Red River: An Unexpected Bend
Feb. 19th, 2026 06:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerAlternating between the “volumes” of Red River still marked out in the thicker omnibus re-releases and volumes of other manga, I made it through what’s been republished so far of the “transported back to the ancient Middle East” story. There was just a bit of a temptation to say something about what I’d read, but I let it slide away.
Then, not that long afterwards I happened to see an announcement the manga would receive an anime adaptation at last. While it’s taken me a little while to find the time to set my reactions down, they were intrigued and amused. Even if the re-release was explained by the possibility of Viz knowing about the adaptation in advance through its Japanese connections, that adaptation at least stands in certain contrast to the potential risk of “musing about the way things used to be” turning into “lamenting the passing of the good old days.”
Part of what had interested me about Red River as I ran out of it was the feeling it had gone beyond “constraining how far the narrative goes for the sake of letting the obvious conclusion arrive in a hurry should reader interest flag during the initial serialization.” That, though, does leave me a bit conscious of current complaints about anime series not getting a lot of episodes to work with these days. Operating in general in the mode of “only reading manga after I’ve seen the potentially lessened anime adaptation, and should I have read the manga first...” does have me thinking at most I’ll “wait and see what others think.” One other thing that got my attention while reading the manga, anyway, was my link to my initial post on Bluesky being noticed by someone claiming they were going to translate the manga themselves and fix all the problems identified with the “localization.” There, though, I have to admit I’ve noticed at least two panels in the manga that didn’t look to have had white-out applied out of fear of pressure groups complaining. There were different credits marked as “original” and “omnibus”; of course, for all I know things are only less watered down now than in “the bad old days.”
Then, not that long afterwards I happened to see an announcement the manga would receive an anime adaptation at last. While it’s taken me a little while to find the time to set my reactions down, they were intrigued and amused. Even if the re-release was explained by the possibility of Viz knowing about the adaptation in advance through its Japanese connections, that adaptation at least stands in certain contrast to the potential risk of “musing about the way things used to be” turning into “lamenting the passing of the good old days.”
Part of what had interested me about Red River as I ran out of it was the feeling it had gone beyond “constraining how far the narrative goes for the sake of letting the obvious conclusion arrive in a hurry should reader interest flag during the initial serialization.” That, though, does leave me a bit conscious of current complaints about anime series not getting a lot of episodes to work with these days. Operating in general in the mode of “only reading manga after I’ve seen the potentially lessened anime adaptation, and should I have read the manga first...” does have me thinking at most I’ll “wait and see what others think.” One other thing that got my attention while reading the manga, anyway, was my link to my initial post on Bluesky being noticed by someone claiming they were going to translate the manga themselves and fix all the problems identified with the “localization.” There, though, I have to admit I’ve noticed at least two panels in the manga that didn’t look to have had white-out applied out of fear of pressure groups complaining. There were different credits marked as “original” and “omnibus”; of course, for all I know things are only less watered down now than in “the bad old days.”