Fandom Overview (supplemental): Yami no Matsuei
Hello! I'm Phoebe, and I'll be doing the driving for Yami no Matsuei this month.
I know, I know. Another bloody anime/manga series you've never heard of, or think maybe you might have heard of but aren't sure because all these animanga titles sound more or less alike to you. But -- Well, allow me to quote an anonymous Stranger To YnM 's reaction to her first glimpse of it:
All I knew about this fandom was:
Nothing, and fucking hell was my life empty for it.
Beautiful, fragmentary, permanently unfinished* and dreamlike in its shifting, treacherous narrative threads (irrational to the point of almost-incoherence, but at the same time suggestive of some order underneath, a logic almost but not quite graspable), YnM is what you might think of as an Arthurian-source kind of text. Like the Matter of Britain, it can and does support many different interpretations, both of character and of core narrative. And like the Matter of Britain, it deals in issues that are the stuff of myth and philosophy: destiny; death and the flight from death; what it is to be human; the end of the world, and a new heaven and a new earth. At the same time, its issues are the stuff of genre epic: True Love, detective work, fights with monsters, inappropriate attractions to enemies, bureaucratic infighting, court intrigue, and -- this is VERY IMPORTANT -- the quest for dessert.
It's a fun series, but more than that, it's an extraordinary fandom. Boniblithe and ranalore wrote a wonderful fandom overview for YnM's first appearance on crack_van back in 2004. But the images have (temporarily, I hope and believe) disappeared from that overview, and believe me, you want the images. Follow me beneath the cut and I'll show you why.
ETA: You'll need to click the images for the full-size versions; LJ has shrunk my attempt to post legible pictures down to thumbnail size. She said, cursing under her breath.
Now that I have your complete and undivided attention? You'll want to go and read through Boni and Rana's overview. (By the way, that's Touda chained to that wall. The original overview will tell you who he is.)
For easy navigation, here's a roster of images to go with Boni and Rana's discussion of the major characters:
Tsuzuki Asato
Kurosaki Hisoka
Muraki Kazutaka
Tatsumi Seiichorou
Yutaka Watari (and 003)
Mibu Oriya
Byakko
-- and, of course, you've already met Touda.
All this is very pretty, of course, and very Id Vortex. But it doesn't wholly explain what makes YnM such an interesting fandom, one that writers and readers will come back to long after they've moved on to other primary fandoms, and one that supports a remarkable quality of work. I don't claim to have a comprehensive explanation, but there are some things that are clear enough, and that it helps to be aware of when you read around in the fandom.
First is that the manga is not merely unfinished, but unfinished in a gaudy and spectacular kind of way. The author left us with cliffhangers involving almost all the key characters; with intimations that the fate of the universe hung in the balance; with hints about Tsuzuki's destiny, of Muraki's role therein, of Hisoka's family background, of the structure of the afterworld. But she did no more than hint, and some of the hints, like much else in YnM, contradict one another. There's no reason for writers in the fandom to worry about being Jossed: it seems unlikely that the story will ever be continued, and even if it were to be, the degree of inconsistency in the material we have makes this a fandom where perfect fidelity to canon is not a possibility. Working with the manga version of YnM already requires a writer or artist or vidder to decide which parts of the source material she's going to use, and which she's going to discard.
The result is a fandom with tremendous storytelling scope -- there are all those open issues, and how they're resolved affects even the way earlier, seemingly-resolved events are interpreted. And the need to interpret the source material, the freedom of reading its inconsistencies provide, allows for an enormous range of approaches. This is a fandom that can and does support work whose variance in form and approach and characterization is in some ways closer to what you'd find from the Matter of Britain than what you'd find from most Western tv-based fandoms.
As if that weren't enough, YnM is a source in which certain fanfic tropes are suddenly, improbably, embedded in the text, with nothing remotely sub- about them. First, there's the angst. As Boni and Rana explained, our lead characters are shinigami, Death's enforcers, tasked principally with ensuring that those who are supposed to die at a given place and time do so, and that their souls go on to the appropriate destinations. They're recruited from among the dead themselves: specifically, from among those few whose sense of unfinished business with the living world is so intense that it precludes their souls from moving on. That instability is an issue for the bureaucracy that employs our heros, just as one might expect. Shinigami are dangerous: they command not-inconsiderable supernatural powers, and alone among the bureaucrats of the afterworld, they are able to assume physical form and visit the world of the living. Officially, therefore, they work only in pairs, so that the partners can police each other. And the need to keep them on a short leash may be the reason for the fact that the shinigami are paid less than anyone else in the afterworld, despite the fact that it's a high-ranking and high-prestige job.**
Shinigami, in other words, are by nature and definition angst-ridden and unstable; it's one of the fundamental qualifications for the job. It is not twisting character to assume that each and every one of our shinigami leads has unspeakable trauma and black secrets in his or her past; that's canon, and one of the few bits of canon that is never contradicted.
Then there's the teasing erotic edge that the mangaka gives to so many of the characters' relationships and interactions.*** Including, but not limited to, what we might think of as the Tsuzuki Effect. Tsuzuki is pursued by all (except, possibly, by his partner, because we wouldn't want to mess with any possibilities for more angst); his mere presence is enough to alter people's sexual orientation. You think I exaggerate for effect? I do not. Here he is with his colleagues, visiting some hot springs.****
Oh, and have I mentioned the author's apparent fondness for her villains? And her willingness to support both partners slash and enemies slash? The previous overview told you something of the principal villain's pursuit of Tsuzuki. Whether it ever came to anything during the time span of the manga is impossible to determine -- there's all that ambiguity again. But we have reason to think that the mangaka herself is not entirely opposed to the idea.
Perhaps you disagree, but I don't think Tsuzuki looks entirely unwilling. In fact, pretty much au contraire.
And then, finally, there's the mangaka's affection for pure crack, stories that are fairly lighthearted, or just plain weird, scattered amid the intimations of gloom and disaster and the end of the universe. Matsushita has given us canonical AUs, and characters whose reactions to cracked-out situations have the perfect deadpan calm of high comedy.
One final thing you should know: As often happens in the anime/manga world, there's a very material difference between the anime and the manga versions of the story, despite the fact that Matsushita was involved with both. The characters aren't quite the same -- Hisoka, for one striking example, is stranger and much darker in the manga version -- and the events of the anime are parallel to but not identical to the relevant manga arcs. Many people strongly prefer the anime, and it's certainly more accessible (and finished, and everything). But others have an equally strong preference for the manga, for its richness and strangeness and comparative darkness. I am among the latter, and while I wouldn't kick the anime out of bed, as it were, my recs are likely to be slanted toward pieces that rely on the manga version of the source.
But whichever version you prefer, it's a wonderful fandom, well worth exploring. Sure, there's badfic out there, and very bad it is -- you probably want to avoid the ff.net boards at all costs. But there's remarkable work out there, and some of the best and most original writers I'm aware of have taken advantage of the scope the Yami universe offers. During the remainder of the month I hope to show you a reasonably broad range of the kind of work the fandom is producing, and to persuade at least some of you that really, I do not exaggerate. Not at all.
---------------------------------------
*In its primary, manga incarnation. The series is officially on hiatus, but it has been for years with no sign that the mangaka will ever continue the story from the point where she left it. Which was with all hell breaking loose, and every possible narrative thread not merely unresolved but fraying before our eyes into frayed sub-threads.
**Unless it's not. The very first volume of the manga states clearly and definitively that the job is one of high rank and prestige and that it's a dirty job that nobody who cared for status would ever dream of taking. This is a contradiction that will never be addressed or resolved, ever. YnM is like that.
***'Hey! This isn't a yaoi manga!' the author proclaims in one early panel. And it's not. Quite. It's like, hello to the plausible deniability -- well, almost plausible, some of the time.
****Not that anyone believes Tatsumi when he says he wasn't gay before. But that's another story.
I know, I know. Another bloody anime/manga series you've never heard of, or think maybe you might have heard of but aren't sure because all these animanga titles sound more or less alike to you. But -- Well, allow me to quote an anonymous Stranger To YnM 's reaction to her first glimpse of it:
All I knew about this fandom was:
Nothing, and fucking hell was my life empty for it.
Beautiful, fragmentary, permanently unfinished* and dreamlike in its shifting, treacherous narrative threads (irrational to the point of almost-incoherence, but at the same time suggestive of some order underneath, a logic almost but not quite graspable), YnM is what you might think of as an Arthurian-source kind of text. Like the Matter of Britain, it can and does support many different interpretations, both of character and of core narrative. And like the Matter of Britain, it deals in issues that are the stuff of myth and philosophy: destiny; death and the flight from death; what it is to be human; the end of the world, and a new heaven and a new earth. At the same time, its issues are the stuff of genre epic: True Love, detective work, fights with monsters, inappropriate attractions to enemies, bureaucratic infighting, court intrigue, and -- this is VERY IMPORTANT -- the quest for dessert.
It's a fun series, but more than that, it's an extraordinary fandom. Boniblithe and ranalore wrote a wonderful fandom overview for YnM's first appearance on crack_van back in 2004. But the images have (temporarily, I hope and believe) disappeared from that overview, and believe me, you want the images. Follow me beneath the cut and I'll show you why.
ETA: You'll need to click the images for the full-size versions; LJ has shrunk my attempt to post legible pictures down to thumbnail size. She said, cursing under her breath.
Now that I have your complete and undivided attention? You'll want to go and read through Boni and Rana's overview. (By the way, that's Touda chained to that wall. The original overview will tell you who he is.)
For easy navigation, here's a roster of images to go with Boni and Rana's discussion of the major characters:
Tsuzuki Asato
Kurosaki Hisoka
Muraki Kazutaka
Tatsumi Seiichorou
Yutaka Watari (and 003)
Mibu Oriya
Byakko
-- and, of course, you've already met Touda.
All this is very pretty, of course, and very Id Vortex. But it doesn't wholly explain what makes YnM such an interesting fandom, one that writers and readers will come back to long after they've moved on to other primary fandoms, and one that supports a remarkable quality of work. I don't claim to have a comprehensive explanation, but there are some things that are clear enough, and that it helps to be aware of when you read around in the fandom.
First is that the manga is not merely unfinished, but unfinished in a gaudy and spectacular kind of way. The author left us with cliffhangers involving almost all the key characters; with intimations that the fate of the universe hung in the balance; with hints about Tsuzuki's destiny, of Muraki's role therein, of Hisoka's family background, of the structure of the afterworld. But she did no more than hint, and some of the hints, like much else in YnM, contradict one another. There's no reason for writers in the fandom to worry about being Jossed: it seems unlikely that the story will ever be continued, and even if it were to be, the degree of inconsistency in the material we have makes this a fandom where perfect fidelity to canon is not a possibility. Working with the manga version of YnM already requires a writer or artist or vidder to decide which parts of the source material she's going to use, and which she's going to discard.
The result is a fandom with tremendous storytelling scope -- there are all those open issues, and how they're resolved affects even the way earlier, seemingly-resolved events are interpreted. And the need to interpret the source material, the freedom of reading its inconsistencies provide, allows for an enormous range of approaches. This is a fandom that can and does support work whose variance in form and approach and characterization is in some ways closer to what you'd find from the Matter of Britain than what you'd find from most Western tv-based fandoms.
As if that weren't enough, YnM is a source in which certain fanfic tropes are suddenly, improbably, embedded in the text, with nothing remotely sub- about them. First, there's the angst. As Boni and Rana explained, our lead characters are shinigami, Death's enforcers, tasked principally with ensuring that those who are supposed to die at a given place and time do so, and that their souls go on to the appropriate destinations. They're recruited from among the dead themselves: specifically, from among those few whose sense of unfinished business with the living world is so intense that it precludes their souls from moving on. That instability is an issue for the bureaucracy that employs our heros, just as one might expect. Shinigami are dangerous: they command not-inconsiderable supernatural powers, and alone among the bureaucrats of the afterworld, they are able to assume physical form and visit the world of the living. Officially, therefore, they work only in pairs, so that the partners can police each other. And the need to keep them on a short leash may be the reason for the fact that the shinigami are paid less than anyone else in the afterworld, despite the fact that it's a high-ranking and high-prestige job.**
Shinigami, in other words, are by nature and definition angst-ridden and unstable; it's one of the fundamental qualifications for the job. It is not twisting character to assume that each and every one of our shinigami leads has unspeakable trauma and black secrets in his or her past; that's canon, and one of the few bits of canon that is never contradicted.
Then there's the teasing erotic edge that the mangaka gives to so many of the characters' relationships and interactions.*** Including, but not limited to, what we might think of as the Tsuzuki Effect. Tsuzuki is pursued by all (except, possibly, by his partner, because we wouldn't want to mess with any possibilities for more angst); his mere presence is enough to alter people's sexual orientation. You think I exaggerate for effect? I do not. Here he is with his colleagues, visiting some hot springs.****
Oh, and have I mentioned the author's apparent fondness for her villains? And her willingness to support both partners slash and enemies slash? The previous overview told you something of the principal villain's pursuit of Tsuzuki. Whether it ever came to anything during the time span of the manga is impossible to determine -- there's all that ambiguity again. But we have reason to think that the mangaka herself is not entirely opposed to the idea.
Perhaps you disagree, but I don't think Tsuzuki looks entirely unwilling. In fact, pretty much au contraire.
And then, finally, there's the mangaka's affection for pure crack, stories that are fairly lighthearted, or just plain weird, scattered amid the intimations of gloom and disaster and the end of the universe. Matsushita has given us canonical AUs, and characters whose reactions to cracked-out situations have the perfect deadpan calm of high comedy.
One final thing you should know: As often happens in the anime/manga world, there's a very material difference between the anime and the manga versions of the story, despite the fact that Matsushita was involved with both. The characters aren't quite the same -- Hisoka, for one striking example, is stranger and much darker in the manga version -- and the events of the anime are parallel to but not identical to the relevant manga arcs. Many people strongly prefer the anime, and it's certainly more accessible (and finished, and everything). But others have an equally strong preference for the manga, for its richness and strangeness and comparative darkness. I am among the latter, and while I wouldn't kick the anime out of bed, as it were, my recs are likely to be slanted toward pieces that rely on the manga version of the source.
But whichever version you prefer, it's a wonderful fandom, well worth exploring. Sure, there's badfic out there, and very bad it is -- you probably want to avoid the ff.net boards at all costs. But there's remarkable work out there, and some of the best and most original writers I'm aware of have taken advantage of the scope the Yami universe offers. During the remainder of the month I hope to show you a reasonably broad range of the kind of work the fandom is producing, and to persuade at least some of you that really, I do not exaggerate. Not at all.
---------------------------------------
*In its primary, manga incarnation. The series is officially on hiatus, but it has been for years with no sign that the mangaka will ever continue the story from the point where she left it. Which was with all hell breaking loose, and every possible narrative thread not merely unresolved but fraying before our eyes into frayed sub-threads.
**Unless it's not. The very first volume of the manga states clearly and definitively that the job is one of high rank and prestige and that it's a dirty job that nobody who cared for status would ever dream of taking. This is a contradiction that will never be addressed or resolved, ever. YnM is like that.
***'Hey! This isn't a yaoi manga!' the author proclaims in one early panel. And it's not. Quite. It's like, hello to the plausible deniability -- well, almost plausible, some of the time.
****Not that anyone believes Tatsumi when he says he wasn't gay before. But that's another story.