Gravitation ranting.....
"So if I had to recommend this series to anyone, which I wouldn’t, but this is a hypothetical situation here, I’d tell them to read the first two volumes of the manga..online..illegally, because it isn’t worth buying. Then watch the anime. Or, just buy the vocal soundtrack and never touch anything else related to the series."
When I first got into slash, I heard all kinds of good things about Gravitation. Like how it was the best BL anime out there and how perfect Shuichi and Eiri are together. Still, it took me awhile to buy the anime, but when I did I had high hopes. I watched the first 4 episodes…and I was pretty much confused and a bit disappointed. Then several people told me to read the manga first before touching the anime again, because “the manga is so much better!11” so I did that. I bought all the manga and I read all 12 volumes. The first five were okay and they definitely cleared up what was going on in the anime, since the anime’s beginning is slightly strange if you know nothing about the series. However, once the manga started going into the New York arc, that’s when I realized Gravitation is a complete fucking joke. Certainly, the manga had its problems before the New York arc, but it still had some perks. Afterwards, it turned into a total disgrace to anime, BL, yaoi, manga, and well anything really. This brings me to the list of crap:
-I hated the unclear happenings the night Eiri killed Yuki Kitazawa. First of all, we don’t know if Yuki was raped or not. The anime clearly shows that he wasn’t, but it also doesn’t show Shuichi’s rape (which really canonly happens), so I’m guessing they didn’t show anything for censoring reasons. The manga is the only real concrete thing to go on, and from that it’s only obvious that Kitazawa didn’t. The other two men possibly did. Now, one of the Remixes supports this, but nothing in the remixes are considered canon(THANK GOD). A few of Eiri’s quotes also appear to support that he was indeed raped by at least one of the two men before getting the gun. I’m talking about the scene where Yuki cries and says something like “now you’re just like me” after Shuichi’s run-in with Taki. Now, normally I wouldn’t give a shit, but these details are important to really figure out just how messed up Eiri really is and why. So, I’d have liked to know. Rape or not, being betrayed like that by someone he trusted and loved is more than enough to screw him up pretty badly, but I guess I just want more details.
Another thing that bothers me is Yuki Kitazawa himself and why he did what he did. Ok, obviously he was drunk, and in the manga, I just figured that was the reason. But in the anime it seems like it’s not as black as white as that. Eiri’s shows up at Kitazawa’s house unannounced, during Yuki’s drunken time. Because he’s wasted he starts acting out on his desires, when he normally would never do something like that. All the other scenes with show him as nice and professional. Of course, deep down he’s still sick and has a thing for Eiri. All I’m saying is that under normal circumstances, he would have never tried to rape Eiri, based on all the other information about the guy. Another thing that’s pretty obvious to me is that Kitazawa saw Yuki as a nuisance. He was probably just tutoring him for drinking money, and alcoholics tend to hate, ya know, working or anything that doesn’t have to do with getting wasted. It matters because that’s why I think he didn’t give a shit about what those guys were going to do. My guess? He was going to take that ten dollars, buy another bottle of wine and pass out somewhere and get taken to jail at the end of the day.
What I’m getting at is in the anime Yuki is molesting Eiri when two guys just come in. They PUSH Kitazawa aside and for a brief second, he’s got a “what the hell” look on his face. Here’s my theory: Kitazawa was making a drug deal or something of that nature. Well, being an alcoholic by night, he’s of course drunk, but that’s just standard procedure. Eiri comes over unannounced and things go bad. He starts messing around with Eiri a little, and in the middle of that his dealers/friends just barge in and push him aside. At this point, I just think Kitazawa didn’t want to get his ass kicked/ screw up whatever deal they were going to make by pissing these guys off denying them their fun with Eiri, and so he goes along with the ten dollar joke(come on it had to be a fucking joke). Plus, he secretly resents Eiri in the first place, so that makes it easier for him just to let it happen. He’s shown walking off after getting the money. He doesn’t care. It still makes him just as much of a sick pathetic fuck, but at least that makes sense to me. I would have thought differently if Eiri’s arrival was planned, but apparently it wasn’t. I also think if those guys wouldn’t have shown up, Kitazawa would have pushed Eiri around a little more and if Eiri still rejected him, he’d have thrown him out the door extremely pissed off. Well, then Tohma would have done some major murdering anyway. lol
Pictures of Kitazawa's micro-expressions of surprise:
This kind of explains why Eiri thinks Yuki didn’t deserve to die. The other two guys, he doesn’t seem to regret killing at all. “Why didn’t you tell me you hated me? Then you wouldn’t have had to die!” What I think Eiri was getting at is if he had known Yuki saw him as an annoying fucking brat then he would have never shown up at his house in the middle of the night without calling or something first. Or he would have never trusted him to begin with.
Or it’s just the standard victim blaming him/herself. I just think the entire event deserved more explanation and Yuki Kitazawa deserved more development. I mean, Eiri’s past is clearly the most important plot point of the series and it is just so vague. The manga is even more vague, so I’m glad the anime gave a tiny window to see what Kitazawa was like and why Eiri adored him so much.
-The characters have no stability and are impossible to pin down. Shiuchi is just plain crazy. Whenever he starts thinking about something serious, something stupid pops up in his head right before he finishes his thought, and he then runs around like a jackass. All we really know for sure about Shiuchi is that he LUVS Yuki and he can sing. Great! Hiro is supposed to be Shuichi’s loyal friend, but sometimes he acts like it and sometimes he doesn’t. He’ll go inform Yuki about Shiuchi’s attack and give useful advice at times, but the next moment he’ll be “GRRR I’m quitting the band!11” only to come back because Eiri bribes his fiancé to date him if he’ll stay. NOW THAT’S FRIENDSHIP. It’s not even that clear why he has these personality swings. Eiri is all over the place. Murakami uses “multiple personality disorder” to explain why Eiri will act nice one second, act mean another second, act really, really mean another second, and threaten to throw a woman off a building the next. Ok, first of all, Eiri’s mystical problems don’t fit that disorder. Eiri is more along the lines of post traumatic stress disorder, or if you want to really stretch it, manic depressive. Ok, he probably is manic depressive. God damnit, Murakami, WOULD IT KILL YOU TO OPEN A BOOK AND RESEARCH SOMETHING BEFORE YOU SHOVE IT IN YOUR MANGA? I guess it would. And I guess your fans are too damn stupid/BL starved to give a flying shit. You could draw entire arc about Eiri and Shuichi playing with rainbow colored lions at a zoo and they’d still buy your horse shit……er anyway…Ryuichi is either mentally challenged 100% of the time in the anime or faking being a retard 50% of the time in the manga. Either way, you have someone who is just goofing off. The only thing that changes in the manga is that we know that he does, in fact, have a brain in there somewhere and he is in fact urging Shuichi on for a purpose. What that purpose is exactly, I’m not sure. I guess it’s pretty hard to find someone as stupid as you are in the world who can also sing, so it’s worth playing around with him until you go back to the states to…uh to be an actor. :/ Either way, I think kidnapping Yuki was way out of character, and we never to get to see Ryu’s “real” personality, if one even exists. Claude is just batshit insane. In the New York arc he switches sides and does lots of crazy shit that makes no sense. If you pretend the New York arc didn’t happen, then he’s relatively stable and devoted to Bad Luck, but there’s still no depth with him. Yoshiki is the transvestite brother of Yuki Kitazawa who loves going around imitating Yuki to scare the shit out of Eiri. And for some reason he/she wants to help out by uhhh reacting Eiri’s attempted rape! Wonderful. Such great story telling. It brings a tear to my eye. Also RAPE IS FUNNY GUYS. Rage is fucking stupid and crazy. Enough said there.
The only t characters who are even remotely stable are Tohma, Mika, Taki, and Suguru. Tohma just wants what’s best for Eiri because he feels guilty for the past. He’ll use anyone and everything in his power to do so. At first he thinks Shuichi will help Eiri, so he does what he can to make sure they work out. Then, Eiri gets sick and he realizes that Shuichi might be doing more harm than good, so he does what he can to break them up. It’s irritating, but at least it makes some kind of sense. Taki will do anything to reach the top. Anything. It’s too damn simple to fuck up. Mika just wants Eiri to be happy. Again, too simple to fuck up. Plus, those two just happen to be minor characters. Saguru wants to surpass his brother and he’s using Bad Luck to do that, but he’s stressed because he is surrounded by retards. I’m thinking he’s the only real sane one in the series.
Basically, Murakamiuses her characters as plot devices with no regard for keeping them “in-character.” It ruins everything. She obviously never bothered to research psychology to figure out just how her characters might realistically react to their situations, and that’s just pathetic. I will never understand why this series did so well besides the fact that it’s the only real BL series to see the light of day outside of Japan. Lucky break, because this shit is shit.
-The Gravitation anime is better than the manga. I don’t care what anyone says; it is. Why? Because it cuts out the entire New York arc, 6 or so volumes of complete fucking nonsense in the manga. That means no Rage. That means no meeting Kitazawa’s transvestite brother. That means no bird costume. That means no giant flying panda. All of that was just filler in the manga and I was glad it was taken out. It added nothing to the plot whatsoever. To break it down:
-Cuts out New York and anything else unnecessary.
-MUSIC. It’s about the only thing really amazing about Gravitation.
-There is slightly less stupidity present at serious moments. When I say slightly, I mean slightly.
-Everyone’s hair color and style stays the same. Hey, it annoyed me in the manga how everyone would look different each volume and sometimes even each track.
-The Japanese VAing is okay. The English is terrible. Absolutely TERRIBLE.
So if I had to recommend this series to anyone, which I wouldn’t, but this is a hypothetical situation here, I’d tell them to read the first two volumes of the manga..online..illegally, because it isn’t worth buying. Then watch the anime. Or, just buy the vocal soundtrack and never touch anything else related to the series.
-The remixes are fucking scary. I know I haven’t said one good thing about Murakami, so I will: She draws pretty good porn, and she has some serious guts to show us all how completely disturbed she is. Lol Ok, for those who don’t know, one of the remixes shows a pre-teen Eiri(he looks 7 though) sucking Yuki Kitazawa’s cock, among other things, and while this is happening the text goes on about him going all the way when he gets older and how it’s a “promise left unfulfilled.” Another one has Tohma and Tatsuha reenacting the two thugs raping Eiri. They cum all over him, take turns, and apparently Eiri is completely drugged the fuck up. The kicker? Shuichi is watching viva a camera in the room. I have no issue with any of this because it’s not canon or anything but it does go to show what goes on in this woman’s mind. ROFL.
I’m really just disappointed though. How often does the creator of a manga draw the dojin for it? Almost never right? So I was hoping for some sweet romantic porn between Eiri and Shuichi, because the manga never could get that explicit. But, of course, everything has to be totally fucked up to epic proportions, so instead I get Shuichi crying and drooling all over himself looking like’s getting raped. And that’s the most normal one.
-Gravitation can never take anything seriously. Well, take Shuichi’s gang rape, for instance. In no way does he act realistic, even for a second. He doesn’t go to the hospital. He has no lasting emotional trauma. Nothing. The next day he dresses up in a school girl outfit for Yuki and it makes no sense whatsoever. I’ve tried to make sense of this. I have. Shuichi didn’t go to the hospital because that would draw unwanted attention. Okay..fine. It doesn’t bother him that he was gang raped because he is just f-ing nuts or one of those few people in the world who can walk away from something like that with no lasting scars.(btw, he cried because of Eiri…not because of what happened TO HIM. : /) Uhhh, fine, whatever. Shuichi dresses up as a girl to avoid news reporters. Right…whatever. He keeps it on around Eiri because being a girl would make Eiri love him and stay with him, and of course, everything is about Yuki loving him. Alright, NO. It makes no sense. It’s not a realistic reaction. It’s thrown in there to be funny I guess, which isn’t right because how is rape funny, especially when it is in a romance anime/manga? Before the rape scene, I thought the manga just had humorous parts in it for entertainment and when the time came it would take things seriously. The thing is, the manga/anime never takes anything seriously, not even the “serious” parts. Nothing can be romantic or touching because Shuichi is dressed in some ridiculous dog suit, banana suit, school girl outfit, etc, etc and making stupid comments no matter what the situation. He even does this when Yuki tells him about his past. It ruins absolutely every scene that is supposed to be important, and I don’t understand why Murakami did that. I don’t understand why she couldn’t have just used the stupidity in everything except important/emotional scenes. It result is an underdeveloped plot and characters with no depth. I’m left trying to understand how this series even has a fandom when it is impossible to relate to any of the characters because they are so damn out there.
Hey guys, guess who my favorite Gravitation character is? Come on, think. Yeah, fucked up right, almost fandom secrets worthy, right? Well, it just goes to show how much watching and reading this shit as fucked me up mentally, when I like the most disgusting character in the series just because I can have some INTELLIGNET(and I mean that so, so loosely) thoughts about his actions. Great. Thanks Gravitation for helping me reach new lows. Yeah, fuck you.