pandora hearts
5 Oct 2009 02:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mayoraaseiI must have missed this anime in my sick-of-anime-ness brought on by the terrible Gundam 00.
I haven't actually watched the anime properly except to scan through the last two episodes (*cough cough*) and I probably won't because it doesn't seem to actually end in the anime.
The manga is published in Square Enix's Monthly G Fantasy, which is home to another recent and extremely popular anime, Kuroshitsuji, as well as older titles like E's and Nabari no Ou. This magazine is supposedly "shounen", but a discerning eye will tell you any of the series mentioned above is really shounen-ai dressed up as shounen...or shounen dressed up as shounen-ai, whichever way you'd like to have it =__=;
In that respect it reminds me a lot of Asuka, which published stuff like X/1999 and D.N.Angel and Kyou Kara Maou, many of which are fantasy epics full of interesting fight scenes but also laden with shounen-ai overtones, although these Asuka comics tended to be a lot stronger on the shounen-ai than Monthly G Fantasy.
None of this is really relevant of course, since, depending on the author, shounen-ai overtones can pop up even in the purest shoujo mangas as comic relief or subconsciously because the mangaka used to write doujinshi ==;
Except...except it gets creepy after a while, if the author doesn't take note. Guys starting to act like girls, sit like girls, look like girls, go all emotional wreckage on people like girls...it's...ick. Especially since I find most girls in manga rather...ick.
Pandora Hearts is an interesting manga, if only its plot wasn't so convoluted, which is the first of its problems. Most synopses online start off with something like: on his 15th birthday and coming-of-age ceremony, Oz Versalius got thrown into "the Abyss" for the sin of existing, and in order to escape there, he made an illegal contract with "a Chain" called Alice, also known as the Blood-stained Black Rabbit. In fact, it wouldn't be so confusing if it stopped giving weird names to everything. Even now I still don't know what the Abyss is except it's some dark place with horrible broken toys that people end up if they form an "illegal contract" with "a Chain". And a Chain is supposedly a monster from the Abyss.
What it really seems to be about is a bunch of emotionally screwed up people with crossing loyalties and gaping vulnerabilities, who try to make the world right by their own standards and end up making it even more screwed up than it was before, and now they're trying to fix it except no one really seems to know what is actually right.
Every now and then I like to read manga about emotionally screwed up people because it reminds me of the good ol' days of high school, when all these mangaka *cough* Kaori Yuki *cough* CLAMP wrote stories about how the world was going to end in 1999 and the way it did so was pivotal on the actions of a few really really screwed up people. Fortunately, the people in Pandora Hearts are very normal by their standards.
But somehow the people in Pandora Hearts fail to endear themselves to me, which confused me because I couldn't pin down what I disliked about them.
They all seem inconsistent. It's not that they're unlikeable - in fact, quite the opposite, they all seem to be rather charming - but maybe that's the problem. They're all charming, in mostly similar ways. Oz is mostly cute and smiley but he can be scary or angsty. Alice is mostly scary but she can be angsty or cute. Gilbert is mostly angsty but he can be cute or scary. Break is mostly smiling mysteriously but he can be cute or scary or angsty...........the list goes on.
I know in most series, most characters can hit most of these emotions.....But....the way the characters do it in this series seems extremely wilful.
Alice is a very strong female character and I like her. I would have liked Oz too if he didn't spend so much time being angsty while wearing an ingratiating smile on his face. I'm not sure what it is that irks me about Oz ="= Normally, he's the kind of character I like, but something about him is failing to click. I think this goes back to the shounen-ai comments...sometimes he acts exactly like a girl...up to making really really girly poses and giving pages of emotional wangstage =____= Sometimes he seems really pampered, other times he seems world-savvy, and at even other times he's just plain insecure. I DON'T KNOW WHAT HE'S MEANT TO BE ARR. It just seems he has random issues that make him one thing or another, instead of one well-defined problem, like his father complex.
I would have liked Break too if he didn't remind me so much of Narumi (Gakuen Alice)...and plus he has Naru's voice actor (Athrun =__=). Gilbert too reminds me too much of Riff (Count Cain), except he's extremely uselss.
The relationship between Gilbert and Oz, and similarly with Gilbert and Jack, if handled by someone like Yuki Kaori, would have been such a heartwrenching story...and yet =__=; In the same vein, a lot of its other relationships are built on tragic circumstances - Gilbert and his ostracised brother, Jack and the best friend he was forced to kill, Oz and his estranged father...etc. Somehow, none of them seem to wring the pity they deserve out of the audience.
I think this series has all the elements and all the potential...it just really needs to figure out a way to make them work.
The anime ended the story prematurely at about 30-odd chapters. Like Gakuen Alice, to make up for the plot it couldn't do, it sidetracked into an alternate climax, which seemed to culminate in a showdown between Oz and the father that despises him. Now, fathers that despise their kids is a staple with Yuki Kaori, so I'm perfectly fine with the angst, but at no point was this a focus in the manga ==;;;;;
The one interesting thing about the manga is that its timeline spans 100 years. There are people who re-emerged from the Abyss after 100 years, there were people who were killed back then and their hatred inherited, or people glorified because of what they did. It's really a story that crisscrosses back and forth in time, and linking it all together are characters whose resolves spanned the century.
Shall now go back to my essay on the graduated licensing system. Seriously. How is this medicine? =___=
I haven't actually watched the anime properly except to scan through the last two episodes (*cough cough*) and I probably won't because it doesn't seem to actually end in the anime.
The manga is published in Square Enix's Monthly G Fantasy, which is home to another recent and extremely popular anime, Kuroshitsuji, as well as older titles like E's and Nabari no Ou. This magazine is supposedly "shounen", but a discerning eye will tell you any of the series mentioned above is really shounen-ai dressed up as shounen...or shounen dressed up as shounen-ai, whichever way you'd like to have it =__=;
In that respect it reminds me a lot of Asuka, which published stuff like X/1999 and D.N.Angel and Kyou Kara Maou, many of which are fantasy epics full of interesting fight scenes but also laden with shounen-ai overtones, although these Asuka comics tended to be a lot stronger on the shounen-ai than Monthly G Fantasy.
None of this is really relevant of course, since, depending on the author, shounen-ai overtones can pop up even in the purest shoujo mangas as comic relief or subconsciously because the mangaka used to write doujinshi ==;
Except...except it gets creepy after a while, if the author doesn't take note. Guys starting to act like girls, sit like girls, look like girls, go all emotional wreckage on people like girls...it's...ick. Especially since I find most girls in manga rather...ick.
Pandora Hearts is an interesting manga, if only its plot wasn't so convoluted, which is the first of its problems. Most synopses online start off with something like: on his 15th birthday and coming-of-age ceremony, Oz Versalius got thrown into "the Abyss" for the sin of existing, and in order to escape there, he made an illegal contract with "a Chain" called Alice, also known as the Blood-stained Black Rabbit. In fact, it wouldn't be so confusing if it stopped giving weird names to everything. Even now I still don't know what the Abyss is except it's some dark place with horrible broken toys that people end up if they form an "illegal contract" with "a Chain". And a Chain is supposedly a monster from the Abyss.
What it really seems to be about is a bunch of emotionally screwed up people with crossing loyalties and gaping vulnerabilities, who try to make the world right by their own standards and end up making it even more screwed up than it was before, and now they're trying to fix it except no one really seems to know what is actually right.
Every now and then I like to read manga about emotionally screwed up people because it reminds me of the good ol' days of high school, when all these mangaka *cough* Kaori Yuki *cough* CLAMP wrote stories about how the world was going to end in 1999 and the way it did so was pivotal on the actions of a few really really screwed up people. Fortunately, the people in Pandora Hearts are very normal by their standards.
But somehow the people in Pandora Hearts fail to endear themselves to me, which confused me because I couldn't pin down what I disliked about them.
They all seem inconsistent. It's not that they're unlikeable - in fact, quite the opposite, they all seem to be rather charming - but maybe that's the problem. They're all charming, in mostly similar ways. Oz is mostly cute and smiley but he can be scary or angsty. Alice is mostly scary but she can be angsty or cute. Gilbert is mostly angsty but he can be cute or scary. Break is mostly smiling mysteriously but he can be cute or scary or angsty...........the list goes on.
I know in most series, most characters can hit most of these emotions.....But....the way the characters do it in this series seems extremely wilful.
Alice is a very strong female character and I like her. I would have liked Oz too if he didn't spend so much time being angsty while wearing an ingratiating smile on his face. I'm not sure what it is that irks me about Oz ="= Normally, he's the kind of character I like, but something about him is failing to click. I think this goes back to the shounen-ai comments...sometimes he acts exactly like a girl...up to making really really girly poses and giving pages of emotional wangstage =____= Sometimes he seems really pampered, other times he seems world-savvy, and at even other times he's just plain insecure. I DON'T KNOW WHAT HE'S MEANT TO BE ARR. It just seems he has random issues that make him one thing or another, instead of one well-defined problem, like his father complex.
I would have liked Break too if he didn't remind me so much of Narumi (Gakuen Alice)...and plus he has Naru's voice actor (Athrun =__=). Gilbert too reminds me too much of Riff (Count Cain), except he's extremely uselss.
The relationship between Gilbert and Oz, and similarly with Gilbert and Jack, if handled by someone like Yuki Kaori, would have been such a heartwrenching story...and yet =__=; In the same vein, a lot of its other relationships are built on tragic circumstances - Gilbert and his ostracised brother, Jack and the best friend he was forced to kill, Oz and his estranged father...etc. Somehow, none of them seem to wring the pity they deserve out of the audience.
I think this series has all the elements and all the potential...it just really needs to figure out a way to make them work.
The anime ended the story prematurely at about 30-odd chapters. Like Gakuen Alice, to make up for the plot it couldn't do, it sidetracked into an alternate climax, which seemed to culminate in a showdown between Oz and the father that despises him. Now, fathers that despise their kids is a staple with Yuki Kaori, so I'm perfectly fine with the angst, but at no point was this a focus in the manga ==;;;;;
The one interesting thing about the manga is that its timeline spans 100 years. There are people who re-emerged from the Abyss after 100 years, there were people who were killed back then and their hatred inherited, or people glorified because of what they did. It's really a story that crisscrosses back and forth in time, and linking it all together are characters whose resolves spanned the century.
Shall now go back to my essay on the graduated licensing system. Seriously. How is this medicine? =___=
