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Some things I've been reading lately:
Peony Pavilion by XIA Da - I'm not quite sure what to make of this. For one, it's not manga, but manhua from the PRC, apparently published in Hunan. For another, they aren't stories per se -- they are color illustrations of romantic situations inspired by various classic Chinese poems. As in drop-dead GORGEOUS illustrations, full of lush sensuality. I will not look at folkloric depictions of peony spirits the same way again. Some chapters have no text beyond the poem itself, line by line, plus commentary by the artist at the end. Others add dialog to suggest a story (sometimes apparently based in folklore?) that the poem inspired in the artist. The poems are, I think, mostly from the Song dynasty plus a little T'ang, but I may have misplaced some. Strongly recommended. One volume complete, unlicensed, scans are only halfway through. Dammit.
Shitsurakuen ("Paradise Lost") by Tôru Naomura - Disturbing manga. For a one-line summary, it's like Mx0 crossed with Revolutionary Girl Utena, with a side-order of The Handmaid's Tale. The Mx0 part: a plucky bad-ass normal manages to enter an academy of magic users (here dressed up with virtual reality handwaving) and performs far better than they ought to be able to, given how the rules are stacked against them. The Utena part: not only is our heroine out to become a knight who rescues the princess, but the duelist/bride dynamic is extended to the entire male/female student body, complete with weapons drawn from the bodies of the female students. The Handmaid's Tale part: the rosebride role is used by the school administration to systematically reduce all female students to objects, each owned and controlled by a male student and subject to ugly abuse.
Fortunately, we've got our quixotic heroine, who sets out to set things right, even if she has to take every other girl in the school under her protection by winning each of them, one duel at a time. She soon has an ever-growingharem stable of girls attached to her (cue increasing les yay) and participates on both sides of several hurt/comfort scenes. And, of course, the absurdly powerful student council stands in her way.
Like I said -- disturbing. Squicky nightmare fuel. The system is painted as not merely unjust but completely fucked up, and most males not merely pervs but right bastards. I think the mangaka is aware of how pervasively bad things are, but it's not completely clear. We have a strong heroine, but the cards are ... stacked against her, to reuse the metaphor. And she's not the best judge of character, or of strategy.
I can't say I recommend this. Except maybe with the disclaimers above. Ongoing series, unlicensed, scans current.
Romance of the Three Kingdoms - Not that I'm done yet, but I'm in the home stretch (chapter 100 of 120). I was stalled for a while after Liu Bei's death -- not so much because of the death itself, which I knew from the novel's scope had to happen, but from just how broken things are at that point. We knew from the oath made in chapter one that the Peach Garden Brotherhood would have trouble surviving the first death of any member, but still. Guan dies out badly, Zhang Fei goes out worse, and Liu Bei gets so unhinged he nearly breaks his kingdom. But it turns out that a few chapters after my stall, Zhuge Liang gets entertainingly Mary Tsu for a while -- but things are still clearly going downhill. Maybe it's time to check out The Ravages of Time, a Taiwanese manhua retelling the Three Kingdoms story from the point of view of the Sima clan, the ultimate winners. Can anyone report on it?
Warrior and Witch by Marie Brennan - Really one story split into two volumes -- though at least the first does come to a good pause, without a cliffhanger. First novels, and it kinda shows. The story flows smoothly, but there's some structural oddities, partly brought about by the division but also by the central conceit, and the prose is flat. More problematic, though, is that the characters intermittently sound and act like role-playing characters written down than living people. But for the sort of person who likes a high fantasy adventure where magic A is magic A, this should fit their tastes quite nicely.
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin - A first novel, but it does not show -- I am astonished at how tight this is, with its somewhat anachronistic structure plotted by a knowingly unreliable narrator (she knows she's losing pieces of herself and is telling the story to fix as much of her memories as possible). Tight, vivid, and astonishing. It's hard to talk about it without spoiling it, but here's a try: In the world (as in the globe) of the titular kingdoms, one kingdom rules the others through the control a handful of gods (who were bound by the Light, after a civil war in heaven). The story starts with the dying ruler of all calling in our protagonist, Yiene, a previously unacknowledged granddaughter as a third potential heir. And no, this is an offer she can't refuse. Unsurprisingly given the nature of absolute power, the plotting around the throne is dense and high-stakes, and to have a ghost of a chance, she forms an alliance with some of the bound gods on the promise of freedom if she wins. True to the genre, the emotional cost of this is even higher than the political -- and we're off into spoiler territory. But I will say, the dismount is nailed solid -- and while it's the start of a trilogy, they are apparently of disconnected stories, as this installment wraps up completely. Strongly recommended, but possibly only to readers who already read fantasy of some stripe or another.
Also, not yet read but at least acquired, the first English volume of Mitsuru Adachi's Cross Game, what's I sometimes natter on about here -- an omnibus of the first three Japanese volumes. Which I suspect was a canny decision on Viz's part, as it does take about that long for the direction of the main story to get established.
---L.
Peony Pavilion by XIA Da - I'm not quite sure what to make of this. For one, it's not manga, but manhua from the PRC, apparently published in Hunan. For another, they aren't stories per se -- they are color illustrations of romantic situations inspired by various classic Chinese poems. As in drop-dead GORGEOUS illustrations, full of lush sensuality. I will not look at folkloric depictions of peony spirits the same way again. Some chapters have no text beyond the poem itself, line by line, plus commentary by the artist at the end. Others add dialog to suggest a story (sometimes apparently based in folklore?) that the poem inspired in the artist. The poems are, I think, mostly from the Song dynasty plus a little T'ang, but I may have misplaced some. Strongly recommended. One volume complete, unlicensed, scans are only halfway through. Dammit.
Shitsurakuen ("Paradise Lost") by Tôru Naomura - Disturbing manga. For a one-line summary, it's like Mx0 crossed with Revolutionary Girl Utena, with a side-order of The Handmaid's Tale. The Mx0 part: a plucky bad-ass normal manages to enter an academy of magic users (here dressed up with virtual reality handwaving) and performs far better than they ought to be able to, given how the rules are stacked against them. The Utena part: not only is our heroine out to become a knight who rescues the princess, but the duelist/bride dynamic is extended to the entire male/female student body, complete with weapons drawn from the bodies of the female students. The Handmaid's Tale part: the rosebride role is used by the school administration to systematically reduce all female students to objects, each owned and controlled by a male student and subject to ugly abuse.
Fortunately, we've got our quixotic heroine, who sets out to set things right, even if she has to take every other girl in the school under her protection by winning each of them, one duel at a time. She soon has an ever-growing
Like I said -- disturbing. Squicky nightmare fuel. The system is painted as not merely unjust but completely fucked up, and most males not merely pervs but right bastards. I think the mangaka is aware of how pervasively bad things are, but it's not completely clear. We have a strong heroine, but the cards are ... stacked against her, to reuse the metaphor. And she's not the best judge of character, or of strategy.
I can't say I recommend this. Except maybe with the disclaimers above. Ongoing series, unlicensed, scans current.
Romance of the Three Kingdoms - Not that I'm done yet, but I'm in the home stretch (chapter 100 of 120). I was stalled for a while after Liu Bei's death -- not so much because of the death itself, which I knew from the novel's scope had to happen, but from just how broken things are at that point. We knew from the oath made in chapter one that the Peach Garden Brotherhood would have trouble surviving the first death of any member, but still. Guan dies out badly, Zhang Fei goes out worse, and Liu Bei gets so unhinged he nearly breaks his kingdom. But it turns out that a few chapters after my stall, Zhuge Liang gets entertainingly Mary Tsu for a while -- but things are still clearly going downhill. Maybe it's time to check out The Ravages of Time, a Taiwanese manhua retelling the Three Kingdoms story from the point of view of the Sima clan, the ultimate winners. Can anyone report on it?
Warrior and Witch by Marie Brennan - Really one story split into two volumes -- though at least the first does come to a good pause, without a cliffhanger. First novels, and it kinda shows. The story flows smoothly, but there's some structural oddities, partly brought about by the division but also by the central conceit, and the prose is flat. More problematic, though, is that the characters intermittently sound and act like role-playing characters written down than living people. But for the sort of person who likes a high fantasy adventure where magic A is magic A, this should fit their tastes quite nicely.
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin - A first novel, but it does not show -- I am astonished at how tight this is, with its somewhat anachronistic structure plotted by a knowingly unreliable narrator (she knows she's losing pieces of herself and is telling the story to fix as much of her memories as possible). Tight, vivid, and astonishing. It's hard to talk about it without spoiling it, but here's a try: In the world (as in the globe) of the titular kingdoms, one kingdom rules the others through the control a handful of gods (who were bound by the Light, after a civil war in heaven). The story starts with the dying ruler of all calling in our protagonist, Yiene, a previously unacknowledged granddaughter as a third potential heir. And no, this is an offer she can't refuse. Unsurprisingly given the nature of absolute power, the plotting around the throne is dense and high-stakes, and to have a ghost of a chance, she forms an alliance with some of the bound gods on the promise of freedom if she wins. True to the genre, the emotional cost of this is even higher than the political -- and we're off into spoiler territory. But I will say, the dismount is nailed solid -- and while it's the start of a trilogy, they are apparently of disconnected stories, as this installment wraps up completely. Strongly recommended, but possibly only to readers who already read fantasy of some stripe or another.
Also, not yet read but at least acquired, the first English volume of Mitsuru Adachi's Cross Game, what's I sometimes natter on about here -- an omnibus of the first three Japanese volumes. Which I suspect was a canny decision on Viz's part, as it does take about that long for the direction of the main story to get established.
---L.