Shaman Warrior, vols. 1-5 (Park Joong-Ki)

[chomiji]

Shaman warriors have the ability to transform their bodies in various ways, making them formidable war machines. As this series opens, a legendary shaman, Yarong, meets his death under circumstances that seem highly suspicious to his servant, the massive fighter Batu. Batu swears to defend his master's child, Yaki, but he soon finds this far more difficult than he expected: shaman warriors are being hunted down and killed, with the circumstances of Yarong's death being twisted to provide an excuse. Batu at last decides he must take desperate measures to ensure that little Yaki survives and becomes able to defend herself.

Thus far, this is playing out like an almost gender-blind shounen/seinen adventure. There are more male characters than female characters (especially in the first volume), but the female characters we've encountered thus far are fighting, doing magic, and adventuring along with the men. These female characters are also generally drawn with reasonable bustlines and amazingly modest clothing. The story includes betrayal, loyalty beyond the grave, a variety of non-romantic attachments (siblings, master-servant, parent-child, team mates, etc.), and complex politics. The artwork is gorgeous, illustration rather than cartoon, along the lines of Inoue's work on Vagabond and Samura's work on Blade of the Immortal (and when we do encounter grotesques, they're all the more unnerving because they're so well-drawn).

Oh, and telophase? Batu the Destroyer traveling with little Yaki is just your kind of thing!

Shaman Warrior, vols. 1-5 (review)

(FYI - that's teenaged Yaki in the icon.)

OK ... wild theories time. The Mr. and I don't think Yarong was Yaki's father. We think Yarong was Yaki's mother.

This may sound like total crack - after all, we have a number of pictures of bare-chested Yarong in vol. 1, and that's a totally masculine-looking torso, very much in the realistic mode: not tapered and bishie-ish, but compactly muscled and slightly stocky. But think about how Yarong has a tiny baby, and Batu keeps urging him to take it easy because "you can't fight anymore. Your body can't take it" and the General who sends Yarong off on his fatal mission apologizes that he had to "inform you of this while your body is still changing," and then later this same General thinks of Yarong with this statement:"I have plucked the most beautiful flower in all Kugai ... ."

I guess only time will tell.

Park gets a little weird with names: there is a character called Genji (female, and supposedly Batu's sister) and another called Aragorn (the tattooed warlord of a clan that's being forced out by the General). Genji is a lot of fun - frankly outspoken, a skilled fighter, and a master of disguise. Aragorn's a pretty good character too, but I keep twitching every time I read that name ... .

Yaki's experiences in the Butcher Camps are all too realistic, except in one area, and I think Park is actually to be commended for not going for the sexual angle in most of what happens to her. I also like how Yatilla gives her a reason to go on and be strong. He's a very promising character, and I hope we'll see more of him.

My only regret thus far is that Yarong was killed off so soon. He was just my sort of character.

Comments

[avierra.livejournal.com]

And I never really thought of myself in a set role -- my big thing was just imagining myself as basically still me, but in the middle of my favorite stories and having the same adventures right along my favorite characters. Mental Mary Suedom, basically. XD

Haha Yes... I watched Labyrinth for the first time in my early 30's, and at the end of the movie I was like "What is wrong with that girl??!! Damn!! Jareth is totally HOT. I sure as hell wouldn't throw that away." But perhaps this is why we write fanfic. ;D

I like the dresses and stuff of the 30's and 40's, the elegant tailoring and details. I like watching those Hercule Poirot Mystery Theatre thingies simply because of the clothes. And also a huge word to the Chinese and Japanese clothes.

[chomiji]

She was too young to appreciate Jareth. She was about 15. She was frightened by the sexiness.

I was scared of overt sexuality at that age too. I knew you could get yourself in trouble that way, and I also was sure I didn't know how to act in that situation.

[avierra.livejournal.com]

That's a good point about her being frightened. At 15, I had just met my future husband (we had a class together), and my entire store of "knowledge" of sex and romance came from Harlequin paperbacks (I mean, I knew that Tab A fit in Slot B, but apart from that, not much else). So in all likelihood, were I Sara, I probably would have reacted in much the same way -- deer in headlights. My 33-year old self wouldn't have, though :). (Of course, I think DB was all of 35 in that movie, so.) I guess what was sort of dissonant to me though is that she became so very strong throughout the movie, and so decisive, and then at the end she reacted the way she did, but maybe that's the point, that while she grew up and made huge strides towards adulthood during the course of the move, she wasn't there yet.

I suspect that is why there is so much fanfiction with Sara and Jareth after she has grown up a bit. She was too young for him, but she was strongly attracted to him too, I think (is it possible not to be strongly attracted to Jareth?!). She just didn't know what to do with it other than to not deal with it at all.

[chomiji]

> hugs! <

I didn't start thinking about actually wanting physical intimacy until about my senior year of high school, and then it was in a wistful, angry way: the boy I liked best only thought of me as a friend. I remember spending an afternoon with him at a park after school, and he was fiddling around, making something (he was good with his hands, and I think I still have a willow whistle he made me), and I had some widget or other that he was able to use as a tool, and he exclaimed "You're beautiful!" - but I knew he just meant it because I had what he needed just then, and I cried when I got home.

In college, I sort of went from 0 to 60 in short order, and then didn't want to see the guy again, ever, because I realized that I didn't really like him all that much. It was my love vs. integrity thing all over again. If Gojyo were the 19-yr-old me, he would have run away from Banri and then made himself miserable by taking up someone who really needed him because he or she was crippled or something, not because they really loved him - but at least they needed him.

[chomiji]

Well, I have had a marriage long enough to reassure me somewhat on that score ... not to say that the possibility of abandonment is not vivid in my mind every time we have a serious argument (which is, thank God, not too often, though we huff and fuss at each other pretty frequently). My inner child still doesn't feel wanted enough (thanks, Mom).

And I have no intention of leaving you. I realize it's not the same, but I think it needs saying. I've had relationships with my few girlfriends peter out more or less mutually (we started having too little in common after changes in job/school situations ... I think if e-mail had been more common then and online communities had existed, it might not have happened that way), and the RPG f-f couple that I was close to cut me off when I got overly clingy after my father's death (on the one hand I don't blame them, but on the other, I do).

Yes ... I guess Saizo's devotion is so goofy so much of the time that I can't think of him in romantic terms, but of course your reaction to him in the anime was quite different. Certainly in the silly Q&A profile she had of him at the end of one of the eearly volumes, he sounded like sexual jealousy could be a part of his personality ... .

(And now of course I'm dying to ask you whether you've had a chance to read any more SDK.)

[chomiji]

> hugs! <   You are not a doormat. You are my lovely smilla lady.

Well, maybe online wouldn't have made a difference ... honestly, the situation with C&J was probably rather unhealthy for all of us ... there were some crush/sexual undercurrents to the whole thing that were making it very awkward. (More details would have to be in a more private venue.)

Good stuff in some of those SDK volumes ... a really key plot point occurs in vol. 12, which will drive the next 10 or so volumes, and in 13, you get to see little Sasuke really strut his stuff, and find out the identity of another of the 4 Emperors. If you've read vol. 11, then you've read Yuki's 2-part gaiden "Dragon of the Blue Sky" - how did you like it? Did you expect anything of that sort in his history?

[chomiji]

Yeah, but if she was 15, and he was 35, he was old enough to be her father ... nevermind that I'd think of him (him-back-then) as a toothsome young thing now! And it's scary to think of someone that much older (and by extension, more powerful) looking at you with who-knows-what expectations!

I didn't have serious romantic thoughts even about boys my own age until two years later than that, although I was already toying with the idea through slashy stuff (one of my favorite books at that age was Mary Renault's The Persian Boy).

I'm sure she was attracted - it was her own reactions that were frightening her, as much as anything. People don't grow up all across the board at once - someone could be quite mature about doing chores and homework, and totally naive about romance/sex.

[chomiji]

Well, The Persian Boy is special even among Renault's Greek historical fiction books because of its focus and first-person narration. A couple of reviewers have called it a really effective portrait of a gay teenager in love. And because Bagoas is not an ambitious person himself - his past life his entirely closed to him, and so he only lives for Alexander - much more time is spent on the relationship stuff than is the case in many of her books. Of course, it was written as a mainstream book in the 1960s, so it's pretty vanilla in anything regarding physical descriptions of romantic encounters ... as my sister once complained, "I wish she'd say a little more about what exactly they're doing with each other!"

[chomiji]

Yes, but when you're a teenaged girl who's just discovered that this sort of relationship is possible at all, you don't have much of a clue as to what to put in with your imagination!

[chomiji]

I just didn't think much of myself when I was little or an adolescent - being someone else seemed preferable.

My early girl crushes - I think I mentioned this - were a whole series of brown-short-haired wiry tomboyish girls (actually, I think Marian "the girl with the dogs" in The Horse Without a Head was blonde, but she fit in every other way): Goth of Karres, Dido Twite in Joan Aiken's AU England historical fantasies, Petrova Fossil in Ballet Shoes (she wanted to be a mechanic or a pilot), and Scout Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. You'll notice that none of them were the fancy-dress type ... .

;-)

So I guess it's not too surprising that later on, I admired Annie Lennox' boyish gender-bending look.

[chomiji]

We really make a sort of bizarre Mutt-and-Jeff, not-quite-butch--not-really-femme duo, don't we? It confounds so many of the expectations ... my being the more maternal one, for example.

I remember Mara, vaguely. I ought to see whether the Young Lady would cough up our copies of Sally Watson's historical novels for you to borrow. I'm not sure why I didn't glom onto the heroines of those more ... I recall liking Kelpie in Witch of the Glens, and she has similar moments to Mara's when she's temporarily taken into a wealthy household, but I didn't secretly wish I were her, the way I did with the gamine brigade.

[chomiji]

What, you mean there are official names for these stereotypes? Where can I educate myself about this?

XD

The Watsons are fun - she has a taste for gentle snark that's enjoyable. The books are sometimes anvil-y - Jade, in particular, gets up on a soap box about women's rights and roles, and equality for non-white races. But it has pirates! Slightly sanitized pirates (no frigging in the rigging), but pirates, nonetheless.

I sometimes think hurt/comfort goes farther back than that for most of us - all too often, being hurt or sick was probably the only way most of us got attention as kids.

[chomiji]

Heh, so if I'd swung the other way entirely I'd be a Granola Lesbian. That figures - the neighborhood is full of them (although the ones across the street with the two little boys moved to Bethesda last year). I'm really not seriously obsessed with the health food stuff enough to be a good one, though.

I never seem to get the kind of fussing over in person that I want, but online seems to be working out fairly well for giving me a goodly portion of what I need ... . I think my mother got overwhelmed by her emotions about my neediness when I was sick or hurt - I've felt it myself with Caroline sometimes - so I didn't get what I wanted and was too self-denigrating to think of demanding it.

The first time I remember coming across hurt/comfort was during the Batman movie of my childhood: Robin takes a bullet in the foot and Batman has to take it out ... my first slashy moment! (Although I didn't realize it until 20 years or more later.) There's also a lovely sequence in Rumer Godden's children's book The Diddakoi, which is about a young Romany orphan and how she eventually finds a - somewhat unconventional - family, where seven-year-old Kizzy is convalescing from pneumonia, and the description of what enticing little bits of food she's given, and the coal fire in the old nursery where she's staying, and how the kind old Admiral whose house it is comes to visit her every morning ... .

[chomiji]

Hee, I should try it again. I may have fallen victim to the bane of any poll - selecting the answers I thought I ought to select. Certainly the definitions that I just found online for those two seem much more the thing, you're quite right.

I think you have rec'ced the Holmes slash thing, but I never read much of the originals ... my bias against 19th-century lit coming out again. I was such a fraud as an English major.