Manga manga manga

[petronia]

(Ced tells me I should make more RL posts while he's gone so this will resemble a proper blog useful for keeping tabs on person with. Unfortunately this post is not one of them. XD)

I'd gotten tired of having odd volumes of everything (when I go to the bookstore I typically buy the most recent tankoubon out I haven't read, because I can't remember if I own it or if I read it in scanlation or if I have the Japanese but not the French/English or what), so on Monday I went with a list and my credit card. XD Now I have:

• Bleach up to vol.8. Eight is all that's out in French, meaning that uh, if anyone happens to have scans of chapters 71 and up lying around somewhere. *coughs*
• Nana up to vol.10. I'm going to give up buying it in Japanese, I think, because it's so hard to read. ^^; Like, in terms of sheer difficulty of comprehension my top three are Trigun, Nana and Peace Maker Kurogane, in that order, all of which are quite a bit harder to read than Mirage of Blaze or indeed Murakami Haruki. Maybe it's just me? I mean, I'm a lot better at kanji than I am at slang or dialect or grammar.
• XXXHolic up to vol.3. Couldn't help buying vol.2 in French, was seduced by the purple-edged paper.
• Tsubasa 1 to go with the XXXHolic 2. Must catch my sister in the evening so I can pimp it to her. :0

That plus the Amazon shipment makes for 17 volumes of manga or thereabouts.

I'm really liking Bleach but then I've always liked Bleach - like Hikaru no Go I took to it at first sight, for the art. Now that I own the sequential volumes I'm going to re-read it from the beginning, as I think it lost overall emotional impact from the way I was reading a volume every few months... I have a sort of perverse urge to declare the series a ship-free zone insofar as I'm concerned, much as Kenshin was, but there's no sense in purposefully limiting one's opportunities, is there. XD It has something to do with the predominating friendship theme. Okay, all WJ series have "friendship" as a theme, but often it's a bit... abstracted? Like unrequited love when the person in question's moved to another city, an emotion still capable of breaking your heart but divorced from the daily reality of, I don't know, hanging out between classes or attending concerts together or bumming around playing video games. 'Nakama' in WJ is like as not 'a person you can trust to watch your back in a fight and vice-versa', but that's only one definition of a true friend, even taken figuratively. I think? I think. If you've gone through some hard or intense times with a given person at your side, you're going to have a special bond. But there's nothing shallow about the hanging-out-for-the-sake-of-hanging-out kind of friendship. It takes longer, is all. A human being is debatably comprised of his or her memories; anyone who takes part in my memories is a part of who I am, and I am a part of who they are. Nothing spectacular needs to occur. It builds up with the simple repetition of simple presence, you and the other bearing witness to your respective passages through time. The bearing witness part is important to humans, somehow: when we say "Remember when...?" we need to hear someone answer, "Yes, I do."

This is what GSeed tells us about Kira and Athrun, as opposed to showing. Bleach shows it, and it does make a difference.

I think all this ties in with my obsession with "texture" in fiction. ^^;

Comments

[halcyonjazz.livejournal.com]

http://odbnoda.com/buncombe/pimp/%5bmanga%5dbleach

please don't pass around the link though >_> but here you go ^_^ (I have to warn you though, the scans between 7~12 are a biiit wonky with the names, but it's readable)

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Eee, thank you! *_*

[dipping_sauce]

Did you get that Nana volume 7.8 thing?

I saw the French ed. of XXXholic last week. So pretty. WANT.

And this reminds me that I need to go to R-B this weekend to see if they can special-order the second volume of Bleach for me, because it seems NO STORE IN THE CITY has a copy of it.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Renaud-Bray had one. I mean, I didn't buy it, because I already owned 2, although I grabbed 1, 3 and 4. ^^; I'm pretty sure they keep extra copies of these things in the back, too.

[dipping_sauce]

Which Renaud-Bray? The one in Cote-des-Neiges?

[petronia.livejournal.com]

The one on Saint Catherine near Guy-Concordia.

[dipping_sauce]

!

Oooh, excellent! Thanks. Going tonight, then.

[worldserpent.livejournal.com]

Wow, some manga is harder to read than actual literature? My level is low so I find all manga hard, but I'm surprised to hear that Trigun is hard.

I do love the friendship themes in Bleach; it does tend to be "shown" really well, much more strongly than in even other Jump manga, especially since it's "normal" friendship as opposed to really operatic stuff at the beginning: I mean, there's almost something shoujo-ish about it. XD

[petronia.livejournal.com]

It's the way they talk in Trigun, all transcribed drawls and mumbles. Part of the Old West feel of the thing, but I do about as well with it as an ESL student would with "ah ben thinkin', marm, it musta come a cropper an' no mistake." ^^; Never mind Wolfwood, he's nigh-on unintelligible to me.

There's a whole bunch of characters in Bleach that are nigh-on superfluous in strict plot terms, just buddies loosely within Ichigo's social circle, but they're quirky and likeable and... shown to have an inner life and independent existence, so to speak? You're right, it is quasi-shoujo in the sense that one could have made a perfectly good schoolyard shoujo series from Ichigo's life if the supernatural hadn't come along and shot it all to hell. XD (Although perhaps Ichigo would not have been the main character of the Bleach shoujo manga that never was. Intuition says Quincy Archer would've made a better male lead, perhaps with Orihime as heroine. XD;;;)

[worldserpent.livejournal.com]

Ahhh, yes, transcriptive dialogue drives me nuts. -_- And the slang I have no idea what to do with, and all the contractions.... Maybe I would also read novels better than manga.

I think it was because Kubo Tite at first thought he would be doing a school scene series, but then eventually he started to think of Plot and then moved everything to the shinigami world. It's sort of like what happened in Shaman King, except I think so far Kubo Tite is doing it better.... But yeah, it did have this real quirky charm to it. (I don't know, does Ishida really strike you as being a shoujo hero? But it would be as hilarious as heck to see him and Orihime as the leads. Heh, wait till you see the parts where Ishida and Orihime are wandering around Soul Society together. XD

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Ishida as shoujo hero: not... a traditional one, by any means. XD In fact I'm probably more thinking of him as the awkward and helpless hero of a Love Hina sort of shounen manga, in the sense that schoolyard shoujo revolves around a heroine by definition, and Orihime's neither self-conscious nor emotionally muddled enough to make for a respectable amount of drama. (Ichigo and Rukia would flatly refuse to play said respective roles, if the opportunity presented itself. XD)

This is a good game, actually. Now I'm thinking we should identify the member of a given shoujo manga cast, who if aliens or monsters attacked their school would be the one who ends up in the giant robot or wielding a spirit sword. XD

[worldserpent.livejournal.com]

Yes... I think Ichigo would actually make a better shoujo manga hero. But yes, Ishida would make a great sort of hapless protagonist, although he has his kewl side to balance that out. (Of course Rukia would make a horrible shoujo heroine. She can fake it for a few minutes, but it hurts your teeth. )

I'd be no good at that game; the reverse is easier somehow (OMG it's just like the last thread I had: the conclusion we reached was that shounen has the seeds of shoujo material but not vice versa XD) . All of the shoujo I read tends to be horror or the crossover variety. Hmm... Karekano? For some reason I think that both the hero and the heroine there would easily hop into mecha.

[starlighter.livejournal.com]

[worldserpent.livejournal.com]

XD But sewing is a very useful skill for someone who messes up his clothes that often to have! And he has his angst too. Karekano is gakuenmono shoujo. Does anyone think it's something else? Heh heh, shoujo gets us all in the end, I suspect.

Oh yeah, and Yukino's friends would make an awesome sentai brigade.

[canis-m.livejournal.com]

Everyone seems to like Bleach, in manner of everyone liking FMA. Would I like it too? Is it worth buying? I think I do like the art. Shounen tends not to float my goat but there are exceptions, and this talk of yours about quasi-shoujo is sort of encouraging.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

There are Shinsengumi in it No, I lie. There are no Shinsengumi in it. However there are shinigami, who - instead of being organized along the lines of a modern Japanese office like in Yami no Matsuei - are organized along the lines of uhh well the Shinsengumi. Which is why I keep associating them in my head. x_x

It's shounen, there's lots of bloody battling. But there's a sort of quirky human warmth to it; the characters seem more three dimensional than usual, have shared histories and don't always react by the book. Like Charmian and I were saying above, it's almost as if the cast of a series like Karekano developed spiritual fightin' powers by accident.

[xerosphere.livejournal.com]

AH I'm really happy to read thoughts from someone else who likes the friendship theme in Bleach!