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

[chomiji]

Crap, I wrote a whole post here about things I used to play, with Barbies and otherwise, and then got a Post Too Large when I tried to post it. Never seen that error before ... and then my modem blew up for a moment. OK, I'll explain what I did with dolls - treat 'em as action figures, basically - some other time.

[chomiji]

Well, when you make the Barbies ride the Breyer horses, their hips eventually dislocate.

:-(

I had pretty much finished with the Barbies when I encountered LotR! (You read it earlier than I did.)

[chomiji]

My father apparently made a valiant effort to teach me to read at 4, which I deflected with the statement "I'll learn to do that when I go to school, Daddy."

I have no idea what I would have made of those books at that age! The first things I really remember reading were at about age 8, and they were all juveniles: Farley Mowatt's Owls in the Family, Ruthven Todd's "Spacecat" books, Esther Averill's books about Jenny Linski, the little black cat. The first fantasy I remember reading - because my wonderful 4th grade teacher, Mrs. Schurman, read them to us aloud - were Edward Eager's marvellous 1950s "low" (i.e., set in our world) fantasies: Half Magic and its siblings (pretty good write-up here). I read The Hobbit the next year, and LotR, The Once and Future King,, and The Witches of Karres at 11 - and the rest, as they say, is history.

[chomiji]

My father read old school SF, but my first intro to the stuff (aside from the aforementioned Space Cat books) was the excellent anthology Tomorrow's Children, which was in my grade school library. It had the abbreviated version of i>Witches of Karres, a Zenna Henderson "People" story, and things by a number of the great Golden Age writers, like Asimov, Silverberg, Leiber, and Simak.

My teens were really the time that I read the most children's fantasy. Among the great things that came out during that time (the 1970s) were The Riddle-Master of Hed, The Dark Is Rising, and The Tombs of Atuan.

Did you ever go in for the classic 9-12 yr old stuff, like Linnets and Valerians and (much earlier) E. Nesbit?

[chomiji]

I'll have to see about getting a one-volume of the Riddlemaster from ABE or somewhere, so I can lend it to people. Currently I have 3 very battered paperbacks and one or two of them in ex-library hardbacks.

Riddlemaster is very different from her later stuff. It's much more character-oriented and less self-consciously beautiful in the writing. It also has the angst in a way her later books don't.

Every once in a while I try to re-read the Foundation series, but aside from that, I'm not real big on most of the classics either. However, I make an exception for Simak's Waystation. Its science hasn't aged gracefully, for the most part (although he does have a smashing description of what's essentially a virtual reality hunting game ... ), and it's very retro in its treatment of women and the disabled, but I still find it stunningly sad and beautiful.

[chomiji]

Way Station is about the human keeper of a secret alien outpost on Earth - basically, one stop along a network of intersystem transporter stops. The man, Enoch Wallace, was born in the 19th century - he's a Civil War vet - but one of the benefits of his job is that he doesn't age while he's insider the station, which is located in the backwoods of the eastern central U.S. The primitive nature of communications and the remoteness of his location have kept his secret until the book's now. But modern times and technology are encroaching on Wallace and the way station, and things come to a head just as the fallout from a galactic crime hits as well.

It's mainly a meditation on what it means to be human - and what it means to be something wider, to be one of many intelligent species. There's a decent review of it here, which points out that the story also has themes of belonging vs. being an outsider.

[chomiji]

Oooh, sorry to add to the book pile!

(Not really ... but you know, you could probably borrow some of these from me.)