Tag Archives: manga

The Eucatastrophy of One Piece

Posted by natechen on

I try to keep my rambling about my favorite manga to a minimum around here. It could very easily be my exclusive focus if I let it and there are so many other topics I want to write about so a certain restraint is called for. Three essays on the topic in one outing is certainly more than I had planned on and two of them on a single series is certainly excessive. Yet there is something in One Piece that I have been contemplating for a while that bears examination.

Eucatastrophe is a literary term coined by JRR Tolkien to describe the moment in a story where things go suddenly and inexplicably right for the protagonist. In short, it is the opposite of a catastrophe. It was Tolkien’s stance that eucatastrophe was the highest form of fairy story just a tragedy was the highest form of drama. They exist to remind the audience of the power of providence. They serve to reward moral behavior. And, let’s face it, when done well they serve to put a smile on our face that will not soon go away. The problem comes about when they are not done well.

The eucatastrophe is a literary device that is often employed by Eiichiro Oda, the author of One Piece. However it is also one of his most controversial tropes. That’s not surprising to anyone familiar with the Internet’s fascination with both trope talk and pessimism but it does bear examination. However conducting that examination is going to require an examination of several events scattered across several thousand pages of illustrated story. I don’t have time to recap all of it so if you’re not already familiar with One Piece you may feel a little lost. My apologies but it can’t be helped in this case. And, of course:

SPOILER WARNING

Oda has a terrible habit of not killing his characters. By this i don’t mean that he doesn’t put his characters in situations that would kill them. The problem is more that he puts them in situations that should kill them, then they just don’t die for no clear reason.

The most obvious example of this is the character Pell, who takes an explosive device that will supposedly level most of a city, and flies it away so no one is harmed. He is still holding it when it detonates. Yet Pell survives and returns home about a week later with nothing more than a bandage wrapped around his head.

A similar case is the butler Merry, who is stabbed through the chest five times, left on the ground overnight, and is up and walking again just days later. The butlers of One Piece are made of impressive stuff, it would seem.

It has been argued that all people in Oda’s world are of superhuman toughness as practically everyone in his story seems stronger, tougher and cooler than a normal person. However that’s not particularly satisfying either. We do see people die in One Piece. The obvious example is Nami’s adoptive mother Belle-Mere, who is executed by the pirate Arlong, but there are plenty of others. Typically they are the friends and family if main characters. This provides us insight into the nature of our cast and an emotional moment to connect them to. Oda is quite good art creating these moments.

However, after writing his story for nearly thirty years, Oda’s patterns are quite clear to anyone who goes looking for them. Deaths in One Piece exist to create emotional moments. The often cruel and arbitrary nature of death in the real world is absent from the world Oda creates. Instead deaths are clearly and deliberately calculated to evoke the strong emotional response Oda desires from his audience. In theory there is nothing wrong with that. I’ve often stated that I believe one of the goals of an author is to create an emotional response in their readership and, over time, I’ve refined that notion to include a corollary, that the best emotion to create in the audience is one in harmony with the characters in the story.

By creating moments where his characters and the audience are both moved to mourn a death Oda pursues this goal. The problem is when he reveals a death he implied took place did not actually take place it fractures this emotional resonance. The characters in the story feel relief, the weight of grief suddenly vanishing from them. The audience realizes their emotions were being manipulated. This shatters the harmony between audience and character and frequently undoes the investment the audience had in the previous emotional moment. In some cases that investment turns into actual hostility towards the creator or the story.

This brings me to the curious case of Jaguar D. Saul and many of the events surrounding him. Saul was a vital character in the history of Nico Robin, one of the main cast of One Piece. We last saw Saul frozen solid on a burning island. Before he was frozen he gave Robin a goal: to live out her life and find friends who would care for her in the place of the family she lost.

Saul was Robin’s last tie to her childhood hopes and dreams. When the audience learned of his death it contextualized one of One Piece’s most complex main characters, who started as a cold and distant antagonist and had slowly been pulled into the fold to become a beloved member of the crew. The Water Seven Saga, where we learned about Robin’s childhood and her brief but impactful relationship with Saul, is widely considered one of the best stories in One Piece. So when it was revealed that Saul was still alive the audience was disappointed, to say the least. To make matters worse, the reveal that Saul was still alive came coupled with not one but two other characters who appeared to die but, in point of fact, did not. These three case studies in “fake out” deaths are illuminating. You see, the audience had no real issue with two of them but a third has really irritated a lot of people. Most interesting is the fact that the fake death of Saul, which had the biggest emotional impact of these three false deaths, is the one the audience has accepted the most readily.

While Saul’s case is the one which prompted this essay I’m going to briefly discuss all three fake out deaths to make my point. But before that, there is one element present in all three cases that most people have cited but I’m going to dismiss by examining Saul’s case on its own. That is the issue of “justifying” the character’s survival.

Saul was presumed dead because he was “frozen solid” by a character with the power to create ice. This is not the first time we’ve seen this power in use nor is it the first time we’ve seen people survive being frozen solid in this way. In fact, Robin herself survives one such attack. When added to the fact that Saul was on the shores of a burning island it’s not unreasonable for him to thaw out in the heat then take refuge in the ocean and thus survive both freezing and burning. At least, not by the logic of One Piece. Given that Saul was also a wanted man, the fact that he never revealed his survival to the outside world but rather retreated to an isolated island where he could lay low also makes sense.

None of this is discussed when people analyze the impact of Saul’s apparent death and survival. That isn’t because the logic of his survival is flawed but rather because the logic is irrelevant. What people are really trying to grapple with is, as I have already stated, their emotional investment in the story and whether it was misplaced. I believe this is also true in the case of Bartholomew Kuma and Dr. Vegapunk, the other two characters who “died” and survived alongside Saul.

Kuma, like Robin, was introduced as an antagonist. Unlike Robin, Kuma was much harder to pin down as friend or foe (and I’m not saying Robin was easy to work out.) Over time we came to understand that Kuma, who was uniquely strong and robust, even in the One Pieceworld, was being used as part of an experimental program to create cyborgs. The project was headed by Dr. Vegapunk. Kuma submitted to the experiments in exchange for medical treatment for his daughter, Bonney, which Vegapunk also oversaw.

However, Kuma was also a wanted man and Vegapunk worked for the government. This created a certain conflict of interests.

In order to overcome that conflict the government demanded that Kuma surrender his free will and allow his consciousness to be completely eradicated, replaced with machine programming. Kuma agreed to this happily out of his love for Bonney. The scene where Kuma and Vegapunk reflect on Kuma’s life before throwing the switch that transforms him into an unfeeling machine is one of the most tragic scenes in One Piece, a series known for making it’s audience weepy. Less than a year later the audience learned that Vegapunk would probably be able to undo the modifications and restore Kuma’s thinking mind.

Of course he was willing to do this because Vegapunk had made discoveries that put him at odds with the World Government and they had ordered his execution. Eventually that execution was carried out and Vegapunk was dead. Except the most brilliant man in the world had made provisions for that, creating a clone and backing up his memories using technology the audience knew he already had.

On a spectrum of audience reactions, Vegapunk surviving his execution is the most disliked by far. Yes, it was in keeping with his character as a forward planner and an inventor but it wasn’t particularly satisfying. While Vegapunk has only been making appearances “on screen” in the story for two years or so he had quickly won the audience over. He was a sympathetic figure to Kuma and his daughter Bonney and he had a certain kind of integrity to him. His death caused a lot of consternation among the cast and the readership. The offhanded reveal that he had a cloned body ready to go just didn’t sit right, even though all the pieces were in place for it. In fact, most people saw those pieces in place and fumed about the inevitable reversing of Vegapunk’s death long before it was made official.

This is a clear case of a moment intended to create harmony between audience and character emotions instead creating dissonance. Oda has been writing One Piece for nearly thirty years and the audience knows his tricks. When we see them coming it prevents our investing in his story even when the emotional moments are fairly good in and of themselves.

On the other hand, the revivals of Kuma and especially Saul were taken very gracefully by the fanbase. The euchatastrophe that Oda offers lands much better in these two cases and I think it’s vital for anyone who wishes to include such an element to at least try to understand why.

The first factor, in my humble opinion, is time. Robin lived for twenty two years from the moment she sailed away from Saul and the burning island of Ohara to the moment she reunited with him on Elbaf. It was a long and trying time for her, full of danger and sorrow. It also gave her the opportunity to meet her closest friends and allies and revive her passion for her childhood dreams. For the audience who read One Piece, the publication history from Ohara to Elbaf spans a period of nineteen years. Nineteen years.

I read One Piece in real time over that entire nineteen year span. I occasionally wondered if, given everything we knew about how Saul supposedly died, we would ever see him again. I watched Robin and the Straw Hats struggle and suffer through all the many cares of Oda’s world. When I heard of Saul’s survival I was a bit surprised, but not terribly. Then I watched as Robin changed her hairstyle to reflect how she looked as a child and got ready to meet Saul again. And eventually, when they met again, for the first time in decades, I was struck by a sudden and surprising sense of relief, as if something I didn’t even know I had been waiting for had inexplicably come to pass.

The moment had been building so gradually I didn’t even realize I had wanted it until it was already past.

The second factor is connection. Saul was a character with a big impact in spite of very little narrative presence. However Bartholomew Kuma has been a mover and a shaker in One Piece for a very long time, appearing in the story for the first time almost twenty three years ago in mid-2002, and having numerous contacts with the Straw Hats over the course of the story. His daughter Bonney appeared six years later, although we wouldn’t know they were related for another decade. We’ve seen Kuma with free will and without it and he has been an antagonist and surprising ally to the Straw Hats over the years.

While Kuma’s actions were often mysterious and his transformation into a machine with no human will was only fully explained in 2023, more than two decades after his introduction, we already knew all we needed to about him through the way other characters acted towards him. The villains of the tale were never fully comfortable with Kuma, even after replacing his mind with a machine, and the love and devotion of Kuma’s friends and daughter spoke volumes about him. That these factors would eventually merge to overcome mere mechanical forces and restore his humanity just makes sense. We’ve seen the tragedy Kuma’s family and friends suffered when they though he was lost. We also get several small moments where Bonney sits quietly with her father, trusting that the man she loves is still in there somewhere, no matter how machine like he behaves at the moment. These moments of connection to Kuma made it much easier to draw him back into the story. They build the emotional harmony between the characters and the audience and make it clear that what we felt when we saw Kuma “die” is not being undone. Rather, that emotional payoff is now the investment in another, even greater moment of resolution.

The third factor is providence. Eucatastrophe is inherently providential, a reaffirmation of what is good and worthwhile in the human condition as stronger than mere fate or circumstance. That Saul fought an ice man on a burning island and was frozen solid in the one place where circumstance would allow him to survive was providential. That the lonely child Kuma would meet and form a family willing to follow him into the worst places on earth and love him even when all his warmth and kindness were gone is nothing short of providential. That added element, the feeling that you can’t quite earn these moments of grace, is ultimately what makes them work. Sometimes the world is just arbitrary and capricious enough that you lose what you love most. Sometimes its providential enough that you get it all back.

Ultimately, I think it’s these three factors that make the difference between “fake” deaths like Saul and Kuma and “fake out” deaths like Vegapunk’s. Vegapunk had no providence in his revival, just his own scientific prowess, he had little connection to other characters outside his role as the most brilliant man in the world (except Kizaru, a subject way outside of the scope for today’s essay) and he hadn’t been around in the story long enough for the sudden reversals in his fate to feel organic.

However there is one other thing to keep in mind if you set out to write a eucatastrophy. The trope is, in and of itself, an idea that revolves around the concept that the universe is created and maintained by a loving and graceful God that desires to know and be known. It assumes that the universe we live in wants us to feel and reciprocate God’s love. Thus, if you seek to write eucatastrophy you are writing a story that mimics that part of the universe in your story – and that notion about the universe has never been widely accepted. It’s very clear, from his persistence in writing One Piece in the way he does, that Oda has simply made his peace with the way the audience reacts to his eucatastrophies. He wants to write them, so he has poured more time and skill into making them the best they can be. If you or I wish to write euchatastrophy, I suggest we make the same peace with whatever response we may get.

They Come in Pairs

Posted by natechen on

One of the seminal manga of the early 21st century was Himoru Arakawa’s Fullmetal Alchemist. It’s a gripping story full of interesting characters living in a deep and fantastical world with a clear and understandable “magic” system. The story began simply and spiraled out into seemingly ever more complex layers. At the end, however, the place we began turned out to be the place we arrived at: The maxim that mankind cannot gain anything without giving something of equal value in return. The fundamental law of alchemy proved to be the fundamental law of the story.

Arakawa has a flair for characters and simple but striking visuals in action scenes, skills she has levered in her artwork for other series. However she hasn’t produced her own fantasy story in over a decade. Silver Spoon, her love letter to the farmers of her home island of Hokkaido, is a great story but also a very mundane one. When I heard she had launched Yomi no Tsugai (localized as Daemons from the Shadow Realm, a literal but somewhat cringey translation), a new fantasy work, I was immediately interested.

First, and perhaps most interesting, Yomi no Tsugai is set in contemporary Japan. While Arakawa’s previous original creation was set in the modern era adding a layer of the supernatural on top of that added a level of depth and, just as importantly, gave her the opportunity to add a rich symbolic language to her story like she did in Fullmetal Alchemist. I cracked open the first chapter with great anticipation.

I was not disappointed.

That said, I was very, very surprised by the nature of the story Arakawa presented. Fullmetal Alchemist featured what is known as a “hard” magic system, where there is a system of supernatural occurrences that work on a series of concrete, almost scientific rules. The story’s titular alchemy has several solid, predictable maxims. Mass must be conserved. Energy needs to come from somewhere. The dead cannot come back to life. Our protagonist, Edward Elric, is a man of knowledge and reason, as befits a master of what is essentially a branch of science in his own world. Edward and his brother Alphonse are as close and brothers can be. The bonds between Edward and his family are a central driving force in his life and he relies on them from beginning to end.

Yomi no Tsugai has what is known as a “soft” magic system. There are few or no hard and fast rules in a soft magic system, they represent the bizarre and inexplicable forces in life that mankind have always struggled to understand and live with. In this case, these forces are called tsugai, spirits of the netherworld that bind themselves to certain people. Tsugai have abilities based on what they are and usually follow some kind of theme. They’re unpredictable and often hard for people to understand. There’s only one concrete rule about tsugai; but more on that in a moment.

Our story opens on the birth of our protagonist. This is not a normal place to start, in fact it would be downright inadvisable except that Yuru and Asa are children of prophecy – twins born on a day where light and dark are equal, one at night and one during the day. This condemns them to a cruel fate. They have the potential to access phenomenal abilities for the low, low cost of dying once and, whether they want to pay that cost or not, others are happy to force it upon them.

The twins are cruelly separated and then cruelly brought together again. Circumstances conspire to destroy all trust between them and Yuru, our protagonist, is forced to leave his home and doubt almost every meaningful connection he has formed in his entire life. Even the village he was brought up in was a lie. Yuru has been raised in a society still living in the middle ages and when he leaves he finds himself in modern day Japan, with all the culture shocks that come with that. It turns out that Yuru is totally ignorant of the world he lives in. The only thing he has to rely on are Sayuu-sama, the guardian deities of his home village. Sayuu-sama are tsugai, the spirits that live in two stone statues that defended the gates of the village for four hundred years. This brings us to the one hard and fast rule of tsugai.

They come in pairs.

The statue on the Left and the statue on the Right are as opposite as they can be. The Left is a stoic woman, not given to expressing herself much, with a hard attitude and a tendency to go out and solve problems proactively. The Right is a boisterous, outgoing man. He defends what he cares about, expresses his fondness for others readily and encourages Yuru to think for himself. Only their stone bodies and dedication to their master Yuru join them together.

What’s fascinating is that, just like equivalent exchange in Fullmetal Alchemist, this paired yet opposite nature of tsugai is reflected in every aspect of the story. Yuru and Asa are fraternal twins, a boy and a girl. Through the story we quickly learn that they pair day and night, light and dark, binding and release, stoicism and emotivism. They are caught between two warring factions, one of which pursues modernity, the other which tries to restore the past. Asa chooses to align herself with a faction, Yuru announces his intention to stand alone.

It’s as if every aspect of the story is slowly revealing itself as another tsugai who’s character, powers and intentions we have to wrap our minds around in order to understand the narrative. It’s brilliant but also exactly what I should have expected from Arakawa. She’s very deliberate with her storytelling. Perhaps far more so than I ever anticipated. It was only when I got current with Yomi no Tsugai and went back to reread Fullmetal Alchemist while I waited for more of Yuru’s story that I made the final discovery. I’ve hinted at it already. That is, of course, that Yomi no Tsugai and Fullmetal Alchemist are also a pair.

They pair hard and soft magic. A fantasy world and a world like the present. A protagonist of science and reason with intact relationships and a protagonist of ignorance and naivety who’s trust has been broken. The thematic core of Yomi no Tsugai looks like it has been implemented in such a way as to duplicate that theme even when it’s just sitting on a shelf next to Arakawa’s previous work! That’s a very meta inference to make, I know. And yet creating a good story requires such care and intentionality that I can easily believe that Arakawa went to that level when crafting Yomi no Tsugai.

Is it true? I don’t know. But I certainly intend to keep reading ’til I find out.

Cool Things: Azumanga Daioh

Posted by natechen on

So we’ve covered gunslingers in outer space and Meiji era romantic swordsmen, what remains to give a full bodied, even handed overview of manga and anime, this month’s focus here at Nate Chen Publications? Oh, yes, of course.

High school.

Now many Americans have fond memories of their high school days. But in our culture college is probably the more important educational milestone. While fewer people go to college, it is where a lot of people seem to form their first meaningful lifetime relationships outside of their birth families. Roommates, sports teams, fraternity or sorority friends or just people who took the same classes you did, college is where you meet them. Sure, you have some friends from high school who might stick around, if you’re lucky. But for the most part, in America, college is where independence really starts and tends to be our high water mark for growing up.

In Japan, it’s high school. College admission exams are exponentially more difficult there, often consuming most of a student’s free time in their last year of high school so, at least in pop culture, the first two years become a frantic rush to accumulate experiences and meet those people sharing your interests. Then you bond together and set your sites on a life path and work towards it as a group.

This theme is made so much of in Japanese pop culture that I have to conclude it’s what actually happens on at least a semi-regular basis. Otherwise they wouldn’t be able to sell it so frequently. But the way it’s typically presented in Japanese pop culture is probably not the way it really is.

There is one work I’ve ready that has the ring of truth to it, though, and that’s Azumanga Diaoh by Azuma Kiyohiko.

If you’ve read/watched any manga/anime at all you know that the Japanese have a slightly higher tolerance for abnormal elements like superhuman martial arts, mind readers, spiritualists and the like in their entertainment and fusing these elements with high school is a very common approach to story telling. Azumanga Daioh is not that.

High school manga or anime are also considered a great format for stories of all out competition with sports teams or game clubs or even movie making groups doing all in their power to win a major competition before exams crash down and end their high school days. Azumanga Daioh isn’t that either.

Lastly, even in America we recognize the unique romantic atmosphere of high school. There’s cute members of the opposite sex all over the place to be chased, gossiped about and rejected by. The Japanese are just as fine writing high school romances as Americans. But Azumanga Daioh doesn’t waste its time with romance.

Azumanga Daioh is what’s known as a slice-of-life drama. It follows its central characters around as they arrive in high school, get to know each other, do funny, stupid or otherwise entertaining things and eventually graduate.

I know, I know. This sounds boring. Somehow, it isn’t.

I really wish I could explain this manga better. It’s roughly the equivalent to a comic strip, what’s called “4-koma” in Japan. Most of the stories are told in a series of four panels that serve to basically tell a joke. But in each of those jokes a surprising amount of character development goes on.

This is significant since Azumanga Daioh (and slice-of-life in general) is not a sitcom. The genre is driven by its characters and not the situation they are in. What Kiyohiko does is he builds a set of very understandable, deep and relatable characters and then lets us live with them for three years until they graduate (high schools in Japane have a 3 year curriculum spanning 10th to 12th grade, just one of many differences between Japanese education and the U.S.) By the end we really feel like people like Osaka, Chiyo and Sakaki really were our classmates. That’s a particularly impressive achievement if, like me, you were homeschooled…

The Japanese pop culture obsession with high school may not always make sense to Western readers. But it is that very fact that makes Azumanga Daioh a great example of it for people dipping their toes into manga and anime. It seems as if this is what they’re really expecting to get, what they really want out of high school. It’s an idealized take on the formative years of young people, from the perspective of Japanese culture.

Plus it’s consistently funny, occasionally heart touching and not that hard to get a handle on. Maybe saying it’s a story about girls who go to school for three years, become fast friends and graduate to move on to bigger things doesn’t inspire you. But all dreams need foundations. And, in a very real way, that’s what Azumanga Daioh is – a foundation for bigger things.

Rurouni Kenshin

Posted by natechen on

Manga is more than just a variation of comics – it’s a learning experience! A great example of this is Nobuhiro Watsuki’s classic Rurouni Kenshin. The title character is an Issin Shishi veteran of the Meiji restoration, one who lived as a killer, an elite fighter sent to eliminate the most dangerous opponents of the revolution. What’s so interesting about this story is that it doesn’t take place during the Bakamatsu, but rather afterwards.

All soldiers need somewhere to go when the war is over but people rarely plan that far ahead. The Bakamatsu was no exception. So when the long days of fighting are over Kenshin is left with nowhere to go and no idea how he goes from a hardened killer to the citizen of a peaceful country. Like many long veteran soldiers, Kenshin finds he loathes fighting and sets out to live in peace. He exchanges his katana for a sakabato and vows to never kill again.

Unfortunately, back in the day Kenshin had quite the reputation and a decade after disappearing into the mists of history Kenshin finds that someone has stolen his name and is using his old reputation for their own ends. Living in peace is not enough to satisfy, it seems. Kenshin must ultimately seek redemption for his misdeeds. He will find it only in humility, service towards others and diligently performing housework for women who will never learn to do it on their own. Everything from the way he lives to the way he speaks, referring to himself in a diminuitive fashion and addressing most other people with the highly respectful “dono“, point to the change in Kenshin.

Rurouni Kenshin is a shonen manga to the core – it has lots of action, lots of humor and an emphasis on making the community you live in a better place.  Every time Kenshin swings his blunted blade he does so in the hopes that the ideals he fought for during the Bakumatsu will be upheld in the new era but, unlike many works about the past, Watsuki makes no attempts to sugarcoat the reality of the Meiji era. Yes, there were patriots out there on both sides of the conflict. But by and large most people were seeking their own gain.

As a weekly comic that ran for five years, Kenshin had a lot of time to look at the various forms that took. Disreputable merchants looking to buy power over people, disreputable teachers looking to play the wealthy and well intentioned for their own ends, well intentioned men branded criminals so others wouldn’t take the heat, virtuous men who turn to violence and crime in the search for petty revenge. All these and more are things that Watsuki and Kenshin stare down through the pages of their manga. Each one is overcome by relying on three simple rules:

  • Serve humbly.
  • Fight for the oppressed.
  • Teach others to do the same.

Rurouni Kenshin is a great yarn about a country, an era and the people that made it. It’s not going to give you anything like a comprehensive idea of what the time was like but it will give you a starting place. None of the historical events mentioned in it are made up, although much of the story taking place around those historical facts is pure fantasy. But there’s still one thing beyond sketchy that Kenshin teaches.

Heroes, it seems, look the same no matter what the culture or the era.