"December" Talking Meme post #7: Non-shoujo manga I love
skygiants asked me to talk about manga I love that isn't shoujo, since
meganbmoore had already asked me about my favorite shoujo.
1) Neon Genesis Evangelion gets a slot for complicated reasons. If you're not an anime or manga fan, you may not be familiar with Eva, so I'll just say that it's famous for essentially deconstructing and reinventing the giant robot genre while traumatizing all of its characters, and it's infamous for becoming a spinning ball of what the FUCK did I just watch about 2/3 through (which is my favorite part of the show, until near the end) and then ramping the WTF?!! factor way, way up for the final two episodes. And then, just for giggles or something (no, I do know some of the reasons that have been given), a movie came out that--all at once--overwrote/jabbed at/supplemented the TV series ending by starting out almost coherently and then getting even more bizarre than the first ending.
I love the anime dearly, although I don't know how I'd feel about it if I were first exposed to it today, and I roll my eyes at the appropriate places where it's weak. And I HATE both endings, for completely different reasons.
Enter the manga version! It's written and drawn by the anime's character designer, and it essentially takes the anime and surgically tightens it up so it's noticeably better. It took forever to come out, because it was a side project for the creator, and it kept being better than the show, and it gave me the only shred of hope I had for an ending to the story that actually satisfied me. My optimism hit a tremendous high with the second-last volume: it covers the part of the movie that inevitably fills me with screaming rage, and made all of the tiny changes I needed for me to be...well, it's Eva, where rocks fall and everyone dies, so I wasn't happy, but it made it so I could cope.
And quite recently "recently" (if you have no sense of time and actually mean just over a year ago), the last volume finally, finally came out, and the ending was unremarkable in the extreme. But given my loathing of both anime endings, I am more than happy with that. I don't see how it could have had an ending that was actually satisfying, because Sadamoto was still working within the original framework, so walking away at the end going "meh" instead of endlessly facepalming and snarling about it was a massive step up for me.
[EDIT: ...given that this is my second edit on the same paragraph, I was clearly not awake when writing the Eva part of the post. Right. So for clarity, vol. 13, the second-last volume, came out in English in late 2012, and vol. 14 came out in Japan but is not officially out in English. (I read it in scans when it first came out, because I had to know. Apparently there's no release date yet for the English edition.)]
(Yeah, I know this whole thing in no way sounds like I love the series. But I do. It's just one of those things I recommend with caveats everywhere, because the stuff it does well, it does really well, and it's a genre-smashing work for a reason.)
2) Rurouni Kenshin is a period piece about a brilliant swordsman named Kenshin, who spent part of his adolescence serving as a ruthless assassin in a civil war. When the series opens he's been wandering the country he helped to shape and trying to live peacefully and anonymously while doing what good he can to make up for the lives he took. It's an action series built around him and the people who become his chosen family when he stops for longer than planned and temporarily moves into a poor dojo owner by the daughter of its founder.
I love the chosen family aspect, because that's one of my things, and despite how implausible a lot of the action can be (usually in a fun, over-the-top way), the emotional dynamics and development are very real. Kenshin wants to atone, but the past refuses to let him be; other swordmasters want to kill him to claim his reputation as the greatest in Japan, and the government he helped place in power aren't willing to let such a valuable asset lie low.
The series is fun, dramatic, and heartfelt. (There's also an anime version which covers the first two arcs [of four] fairly well, but after that it goes off the rails.) And VIZ has my eternal gratitude for rendering Kenshin's usual archaically formal speech in a way that works. Under most circumstances I roll my eyes if people refuse to buy the legit version of something because they dislike something about it (unless it's been butchered, which is much less common now than it used to be), but I don't own more than one disc of the TV series because I literally find its script excruciating and unreadable. (Basically, they make Kenshin talk like this: "Today I must go to the store, that I must. I love sunny days, that I do. I got caught in the rain, that I did." NO. JUST NO. But then VIZ released the manga and made his dialogue read smoothly by simply having him refer to himself as "this one" when he's speaking that way. SO MUCH BETTER. I could cry at how much better it is.)
3) Fullmetal Alchemist is so good. So, so good. (It's been animated twice, with the first series being interesting but ultimately very different, and the second series--Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood--actually being very faithful. If anyone out there isn't into manga but wants to try this story, go with FMA:B.) It's a fantasy about two brothers trying to get their lives back to normal after using their hard-earned gifts of alchemical transmutation to attempt something that should never be tried. It's a complex enough story that I'm not going to really try to summarize it, but here's a lot of what I love about it.
It's fun, and joyful, and full of love--again, chosen families, and many of them found in the unlikeliest of places. It's intensely dramatic on both large and small scales. It's uplifting and heartbreaking and sometimes very, very dark. It has key supporting characters who committed or enabled atrocities during a not-too-long-ago civil war, and it doesn't back away from the horror of that. They were "just following orders", and they know that that's a bullshit excuse. They live with what they've done in different ways, including being relentlessly determined to transform their world into something better, knowing they can't atone but are in a position to do good now...whatever that means to them.
Basically all of the characters are awesome; it's particularly worth noting that all of the female characters are well-developed, competent people with lives and concerns of their own, and there's a tremendous range of them, from kickass fighters to mechanics to domestic homemakers, plus some overlap, and they're all treated with respect by the series. (May we someday live in a world where this isn't noteworthy.)
4) The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service is a quirky, often gruesome series that needs all kinds of warnings, and which I never would have thought I'd like, but it's great. It's about a group of college kids who each have an ability relating to the dead, or a practical skill that can be used in their collective money-making endeavor: they locate corpses, speak to the deceased, and deliver the final messages of the dead to help them find peace. And ideally, they make a living doing this. (Spoiler: it's not lucrative.) One can dowse for bodies; one can communicate with the dead; one's an embalmer, and so on.
5) Yotsuba&! is as different from that as you can possibly get. It's a slice-of-life episodic series about a ridiculously enthusiastic, engaging little girl and the man who's raising her. It's not so much about the experience of childhood as it is about the highs and lows and exhaustion and constant surprises and delight of having a precocious child underfoot. It's one of the cutest things I've ever read, and genuinely sweet, and hilarious. We only get about one new volume a year, and these days I hardly ever get around to reading new manga, even though I keep faithfully buying it and adding it to the piles, but Yotsuba&! gets read almost immediately, every time.
6) Monster is a psychological thriller and drama about--how to crunch this down--Dr. Tenma, a gifted Japanese surgeon practicing in Europe, who's forced to make a decision where one choice is good for his career and the other follows his own moral code. He does what he thinks is right, with two lifechanging results: he loses nearly everything, and then, years later, discovers that the child whose life he saved has grown up into a murderous mastermind, ending and ruining lives right and left--lives that would have been unharmed if our hero had made another choice. To make things more immediately dreadful, Tenma himself is accused of murder, and no one believes the wild story he knows to be true.
What's a man to do, especially a man like Tenma, who's one of the most honorable, decent characters I've come across? Clearly there's nothing to do but flee the law and embark on a journey across Europe with the end goal of rectifying his mistake at any cost to himself.
That's the setup.
Monster is my go-to recommendation for people who don't like manga or anime, especially if the lack of interest is due to preconceived notions about what kinds of stories they tell. (There's also an excellent and faithful anime adaptation.)
[Since I'm carrying my answers into January, I'll take requests this month too, if anyone happens to have anything they want to ask. Let me know here (or here on LJ). ^_^]
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