If a CLAMP manga ends and a fan doesn't hear about it...
Continuing the theme of 'posts I had half written before cosplay took over my free time for a month, I finally got around to catching up on both xxxHOLiC and Tsubasa a couple of months ago - to discover that Tsubasa had actually gone and ended in my absence. *cough* Definitely time to catch up.
Though hardly the most satisfying of conclusions, for what it was, I'd call it a pretty decent ending. My attitude to every weird twist Tsubasa threw has always come down to something along the general lines of: hell, it's CLAMP, I knew what I was signing up for. I don't know if there are any other creators on the planet who alternate between complete and utter fluff and angsty doom and gloom the way CLAMP do, but Tsubasa sure travelled the full spectrum over its run.
If I've got one real complaint about how far the series diverged from its origins - back when the major source of conflict was the need to get Sakura's feathers back, and the major complication was that she'd never remember Syaoran even if she was restored - it would be the way the latter of those points was so completely steamrolled by other plot elements that it was effectively dumped without ever being resolved. It's hard not to be disappointed that a plot element that was that big would turn out to be no more than a red herring to distract us from where the story would ultimately decide to go. All the more so because I'm sure it could have been worked in somewhere, and we'd have had a better conclusion for it.
For that matter, I'm sure I recall Yuuko, in one of the early chapters, going so far as to say Sakura and Syaoran would be 'kitto daijoubu' - everything would definitely turn out okay. I'm... not sure that feels justified now, given the ending that particular Sakura and Syaoran got.
It probably makes a big difference that it's been a while since I was as invested in Tsubasa as I was back at my peak in that fandom - then again, the fact the manga shifted in mood so much is most of the reason I drifted away from it, so bit of a chicken and egg thing there. This is a shame, because the holic/Tsubasa fandom as a whole was such a great experience at the time that I still miss it. It was the first fandom I started writing for regularly - in many ways it was the fandom that taught me how to write - not to mention the most friendly and generous with feedback. Large enough to have a decent-sized fanbase, but not as massive and feral as the big fandoms like Kingdom Hearts and Naruto (both of which I wrote in briefly), and I met a lot of really awesome people - many of whom I still kinda wish I'd done a better job of keeping in contact with after we started drifting away to other fandoms.
From the first, Tsubasa and I got off to a bit of a shaky start. While I'd read enough different CLAMP series to enjoy a mega-crossover, and Syaoran was always one of my favourite characters from CCS, I liked him most back when he was still an arrogant little brat and every scene we got where he and Sakura actually connected with each other really meant something. By contrast, Tsubasa's Syaoran is a sweet young man from the very first time we see him - who practically fell for Sakura the first time they met as kids - and that unfortunately meant that the central ship of the series had already been stripped of most of what made me like it in CCS. Fye and Kurogane I liked a lot more, and the crazy remixed CLAMP worlds they kept flying through were generally good value, so that kept me reading long enough to get to the epic events of the Acid Tokyo world which completely blew me away and turned a series I'd been passingly enjoying into a series I loved overnight. It was a hell of a plot-twist, with just enough lead-up that you never saw it coming until it hit.
Alas, for me personally, it was a high that the series never really reached again. Much as I'd enjoyed this darker turn to the series, the chapters that followed descended into more doom and gloom than I had the taste for, especially as a contrast to the manga's lighthearted beginning. Actually, I should probably have listed one more complaint up above, as the reveal towards the conclusion that just about every character in the cast had had to make huge and miserable sacrifices just to stand a chance against the Big Bad (who never moved beyond a sadly one-dimensional character himself) got more than a little dreary. I had high hopes when he first showed up that I was going to find 'real' Syaoran to be a more interesting character than the clone, but when we finally got any backstory about him, it was yet again all about falling madly in love with Sakura and about making ridiculous sacrifices to save her. To the end, confused and contradictory as things got, I wouldn't call Tsubasa a bad story - just not quite the one I wanted to be reading.
I had a much better run with xxxHOLiC, as a whole. It took longer for me to get into (CLAMP had abandoned Gouhou Drug around the time Doumeki was first introduced, and for a long time he and Watanuki read like a cheap rip-off of the GD lead couple to me) - but when I finally fell for it I fell hard (Gouhou Drug? Hell with it, give us more holic!). Like Tsubasa, it was a serious turn that made the difference, starting with the story of the lady in the park, and for a long time after that the story just went to go from strength to strength - the spider arc, the introduction of Haruka and Kohane, the revelations about Himawari. Watanuki developed from a character who initially hadn't impressed me much into one of my all time favourites of any series I can think of - beyond his spazziness and prickly reactions to Doumeki he's such a helplessly nice person at his core - who'll give up so much to help people he cares about that him learning not try to solve every problem by throwing his life away is a major theme of the series. Now that I think of it, that's actually a pretty stark contrast to the increasingly high prices all the Tsubasa characters wound up making towards the end of the series (Watanuki and Yuuko too, ultimately). Small wonder xxxHOLiC got me so much more invested than Tsubasa managed to.
xxxHOLiC's still not quite done yet - but it has got me checking for new chapters regularly and looking forward to finding out what happens next for the first time in ages, so there's that. ^^; I'm actually enjoying it more now it's not mid-tangle with Tsubasa's conclusion, and despite recent events, I'm still hoping for a happy ending - and by that I do mean the kind of happy ending that resolves those last crucial dangling plot threads. I don't know quite how I expect them to pull that off (endings don't generally seem to be CLAMP's strongest suite), but Watanuki deserves it.
Though hardly the most satisfying of conclusions, for what it was, I'd call it a pretty decent ending. My attitude to every weird twist Tsubasa threw has always come down to something along the general lines of: hell, it's CLAMP, I knew what I was signing up for. I don't know if there are any other creators on the planet who alternate between complete and utter fluff and angsty doom and gloom the way CLAMP do, but Tsubasa sure travelled the full spectrum over its run.
If I've got one real complaint about how far the series diverged from its origins - back when the major source of conflict was the need to get Sakura's feathers back, and the major complication was that she'd never remember Syaoran even if she was restored - it would be the way the latter of those points was so completely steamrolled by other plot elements that it was effectively dumped without ever being resolved. It's hard not to be disappointed that a plot element that was that big would turn out to be no more than a red herring to distract us from where the story would ultimately decide to go. All the more so because I'm sure it could have been worked in somewhere, and we'd have had a better conclusion for it.
For that matter, I'm sure I recall Yuuko, in one of the early chapters, going so far as to say Sakura and Syaoran would be 'kitto daijoubu' - everything would definitely turn out okay. I'm... not sure that feels justified now, given the ending that particular Sakura and Syaoran got.
It probably makes a big difference that it's been a while since I was as invested in Tsubasa as I was back at my peak in that fandom - then again, the fact the manga shifted in mood so much is most of the reason I drifted away from it, so bit of a chicken and egg thing there. This is a shame, because the holic/Tsubasa fandom as a whole was such a great experience at the time that I still miss it. It was the first fandom I started writing for regularly - in many ways it was the fandom that taught me how to write - not to mention the most friendly and generous with feedback. Large enough to have a decent-sized fanbase, but not as massive and feral as the big fandoms like Kingdom Hearts and Naruto (both of which I wrote in briefly), and I met a lot of really awesome people - many of whom I still kinda wish I'd done a better job of keeping in contact with after we started drifting away to other fandoms.
From the first, Tsubasa and I got off to a bit of a shaky start. While I'd read enough different CLAMP series to enjoy a mega-crossover, and Syaoran was always one of my favourite characters from CCS, I liked him most back when he was still an arrogant little brat and every scene we got where he and Sakura actually connected with each other really meant something. By contrast, Tsubasa's Syaoran is a sweet young man from the very first time we see him - who practically fell for Sakura the first time they met as kids - and that unfortunately meant that the central ship of the series had already been stripped of most of what made me like it in CCS. Fye and Kurogane I liked a lot more, and the crazy remixed CLAMP worlds they kept flying through were generally good value, so that kept me reading long enough to get to the epic events of the Acid Tokyo world which completely blew me away and turned a series I'd been passingly enjoying into a series I loved overnight. It was a hell of a plot-twist, with just enough lead-up that you never saw it coming until it hit.
Alas, for me personally, it was a high that the series never really reached again. Much as I'd enjoyed this darker turn to the series, the chapters that followed descended into more doom and gloom than I had the taste for, especially as a contrast to the manga's lighthearted beginning. Actually, I should probably have listed one more complaint up above, as the reveal towards the conclusion that just about every character in the cast had had to make huge and miserable sacrifices just to stand a chance against the Big Bad (who never moved beyond a sadly one-dimensional character himself) got more than a little dreary. I had high hopes when he first showed up that I was going to find 'real' Syaoran to be a more interesting character than the clone, but when we finally got any backstory about him, it was yet again all about falling madly in love with Sakura and about making ridiculous sacrifices to save her. To the end, confused and contradictory as things got, I wouldn't call Tsubasa a bad story - just not quite the one I wanted to be reading.
I had a much better run with xxxHOLiC, as a whole. It took longer for me to get into (CLAMP had abandoned Gouhou Drug around the time Doumeki was first introduced, and for a long time he and Watanuki read like a cheap rip-off of the GD lead couple to me) - but when I finally fell for it I fell hard (Gouhou Drug? Hell with it, give us more holic!). Like Tsubasa, it was a serious turn that made the difference, starting with the story of the lady in the park, and for a long time after that the story just went to go from strength to strength - the spider arc, the introduction of Haruka and Kohane, the revelations about Himawari. Watanuki developed from a character who initially hadn't impressed me much into one of my all time favourites of any series I can think of - beyond his spazziness and prickly reactions to Doumeki he's such a helplessly nice person at his core - who'll give up so much to help people he cares about that him learning not try to solve every problem by throwing his life away is a major theme of the series. Now that I think of it, that's actually a pretty stark contrast to the increasingly high prices all the Tsubasa characters wound up making towards the end of the series (Watanuki and Yuuko too, ultimately). Small wonder xxxHOLiC got me so much more invested than Tsubasa managed to.
xxxHOLiC's still not quite done yet - but it has got me checking for new chapters regularly and looking forward to finding out what happens next for the first time in ages, so there's that. ^^; I'm actually enjoying it more now it's not mid-tangle with Tsubasa's conclusion, and despite recent events, I'm still hoping for a happy ending - and by that I do mean the kind of happy ending that resolves those last crucial dangling plot threads. I don't know quite how I expect them to pull that off (endings don't generally seem to be CLAMP's strongest suite), but Watanuki deserves it.