Unrealized Cross-Media Fortunes
Nov. 11th, 2024 04:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerTo be brief, I’ve pared time spent with a web browser open well back. To fill that gap, I decided to return to some manga and read it again. Picking up The Promised Neverland, I pushed through twenty volumes and a special follow-up of one-shots also from author Kaiu Shirai and artist Posuka Demizu in four days. This was a considerable acceleration from my usual pace of courteous chapter-sized nibbles.
I did turn to The Promised Neverland for one more reason than it having moved to a shelf position of relative prominence after rearranging a few bookcases to winnow out some titles for consignment to my local library’s book sale. A little while ago, I happened on a message board post asking if anyone else out there only watched anime because manga didn’t appeal to them. The Promised Neverland was specifically invoked as part of the difficulty there. Unimpressive anime adaptations are familiar enough, but that specific series had started off impressing many only for that opening to be followed with a rather diffident overcompression. I suppose I thought to acknowledge my personal good fortune in being able to move from anime to manga.
So far as that goes, though, I might have been surprised an “anime-only” viewpoint existed at all. Impressions are stuck in my mind of past comments from others about manga “obviously” being such a more satisfying experience than anime that the increasing abundance of the original material over here would displace mere adaptations in our collective affections. I’ve fallen into the temptation of supposing the old scandals about retouched manga art were much of what kept me from just focusing on “the uncompromised original with its more distinctive art” to the point of turning away from anime.
After all of that, however, I did get to thinking everyone is different. It’s downright trivial to envision people uninterested in animation and comics alike. It’s easy enough, too, to imagine there might yet remain people out there who take interest in specific works of animation and specific comics but react to “product from Japan” with “that big-eyed stuff? No thanks!” (Of course, that’s not the only objection I can imagine...) I could consider thoughts evoked by the original post about animation offering colour, motion (“manga action sequences that are hard to follow” is a familiar complaint), background music, and voice work (when I read any sort of comic the characters pretty much “speak in my head” using my own voice and that’s it, although that doesn’t bother me all that much). I suppose that in the end, too, I don’t have as much interest as I once had in “novels that continue stories told in visual media,” and I’m not just alluding to “‘light novels’ with awkward translations.”
Now that all of that has been said, I do have to acknowledge how the post that had got my attention hadn’t just been searching for kindred spirits but itself acknowledging difficulties in being stuck with “promotional adaptations” intended to point to different formats with different demands. One tenuous path forward from there is the question of whether streaming is making anime by itself a bit more valuable than when a few thousand pricy DVDs were being sold in Japan, but of course there are questions about making a go of streaming video in general.
As for The Promised Neverland itself, I did start into it again aware of how there’d been a savour of sour grapes to some of the negative reactions to the way the anime adaptation had wound up, insisting the best part of the manga had been the “grade school Great Escape” opening arc turned into the initial adaptation. I was conscious of the way the story changed after that into more standard chase-escape-battle action, and yet the initial change did wind up working for me. After that I kept wondering about the conclusion itself and a certain general feeling of mine that “stories of the fantastic” can get to betraying authorial hands with arbitrary complications and resolutions. Following that general speculation, I did note one late moment where recurring characters were rescued from their latest pinch by a sort of diabolus ex machina, although the story had established the latest special rule at play beforehand and brought that up afterwards. In any case, the repeated “when you have to keep keeping on” moments did register on me, but so too did moments where “virtue” wasn’t just some inevitable byproduct of having been historically oppressed even in a story that makes a point of “systems” being problems. There can seem a danger in some deciding that to be criticized over collective responsibility is to become “oppressed,” too.
I did turn to The Promised Neverland for one more reason than it having moved to a shelf position of relative prominence after rearranging a few bookcases to winnow out some titles for consignment to my local library’s book sale. A little while ago, I happened on a message board post asking if anyone else out there only watched anime because manga didn’t appeal to them. The Promised Neverland was specifically invoked as part of the difficulty there. Unimpressive anime adaptations are familiar enough, but that specific series had started off impressing many only for that opening to be followed with a rather diffident overcompression. I suppose I thought to acknowledge my personal good fortune in being able to move from anime to manga.
So far as that goes, though, I might have been surprised an “anime-only” viewpoint existed at all. Impressions are stuck in my mind of past comments from others about manga “obviously” being such a more satisfying experience than anime that the increasing abundance of the original material over here would displace mere adaptations in our collective affections. I’ve fallen into the temptation of supposing the old scandals about retouched manga art were much of what kept me from just focusing on “the uncompromised original with its more distinctive art” to the point of turning away from anime.
After all of that, however, I did get to thinking everyone is different. It’s downright trivial to envision people uninterested in animation and comics alike. It’s easy enough, too, to imagine there might yet remain people out there who take interest in specific works of animation and specific comics but react to “product from Japan” with “that big-eyed stuff? No thanks!” (Of course, that’s not the only objection I can imagine...) I could consider thoughts evoked by the original post about animation offering colour, motion (“manga action sequences that are hard to follow” is a familiar complaint), background music, and voice work (when I read any sort of comic the characters pretty much “speak in my head” using my own voice and that’s it, although that doesn’t bother me all that much). I suppose that in the end, too, I don’t have as much interest as I once had in “novels that continue stories told in visual media,” and I’m not just alluding to “‘light novels’ with awkward translations.”
Now that all of that has been said, I do have to acknowledge how the post that had got my attention hadn’t just been searching for kindred spirits but itself acknowledging difficulties in being stuck with “promotional adaptations” intended to point to different formats with different demands. One tenuous path forward from there is the question of whether streaming is making anime by itself a bit more valuable than when a few thousand pricy DVDs were being sold in Japan, but of course there are questions about making a go of streaming video in general.
As for The Promised Neverland itself, I did start into it again aware of how there’d been a savour of sour grapes to some of the negative reactions to the way the anime adaptation had wound up, insisting the best part of the manga had been the “grade school Great Escape” opening arc turned into the initial adaptation. I was conscious of the way the story changed after that into more standard chase-escape-battle action, and yet the initial change did wind up working for me. After that I kept wondering about the conclusion itself and a certain general feeling of mine that “stories of the fantastic” can get to betraying authorial hands with arbitrary complications and resolutions. Following that general speculation, I did note one late moment where recurring characters were rescued from their latest pinch by a sort of diabolus ex machina, although the story had established the latest special rule at play beforehand and brought that up afterwards. In any case, the repeated “when you have to keep keeping on” moments did register on me, but so too did moments where “virtue” wasn’t just some inevitable byproduct of having been historically oppressed even in a story that makes a point of “systems” being problems. There can seem a danger in some deciding that to be criticized over collective responsibility is to become “oppressed,” too.