a few swings.

This is not enough to pin a whole manga on, but it’s damn sure enough to pin an opening chapter on, and I think this particular trick is where Kagurabachi is getting most of its hype from right now, no matter how much ironic attachment there may or may not also be.

In general, this really is a strong first chapter, and it does a good job of providing emotional context for the burst of action that is going to be most of the reason Shonen Jump’s target audience pick this thing up. Clearly, something happened to Chihiro and his father. One does not go from a snarky but otherwise well-adjusted kid to an angel of death due to happy circumstances. Time will tell if the series can keep this momentum going, but I would say that the series’ surging popularity is, at least at this very early juncture, well-earned.

There are some weaknesses here, too, of course, very few manga absolutely nail everything right from chapter one. (The handful that do are exceptional for a reason.) The character art tends toward a bit stiff, and other than Chihiro himself and the villainous sorcerer I’d like to see the designs get a little more wild. The translation also tends toward the just slightly too-corny, with Chihiro calling the villains “slime” sticking out as a particularly bad offender. Of course, that part is not mangaka Takeru Hokazono‘s fault, and really, these are minor gripes more than serious complaints anyway. Overall, this is a very good first chapter, especially considering that it’s Hokazono’s first proper series.

At this early point, all that’s really left is to see what shape, if any, the series’ raw potential takes, not unlike the unforged swords in the chapter’s opening pages themselves. The manga’s early fan community will be a huge boon to it if it can manage to pull a good story from this setup (and if it can keep delivering on the action), and no amount of ironic distance will diminish that.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Manga, Other Posts

I’m Burned Out, and I Want to Talk About It

Header image from Lupin III: The Woman Called Fujiko Mine. I haven’t finished it, so please no spoilers!

This is not a goodbye. At least not permanently, but things are going to be slowing down significantly here on Magic Planet Anime, and that very well might be permanent.

There are a lot of reasons for this, which we can broadly sort into the emotional and material. The former are more relevant to why any of you actually read this stuff, so let’s start there.

I have been, as I alluded to in last year’s Year-End Ranking article, very depressed for quite a long while now (we’ll get to why in a bit), and it’s seriously impacted my ability to keep up with seasonals on a simple schedule basis, and it’s also really dented my ability to follow even very simple plotlines of what I am watching. I get very bad “brain fog,” and it sucks. I frequently miss entire lines of dialogue and find myself having to rewind what I’m watching, etc. This has also dinged how much I actually enjoy these anime, because if I’m not keeping the plot straight I am having a much harder time parsing anything deeper than the literal goings-on. The haze is real, and it sucks.

By and large, I still like most anime I actually finish, but the amount of anime I do finish per season has been dropping for a while now, and even if I like a show, keeping up with it can feel like a chore because of all this. At this point, I’m a fair bit behind on even some shows I’ve really enjoyed this season, like Yohane the Parhelion. Instead, I’ve increasingly turned into one of those people who watches random old anime I hadn’t previously seen. (Not for nothing is my Devil Lady article one of the better things I’ve written recently.)

None of this is to say that I’m about to turn into one of those people who only watches Patlabor and berates others for watching anything made after the switch to digipaint, but it’s hard not to notice the change. And I guess, really, that is what this article is about. Because while this is not a goodbye, it is definitely the start of a different, slower phase of Magic Planet Anime’s existence. I do still want to write, but I want to feel like I don’t have to write quite as much. Possibly not nearly as much. Accordingly; another part of what I’m doing here is just giving myself permission to write a less if it will (hopefully) make what I actually do write a little better. I have no delusions about turning into the greatest anime critic who ever lived overnight, but maybe I can finally dream up some things to say about anime that are not “this sucks”, “this is pretty good”, or “this is weird;” a pattern that I feel I’ve been stuck in for the past good while. There is more to this medium than those three points on the chart.

All this to say; I need to do some soul searching. I don’t really have a strong idea of what I want this site to be or accomplish anymore, and that really sucks. I feel like “I just want to write about anime” is not quite enough anymore. So I’m putting a lot of it on hold. I’m definitely not going to be doing any weekly watches this season—although you’ve probably guessed that by now—and my other columns are going to be very sporadic things. Probably coming out in occasional fits and spurts when I manage to get my head sorted for a week or two. I want to get a Year-End List out again this year, but beyond that, I really don’t want to promise anything at all.

With a few half-exceptions; I have a few commissions that I still need to finish, and my ongoing podcast projects with Sredni are going to continue (however slowly or quickly that may be), but otherwise, I am releasing myself from all of my imagined writing “commitments.” All I have done is stress myself out for no good reason, at the end of the day. I want to care more about whether what I’m writing is any good than I do if I’m putting out 2 articles a month or 20. My hope is that, however many or few pieces I write over the remainder of 2023, those that do go up will at least give you something to appreciate or think about. There will be more articles this year, and I’m hoping that maybe putting the brakes on my attempts to be ‘relevant’ will make those articles that do come out more interesting, whether they’re involved analyses or off-the-cuff ramblings.

So, those are the personal reasons. What about the material ones?

Agh.

Dear reader, have you ever been considered a legal non-entity by your state government? No? I recommend avoiding it, if at all possible.

I don’t want to go into too many details here, but suffice it to say, the ten-car pileup of health problems, legal issues, and the intertangling thereof that plagued me last year has only gotten worse this year. This is definitely a massive contributing factor to my stress, and I have spent a decent chunk of this year so depressed that I have genuinely wondered if I’m ever going to sort this out, and I’ll cop to having contemplated suicide more than once.

For complex reasons, a lot of the basic necessities of being an adult in the US (health insurance, a driver’s license or equivalent, and a steady income, just to name a few) are denied to me. That’s all been true for pretty much the entire time I’ve been working on this site, and maybe that, more than the fiddlier and more emotional stuff, is the real reason I should be setting much of what I do on this site aside for a while. Not that the two aren’t intertwined; I’m starting to hit my limit with how much more of this crap I can take, and it’s definitely been affecting me mentally, as outlined above.

So, all of that is the very long version. I hope you’ll forgive me for being reluctant to offer a shorter one this time around, I think conveying the context for why I’m doing this is important, since I didn’t want to feel like I was just abandoning all of my regular readers to the wind. And as a result, I really struggled with putting this article together. (I had to cut a bunch of stuff that I imagine would’ve come off as just overly self-deprecatory, among other things. I’m not trying to commit emotional self-harm, here.) But in spite of everything, I’m pretty optimistic. I think—much like last year—I really just need some time away, and to do some reflecting on what I really want to do with my life, and how Magic Planet Anime fits into those plans.

I think I’ve gotten my point across by now, more or less. To a future filled with fewer, but hopefully better articles. To my own mental health. And to a brighter tomorrow. If I round up, I’m nearly 30. But life doesn’t end there, and otakudom doesn’t have to either.

See you when I see you, anime fans.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter, Mastodon, Cohost, Anilist, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in Manga

The Manga Shelf: KINDERGARTEN WARS and The Struggle to be Loved

The Manga Shelf is a column where I go over whatever I’ve been reading recently in the world of manga. Ongoing or complete, good or bad. These articles contain spoilers.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. His codename is “Spade”, real name unknown and unknowable. He’s an assassin, a stalker in the shadows and a kiss of death to the unwary. He will kill anyone, anywhere, for the right price.

And unfortunately for him, this is not his story.

Kindergarten Wars doesn’t care much about Spade, who gets capped in the head not long after this and is not an important player in this story. The other person in that image, the woman who blocks his sniper bullet with a shovel, is our real protagonist. And I have to start this column with a confession; this was originally a completely different Manga Shelf article. I want to survey the recent rise in manga that take at least some degree of inspiration from Spy x Family and examine what they did with that influence. I still might write that column someday, but Kindergarten Wars deserves a spotlighting of its own. This is some good stuff. Of just 21 currently-available chapters, it does take a little while to find its footing, but once it does, it hits hard. This is a little surprising given its premise, which is goofy even by the standards of this emerging subgenre.

Speaking of, even though this column is no longer about the Spy x Family….Family, we should at least briefly define what “this subgenre” actually is, as there are a few common points. In particular, these manga usually juxtapose absurd, highly “genre” elements; mostly ridiculous hyperviolence, leagues of assassins, international conspiracies, a sprawling criminal underworld, etc. with down-to-earth concerns, and a particular focus on domesticity; romance, family, friendships, and finding one’s place in the world. The simple and slow things in life. Without fail, they come to the conclusion that the latter is better (and in this sense they find some common ground with the rather more out-there Chainsaw Man), and is the real thing worth fighting for. No one in any of these manga has ever truly been fulfilled by being a gun-toting killing machine. They’re fulfilled by little things; dates, shoujo manga, the laughter of children, and whatever found family they manage to rustle up along the way. Other than SpyFam itself, the most successful example is probably Sakamoto Days, which, if Kindergarten Wars isn’t also taking that series as an influence, its similarities are remarkable for being convergent evolution.

As for our actual premise? Nothing too weird for an action manga these days. Rita—that’s the lady blocking a bullet with a spade—works at the world’s safest kindergarten, Kindergarten Noir, where the children of the wealthy and influential are sent so they can receive a normal education away from the dangers of the world. The only problem is that the school is the frequent target of assassins and kidnappers, meaning that these teachers have to also be world-class bodyguards for their students. Rita is an ex-assassin herself, formerly a human swathe of destruction nicknamed the Witch. Not that you’d know it by looking at her, for most of the manga’s current run; despite her deadly skills, Rita is a gremlin obsessed with finding a hot boyfriend, and that contrast is where the manga gets most of its more comedic elements from.

To be honest, while this is hardly a bad gag, it is the primary reason that I way underestimated Kindergarten Wars when I first flipped it open. The series’ first several small mini-arcs are primarily comedic, and while they do still have the violence angle to supply some solid action, they’re more about humor and small-scale character developments. For example, Doug, Rita’s coworker and a secondary protagonist, develops a crush on her when she saves his life, despite a past as a swindler and a ladies’ man. This sort of setup is typical of this very early part of the manga, and is also the fuel for the manga’s “romantic” side, given that romcoms are a part of its DNA as well. You get a bit more of an idea as to where all of this is going when we’re introduced to Hana Bradley, the manga’s other main female character and who it hilariously tries to play as a comparative straight man despite the fact that her preferred method of attack is batting homeruns with live grenades. Still, where Kindergarten Wars goes from decent but unremarkable to actually feeling like it’s worth following is in its most recent half dozen or so chapters, where we get a peek at an inner darkness that may betray more ambition than might be expected.

Chapters 14-18 mark a turning point, and it’s here where we should consider two things. One, Rita’s old assassin nickname/persona of the Witch, a lingering phantom of her old self who threatens to come to the fore every now and again. Two, the character Natasha, a swordswoman just as deadly as Rita herself who is obsessed with The Witch, seeing her as a lone kindred soul in a world full of people who are otherwise nothing like herself.

Natasha, hired to attack the kindergarten just like any number of the scores of dead goons from earlier in the series, eventually confronts Rita directly, only to find herself absolutely perplexed that she doesn’t enjoy fighting this woman. If anything, she feels scared. All of this happens as we flash back through Natasha’s life as a prodigal killer. And all at once, like a bullet through the brain, a revelation hits Natasha; a blunt, heavy, deeply unsubtle and direct statement of what can only be the manga’s core theme.

This all manages to capture a very real desperation, from the mouth of someone who feels like she never had any other options in life. Trying to talk yourself into being satisfied with your place in the world is a rough thing even when that place is somewhere fairly innocuous. For Natasha, this revelation breaks her, and unfortunately, she doesn’t survive the arc. Chapter 18 is an entire postscript of her dying thoughts as Rita holds her in her arms. For just a little while, Kindergarten Wars transforms into something greater than the sum of its parts, and the spilled blood spells a plea for empathy.

It’s easy, and not at all wrong, to say that none of this is exactly revolutionary. God knows this isn’t the first manga to feed a character a line like “If I keep on killing, what will I find beyond it all?!”, but just dryly relaying the story in descriptive prose doesn’t capture its emotional impact and neither does chopping, cropping, and dropping select pages, even very good ones. There’s some real weight here, partly just from how much of a swerve this is from Kindergarten Wars‘ usual style, which is pretty lighthearted even as buildings and heads alike explode. Natasha seems like an early sign of things to come, and combined with more recent revelations about the actual nature of Kindergarten Noir it seems like the series is gearing up to tackle its first larger, more ambitious arc.

We should be taking all of this in context, of course. “Ambitious” is not a synonym for “good,” and there are plenty of ambitious manga and anime that have been done in by their own inability to stick to a single tone or topic. Most of what happens in Kindergarten Wars is still pretty cartoony, and its flashes of a more sincere and resonant emotional core are exactly that, flashes. We haven’t been handed a bombshell that turns this into a must-read just yet, even if some stories (like Natasha’s) are very good, they’re still playing with recognizable shapes. Time will tell what it eventually combines them into.

That’s what the cynical part of me says, anyway. The optimistic part says that the fact that something like this is being so well-received despite its obvious influences is evidence that there is an appetite for this kind of stuff, and that manga like Kindergarten Wars are rising to the occasion. Maybe it just wants to be loved, too.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter, Mastodon, Cohost, Anilist, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.