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Manga reviews: Bunny Drop 9, Library Wars 10
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yuletide nominations are currently in progress and I plan to request Bunny Drop fic this year, I thought it might be a good time to discuss my feelings on Bunny Drop's controversial ending. Also, some unadulterated squee on Library Wars, which just gets more awesome with each volume--the current one hits one of my narrative kinks with its parent/child confrontations and misunderstandings.
Bunny Drop: It started off as a sweet and moving story about an adoptive father and child. The series starts off with Daikichi, a 30-year-old salaryman, attending his grandfather's funeral, and much to his (and the rest of the family's) shock, he discovers that his widowed grandfather has left behind a six-year-old illegitimate daughter, Rin. No one knows who (or where) the mother is, and none of the relatives want to take in Rin, and they get into a loud argument over which one of them should be burdened with her care. Disgusted by their callousness, and feeling compassion for Rin, Daikichi impulsively declares that he'll take care of her if they won't. He soon finds himself in over his head, scrambling to enroll her in day care and school, and trying to fit caring for her into his busy work schedule, not to mention that he has no experience taking care of children. But as overwhelmed as he gets, Daikichi never considers going back on his promise, and does his best as a foster parent, even transferring to a less demanding position at work so that he can look after Rin properly. The two of them soon form a close bond, and Daikichi gets some parenting advice from a coworker, and from attractive single mom Nitani-san, who is the mother of Rin's classmate and friend, Kouki.
The first four volumes have a Yotsuba-like vibe, with sweet and heartwarming stories about Daikichi and Rin's father/daughter bonding, though a bit more realistic and serious, since Daikichi deals with single-parent and adoptive-parent issues that the dad in Yotsuba doesn't, including Daikichi wondering whether Rin would be better off with her biological mother. (The answer is "no," since the mother wants to concentrate on her career rather than raising a child, and she comes off as being a little immature and self-centered--someone who isn't emotionally ready to be a mother. But at the same time, she's a three-dimensional character and not entirely unsympathetic.)
But the fifth volume suddenly skips ahead in time and we see Rin as a teenager, and while I don't dislike teenage-Rin, I felt kind of cheated that we didn't get to see her grow up. More problematic is the direction the story starts taking--as many readers learned from spoilers posted on the web, it soon becomes apparent that Rin is secretly in love with Daikichi, and at the end of vol. 9 (when Rin is an adult), they decide to get married. The author handwaves the incest problem and tries to make everything okay by revealing that Daikichi's grandfather was not Rin's biological father, but had adopted Rin. But this is still problematic, because it has the unfortunate (though probably unintended) implication that adoptive families are not "real" because they're not related by blood.
On one hand, it's been made clear from the start that Rin doesn't consider Daikichi to be her father. He asks her in the first or second volume if she would like to take his last name and call him "Dad," and she replies no, because "Grandpa" (what she called Daikichi's grandfather) is her dad. Daikichi respects her wishes, and they both are content with Rin continuing to address him by name. On the other hand, it's equally clear that Daikichi considers her to be his daughter, and she loves and looks up to him as a father. In a way, I could maybe kind-of-sort-of buy Rin falling in love with Daikichi, because there's a clear separation in her mind between "Dad/Grandpa" and "Daikichi," but I would see it more as a gratitude/hero-worship kind of infatuation because he rescued her as a child, rather than true love everlasting. And as for Daikichi, I could not ever see him thinking of Rin as anything but a daughter. The canon doesn't entirely contradict this, since as Sean Gaffney points out in his review: "his acceptance of Rin’s love and agreement to marry her seems to come less from romantic feelings and more, 'well, a father can’t say no to his daughter'." While he loves Rin deeply, I never get the feeling that Daikichi's feelings suddenly become more passionate and romantic, but more like he wants to do what will make her most happy. And there's a slightly skeevy implication that (like many overprotective dads), he doesn't really want some guy to take his precious daughter away--although I think he would have been okay with her eventually marrying someone that he trusted would love her and treat her well, like Kouki.
I find the series maddening, because it feels like a bait-and-switch, where in the first half, Nitani-san is presented as a love interest for Daikichi, and we're allowed to believe that they might get together and form a happy Brady Bunch style family, but in the second half, that's suddenly snatched away and we're presented with a problematic and incestuous end game pairing. And especially maddening because the characters and the familial bond between Daikichi and Rin are so well written, even in the second half--it could have been such a great story!
It also bugs me that the revelation that "Grandpa is not Rin's biological father" twist was obviously tossed in at the last minute in order to make Rin and Daikichi's marriage acceptable. It leaves us with so many unanswered questions: Who was Rin's biological father? Why did Grandpa adopt Rin--were he and Rin's mom really lovers, or (as I suspect) did he merely take pity on an unwed single mother in a difficult situation? Much time is spent in the series developing the character of Rin's mother: Daikichi tracking her down to see if she might be a fit parent, then concluding that Rin is better off with him; and teenage Rin eventually meeting her mom and forming a relationship with her, though one quite different than the one she has with Daikichi. But neither Rin nor Daikichi ever expresses any interest in finding or meeting Rin's biological father; it's more like, "Whew! We're not actually related, so it's okay to get married!" I could maybe have accepted the ending better (albeit grudgingly) if Rin's background had been more fully explored and not tacked on at the last moment.
I would still recommend Bunny Drop, but suggest that you stick to vol. 1-4 of the manga. And also, the anime series, which is delightfully sweet and sticks pretty closely to the first few volumes of the manga, so it only portrays Rin as a six-year-old and avoids all the problematic incest stuff.
From the beginning, I was rooting for Daikichi and Kouki's mom to get together, so I'm going to ask for fix-it fic in my Yuletide letter, or just some gen family bonding if the writer isn't into the ship or doesn't want to deviate from canon. After reading vol. 9, though it wasn't as horrible as it could have been, I want to comfort myself with some sweet Daikichi and Rin father/daughter bonding.
***
Library Wars 10: As mentioned in my previous review, main character Iku is a member of the Library Forces, essentially a soldier that defends libraries against the pro-censorship government forces. Because her mother is overprotective and would object to her taking such a dangerous job, Iku has kept her real position a secret from her family, letting them think that she's an ordinary librarian. However, in vol. 10, she and her comrades are sent to a library in her hometown in order to protect a controversial art exhibit, and her parents discover the truth--it's a confrontation that's been inevitably building since the first volume. There's a huge confrontation in which Iku's mother demands that she quit her job, and all Iku's childhood frustrations and resentments come pouring out: Iku has always been a tomboy, and her mother has never been proud of her athletic accomplishments, brushing them aside with attempts to make Iku more dainty and feminine. Iku wants her mother to accept her for herself, and feels like her mother doesn't love the real Iku, only the idealized pretty, obedient, feminine daughter that she wants Iku to be. As her mother left after the confrontation, Iku called out, "Please...accept me. I may not be the daughter you wanted. And I'm never going to be feminine, and I'm sorry. I hope you'll like me......someday." My heart just broke for Iku when her mother left without turning around or saying a word. (Though from the reader's POV we can see the stricken expression on Mom's face, and I hope she realized how much she'd hurt her daughter, albeit unintentionally.)
The emotional blow is softened for Iku by her father's support--he had learned her secret in a previous volume and is now proud of her. And she learns from one of her brothers that her mom's obsession with making Iku ladylike stems from a childhood accident in which her brothers took her rock climbing when she was three, and she fell and hit her head and nearly died. So Iku is relieved to learn that her mom really does love her, and that the overprotectiveness was caused by genuine fear and concern.
The whole confrontation and resolution was very emotional and cathartic for Iku, and for me as a reader, and I realized that I put a lot of the same emotions into Onozuka's troubled relationship with his family in my Haru fics. Like Iku, he resents his parents for not accepting him for his true self instead of the dutiful son that they want him to be. And also somewhat like Iku, he hasn't really given them the chance to accept him: Iku by keeping her job a secret, and Onozuka by running away instead of confronting them. I guess there's something about that trope that appeals to me, a character seeking understanding and unconditional love (from a parent or a lover), but at the same time, pushing away the people that they care about--my fanon Snape falls into this category, too. Though Iku is hardly as bitter as Snape or as scheming as Onozuka--aside from her family issues, she's a very open, cheerful, and straightforward person. (And all this reminds me that I need to get back to writing my Kikuchi/Onozuka series and my plans for Onozuka to confront/reconcile with his own family.)
Aside from the mother/daughter conflict in Library Wars, I also thoroughly enjoyed seeing Iku take on some mean librarian girls--in the Ibaraki Library, the regular librarians look down on the Library Forces, and they bully the young local soldiers in a stereotypical high school clique-ish way. They try to bully Iku too, and when they finally go too far, we get to see her be a badass and put an awesome (verbal) smackdown on them. It really shows how far she's come from the beginning of the series--Dojo used to have to bail her out when she got into trouble, but now she can handle problems by herself, although he's still there to support her. I'm loving this series more with each volume, and I can't wait for the next one!
yuletide nominations are currently in progress and I plan to request Bunny Drop fic this year, I thought it might be a good time to discuss my feelings on Bunny Drop's controversial ending. Also, some unadulterated squee on Library Wars, which just gets more awesome with each volume--the current one hits one of my narrative kinks with its parent/child confrontations and misunderstandings.Bunny Drop: It started off as a sweet and moving story about an adoptive father and child. The series starts off with Daikichi, a 30-year-old salaryman, attending his grandfather's funeral, and much to his (and the rest of the family's) shock, he discovers that his widowed grandfather has left behind a six-year-old illegitimate daughter, Rin. No one knows who (or where) the mother is, and none of the relatives want to take in Rin, and they get into a loud argument over which one of them should be burdened with her care. Disgusted by their callousness, and feeling compassion for Rin, Daikichi impulsively declares that he'll take care of her if they won't. He soon finds himself in over his head, scrambling to enroll her in day care and school, and trying to fit caring for her into his busy work schedule, not to mention that he has no experience taking care of children. But as overwhelmed as he gets, Daikichi never considers going back on his promise, and does his best as a foster parent, even transferring to a less demanding position at work so that he can look after Rin properly. The two of them soon form a close bond, and Daikichi gets some parenting advice from a coworker, and from attractive single mom Nitani-san, who is the mother of Rin's classmate and friend, Kouki.
The first four volumes have a Yotsuba-like vibe, with sweet and heartwarming stories about Daikichi and Rin's father/daughter bonding, though a bit more realistic and serious, since Daikichi deals with single-parent and adoptive-parent issues that the dad in Yotsuba doesn't, including Daikichi wondering whether Rin would be better off with her biological mother. (The answer is "no," since the mother wants to concentrate on her career rather than raising a child, and she comes off as being a little immature and self-centered--someone who isn't emotionally ready to be a mother. But at the same time, she's a three-dimensional character and not entirely unsympathetic.)
But the fifth volume suddenly skips ahead in time and we see Rin as a teenager, and while I don't dislike teenage-Rin, I felt kind of cheated that we didn't get to see her grow up. More problematic is the direction the story starts taking--as many readers learned from spoilers posted on the web, it soon becomes apparent that Rin is secretly in love with Daikichi, and at the end of vol. 9 (when Rin is an adult), they decide to get married. The author handwaves the incest problem and tries to make everything okay by revealing that Daikichi's grandfather was not Rin's biological father, but had adopted Rin. But this is still problematic, because it has the unfortunate (though probably unintended) implication that adoptive families are not "real" because they're not related by blood.
On one hand, it's been made clear from the start that Rin doesn't consider Daikichi to be her father. He asks her in the first or second volume if she would like to take his last name and call him "Dad," and she replies no, because "Grandpa" (what she called Daikichi's grandfather) is her dad. Daikichi respects her wishes, and they both are content with Rin continuing to address him by name. On the other hand, it's equally clear that Daikichi considers her to be his daughter, and she loves and looks up to him as a father. In a way, I could maybe kind-of-sort-of buy Rin falling in love with Daikichi, because there's a clear separation in her mind between "Dad/Grandpa" and "Daikichi," but I would see it more as a gratitude/hero-worship kind of infatuation because he rescued her as a child, rather than true love everlasting. And as for Daikichi, I could not ever see him thinking of Rin as anything but a daughter. The canon doesn't entirely contradict this, since as Sean Gaffney points out in his review: "his acceptance of Rin’s love and agreement to marry her seems to come less from romantic feelings and more, 'well, a father can’t say no to his daughter'." While he loves Rin deeply, I never get the feeling that Daikichi's feelings suddenly become more passionate and romantic, but more like he wants to do what will make her most happy. And there's a slightly skeevy implication that (like many overprotective dads), he doesn't really want some guy to take his precious daughter away--although I think he would have been okay with her eventually marrying someone that he trusted would love her and treat her well, like Kouki.
I find the series maddening, because it feels like a bait-and-switch, where in the first half, Nitani-san is presented as a love interest for Daikichi, and we're allowed to believe that they might get together and form a happy Brady Bunch style family, but in the second half, that's suddenly snatched away and we're presented with a problematic and incestuous end game pairing. And especially maddening because the characters and the familial bond between Daikichi and Rin are so well written, even in the second half--it could have been such a great story!
It also bugs me that the revelation that "Grandpa is not Rin's biological father" twist was obviously tossed in at the last minute in order to make Rin and Daikichi's marriage acceptable. It leaves us with so many unanswered questions: Who was Rin's biological father? Why did Grandpa adopt Rin--were he and Rin's mom really lovers, or (as I suspect) did he merely take pity on an unwed single mother in a difficult situation? Much time is spent in the series developing the character of Rin's mother: Daikichi tracking her down to see if she might be a fit parent, then concluding that Rin is better off with him; and teenage Rin eventually meeting her mom and forming a relationship with her, though one quite different than the one she has with Daikichi. But neither Rin nor Daikichi ever expresses any interest in finding or meeting Rin's biological father; it's more like, "Whew! We're not actually related, so it's okay to get married!" I could maybe have accepted the ending better (albeit grudgingly) if Rin's background had been more fully explored and not tacked on at the last moment.
I would still recommend Bunny Drop, but suggest that you stick to vol. 1-4 of the manga. And also, the anime series, which is delightfully sweet and sticks pretty closely to the first few volumes of the manga, so it only portrays Rin as a six-year-old and avoids all the problematic incest stuff.
From the beginning, I was rooting for Daikichi and Kouki's mom to get together, so I'm going to ask for fix-it fic in my Yuletide letter, or just some gen family bonding if the writer isn't into the ship or doesn't want to deviate from canon. After reading vol. 9, though it wasn't as horrible as it could have been, I want to comfort myself with some sweet Daikichi and Rin father/daughter bonding.
***
Library Wars 10: As mentioned in my previous review, main character Iku is a member of the Library Forces, essentially a soldier that defends libraries against the pro-censorship government forces. Because her mother is overprotective and would object to her taking such a dangerous job, Iku has kept her real position a secret from her family, letting them think that she's an ordinary librarian. However, in vol. 10, she and her comrades are sent to a library in her hometown in order to protect a controversial art exhibit, and her parents discover the truth--it's a confrontation that's been inevitably building since the first volume. There's a huge confrontation in which Iku's mother demands that she quit her job, and all Iku's childhood frustrations and resentments come pouring out: Iku has always been a tomboy, and her mother has never been proud of her athletic accomplishments, brushing them aside with attempts to make Iku more dainty and feminine. Iku wants her mother to accept her for herself, and feels like her mother doesn't love the real Iku, only the idealized pretty, obedient, feminine daughter that she wants Iku to be. As her mother left after the confrontation, Iku called out, "Please...accept me. I may not be the daughter you wanted. And I'm never going to be feminine, and I'm sorry. I hope you'll like me......someday." My heart just broke for Iku when her mother left without turning around or saying a word. (Though from the reader's POV we can see the stricken expression on Mom's face, and I hope she realized how much she'd hurt her daughter, albeit unintentionally.)
The emotional blow is softened for Iku by her father's support--he had learned her secret in a previous volume and is now proud of her. And she learns from one of her brothers that her mom's obsession with making Iku ladylike stems from a childhood accident in which her brothers took her rock climbing when she was three, and she fell and hit her head and nearly died. So Iku is relieved to learn that her mom really does love her, and that the overprotectiveness was caused by genuine fear and concern.
The whole confrontation and resolution was very emotional and cathartic for Iku, and for me as a reader, and I realized that I put a lot of the same emotions into Onozuka's troubled relationship with his family in my Haru fics. Like Iku, he resents his parents for not accepting him for his true self instead of the dutiful son that they want him to be. And also somewhat like Iku, he hasn't really given them the chance to accept him: Iku by keeping her job a secret, and Onozuka by running away instead of confronting them. I guess there's something about that trope that appeals to me, a character seeking understanding and unconditional love (from a parent or a lover), but at the same time, pushing away the people that they care about--my fanon Snape falls into this category, too. Though Iku is hardly as bitter as Snape or as scheming as Onozuka--aside from her family issues, she's a very open, cheerful, and straightforward person. (And all this reminds me that I need to get back to writing my Kikuchi/Onozuka series and my plans for Onozuka to confront/reconcile with his own family.)
Aside from the mother/daughter conflict in Library Wars, I also thoroughly enjoyed seeing Iku take on some mean librarian girls--in the Ibaraki Library, the regular librarians look down on the Library Forces, and they bully the young local soldiers in a stereotypical high school clique-ish way. They try to bully Iku too, and when they finally go too far, we get to see her be a badass and put an awesome (verbal) smackdown on them. It really shows how far she's come from the beginning of the series--Dojo used to have to bail her out when she got into trouble, but now she can handle problems by herself, although he's still there to support her. I'm loving this series more with each volume, and I can't wait for the next one!