What I Need (from Manga and Other Fiction)

[chomiji]

A few weeks back, I bought Ouran High School Host Club vol. 10 and the first few volumes of The Wallflower. As usual, Ouran filled me with glee and warm fuzzies, but Wallflower soon left me cold (I tried - I read through vol. 5). And I began to wonder why. They're both screwball high school romantic comedies, involving an odd girl (boyish, downright Haruhi in Ouran, über-goth Sunako in Wallflower) who ends up interacting with a group of guys (the manga male harem trope) because she has to: Haruhi has to pay the Host Club back for the pricey antique vase she broke; Sunako's aunt is letting the guys stay rent-free at her house if they make Sunako into a "lady."

I think I've decided that the key is the way each girl interacts with her harem, and the way the boys interact with each other. Sunako is an object to the guys, at least at first (and seemed to be staying that way for most of them, even at vol. 5) - she's the Project. And she doesn't feel any more warmly toward them: they're irritants, antithetical to what she enjoys. She lumps them all together as "Creatures of Light." Haruhi, on the other hand, has a variety of interactions with the boys in the Host Club: Tamaki has a crush he tries to deny, Kyoya sees her as a club asset, the twins find her amusing (at first), Hunny simply likes her, and Mori feels protective toward her. In fact, they all make attempts, at various times, to take care of her. And she soon begins to treat them all more or less as a pack of older brothers: often annoying, sometimes amusing, dependable in a pinch, and worthy of affection.

Similarly, the interactions among the guys themselves differs sharply in both series. The guys in Wallflower don't seem to care about each other beyond the sort of facile comrades-in-arms loyalty that classmates tend to have toward each other, whether they actually like each other or not. The guys in Ouran, on the other hand, are at the very least team mates, and often friends. They know each other's family problems, and even those that are too cool to express concern about each other (Kyoya, the twins) show by their actions that they care. Even the fact that they often torment each other is part of this: they often act like brothers to each other, as well as to Haruhi.

So - close camaraderie between the principals is very important to my enjoyment of a story. And I began to wonder what other aspects of a story are really important to me. I think I've come up with four really important areas: camaraderie, emotional engagement, ideas, and humor. Not every story needs to have all four, but the more bases are covered, the better. And humor by itself is just not enough.

So, here's the list. And I'm going to use examples from a wide range of fiction and manga.

Camaraderie: It can be siblings (Scout and Jem in To Kill a Mockingbird), buddies (Ryo and Dee in Fake; Goth and the Captain in The Witches of Karres), a circle of friends (the guys in Ouran), comrades-in-arms (Kyo's band of companions in Samurai Deeper Kyo; the 11th Division in Bleach), mentor and pupil (Shoka and Taizu in The Paladin), or any combination thereof (the Sanzo ikkou in Saiyuki, for example, fall into several categories). Because this is a big feature of shounen manga, I tend to like this type of series. Romance could be involved, but usually isn't.

Emotional Engagement: I like characters who care. They must have passion. I don't necessarily mean romance, now. They can care about Being The Best (Onime-no-Kyo of SDK and dozens of other shounen heroes), about overthrowing the current regime (Sanada Yukimura in SDK, Taizu in Paladin), about finding out what's going on (Gingko in Mushishi, Shadow in American Gods, Inspector Pibble in One Foot in the Grave), about their friends (Yukimura again; the Host Club boys in Ouran; the Sanzo ikkou), about their families (Isshin in Bleach; Atticus in Mockingbird), about justice and goodness and freedom (Atticus again; the Captain in Karres), and so on. I don't have any use for the cool-headed and completely cynical, or the nihilistic.

Ideas: Tell me something interesting! This can cover plot twists, weird science, convoluted family trees, strange politics, unusual creatures, world building, mythology, and so on. I'd include beautiful descriptions under this as well. If a book has lots of this and not so much on the emotional front, I might describe it as "an affair of the head, not the heart." Examples are Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service and American Gods.

Humor: Make me smile - or laugh out loud. This can be wry and dry (Mockingbird, Peter Dickinson's mysteries), black (Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service), slapstick (Bleach), snarky (Saiyuki), or whatever. But humor's the weakest thing on this list: it's rare that humor alone is enough to carry a story for me.

So - there we have it. Wallflower fails for me because as far as I can tell, humor is the only thing it has going for me. (OK, Sunako cares about her gothy stuff. But no one else much cares about anything.)

Now, it's quite possible for a story to have all of this and still fail for me. It may have negative factors that the positives can't overcome. I don't think I'm going to try to get into a negative factors list, though. Ugh. With the presidential campaign going on, there's already enough negativity ... .

So ... talk to me about this. Are these big factors for you, too? If you've been reading my reviews, do you think I've left anything out? Do you have different factors that are important for you?

 

Comments

[chomiji]

But these guidelines go for any genre! They have nothing to do with concepts like male vs. female characters, happy vs. sad endings, and so on. I was hoping I'd made that point by using things as disparate as To Kill a Mockingbird and SDK as examples.

Writing style is something I didn't cover in this either, any more than manga art quality. I have a feeling that again, it's not a make-or-break issue for me, even though I can appreciate it. For example, Patricia McKillip is a superb stylist - she's written some of the most beautiful fictional prose I've ever encountered - but I haven't been in love with any of her books since the Riddlemaster trilogy finished up. She left behind the passion and camraderie of those books and started going for mystery and beauty exclusively, and I just can't love any of her later books. Just. Can't.

That's an interesting point, about comics. I haven't been liking U.S. comics in general, and JT (our GM, who loaned me his precious Sandman issues when I was first reading them) has had plenty of them around for me to check out, so it's not like I haven't seen a bunch of different ones. Sandman has been the onl thing I liked (well, that and the introductory Books of Magic.) I don't know what it is about the art I find off-putting. It may be something as basic as childhood trauma - my over-active imagination did me a disservice at about the age of 10 with a Green Lantern story arc involving a villain who had released a killer virus. I was terrified. My father let me know that he was very displeased with the comic book for scaring his kid, and I have a vivid memory of him tearing it up and stuffing it into the kitchen garbage with the gronky eggshells and coffee grounds.

[chomiji]

I love LeGuin as an essayist. I keep thinking I should get one of her "on writing"-types of books. Yes, she was targeting Katherine Kurtz' "Deryni" series in the example that she used for the "it quacks like a political thriller" section of that essay, and she was quite right. What's interesting is that Peter Dickinson - who is also a mystery writer, after all - is one of the best stylists I know of - in fantasy, too! He definitely has a more "mythical" style that he uses in his fantasy, though.

We had our D&D game this weekend, and I mentioned the business about me and not liking comments to Beth & Mike, who are our most senior players. Mike said "Fables" got him back into reading comics as an adult, but Beth cautioned that if I didn't hit the start of a story arc, I'd probably have a tough time. On the other hand, they're both more cerebral than I am ... that entire crew is a bunch of INTx types (maybe one of two ISTx types).

[chomiji]

It'd be interesting to see what you make of Martha Wells' tone in her gaslight/early 20th-tech fantasies, because in the Fall of Ile Rien series, you have the story running back and forth between a tech society (albeit an early one) and a more traditional fantasy setting.

[chomiji]

Well, you have to read the sequels! There's a character in there who might have been written for you! That's her on the cover of Lirael, next to our pale-skinned brunette heroine ... .

They are also quite good.

[chomiji]

I'm so glad! Yes, Sabriel was a great book, but the character isn't so approachable. There is much coolness in Lirael as well, with the whole library business. And the Disreputable Dog is one of the greatest fantasy characters - along with Mogget, for whom I have a certain liking as well!

I've got to warn you, though, that Lirael doesn't really end so much as flow into Abhorsen ... .