One Piece Every Day is a column where I read a chapter of One Piece every single day—more or less—and discuss my thoughts on it. Each entry will have spoilers up to the chapter covered in that day’s column.
In today’s chapter, Koby successfully navigates Luffy’s ship to a navy town, a feat that astonishes the young pirate. The fact that Luffy apparently expected to become King of the Pirates by just aimlessly drifting from place to place is pretty great.
More importantly, we meet a couple people here. Chiefly there’s Roronoa Zolo, the tough-as-nails bounty hunter mentioned who was mentioned in the last issue and is currently taking up the banner image for the first but probably not last time. Luffy ponders trying to get him to join his crew, while Koby reveals that he has extremely simplistic views on rehabilitative justice.
Like everyone else we’ve met in One Piece so far, he’s a classic archetype; the bounty hunter with a heart of gold. Everyone in town is terrified of him, to the point that Luffy just mentioning him causes a ruckus at a local tavern. (The same happens when he mentions the “Captain Morgan” who apparently runs the whole place, but we don’t meet him yet here.)
But when we actually meet him a bit later, it becomes obvious that he has a soft center. He has an old school “tough guy / cute little kid” friendship with a local girl, who comes to bring him food and talk to him while he’s serving his sentence of being tied to a post in the prison yard. That friendship arouses the displeasure of one of the local bigshots; the other character we meet in this chapter.
Honestly, “mean, privileged rich guy” is almost cheating when it comes to creating antagonistic characters. Doubly so when their privilege is inherited and they threaten to “tell daddy” when something goes wrong, both of which are true of Helmeppo. Triply so when they’re also such a vile motherfucker that they’re mean to kids, which Helmeppo also is. (Not content with making a guard escort the little girl out of the prison, he smashes her rice balls into the ground! What a dick!)
It very briefly looks like Helmeppo might at least have a sense of fair play; he’s been telling Zolo that if he can survive for a month tied to that post, he’ll be free to go. But, shocker, at the end of the chapter we learn that that’s not actually true, and he’s planning to have the bounty hunter executed in three days. Upon learning this, Luffy delivers on his apparently once-per-chapter obligation to sock a bad guy directly in the face.
Helmeppo’s bloody-mouthed quip about “making an enemy of the navy” is where the chapter ends, setting us up with a thrilling cliffhanger for next time.
I haven’t really been mentioning the after-chapter bonus pages up ’til now, because I’m not terribly clear on if they were part of the original print run or were added at a later date in a rerelease. (Allusion to “Luffy’s Flag”, which hasn’t shown up yet, makes me think the latter.) I’m mentioning this one, though, because it’s a cute little drawing exercise—the sort of thing that really drives home just exactly how young One Piece‘s target audience is, or at least initially was—and I thought y’all might potentially be interested.
I gave it a quick go myself. I admit; I’m not much of a visual artist. But I think for doodling it in Paint.NET with my mouse it certainly could’ve come out worse.
Now available on your local NFT marketplace.
If you deign to partake in this particular game and can doodle a more convincing jolly roger, do feel free to drop a link in the comments or to show me on Twitter. I’d be delighted to see such a thing.
One Piece Every Day relies on reader support even more than most of my columns do. Please consider sharing this article around if you liked it!
Also 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 and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto 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.
One Piece Every Day is a column where I read a chapter of One Piece every single day—more or less—and discuss my thoughts on it. Each entry will have spoilers up to the chapter covered in that day’s column.
“I’ve set myself to become King of the Pirates…and if I die trying…then at least I tried!”
The very first person Luffy D. Monkey tells about his ambition to become King of the Pirates is a dejected, down-on-his-luck cabin boy named Koby. I don’t know what it is, but that’s just absolutely hilarious to me for some reason. He’s the Jimmy Olsen to Luffy’s Superman, except I think if you put Koby and Olsen in a fight, Olsen would probably win.
I said when I began this project that I wouldn’t sugarcoat my opinion if I felt One Piece did something problematic or just straight up bad. We don’t cross into the latter at all here, but the former….eh, yeah, kind of. There’s just something a little weird about this chapter’s villain, a beauty-obsessed overweight woman with a huge mace named Lady Alvida. That said; I’ve definitely seen a lot worse, so I’ll not harp on it too hard, here.
Mostly, she serves as a decent starter villain for Luffy. Her modus operandi seems to be very simple; she asks her crew, under her wood-deck tyranny, who is the fairest of them all. If they don’t say her, she hits them with a giant mace.
When Luffy confronts her, he has an obvious opening; since his body is made of weird magic rubber stuff, he can’t be hurt by the mace, which Alvida doesn’t see coming because, well, why in the living thunder would she? Luffy takes advantage of her confusion, and promptly decks her across the face. I really hope he keeps doing this to every villain, it’s funny as hell.
More important is that we get a little bit of exposition here! Koby balks at the very notion that Luffy could ever be King of the Pirates, which eventually leads him to reply with this article’s lead quote. He incredulously mentions that Luffy will have to go to the Grand Line if he wants to accomplish such a thing. What’s the Grand Line? Who knows! A “graveyard for pirates”, apparently, which sounds suitably dangerous for our hero. Also, I had no idea that One Piece was named after an actual thing within its universe, but apparently Gold Roger’s treasure is called the “One Piece.”
In general this chapter does a lot to establish that, yeah, even ten years after the prologue, Luffy is still kind of amusingly dumb. It’s a likable sort of dumb; he doesn’t really sugarcoat anything and speaks his mind in an extremely straightforward way, even when he maybe shouldn’t.
The beginning of the chapter reestablishes that he can’t swim (who am I to judge? Neither can I), and he almost dies by being sucked into a whirlpool. Only to emerge like this a few pages later.
Luffy is an odd one, and he ends this chapter with a new boat (still just a small dinghy, but hey, it’s a new small dinghy), and a new companion; the aforementioned cabin boy, who wants to eventually join the navy.
A pirates’ graveyard and a mysterious bounty hunter. I wonder what sort of adventure our boys are about to sail themselves into? I suppose we’ll find out tomorrow.
Until then.
One Piece Every Day relies on reader support even more than most of my columns do. Please consider sharing this article around if you liked it!
Also 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 and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto 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.
One Piece Every Day is a column where I read a chapter of One Piece every single day—more or less—and discuss my thoughts on it. Each entry will have spoilers up to the chapter covered in that day’s column.
The temptation when starting a project like this is always to make grand statements of intent and purpose. I’ve already explained my reasoning at length in the intro article, though, so all that’s really left to do is aweigh the proverbial anchors and set sail. As I mentioned there, some back of the envelope math tells me that even if I keep up the rate of one chapter per day, every single day, with no breaks, and even if no new material came out at all, it will take me somewhere on the order of three years to catch up to the current chapter. Lots of things can happen in three years, but the great cliché goes that the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. We take that step today, together. I do hope you’re reading along.
I wonder what it was like, on that hot July day in ’97, to read the first chapter of One Piece. Did people read this and just know that they had something special on their hands? I certainly didn’t, I was a mere three years old at the time and even if I could’ve read comic books of any kind, I don’t believe One Piece was translated into English for some time until after it debuted.
I suspect that most people took away from the first chapter back then basically what I took away from it today; it’s got some really great action scenes and some nice cartoony art. For the first step of a thousand-mile journey, that’s probably more than enough.
Another thing that strikes me right out of the gate is a strong—albeit, simple—theme. There’s some solid thoughts had about the true nature of strength itself here. We’re introduced to Monkey D. Luffy as a kid, and he has a kid’s idea of what it means to be strong. His role model / eventual hat donor Captain Redhair Shanks just taking it in stride when “mountain bandits” intimidate him and his crew in a bar confuses Luffy. (And because Luffy is a young boy in a shonen manga, he expresses that confusion loudly and angrily.)
But when they go after Luffy himself later in the chapter, Redhair’s crew dispatch most of them with minimal fuss, proving that they could have fought off the bandits all along. There’s having strength, and there’s knowing what to do with it, and over this chapter, Luffy learns the difference. (Or at least, gets the first of however many lessons.) I think the key is here, fairly early on, where Redhair pretty much lays it out plain.
I’m particularly fond of the scene where the bandit leader kidnaps Luffy. He’s eaten by a sea serpent—a properly cartoony-monstrous thing, all crocodile teeth and fish fins—and it’s up to Redhair to fight the thing off and save Luffy. The fact that he loses an arm in the process barely seems to faze him. He saved his little buddy, that’s the important thing, right?
So the prologue ends, and years later when Luffy sets out on his own journey, he avenges his mentor by clocking that “local sea monster” right across the face as he paddles out to sea in nothing more than a wooden rowboat. The two-page spread of Luffy womping the monster is nice and dynamic, incidentally, it’s probably the best art in the whole chapter.
If you’re not reading along you’re probably puzzled as to why he has Mr. Fantastic-esque stretchy powers. The answer is that he ate a magic fruit. Manga truly is a medium without parallel.
An image that strikes me even more though, is the final page of the chapter. Luffy, despite being alone on a little rickety-rack ship in the middle of the ocean, loudly declares to no one in particular that he’s going to become king of the pirates! To surpass Redhair Shanks (and eventually return the older captain’s straw hat!), presumably find Gold Roger’s buried treasure which we learned about in the chapter’s intro. All that good stuff! Adventure, hoy!
As in the ocean, so on land, and as he goes, so too do we.
One Piece Every Day relies on reader support even more than most of my columns do. Please consider sharing this article around if you liked it!
Also 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 and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto 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.
One Piece, Eiichiro Oda‘s magnum opus, is, by some metrics, the most popular manga ever written. It’s a defining work of the modern shonen landscape, and in a broader sense, massively influential to a whole generation of creative talents both within Japan and abroad. The adventures of Monkey D. Luffy and his crew, the Straw Hat Pirates, have been captivating audiences for 25 years; a quarter of a century as of next month. But, if you know enough about anime and manga to even be aware of this blog, let alone be reading it, you know all of that. So why am I telling you something you already know?
Well, to be frank, despite its massive popularity and a reputation that precedes it by a nautical mile, I’ve never read a single page or watched a single minute of One Piece. For whatever reason, until recently, I’d just never felt compelled to. This is, in its own way, strange for me personally. I’ve been a fan of anime and manga since I was pretty young, and I was a child of the Toonami era of American anime distribution. On top of that, I really like pirate stories! Around that very same time, the Pirates of the Caribbean films were some of my favorites (and I still kind of like them today, despite their poor critical reception and any thoughts I may have about a certain actor who was in them).
But I was a dumb preteen, and then a dumb teen, and when I was that age I had a vague snobbery to my taste in anime. I don’t remember, exactly, but I think, knowing myself at the time, I probably just assumed that anything that was that popular couldn’t possibly be worth my time. In hindsight, this was very stupid for a lot of reasons, but there’s not much sense in dwelling on it. Still, even as I’ve gotten older the time just hasn’t felt right.
It occurred to me a few weeks ago that this was also a very dumb attitude to have. A few things put it in perspective for me; the keen awareness that while I’m not old yet I’m certainly not getting any younger, the recent popularity of tumblr phenomenon Dracula Daily, and my own aforementioned thoughts on a certain actor in a trilogy of pirate movies that I used to like.
And then, about a week ago, I learned—spoiler for a recent One Piece manga chapter, I think, coming literally right after this interjection, you’ve been warned—that there is a trans woman in the series as of a recent chapter of the story. And that scrap of representation was, I think, what the last of my weird, completely irrational, totally pointless defenses against this shonen series needed to fall. “Fuck it” I thought. “What is there to lose?”
Hence; this project. The premise is extremely simple. I will read the One Piece manga. Every single day, you will have a new article to read—usually on the shorter side—about a chapter of said manga. Starting from the beginning. In order. One day at a time.
It will take me, provided I take no breaks, and not accounting for any chapters that have yet to be released, about three years to catch up to where the manga is at the time of this writing, June 6th, 2022. I am setting myself a fundamentally absurd task, to not just read a very long story but to write about it, to write about every single part of it.
I have a lot of reasons for wanting to do this, but the biggest is simply to see if I can. I’m not quite brave enough to leave myself no escape hatches here; if the columns are pulling little interest by the time I’ve finished the first collected volume I’ll probably pull the plug and just continue reading the series by myself. Likewise, if I burn out on the project I will allow myself to take hiatuses. But still, I’m optimistic. The real honest core of this whole project is that I just Want To Do This. It’s a Mt. Everest for a lifelong couch potato.
Also! I want you, yes you, the girl, boy, enby, or whatever else you may be reading this, to read One Piece along with me. A chapter a day is not much; while One Piece on the whole is very long, the individual chapters are only a brisk 20 or so pages each. It will be entirely viable for you, dear reader, to settle in with a chapter of the story and one of my columns at night before you turn in for bed, or in the morning before you go to work. Is assuming that you want to arrogant of me? Maybe, but I think it’ll be fun, and I place a lot of value in fun.
As for how I’m doing this, here are the basics.
I will be reading the chapters myself in chunks, usually a few at a time, because I want to keep a nice buffer for myself so that way there will be—ideally!—a new One Piece Every Day, you know, every day.
I fully intend to give my honest thoughts on each chapter. Those may be very brief or very lengthy, and they may skew positive or negative. (I have already been informed by some well-meaning friends that there are some things in this manga that have Not Aged Well, but I have never shied away from earnestly evaluating art, even if it is problematic at times.)
These columns will have their own archive on the main page, as well as their own “recent posts” section. (They technically already do, that was the reason behind that unexplained change a few days ago, for those of you who noticed.)
And that’s basically it! Conceptually, this is all very simple. It is just a matter of effort. And there’s good news on that front; if you’re reading this, I’ve already read the first week’s worth of chapters, and already have the columns written. So, I’m already getting this ship ready to sail, you just need to decide if you’re on board or not.
I hope to see you tomorrow, for the proper casting off.
Until then.
One Piece Every Day relies on reader support even more than most of my columns do. Please consider sharing this article around if you liked it!
Also 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 and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto 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.
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; totally average person from our world dies and gets reincarnated as someone of note in a stock JRPG-style fantasy universe. This is, fundamentally, the rock that the modern iteration of the isekai genre is built on. There are many, many variations of it, but the central premise remains familiar to anyone who has even a slight familiarity with modern anime.
The Magical Revolution of the Reincarnated Princess and The Genius Young Lady, monstrously long title and all, is really only different in one key way. Our protagonist—and her obligatory love interest—are both girls.
Yes, it’s true, a yuri fantasy isekai. There are a couple of these. I’m in Love with the Villainess is well-liked, and The Executioner and Her Way of Life has an anime airing right now. Revolution Princess is a bit simpler than either of those, though. It is, at least going by the nineteen chapters currently available in English, a more straightforward heroic fantasy. (That’s nineteen chapters of the manga, for the record. It’s based on a light novel, presumably much farther along, by Piero Karasu.) It also draws a bit on the “tech boost” subgenre, a style wherein the hero uses their modern knowledge to fast-track technological development in their new world. It’s a fraught, and frankly, very silly, style, but that doesn’t much matter here. We haven’t really seen many fruits of this pursuit of better living through magitek yet, and indeed some part of the series’ point seems to be in illustrating how difficult doing such a thing would actually be. But I risk getting ahead of myself. Let’s start with the basics.
Anisphia (“Anis” for short) is the princess of a roughly medieval European-ish kingdom somewhere in a fantasy world. She used to be someone else, in another life. We don’t learn much about that “someone else,” but we do learn, crucially, that she was obsessed with the idea of magic. Now living in a world where it’s a reality, she’s hellbent on learning as much about it as she can. (Credit here, the scene of young Anis’ personality being “built” puzzle piece by puzzle piece, and finally completing as her past life memories come rushing back to her, is an intriguingly poetic visual.)
Because of a condition, she can’t actually use magic herself, directly. But over the course of her young life, she studies it extensively, becoming something of a magical mad scientist, creating useful gadgets for herself and inventing an entire field of study; a sort of “applied science of magic” called magicology. If that all seems a little dry to you, early parts of the manga are indeed a bit so. Things get more interesting when we’re introduced to Anis’ co-protagonist.
The daughter of a duke, one Euphyllia (“Euphy”), is renounced by the man she was betrothed to. That man? Anis’ older brother, the kingdom’s prince. It’s not totally clear why he’s dumping Euphy—he claims she was talking badly to a lady-friend of his who he seems to have far stronger feelings for, but the situation seems more complicated than that and we don’t learn all the details—but he’s doing it very publicly, destroying her reputation in the process.
Cue Anis, flying in on a magic broomstick of her own design. In an absurd—even in-universe—turn of events, Anis sees this as an opportunity. She reasons that if her older brother doesn’t need Euphy anymore, maybe Euphy should come with her instead. None of the nobles present are particularly okay with this, but Anis does manage to (eventually) convince the only person whose opinion on the subject really matters; Euphy herself.
Even this early on, Anis’ spur-of-the-moment decision to pick up this random disgraced woman as her (we soon learn) lab assistant is strange, but Anis is a beaming ray of pure personality, and it’s hard both for the other characters and for us the audience to not be charmed by her. Her sudden absconding with the Duke’s daughter somehow manages to scan as romantic.
Anis is, in general, an endearing protagonist, although not a flawless one. She’s charming when taken with the magic of her world, which she’s singlehandedly wrought into a science mostly by herself. She has an enthusiasm for admiring her own handiwork (sometimes to a positively Dexter’s Laboratory-ish degree).
But she also has a cool side. She was born without the ability to use magic naturally, and so Sciences her way around problems that would ordinarily be solvable with “regular” spellcasting. It’s easy to be cynical about this kind of thing nowadays, but Revolution Princess sells this characterization very well, partly by making it clear how into her Euphy is, and partly by cutting it with her general immaturity to not make her too perfect. She can occasionally come across as remote and, when pursuing her interests, reckless.
(There’s also the matter that her disregard for the spirits that are responsible for the world’s magic system, and the stones they leave behind that she uses to power her devices, does feel kind of Reddit Atheist-y at points. Thankfully it doesn’t come up enough to be a real problem.)
Euphy, meanwhile, is so dazed by the sudden shakeup in her life that it takes a while for her to know what to do with herself. She knows she likes Anis, at least in some way. She knows that all the training she did to become the future queen—remember, Anis’ brother is a crown prince—was for naught. She feels directionless and adrift. Anis doesn’t entirely get this, and the two come into conflict a few times over it. Anis, you see, is more than content to let Euphy do what she likes, but since she doesn’t know what “what she likes” even is, it just makes her feel restless.
They come to an understanding during of the manga’s first—and currently only—big, dramatic arc, wherein Anis decides to try stopping a rampaging dragon. Why? Well, aside from the fact that if left unchecked it might kill a lot of people, she wants the magical stone it carries within it to make more magitek gadgets. Fair enough. There’s a whole other slate of stampeding monsters to take care of, too, and Anis gets to really show off her action heroine chops here. (For those of you who, like me, just enjoy watching anime girls go full stone-cold killer, this is probably enough to sell the manga alone.)
The fight with the dragon is a visual treat, artist Harutsugu Nadaka‘s compositional skill is really something to behold in general, and he knocks the climactic battle scene here out of the park. I could easily fill this whole article with examples, and the dragon itself is worth highlighting; all shadowy wings beating the air, teeth and claws.
But I have to say my personal favorite is this absolutely bonkers page where Anis uses one of her gadgets, a magic dagger, to split the dragon’s breath in two.
These would be the obvious highlights of any hypothetical anime adaption as well, but don’t consider Nadaka a one-trick pony who’s only good at fight scenes. He can also excellently portray say, warm intimacy or imposing projection equally well, and it is this that gives the manga most of its visual strength. It’s immersive in a way that’s all too easy to take for granted.
When Euphy saves Anis from her first, botched run at the dragon, the princess is undeterred, and the panel makes her look positively majestic. You can practically see her cape flapping in the wind, feel the breeze blowing, and smell the sulfur and burnt fabric. It’s only natural that this eventually leads to that page of Anis splitting the dragon’s breath above. How could someone this confident not be able to do the impossible?
This is the difference between a relationship that feels convenient and one that feels real, and it’s here where Anis and Euphy seem to finally “click” with each other for good. The general sentiments here are old—far older than the manga format itself—but they’re expressed very well. Reading Revolution Princess, I get why Euphy and Anis are into each other, and the visuals play a huge part in selling that. At a ball, some weeks later and held in celebration of Anis’ victory, Euphy straight-up confesses. I’ve seen a lot of confession scenes over the course of my time reading manga, and I have to say that this is one of the sweetest. I absolutely love how we get to see a rare shot of Anis being totally, sincerely flummoxed by someone else’s actions, the brave isekai heroine reverts to a blushing schoolgirl in the face of such strong feelings. (Note also how this scene and the one immediately above mirror each other. I like that, it’s a nice visual touch.)
I’d tell you more—because goodness dear readers, do I ever want more people to pick this up—but in truth, there isn’t much more, at least not yet. Revolution Princess is still a fairly young serialization, and as good as it’s been so far, I feel as though its best chapters are ahead of it. I can only hope it picks up the following it deserves. In addition to its obvious appeal to the WLWs of the world (or just anyone who likes a good romance), there are other, intriguing plots forming in the background; dragon prophecies, jealous older siblings, and and an eccentric girl who “collects curses.” A world is being built here, and while Anis and Euphy are at the center of it, they aren’t the only interesting parts of it.
I often lament that so much yuri focuses solely on the romantic aspect. I like romance (I’m covering two romance anime this very season!), but having some other plot as well definitely helps things feel more fleshed-out and lived in. In general, I’m fond of this current wave of yuri isekai manga, and I hope that Executioner is not the last to get an anime adaption. Stories like this are built on old foundations, but Revolution Princess is a breath of exhilarating, magical fresh air.
Update: If you liked this article, be sure to check out my writeup on the anime!
Wanna talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers? Consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto 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.
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.
“104.3a A player can concede the game at any time.“ -The Comprehensive Rules of Magic The Gathering
I rarely find reason to bring it up on this blog, but I really like trading card games. I have since I was young, when a nascent infatuation with Yu-Gi-Oh! led me to the medium and I developed a fondness for the Empty Jar deck type as soon as I knew enough about the game to know how it worked. There is something compelling, even slightly mystical, about TCGs. And beneath all the corporate politics that drive the practical, business side of their development and proliferation, card games have a magnetism that is rare in popular leisure. They combine the strategy of classic board games like Chess with the brain-teasing presence of concealed information inherited from age-old traditional playing card games. They’re good fun.
But all this is true of me, and even I think that we don’t really seem to appreciate TCGs here in the west to quite the same level that they do over in Japan. Some would blame, again, Yu-Gi-Oh! I’d be more inclined to thank it. For whatever reason, while the anglophone scene has always been dominated by Magic The Gathering, YGO imports, the Pokémon TCG, and more recently, Hearthstone and its competitors, Japan has developed dozens upon dozens of TCGs which seem to wax and wane in popularity with fair regularity. In doing so, they have gained a foothold in popular culture rare for a pure leisure activity. Naturally, this has an influence on anime and manga. Once again, the original Yu-Gi-Oh! anime is by far the most well-known, but there truly are quite a few of these things. And in the manga format, where there is less pressure to actually push product and more allowance to simply tell a story, the card game genre has taken on some interesting forms. Near the top of the year I covered Destroy All of Humanity, It Can’t Be Regenerated, a romcom with an official blessing from Wizards of The Coast and a title nicked from one of the most famous Magic cards of all time. A fair bit older than Humanity is the subject of today’s column; Wizard’s Soul ~Holy War of Love~. It comes to us from back in 2013, and from the pen of Aki Eda, probably best known as the artist for one of the official Touhou manga, Silent Sinner in Blue. Technically, it is also a romance manga. Besides that, it and Humanity have shockingly little in common. (Although like that series, non-TCG aficionados may find themselves a bit lost with this one.)
Frankly, while it does meet the genre’s criteria in a very technical sense, calling Wizard’s Soul a “romance manga” seems fundamentally misaimed. There is romance in it, but the real focus is on our lead, Manaka Ichinose, in a more general sense. She’s a wonderfully full character, and even at her lowest it’s a serious treat to spend most of the series’ relatively brief 22 chapters by her side.
Wizard’s Soul setting is genre-typical. Like the King of Games before it, everyone in Wizard’s Soul takes the titular card game extremely seriously. Skill in “Wizard’s Soul” can ensure entrance to a good college, defines one’s social groups, and informs one’s outlook on life. It’s a bit less camp than the most extreme examples of the genre (a good recent example of the far end of the scale being this season’s Build Divide: Code Black), and there are no supernatural elements, but the core elements of the setup remain. The game itself is some hodgepodged mix of, yes, Magic The Gathering and Yu-Gi-Oh!, with a few other elements from other games sewn into the fabric for good measure. The rules are never detailed to us at length (although a dedicated reader might be able to reconstruct most of them from what we do learn), because they’re less important than the general feelings of playing a trading card game. Feelings both positive and, importantly, negative.
Manaka herself sticks out by dint of being a card game manga protagonist who has a complicated, thorny relationship with the game that defines her world. There are several aspects to this part of her character, and it’s worth going over them in detail and one at a time.
For one, she does not play the game much at manga’s start. And it’s implied that on the rare occasion she does sit down to play “Wizard’s Soul”–mostly with her younger siblings or occasional customers at the card shop she works at–she deliberately softballs, not caring terribly much about winning. This in spite of the fact that, as we learn, she’s actually very good.
For two, she is that widely-reviled archetype of TCG player. Her specialty is permission control, and it is hilarious how seriously some characters in the earlier parts of the manga take this revelation, acting as they do that her being the equivalent of a mono blue player is “disgusting” and “twisted.”
And the most important bit. Manaka learned how to play WS from her late mother, also a deadly-serious permission player who spent most of her daughter’s childhood holed up in a hospital with some unspecified but evidently very serious illness. Manaka’s mother is an absolutely merciless opponent, and over the course of a number of flashbacks we learn that Manaka never beat her even once. Her mother spent her waning days on Earth beating her daughter in a card game over and over again, offering thorough, detailed criticism each and every time. She pairs this with a superstition that the worse her luck is in real life, the better her card draws are. We see her essentially playing the game on her deathbed, and it’s genuinely pretty disturbing!
This has, understandably, given Manaka quite the complex about playing WS. The specific feelings she describes; remembering positive experiences with the game only as vague blurs but her constant losses to her mother and the ensuing sharp criticism with haunting clarity, almost scan as abusive. (If that sounds silly, consider that the terminally ill angle aside, this is roughly similar to something that happens in real life with chess prodigies.) I’m not sure she’s meant to be read that way, but the signs match up. As the only real opponent that Manaka never beat, and now never can beat, she hangs over the darker parts of the manga like a ghost.
What does all this add up to? A monstrously skilled protagonist who borderline loathes something she’s very good at. And worse, something that is supposed to be fun. We do get little hints that she somewhat still enjoys WS in spite of herself, but only with a pretty heavy sidecart of guilt until the very end of the series.
So what pushes her into actually playing more “Wizard’s Soul” and kicking off our plot? Well, her father falls for a scam and plunges her entire family into debt. A WS tournament–and the associated prize money–offer a simple, if not necessarily easy, way out. Wizard’s Soul, then, is us rooting for her to overcome these impossible odds and the social stigma that comes with even trying. While her playstyle is a million miles away from that of the flashy card combinations that are the norm for the more bombastic angles of the genre, Manaka is a true card game protagonist with regard to her near-prodigal skill. She remains quite compelling to follow throughout the whole series.
About that tournament; to secure enough “ranking points” to be able to enter it, she challenges and, of course, swiftly defeats the strongest player she knows; her close friend and (unknowingly mutual) crush, a boy named Eita. Wizard’s Soul from here on out takes on the structure of a tournament arc. We get into Manaka’s head as she builds and tweaks her deck and, during her matches, gain similar (though more limited) insight into her opponents’ minds as well.
Manaka reworks her deck several times over the course of the manga. Here, she’s reworked it into a mill deck. As an aside, I couldn’t help myself from thinking about how WS must allow a crazy amount of sideboarding.
All of this leads to a rather complicated knot of human drama where the card game is both part of “the point” in of itself but also a lens through which this is all explored. (Not a new innovation in this genre by any means, but more grounded here than most examples.) Manaka is unable to truly enjoy “Wizard’s Soul” itself because playing it dredges up memories of her late mother’s brutal tutoring lessons. Eita is probably actually the most adjusted of the group, as he gets over the sting of his abrupt loss to Manaka rather quickly, before eventually coming over to her corner as a silent cheerer-on during her run in the tournament. Eita’s “fangirl” Koba attempts to sabotage Manaka’s play at every turn, hating her for stealing his attention and affection and then seemingly spurning it.
Her opponents run the gamut in both character archetype and play style. There’s a “romance decker” named Roman who stubbornly refuses to build anything that’s not a convoluted, flashy combo deck, a snooty metagamer, a big-fish-small-pond incarnate in the form of a country girl who’s hit her skill ceiling, an overweight girl who loves playing huge, direct creatures and smashing her enemies’ faces in (and is subject to more than one fat joke, one of the manga’s few real negatives), and many more besides. A lot of them also underestimate her; dismissing her skill as the product of either fluke luck or metagaming. Something that is both true-to-life, and which generally ends quite badly for them.
Manaka triumphs over all of them eventually, furthering both her own personal growth and with the help of Eita himself, who also slips her a rare card into her deckbuilding box at one point.
That card–“Holy War”, from which the manga derives its subtitle–is a pretty direct riff on MTG’s own “Wrath of God”. Which means that improbably, Wizard’s Soul is the second manga I’ve covered this year to indirectly derive its title from this same specific Magic The Gathering card. TCG nerds; eat your heart out. Manaka in fact becomes decently close with almost all of her opponents. “Wizard’s Soul” is, after all, a game, and it’s through her friendship with these people; people she actually has something in common with, that she can grow as a person.
They eventually help her build a new deck, partly out of some of their own spare cards. It’s symbolic, y’see.
This particular plot development is, in fact, about as close as Manaka and Eita ever get, some fluff in the final few pages aside. But if the romance feels perfunctory, perhaps that’s because equally important to Manaka learning to love Eita is her learning to love play again; something sorely resonant to a person like me, who was raised in a pretty work-first, no-nonsense household. (That’s without accounting for the added layer that I, too, enjoy trading card games.) Honestly I suspect it’s a more broadly relatable theme than one might first assume, given the sheer amount of millennials with ‘productiveness’-related anxiety that I know.
If there’s a takeaway here, it’d be that. Wizard’s Soul will probably never be considered a classic, but it’s certainly a worthwhile manga. As one, it’s a fascinating reminder of how we can find reflections of ourselves even in unlikely places, and a study on the difficulty of slipping out from under anxiety. It’s all quite nicely done; a tournament finish if ever there was one.
Wanna talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers? Consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto 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.
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.
There are numerous ways to start a work of fiction. You have your classics; “once upon a time”, “it was a dark and stormy night” and such that are true arch-clichés. Then, far, far on the other end of the spectrum, you have real head-scratchers. Unique opening lines that make you spit out a mental “huh?” before you even know what kind of thing you’re reading. The Maria Kodama Literary Corpus starts with one of those.
“These leaves are like Jupiter, aren’t they?” Asks the title character. Before you go flipping this particular simile over in your mind, trying to untangle it, know that that’s not really the sort of story Kodama Literary Corpus is. Corpus revolves around both Kodama herself and her male companion, our ostensible main character, Fueda. Together they make up the sole members of the school’s Literary Club, and their conversations comprise the bulk of the series. Fueda is something of a dazed everyman (although it eventually becomes clear that he’s stranger than might first be obvious), awestruck by the evident brilliance (and perhaps more obvious to us than him, the mercuriality) of Kodama. They have a fun dynamic that shines through even their more convoluted interactions. It’s cute, which is a good beating heart for any romantic comedy to have.
Of course descriptors like “romantic comedy” and “school life comedy” only loosely apply to Kodama Literary Corpus. It is perhaps more accurate to say that it uses their structure to examine topics that ordinary entries in those genres would not. In this way, it is somewhat reminiscent of Imitation Crystal’s work in the school life genre, though it’s far less emotionally dire than something like Game Club. (More distantly, it has a cousin in the more downtempo, conversational parts of Bakemonogatari.) Much of those topics consist of the structure of literature and storytelling itself, something that Kodama is keenly interested in, and is what gives the manga its name. She’s fond of blithely quipping “it’s literature.” when laying another lesson in the subject on Fueda. This is the core “storytelling loop” of Corpus, although there are other aspects to the manga as well.
The series’ somewhat flippant attitude towards fairly serious subjects (such as teenage drinking, here) in the non-Kodama/Fueda sections also pushes it further toward the IC camp of subversive pseudo-school life manga which use the format to accomplish non-traditional things.
Corpus even comes with its own dedicated “recommended reading” list, in the form of the books namechecked underneath each after-chapter doodle. This is perhaps the rare school life manga it is possible to be under-read for. (And lest it sound like I’m trying to make myself seem smart; I may well fall in that category myself. I have read just one of the books the manga mentions, and some of them I’ve never even heard of.)
The series sometimes likes to poke at its own format’s tropes as well. For example; at one point Fueda’s sister is introduced, and he takes a thoughtful lean against the fourth wall to ponder whether or not he even had a sister until a few days prior. There are also occasional shorter segments that offer looser, more surreal ideas. These are fun, although not the norm for the manga. It also picks at its romantic comedy side on occasion. One chapter establishes that Fueda can’t see very well and probably should be wearing glasses. It’s his perspective that the manga is filtered through, so the person we see as “Maria Kodama”, the long-haired school beauty, is in part his own wishful thinking, and isn’t how she actually looks in reality. Despite this, Kodama claims at one point that Fueda’s delusions “protect her”, giving away that she cares for him more than she might outwardly admit. To really nail home the point that Fueda is not purely in love with his idea of Kodama rather than the girl herself, we eventually learn that he does know what she actually looks like, and even has a picture of her reading at her desk.
Of what currently exists in English of Kodama Literary Corpus, the eleventh chapter is perhaps both its best and most representative. This chapter features a storyline wherein Fueda is asked to improve his schoolday diary. Kodama suggests he do this by thinking of the many mundane tasks he and his classmates do through a mythological, literary lens. In other words; Literary Corpus takes a chapter to analyze itself, taking a critical scalpel to its own worldbuilding and by extension those aforementioned genres. (You may notice this also means it’s basically doing my job for me, but hey, I’ve never been above an easy mark.) Fueda’s writing is greatly improved by doing this, but more importantly Kodama brings the entire thing back around to her and his relationship. She ends the chapter with another quip of “that’s literature”, and in a very real way, she’s right.
All but explicitly stated here is the idea that stories are how we connect to each other; Kodama understands that more than most, so it’s not unreasonable (or even uncharitable) to read this entire endeavor she sets upon Fueda as simply a way to bring them closer together. After all, these are the final two pages of the chapter.
The after-chapter doodle also (half-jokingly?) claims a kinship with James Joyce’s Ulysses, drawing a line between two wildly different literary traditions in a way that only an oddball underground manga could. Given the presence of both a fixation on the goings-on of daily life, and a tendency to subvert or reanalyze those expectations present in both works, it’s not really an inaccurate comparison, either. (Whether Literary Corpus is anywhere near as good as Ulysses, or indeed, vice versa, is up to you, of course.)
Not that Kodama’s intentions are all good. A few chapters after this, she slyly destroys a burgeoning poet’s interest in the form, simultaneously using Fueda as a mouthpiece to do so and doing so specifically so he doesn’t take an interest in her. It’s hard to say, the work still incomplete, whether this mildly darker undertone will be explored in detail. One could also quite easily argue given what we see that Kodama is–by intention or by side effect–saving the girl from a fairly lonely life. After all, Kodama doesn’t entirely seem to think that her own being a “literature girl” is an admirable thing, as previously established in several chapters. (And either point of view assumes this will even stick. It’s hard to say if Inoue, as the girl’s named, will return as a character in any major capacity.)
Maria Kodama Literary Corpus, all told, is a unique little thing. And really, I have no reason for writing about it here beyond that fact. Strange little underground manga like this are perhaps my favorite thing in the medium, and if I can share them with my readerbase, all the better.
Wanna talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers? Consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto 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.
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.
“Are we cinephiles because we watch masterpieces? No! We’re cinephiles because we watch whatever we damn well please!”
It’s a known phenomenon. Occasionally, a writer will get an idea stuck in their head. A challenge to themselves, a way to prove that they can write compellingly about anything. Yet, even more occasionally, the world itself will present you with this sort of challenge entirely of its own accord. As if to say “hey bozo, you think you’re so smart? Review this.”
This, in the form of a pair of close friends who I’ll here call H. and Z., is how Kine-san no 1-ri de Cinema, (I Love Cinema, I am Lonely or Kine-san’s Solo Cinema as it’s been variously unofficially known in English) entered my life. What prompted this thought that I simply must read and review Kine-san? Well, that’s down to its premise. Kine-san‘s title character, Kine Machiko, is a 30-year old businesswoman, whose main hobby is watching western action films and writing about them on her blog.
I could belabor the point, but there’s no reason to. Yes, I was curious as to how this fictional woman’s habits would reflect my own. Our interests are, in a way, a mirror of each other’s. She is a Japanese woman who loves American live action films. I am an American woman who loves Japanese animated television.
Not unlike my own preference for TV anime, Kine’s interests skew toward pop action films. Early on she names Michael Bay as a favorite director (a man who I mostly associate with defacing the Transformers franchise, myself), a later chapter is about the then-timely process of avoiding spoilers for the 2015 Star Wars film. Etc. This interest is what colors the manga the most. Kine-san is certainly the only manga I have ever read in my life to feature a shadowed gag-cameo from Jar-Jar Binks.
What Kine-san excels at is tapping into the universal etiquette dance that we build around the stories that mean things to us. Chapter 7 has Kine’s coworkers gawk in disbelief when she tells them she’s never seen a Ghibli movie. I briefly sympathized more with the coworkers–after all, my own interest in anime was sparked by seeing Spirited Away at a young age–but then yours truly remembered she’s never seen any of the Star Wars films, and the entire point of the sequence clicked into place.
Young girl DESTROYS possessive fanboyism with HEARTFELT PASSION and LOGIC.
On the other side of things, when Kine does vibe with someone (often her recently-divorced coworker and sometimes-roommate, Kasumi Satou) it’s a moment of joy. What we all ultimately want is just to be understood, and works of art are basic cultural units we trade with each other to expand that understanding. Satou in general is a fun character, and I often found myself relating to her particular brand of projective Letterboxd logorrhea a bit more than Kine’s own largely uncritical fangirlism.
Visually the manga is competent, with a particular knack for wide shots that convey an impressive sense of scale, albeit usually to comedic ends. There are a fair amount of impressive splash panels, often parodying famous movie scenes or posters, so, appropriately, cinephiles will have a lot to latch on to here.
It can even occasionally pull off some more serious composition. These moments are rare, but they prevent Kine-san from falling into a fairly common trap of comedy manga; making it seem like the cast don’t actually like each other at all.
On the less positive side, there’s a weird habit throughout of centering panels on the cast’s collective rear ends. Of course, Kine herself would probably argue that complaining about such a thing is simply nitpicking a genre cliché. (This thing runs in Young Animal, alongside a number of other seinen manga, yes, but also photos of scantily-clad gravure models, so perhaps it’s to be expected.) On its own it’s a minor complaint, but here it is unfortunately indicative of an undertone of sexism that at its worst takes some of the fun out of Kine-san. And it dampens some otherwise strong characterization. Take for instance, Kine’s mother, who is depicted, usually via flashback, as fairly strict about not wanting her daughter to become an otaku “because she’s a girl”. Later, we learn in chapter 19 that she’s a former sukeban, and much of her harsh demeanor stems from wanting her daughter to be a proper lady, and her own complex about her self-perceived lack of femininity. Does this add dimension to an otherwise fairly minor character, or is it that old otaku misogyny creeping in?
Well, let’s say this. As I finished reading all of Kine-san that’s currently available in English, I found myself realizing that despite finding it pretty funny in its best moments, I certainly don’t love it. I don’t like to get into the ten-point rating scale game on this blog (I think it’s kind of superfluous) but 21 chapters in, I was struck by the realization that the way that the title character and I are most similar is in our lackadaisical attitude toward actual quality. Now, at one point Kine disses Citizen Kane by implication (one of the very few live action western films I’ve both seen in my adult life and actually quite like), and I can’t stand for that. But, do I relate to the broader feeling of, say, watching a classic and finding that even if you respect its craft you don’t really, you know, like it? Well, all due apologies to Cowboy Bebop, but, yeah.
So I leave you with the quote sitting at the top of this article as a final thought. I find it hard to pass judgment on Kine-san, given how much of myself I (unfortunately?) see in it.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have an episode of Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid to watch.
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 owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
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.
What does it mean to be famous?
Like, what does it really mean?
To some extent, that is the driving question behind Oshi no Ko. Billed as an exploration of the dark side of the entertainment industry, it chronicles the brief life and consequent death of one Ai Hoshino, an idol, the center position of a decently-popular group called B-Komachi!
Technically, that she dies is a spoiler. But is it so surprising? The entertainment industry is littered with corpses, both figurative and literal. Burned-out rockstars, child actor has-beens, disbanded indie idol groups, rappers who never made it, abandoned Youtube channels and shuttered TV studios, and on and on. Ai Hoshino is just one of those skeletons. Oshi no Ko centers the curious circumstances around her rise and fall, and how it inspires those who she leaves behind. The series is built around a rather harsh truth; the white hot light of fame burns bright and short. Some people get a second act, most do not.
The entertainment industry is a pretty fucked up one. Oshi no Ko‘s initial thesis is that to participate in it, one must be an adept liar. A seller of fantasies , yes, but what’s not explicitly spelled out but is equally important is that one has to lie to themselves, too. The industry is an ouroboros that devours dreams, and it is only a very rare and lucky few who escape it both alive and with those dreams intact. It is against this rather dire backdrop that Oshi no Ko eventually settles, but how it begins is actually quite far from all this; from the point of view of two idol fans, a chronically ill girl named Serina and the doctor who took care of her.
Ai Hoshino, face of the idol group B-Komachi, is pregnant with twins. Goro, the doctor, who lives in a small town in the Japanese countryside, is in charge of her care, as she’s chosen to keep the children despite the difficulties she’ll inevitably face. He vows to help her as best he can, because one of his patients–the aforementioned chronically ill girl–was a dedicated fan of the idol. Circumstances twist, and he is run down by a stalker and murdered, mere minutes before Ai gives birth. He and his former patient are thus reborn as Ai’s twins; Goro as Aquamarine, a boy, and Serina as Ruby, a girl.
It’s a very strange conceit to use as a launchpad for this sort of thing. It raises a lot of questions and only half-handwaves the twins’ borderline-supernatural talents as entertainers. Things only get more complicated when the very same stalker eventually kills Ai, on her 20th birthday. The young reincarnates’ lives are rocked by the tragedy, and they develop into very different people as a result. Aqua seeks to find his biological father–and possibly kill him, given that he has reason to believe Ai’s death was indirectly his fault–while Ruby seeks to become an idol just like her mother. Yin and Yang, blue and red.
This whole premise is only intermittently relevant. Oshi no Ko really shines when it’s exploring the many, many pitfalls of showbiz. Mangaka Aka Akasaka has said that he prefers to character-write by starting with a broad template and “filling” the characters in over time, but here the characters are so complex that it’s hard to assign any template to them at all. Witness, for example, Akane, a prodigal theatre actress with a fragile personality, a strong perfectionist streak, and an intense affinity for deep method acting. That’s a lot to even pay lip service to with a character, that she–and indeed, basically every major character–can balance all this or something like it in a way that feels natural is pretty amazing.
Yes these really are pictures of the same character. In Akane’s defense, she’s an actress, after all.
But that’s a strength, and a strength is meaningless if it’s not in service of something. Oshi no Ko, thankfully, knows what it’s doing. Far more than simply a condemnation of the entertainment industry (with a focus, though not an exclusive one, on acting and idol work), it is an examination of it. As keen as the series is to portray the truly loathsome–such as a recurring producer character–for what they are, it goes through even greater pains to examine the inner lives of each and every one of its entertainers. That is what transmutes the strong character writing from simply a strength into what is almost inarguably the manga’s core. Through its writing, Oshi no Ko is able to explain why these characters want to be famous, and how that desire is exploited by the industry around them. It’s at times a rough and upsetting read.
And I do worry that I’m making this manga sound like a drag through and through. The truth of the matter is that for as much complex character exploration and heavy subject matter it gets into, one trait that Oshi no Ko does share with Akasaka’s more well known manga–Kaguya-sama: Love is War!–is that it knows when to cut the more serious plot developments with some humor. Oshi no Ko is incredibly funny when it wants to be.
Just go with it, you know?
And also to this point, in the rare event that someone leaves the entertainment industry alive on-screen in Oshi no Ko, it’s treated as a sad thing but not a bad one. The blow-you-down superstar debut of Ruby’s idol group is contrasted with a brief vignette where we see a former idol quit the business for good. The juxtaposition gives the latter a stunning sense of finality.
But while Mana’s story ends here, it really seems like it’s only the beginning for Ruby and Aqua. Given Love is War!‘s length, it seems a fair assumption to make that any ending to this manga is a long way off.
And look, all of this about the plot and themes and I’ve barely mentioned the art! Akasaka and Mengo Yokoyari–best known as the artist behind Scum’s Wish–make an incredible pair, and the emotional heavy lifting is carried as much by Yokoyari’s beautifully expressive art and the wonderful, clever panel composition as it is the writing. It’d be very hard to capture Oshi no Ko‘s look in an anime, though I’d be fascinated to see a properly-equipped team try anyway.
As for that far-off ending? Who knows, one of the exciting things about manga that are still being published is that they are, in a way, pure potential. Perhaps the next time you read about Oshi no Ko on this blog, it will be about an upcoming anime adaption. Or perhaps a truly shocking volume. Who can say?
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 owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
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.
Destroy all creatures. They can’t be regenerated. –Rules text of “Wrath of God“, and namesake of the manga.
What we have here today is, without beating around the bush, a simple boy-meets-girl romance. There are hundreds of manga like this, probably thousands, so it’s difficult for one to stand out without some kind of twist. Something that grabs the audience’s attention. That twist here is simple, but surprisingly important to the general flow of the story. As its lengthy title hints at, Destroy All of Humanity, It Can’t Be Regenerated is deeply entwined with, and is basically about, seminal trading card game Magic: The Gathering. It is, in fact, licensed, which is why the manga can get away with showing you all of its period-accurate power combos faithfully reproduced from the actual card art without having to censor them. It is frankly sensationally geeky, and it’s less a flaw and more just a fact that if you don’t have some level of MtG knowledge, the manga will be a touch hard to follow.
And yes, period-accurate. Because Destroy‘s other big deviation from the norm is that it is something of a period piece, though it’s closer to present day than the term normally implies.
The year is 1998. The global mood shifts from optimism to wariness about the impending year 2000. In Japan, Obuchi Keizō becomes Prime Minister and the Nozomi Mars probe launches. In the world of anime; Cardcaptor Sakura, Cowboy Bebop, Serial Experiments Lain and, perhaps most pertinently, Yu-Gi-Oh! all premiere. In other words; it’s not the worst time to be a nerd living in suburban Japan. Perhaps less specifically associated with Japan is the growing global popularity of Magic: The Gathering. At this point in time, Magic–and the entire medium of TCGs–was just five years old, younger than contemporary competitor Hearthstone is now in 2021. The game is about to enter one of the most infamous phases of its first decade. And it is in this environment that we meet our protagonists, and, indeed, they meet each other.
Left: Hajime. Right: Emi.
Hajime and Emi are ordinary middle schoolers*. They compete for the top spot in their grade but don’t otherwise really know each other, until one day Hajime discovers that Emi–shock of shocks–plays Magic: The Gathering, just like he does. What initially seems like it might be the setup for a very stupid “what? Girls have hobbies?!” kind of comedy eventually proves itself to be a surprisingly thorough look at both young love and the transience of youth in general. That’s a lot to put on a manga about a card game, but it’s not exactly unique in this regard, as we’ll get to.
Destroy All of Humanity‘s real ace in the hole here is an ability to transmute pop-culture ephemera into actual, meaningful pathos. Obviously, the connection to Magic: The Gathering is what runs deepest. There is an ongoing thread wherein the release of various sets–especially those in the Urza block–is directly and deliberately correlated with the basic inevitability of time moving forward. “Growing up” is a big theme here. Another occasional reference point, Revolutionary Girl Utena, is tied explicitly to the arc of a specific character, Yakumo.
It’s good to know the shadow girls are still getting work.
Elsewhere, everything from the Boogiepop series that spawned the Light Novel format to Final Fantasy VII, to Eurodance hit “What Is Love?” come up. Sometimes, as with the many anime referenced, these appear to just be namechecks, but they tie into the wider narrative often enough that the interpolations feel meaningful rather than simply clever.
So why this, why all of these allusions? Well, they’re merely the methodology. Destroy All of Humanity runs on the same internal logic as a sports movie. Personal growth is tied, directly or not, to persistence, determination, and skill at a game of choice. In that way it’s very classic, maybe even old-fashioned. What prevents it from feeling maudlin or corny is a shock of wistful melancholia that shoots through much of the series. There is a palpable sense that with the end of the 20th century comes a kind of end of innocence. Everyone, Hajime most of all, is keenly aware that teenage years don’t last forever.
Running alongside the many references to pop culture media is a lone nod to one of the phenomena of the day. A fixation on the idea that the year 2000 would bring about the end of the world–in recent memory this has largely been supplanted by the later 2012 debacle, but it was definitely a presence at the time. Here, it serves as the simplest of the manga’s many metaphors for the waning of youth. But in that would-be apocalypse, it sees a kind of romance, and it is for that reason that it’s so easy to root for Hajime and Emi. Even if the world were to burn, they’d have each other.
Tip for all the straight boys in the audience: if she asks you to “be with her when the world ends”, that means she dreams of kissing you under the moonlight.
Visually, Destroy All of Humanity‘s default mode is a sort of nostalgic charm. The character designs aren’t throwbacks exactly but they don’t quite feel contemporary either, aiming for a sort of timeless middleground that works more often than it doesn’t. The backgrounds similarly hit an ageless “suburban Japan nostalgia” feel that is so ingrained in the medium it’s practically invisible if you don’t take the time to notice it.
The main thing that departs from all this is the actual Magic duels themselves. There’s a certain type of person who will want to pick this manga up just for the wonderfully nerdy sight of things like a mill combo (specifically, the “Turbo Genius” deck, and yes, they do use that very name in-fiction here) getting the full Yu-Gi-Oh! treatment.
Destroy All of Humanity is also good at capturing how control players see themselves.
And about that whole “rival in love” thing. The main pairing remains pretty uncontested throughout, but Destroy does manage to shake things up a few times, and the duels also being the emotional centerpieces of the story is a big part of how. The aforementioned Turbo Genius duel is actually surprisingly intense. (Making a Blue artifact deck the one the “bad guy” of the match uses may be a little obvious, admittedly.) It’s not the only one of its ilk in Destroy All of Humanity, either, mangaka YOKO really seems to have a knack for this kind of thing.
In general, Destroy All of Humanity has few notable flaws. It is noticeable how often the skeevier side of 90s otakudom is simply brushed off. One minor character’s bouts of misogyny are even played as an obvious joke–no one takes him seriously–which frankly just kind of seems like wishful thinking. But this is a minor complaint and I find it hard to hold against the series.
It is also worth noting that Destroy All of Humanity isn’t finished. The series releases fairly slowly, though scanlators The Fallen Angels are diligent about translating it when new chapters do release. So there is of course, time for all of this to go south, but it seems unlikely that it will. Things aren’t this well-written by mistake.
The most recent chapter ends with the delightfully sitcom-y revelation that–oh my!–our lovebirds are in the same class after years of being assigned different classrooms within their grade.
It’s the kind of slightly-cheesy twist that suits this sort of thing well. Where is it going to take it? Who knows. But when Destroy All of Humanity finally ends, I think I do know where Hajime and Emi will be; right beside each other.
*I think. They’re called “middle-schoolers” in the scanlation but act more like high schoolers and I can’t tell if that’s artistic license or due to that thing where Japanese and American high school years don’t line up exactly right. I suppose it ultimately doesn’t matter.
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