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Alphabet meme, I
Sep. 17th, 2011 11:03 pmIdol, Magical School Lunar manga: Whenever I sit down with a piece of Magic School media, I think, "All right! A chance to see Idol again!" Then, if it's not the manga, I suddenly remember and think to myself, GodDAMMIT. Idol is Lunar's second-best villain: a bereaved husband and father who wants to protect a child that's not even really his beats the baddest and most foreboding God of Doom any day of the week. Idol's cool-headed and pragmatic, capable of hugely cold violence, yet heroically self-sacrificing; he's beaten into violence by atrocity yet has come to his ultimate position on mazoku-human relations through logic and necessity. The choice of a character in his position as an antagonist makes sense for a tale of child heroes. The MSL mangaka wasn't the best, but Idol was a huge gift she gave to Lunar that it never really got the chance to utilize fully.
Iason, Lunar: Strolling School: Odd sentence, but I find the game's portrayal of Iason's chauvinism refreshing - it's a small sidenote, it's never treated as anything but dismissively ridiculous, and it's pushed aside once Elie passes his test. Iason's a jerk, but not a jerk that poisons the well, and really not even much of a jerk at that rather than an otherwise OK fellow who somehow got to holding a couple seriously stupid beliefs. (This subplot is expanded to an entire chapter in Magical School Lunar, where it's dragged out to an obvious conclusion. I don't think that institutional prejudice is "dismissively ridiculous" - in fact, those kind of "harmless," unquestioned assumptions by gatekeepers to power are often the most damaging - but in a setting like this, I think the capableness of girls is better illustrated by getting on with the heroines' awesome adventures rather than acting out the kabuki of a hackneyed plotline, no matter how valid its point.)
(ETA: Hmmm. I'm rereading this, and if someone else had written it, I'd be rolling my eyes at the perceived excuse-making. To rephrase: not OK with Iason being a chauvinist; impressed with how the game throws it in without ruining the mood or character and still making it clear that Iason's totally wrong.)
Ignatius, Lunar: Genesis/Dragon Song: Cripes, this is shaping up to be another all-Lunar entry. Anyhow, I actually got excited when I saw Blatant Ghaleon Rip-off #1 there in some promo art; I looked at the angling of the eyes and the height of his forehead, factored in the game's time frame and how long mazoku tend to live, and I...I thought there was a possibility he might have been a young Rouj. Don't look at me like that! IT WAS POSSIBLE!
Iris Cobb, The Cat Who...: A very odd statement here, but Iris is somewhat of a counterpart to Clavis in her franchise: she was replaced (by Celia, as Shiozawa was by Tanaka), but it wasn't the same, and even though the series continued to produce worthy installments in the original's absence, something was missing that in retrospect kinda signaled the beginning of the end. I'm not sure The Cat Who... suffered as much from the blow, not immediately, anyway - it produced some of its best installments after Iris's passing, which was given due reverence and a book-long rumination - but it was the first instance of replacing a substantive, multifaceted character with a thinly-drawn, flatly cheery knockoff, a trend that would steal much of the heart from the series in later installments.
Isaac, Under the Rose: I've been reading through Akari Funato's Under the Rose Vol. 1 lately and having a somewhat mixed reaction: this is a great storyteller and artist (and, man, are her expressions in this thing off the hook; this is perhaps the most painstakingly-drawn manga I've seen) telling a story I'm not much interested in reading, due to personal prejudices against the Victorian era and the book's Game of Thrones-type treatment of its characters where no one's really bearable and the most objectionable types of all are the ones safely ensconced atop the food chain. It's wearing a bit better - I'm honestly intrigued in the denouement of the mystery, the "accidental" death of the mistress of an English count investigated by one of her children, and there's a character who's Vheen Hikuusen's Morris with a different haircut.
Anyhow, thirteen-or-so-year-old Isaac is one of the few characters to be somewhat consistently likable. As one of the count's bazillion children, his lives more or less in the shadow of his hot-blooded twin, Not Draco Malfoy. Isaac's more thoughtful than most here, though; he responds to the maelstrom of his household by devoting himself to more solitary pursuits (woodworking, baking, horses) instead of his family sport of Ruining Other People's Lives, and he's near-always attempting to do something constructive whenever another of his father's considerable brood barges in to turn everything tits-up. Every so often, however, his brothers and half-brothers will finally provoke him to an exchange of blows, which, considering how far these jerks can push, just means that, y'know, Isaac still has a heart. (The best way to approach this manga, really, is to treat it as a Victorian Arrested Development and marvel at how shamelessly, amorally horrible the characters can behave. How I imagine Arrested Development to be, anyway; I've never really seen it.)
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Iason, Lunar: Strolling School: Odd sentence, but I find the game's portrayal of Iason's chauvinism refreshing - it's a small sidenote, it's never treated as anything but dismissively ridiculous, and it's pushed aside once Elie passes his test. Iason's a jerk, but not a jerk that poisons the well, and really not even much of a jerk at that rather than an otherwise OK fellow who somehow got to holding a couple seriously stupid beliefs. (This subplot is expanded to an entire chapter in Magical School Lunar, where it's dragged out to an obvious conclusion. I don't think that institutional prejudice is "dismissively ridiculous" - in fact, those kind of "harmless," unquestioned assumptions by gatekeepers to power are often the most damaging - but in a setting like this, I think the capableness of girls is better illustrated by getting on with the heroines' awesome adventures rather than acting out the kabuki of a hackneyed plotline, no matter how valid its point.)
(ETA: Hmmm. I'm rereading this, and if someone else had written it, I'd be rolling my eyes at the perceived excuse-making. To rephrase: not OK with Iason being a chauvinist; impressed with how the game throws it in without ruining the mood or character and still making it clear that Iason's totally wrong.)
Ignatius, Lunar: Genesis/Dragon Song: Cripes, this is shaping up to be another all-Lunar entry. Anyhow, I actually got excited when I saw Blatant Ghaleon Rip-off #1 there in some promo art; I looked at the angling of the eyes and the height of his forehead, factored in the game's time frame and how long mazoku tend to live, and I...I thought there was a possibility he might have been a young Rouj. Don't look at me like that! IT WAS POSSIBLE!
Iris Cobb, The Cat Who...: A very odd statement here, but Iris is somewhat of a counterpart to Clavis in her franchise: she was replaced (by Celia, as Shiozawa was by Tanaka), but it wasn't the same, and even though the series continued to produce worthy installments in the original's absence, something was missing that in retrospect kinda signaled the beginning of the end. I'm not sure The Cat Who... suffered as much from the blow, not immediately, anyway - it produced some of its best installments after Iris's passing, which was given due reverence and a book-long rumination - but it was the first instance of replacing a substantive, multifaceted character with a thinly-drawn, flatly cheery knockoff, a trend that would steal much of the heart from the series in later installments.
Isaac, Under the Rose: I've been reading through Akari Funato's Under the Rose Vol. 1 lately and having a somewhat mixed reaction: this is a great storyteller and artist (and, man, are her expressions in this thing off the hook; this is perhaps the most painstakingly-drawn manga I've seen) telling a story I'm not much interested in reading, due to personal prejudices against the Victorian era and the book's Game of Thrones-type treatment of its characters where no one's really bearable and the most objectionable types of all are the ones safely ensconced atop the food chain. It's wearing a bit better - I'm honestly intrigued in the denouement of the mystery, the "accidental" death of the mistress of an English count investigated by one of her children, and there's a character who's Vheen Hikuusen's Morris with a different haircut.
Anyhow, thirteen-or-so-year-old Isaac is one of the few characters to be somewhat consistently likable. As one of the count's bazillion children, his lives more or less in the shadow of his hot-blooded twin, Not Draco Malfoy. Isaac's more thoughtful than most here, though; he responds to the maelstrom of his household by devoting himself to more solitary pursuits (woodworking, baking, horses) instead of his family sport of Ruining Other People's Lives, and he's near-always attempting to do something constructive whenever another of his father's considerable brood barges in to turn everything tits-up. Every so often, however, his brothers and half-brothers will finally provoke him to an exchange of blows, which, considering how far these jerks can push, just means that, y'know, Isaac still has a heart. (The best way to approach this manga, really, is to treat it as a Victorian Arrested Development and marvel at how shamelessly, amorally horrible the characters can behave. How I imagine Arrested Development to be, anyway; I've never really seen it.)
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