Manga Thoughts: They Were 11!
Aug. 8th, 2025 06:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerWith the continued impression manga releases from Denpa keep missing release date after release date before they’re available for purchase at last, there was some element of “trying to help the company” in my mind when I ordered a copy of They Were 11! When that manga arrived, though, I was a bit impressed by its oversized pages and production values, including not just colour plates at the front but “semi-coloured” pages within.
I’d at least been aware of the title for some time, in part because I knew it had been adapted into an anime (if an anime I haven’t seen). With my manga-buying habits more or less amounting to “new releases,” another chance to see something older and perhaps even “formative” was welcome. At the same time, as I settled into a story about students in a distant future boarding a spaceship for a final exam only to discover there’s one more person on board than they’d expected, I might have been dwelling on the art with a thought or two about “1970s live-action science fiction” (there’s a note in the manga that establishes it preceded the original Star Wars, anyway) and the art associated with “1970s written science fiction.” (Psychic powers got involved in the story, and that can get me thinking once again of how that seemed to drop out of written science fiction once “everyone else” appeared to take the idea for granted.) I noted a certain amount of diverse appearances among the students (even if that risks lapsing into lazy assumptions about “Japanese science fiction”), but did wonder if somewhat later stories would have had more female characters mixed in. Then, things got to the revelation that one of the students, who’d got worked up every time someone else supposed them to be a woman, was of indeterminate gender like every other youth in their society and was hoping to pass the test and earn treatments to become a man. It was certainly intriguing, and yet, at the real risk of making comments I’m not qualified to and don’t realise the genuine issues with, I couldn’t help but wonder if there was a contrast between “men can do things; women can... get married” and “you think I’m going through all of this trouble out of anything other than innermost conviction?”
It also got my attention how the story wrapped up in a positive way part of the way through the volume, to be followed by a sequel set more on distant planets. I had come to think part of the way through the original story the eleven characters weren’t all getting the same attention; who featured in the sequel was another suggestion of that. Finishing the manga did leave me aware I’m not very familiar with other works by Moto Hagio (which might suggest there are problems in sliding into assumptions about how connected she was to “science fiction.”) I did search out my old copies of another science fiction manga of about the same vintage (also adapted into an anime I haven’t seen), To Terra, but noted they were by Keiko Takemiya.
I’d at least been aware of the title for some time, in part because I knew it had been adapted into an anime (if an anime I haven’t seen). With my manga-buying habits more or less amounting to “new releases,” another chance to see something older and perhaps even “formative” was welcome. At the same time, as I settled into a story about students in a distant future boarding a spaceship for a final exam only to discover there’s one more person on board than they’d expected, I might have been dwelling on the art with a thought or two about “1970s live-action science fiction” (there’s a note in the manga that establishes it preceded the original Star Wars, anyway) and the art associated with “1970s written science fiction.” (Psychic powers got involved in the story, and that can get me thinking once again of how that seemed to drop out of written science fiction once “everyone else” appeared to take the idea for granted.) I noted a certain amount of diverse appearances among the students (even if that risks lapsing into lazy assumptions about “Japanese science fiction”), but did wonder if somewhat later stories would have had more female characters mixed in. Then, things got to the revelation that one of the students, who’d got worked up every time someone else supposed them to be a woman, was of indeterminate gender like every other youth in their society and was hoping to pass the test and earn treatments to become a man. It was certainly intriguing, and yet, at the real risk of making comments I’m not qualified to and don’t realise the genuine issues with, I couldn’t help but wonder if there was a contrast between “men can do things; women can... get married” and “you think I’m going through all of this trouble out of anything other than innermost conviction?”
It also got my attention how the story wrapped up in a positive way part of the way through the volume, to be followed by a sequel set more on distant planets. I had come to think part of the way through the original story the eleven characters weren’t all getting the same attention; who featured in the sequel was another suggestion of that. Finishing the manga did leave me aware I’m not very familiar with other works by Moto Hagio (which might suggest there are problems in sliding into assumptions about how connected she was to “science fiction.”) I did search out my old copies of another science fiction manga of about the same vintage (also adapted into an anime I haven’t seen), To Terra, but noted they were by Keiko Takemiya.