Manga/anime ramblings and recs, part 2
Okay, here's part 2 of recs and ramblings, and also weird plot bunnies eating at my brain... (Part 1 is here.)
Hana-Kimi actually has some interesting gender issues and a bit of canon slash. The main character, Mizuki, is a girl who disguises herself as a boy so that she can attend an all-boys school and meet the athlete she idolizes, the high jumper Sano. Hijinks and misunderstandings ensue when Mizuki starts to fall for Sano, and Sano (unbeknownst to Mizuki) discovers her secret, and her classmate Nakatsu falls in love with her, and is naturally confused and upset by the fact that he's attracted to a guy (as far as he knows). The canon slash comes in the form of Doctor Umeda, the school nurse, who becomes Mizuki's friend and confidant despite his cynical and sarcastic personality. Umeda, shown here on the cover of Book 6, is openly gay and makes no attempt to hide it. Early on in the series, Mizuki walks in on him kissing his boyfriend in the infirmary, and he later has an assignation with another guy at a hot springs during a school trip. He also confesses to Mizuki that he still suffers from unrequited love for an old high school friend, who treats him rather coldly. And it turns out that his former kohai (underclassman), Akiha, who is now a famous fashion photographer, has an unrequited love for Umeda, and pursues him relentlessly, much to Umeda's dismay. Their non-relationship is played mainly for laughs, with an exuberant Akiha glomping onto a protesting Umeda, but there are a few serious moments when we discover that there's more to Akiha than he shows on his happy-go-lucky surface. (More on him later, as it's sort of tied in with my Prince of Tennis ramblings...)
I discovered The Prince of Tennis through![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
orpheneritus's fics on LJ. It's supposedly a shonen, or boy's comic, but has many female fans due to the cast of handsome male tennis players. PoT slash fics squicked me a bit at first, since the characters are all in middle school, but it helps that many of them look much older, more like high school students, and some of the fics are set in the future when the characters are in high school or have become adults. (As a side note, I do think that Kamio and Ibu from Fudomine make a nice pairing, and I've grown to love Orphen Eritus's Yuushi/Gakuto fics.)
My imagination tends to run amok sometimes while reading or watching a series, and I find myself creating character histories that are eventually proven false, especially when only the first few volumes of a story are available in English. For example, I was convinced that Count D, who is obviously something more than human, was descended from dragons, who can take human form in Asian mythology. (This might be because at the time, I had been watching an anime series called Sohryuden, where four brothers discover that they are the reincarnations of the four Dragon Kings.) I spun a tale in my head where D's dragon father married a human woman, producing D, and Papa D's subsequent madness and hatred for humanity was caused by his wife's death, perhaps at the hands of fearful and superstitious humans who killed her for wedding a monster. As Petshop readers know, this was completely off the mark, and D not only isn't a dragon, he doesn't even have a mother--the Ds reproduce through a process similar to cloning. Also, before I learned that Sofu D still looks young and beautiful (the Ds apparently don't age, or age very slowly), I sort of pictured him as looking like Tenchi's grandpa in the Tenchi Muyo anime! ^_^ (I'm sure that Sofu would be horrified!) For awhile, I considered writing an AU story where the Ds are dragons, but I think it would be hard to write now that we know the true origin of the Ds. Plus, it's kind of hard to pair Papa off with a woman when there is so much Papa D/Vesca slash fic out there. Although I still fondly remember a fic on Yahoo Groups where Papa D fell in love with Jill...
Something similar happened with Prince of Tennis. I was fascinated by Kunimitsu Tezuka, the team captain, who seems unusually stoic and mature for his age, in both looks and demeanor. (It's a running joke that he looks older than he is, and one of the student's fathers mistakes him for an adult coach even though he's a ninth grader.) I was convinced that someone so mature must have had responsibility forced on him at an early age, that perhaps he gained his maturity by living on his own because his parents were absent for some reason--dead, or by jobs that required them to travel abroad. And before I knew it, my mind was creating a character history for him, even though I knew that I'd probably be proved wrong. I love angst, so I decided that his parents were neglectful rather than deceased--classical musicians who travel abroad with an orchestra (a plot device borrowed from Kimagure Orange Road), and who paid little attention to their son once they determined that he had no musical aptitude. So Tezuka strives to become a great tennis player as a way of rebelling against his parents, as they place no value on anything but music. He's intelligent and responsible, outwardly calm and self-possessed, the model student, but deep inside he's seething with angst and pain, and is afraid to get too close to anyone emotionally.
Great story--but none of this is even close to the mark! It turns out that Tezuka comes from a fairly normal and happy family according to his official character profile: a salaryman father, housewife mother, and somewhat eccentric retired police detective grandfather, from whom he probably gained his stern demeanor. No angst, no inner turmoil. *sighs heavily*
(I could have saved myself a lot of trouble by looking up spoilers on Wikipedia or various fansites, but what fun would that have been? ~_^)
Anyhow, I really wanted to slash Tezuka, but he seemed so much more mature than most of his fellow team members that I couldn't really see him with any of them, although Fuji/Tezuka is a popular pairing in the fandom. I don't know, something about Fuji leaves me a little cold--maybe it's because we never seem to see past his smiling mask until vol 25, although that's usually license for me to create some angsty inner turmoil. (*shrugs*) Tezuka is also sometimes paired with his rival, Atobe, but I really can't stand the vain and self-centered Atobe, although Orphen Eritus does a great job of fleshing out his character in her fics. I really saw Tezuka as the type to be with someone older, so in my little fantasy universe, I sent him to Osaka High School (from the Hana-Kimi manga), where he struck up a sort of friendship with, and eventually an attraction to Dr. Umeda. He'd have good reason to be in the doctor's office frequently, since he suffered a severe injury in the PoT manga, and even though it healed, he could conceivably need to have it checked on periodically. Umeda seems to have a knack to seeing through to the heart of people, so he'd be able to see right through the act that my fanon Tezuka puts up, and I thought it would be a relief to Tezuka to have one person that he can be himself with. I suppose that canon Tezuka could still pair up with Umeda, but it would be less interesting without the angst. It's really weird, but I feel attached to "my" version of Tezuka even though it's totally AU.
Incidentally, Osaka High, the school where the Hana-Kimi manga is set, is known for having a good athletics program, so it's within the realm of possibility that Tezuka might choose to go there after finishing middle school. And it's a boarding school, which would make it a good school for a teenager without any family at home to attend.
Of course, Umeda already has an admirer in Akiha, who naturally wouldn't take kindly to a rival. I see him as being vindictive in a playful sort of way, trying to get a rise out of the reserved Tezuka by calling him by his given name, or even a cutesy shortened nickname like "Kuni-chan". And Tezuka would respond with the cold glare that intimidated his former teammates at Seishun so well. I also imagine Akiha trying to bribe Tezuka into modeling for him with info about Umeda's high school days. On the surface, they seem like total opposites, fire and ice, but they actually have more in common than they first realize.
(Side rant: one thing that bugs me about the Viz translation of PoT is that in Japanese, the characters generally call each other by their last names, and Viz changes that to their first names, in what I assume is an attempt to Americanize the story, because that's how kids in the US would address each other. They also do this with Bleach, and probably many of their other titles. But to me, this creates a sense of familiarity that wasn't intended, and it can also become problematic, because what will the translator do later on if one of the characters starts calling another by his or her first name instead of the last, indicating a closer relationship between them? How do you show the change if you've been using the first name all along? Calling someone by their given name instead of their family name can be a big deal in Japanese, along with the use or non-use of honorifics like "san" and "kun" and "chan". Not using an honorific can indicate either intimacy or rudeness, depending on the intent, and Viz generally drops the honorifics, too. End rant.)
In vol. 10 of Hana-Kimi, Akiha tells Mizuki that he was abandoned by his mother when he was a child, then makes light of it, saying that he uses his past as a sob story to pick up women. He's bisexual, btw, and was married in the past, and he and his ex-wife Ebi remain friendly; she even works with him as a make-up artist. It's partly from her that we learn that Akiha's past scarred him more deeply than he lets on--she confides in Mizuki that there is a void in Akiha's heart that she could never fill, no matter how much she loved him.
So I do think Akiha and Tezuka would hate each other at first, but slowly come to a sort of grudging sense of understanding and maybe even sympathy.
Hmm, just realized that I tend to be attracted to characters with troubled childhoods--I had already created a set of neglectful-bordering-on-abusive parents for Snape in my Alway series, even before we learned anything about his family in canon. (That part was close, I suppose, although I had portrayed them as purebloods, and it was a shock to find out that Snape's father was a Muggle in HBP.) I guess it's because I love a good dose of angst--as long as the story ends happily--I enjoy watching the characters suffer, but I want their suffering to be alleviated at the end! ^_^
Anyway, getting back to the AU plot bunnies, normally I'm a one-true-love sort of person, and I don't like threesomes or people being entangled with more than one person at the same time--I even don't like it when Lupin has been with Sirius before Snape in Snupin stories, although obviously there are stories good enough to make me overcome my usual dislikes. But since Umeda is so hung up on his first love, Kijima, and even has a sort-of date with him in canon at one point (more of a meeting between friends, really), I found myself spinning off a side story where rivals in love Tezuka and Akiha team up to follow Umeda on his date, although it's really OOC for any version of Tezuka to do something like that, get discovered and chased away by Umeda, and end up having a serious heart-to-heart talk where they discover that they actually have a lot in common even though their personalities seem like total opposites. And they end up having a one night stand to console each other, sort of acting like substitute lovers for each other, like Takumi and Usami in Empty Heart from my first post. (Now that I think about it, it's sort of like Takeshi and Ash's one night stand in Aftermaths in my Always series, when Takeshi was trying to get over Aric.)
It was only supposed to be a one-time thing, and in the story--which still exists only in my head--Umeda is eventually able to get over his first love and fall in love with Tezuka, and Akiha realizes that he's been pursuing his unrequited crush on Umeda as an excuse to avoid being in a real relationship, and is finally able to open his heart to Ebi, and everyone lives happily ever after. But the evil AU plot bunny is still not satisfied--no, it has to whisper, "What would happen if Akiha and Tezuka got together instead, and Umeda finally won over his first love?" So of course now I have to mentally write a totally different ending in which the substitute lovers become real lovers. And maybe a third, where they end up as a threesome, although that usually isn't my thing.
I do think in canon that Umeda is pretty hung up on his first love, and although he has other relationships, I often wonder if they don't work out because he can't completely let go of Kijima in his heart. I can't stand Kijima, whom I think is a real bastard for stringing Umeda along and toying with his feelings by doing things like ordering Umeda to keep a certain night free for them to meet, then canceling at the last minute. Of course, I ought to feel some sympathy for Kijima, since he has his own family issues--a cold and unloving father--and at least in a flashback that looks at his and Umeda's school days, he has a lot of pain that he hides beneath his cold and manipulative exterior. The only person he seems able to love is his foster brother, Masato, who has been emotionally broken by his own dysfunctional family situtation. In school, Kijima used to put on a nice, friendly act that only Umeda was able to see through, and I suspect that he strings Umeda along because he likes the security of having someone who loves him for his true self, even though he can't quite bring himself to open up enough to return Umeda's feelings. Which is rather sad...though I still think he's a bastard. ;) But if a true rival ever came along and he was in real danger of losing Umeda, then maybe that would finally motivate him to get off his butt and confess his feelings.
Or maybe it's all in my imagination. Which we have already established is rather overactive and prone to flights of fancy. ;)
Well, for now, I'm working on the "Snape and Lupin watch porn videos in the love hotel" story that I promised![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
myene_01, and a Petshop bunny in my Daiki universe. But it was fun to rant about my random manga/anime bunnies for a change, and it was fun to write down my plot bunnies, even if only as summaries.
I discovered The Prince of Tennis through
orpheneritus's fics on LJ. It's supposedly a shonen, or boy's comic, but has many female fans due to the cast of handsome male tennis players. PoT slash fics squicked me a bit at first, since the characters are all in middle school, but it helps that many of them look much older, more like high school students, and some of the fics are set in the future when the characters are in high school or have become adults. (As a side note, I do think that Kamio and Ibu from Fudomine make a nice pairing, and I've grown to love Orphen Eritus's Yuushi/Gakuto fics.)My imagination tends to run amok sometimes while reading or watching a series, and I find myself creating character histories that are eventually proven false, especially when only the first few volumes of a story are available in English. For example, I was convinced that Count D, who is obviously something more than human, was descended from dragons, who can take human form in Asian mythology. (This might be because at the time, I had been watching an anime series called Sohryuden, where four brothers discover that they are the reincarnations of the four Dragon Kings.) I spun a tale in my head where D's dragon father married a human woman, producing D, and Papa D's subsequent madness and hatred for humanity was caused by his wife's death, perhaps at the hands of fearful and superstitious humans who killed her for wedding a monster. As Petshop readers know, this was completely off the mark, and D not only isn't a dragon, he doesn't even have a mother--the Ds reproduce through a process similar to cloning. Also, before I learned that Sofu D still looks young and beautiful (the Ds apparently don't age, or age very slowly), I sort of pictured him as looking like Tenchi's grandpa in the Tenchi Muyo anime! ^_^ (I'm sure that Sofu would be horrified!) For awhile, I considered writing an AU story where the Ds are dragons, but I think it would be hard to write now that we know the true origin of the Ds. Plus, it's kind of hard to pair Papa off with a woman when there is so much Papa D/Vesca slash fic out there. Although I still fondly remember a fic on Yahoo Groups where Papa D fell in love with Jill...
Something similar happened with Prince of Tennis. I was fascinated by Kunimitsu Tezuka, the team captain, who seems unusually stoic and mature for his age, in both looks and demeanor. (It's a running joke that he looks older than he is, and one of the student's fathers mistakes him for an adult coach even though he's a ninth grader.) I was convinced that someone so mature must have had responsibility forced on him at an early age, that perhaps he gained his maturity by living on his own because his parents were absent for some reason--dead, or by jobs that required them to travel abroad. And before I knew it, my mind was creating a character history for him, even though I knew that I'd probably be proved wrong. I love angst, so I decided that his parents were neglectful rather than deceased--classical musicians who travel abroad with an orchestra (a plot device borrowed from Kimagure Orange Road), and who paid little attention to their son once they determined that he had no musical aptitude. So Tezuka strives to become a great tennis player as a way of rebelling against his parents, as they place no value on anything but music. He's intelligent and responsible, outwardly calm and self-possessed, the model student, but deep inside he's seething with angst and pain, and is afraid to get too close to anyone emotionally.
Great story--but none of this is even close to the mark! It turns out that Tezuka comes from a fairly normal and happy family according to his official character profile: a salaryman father, housewife mother, and somewhat eccentric retired police detective grandfather, from whom he probably gained his stern demeanor. No angst, no inner turmoil. *sighs heavily*
(I could have saved myself a lot of trouble by looking up spoilers on Wikipedia or various fansites, but what fun would that have been? ~_^)
Anyhow, I really wanted to slash Tezuka, but he seemed so much more mature than most of his fellow team members that I couldn't really see him with any of them, although Fuji/Tezuka is a popular pairing in the fandom. I don't know, something about Fuji leaves me a little cold--maybe it's because we never seem to see past his smiling mask until vol 25, although that's usually license for me to create some angsty inner turmoil. (*shrugs*) Tezuka is also sometimes paired with his rival, Atobe, but I really can't stand the vain and self-centered Atobe, although Orphen Eritus does a great job of fleshing out his character in her fics. I really saw Tezuka as the type to be with someone older, so in my little fantasy universe, I sent him to Osaka High School (from the Hana-Kimi manga), where he struck up a sort of friendship with, and eventually an attraction to Dr. Umeda. He'd have good reason to be in the doctor's office frequently, since he suffered a severe injury in the PoT manga, and even though it healed, he could conceivably need to have it checked on periodically. Umeda seems to have a knack to seeing through to the heart of people, so he'd be able to see right through the act that my fanon Tezuka puts up, and I thought it would be a relief to Tezuka to have one person that he can be himself with. I suppose that canon Tezuka could still pair up with Umeda, but it would be less interesting without the angst. It's really weird, but I feel attached to "my" version of Tezuka even though it's totally AU.
Incidentally, Osaka High, the school where the Hana-Kimi manga is set, is known for having a good athletics program, so it's within the realm of possibility that Tezuka might choose to go there after finishing middle school. And it's a boarding school, which would make it a good school for a teenager without any family at home to attend.
Of course, Umeda already has an admirer in Akiha, who naturally wouldn't take kindly to a rival. I see him as being vindictive in a playful sort of way, trying to get a rise out of the reserved Tezuka by calling him by his given name, or even a cutesy shortened nickname like "Kuni-chan". And Tezuka would respond with the cold glare that intimidated his former teammates at Seishun so well. I also imagine Akiha trying to bribe Tezuka into modeling for him with info about Umeda's high school days. On the surface, they seem like total opposites, fire and ice, but they actually have more in common than they first realize.
(Side rant: one thing that bugs me about the Viz translation of PoT is that in Japanese, the characters generally call each other by their last names, and Viz changes that to their first names, in what I assume is an attempt to Americanize the story, because that's how kids in the US would address each other. They also do this with Bleach, and probably many of their other titles. But to me, this creates a sense of familiarity that wasn't intended, and it can also become problematic, because what will the translator do later on if one of the characters starts calling another by his or her first name instead of the last, indicating a closer relationship between them? How do you show the change if you've been using the first name all along? Calling someone by their given name instead of their family name can be a big deal in Japanese, along with the use or non-use of honorifics like "san" and "kun" and "chan". Not using an honorific can indicate either intimacy or rudeness, depending on the intent, and Viz generally drops the honorifics, too. End rant.)
In vol. 10 of Hana-Kimi, Akiha tells Mizuki that he was abandoned by his mother when he was a child, then makes light of it, saying that he uses his past as a sob story to pick up women. He's bisexual, btw, and was married in the past, and he and his ex-wife Ebi remain friendly; she even works with him as a make-up artist. It's partly from her that we learn that Akiha's past scarred him more deeply than he lets on--she confides in Mizuki that there is a void in Akiha's heart that she could never fill, no matter how much she loved him.
So I do think Akiha and Tezuka would hate each other at first, but slowly come to a sort of grudging sense of understanding and maybe even sympathy.
Hmm, just realized that I tend to be attracted to characters with troubled childhoods--I had already created a set of neglectful-bordering-on-abusive parents for Snape in my Alway series, even before we learned anything about his family in canon. (That part was close, I suppose, although I had portrayed them as purebloods, and it was a shock to find out that Snape's father was a Muggle in HBP.) I guess it's because I love a good dose of angst--as long as the story ends happily--I enjoy watching the characters suffer, but I want their suffering to be alleviated at the end! ^_^
Anyway, getting back to the AU plot bunnies, normally I'm a one-true-love sort of person, and I don't like threesomes or people being entangled with more than one person at the same time--I even don't like it when Lupin has been with Sirius before Snape in Snupin stories, although obviously there are stories good enough to make me overcome my usual dislikes. But since Umeda is so hung up on his first love, Kijima, and even has a sort-of date with him in canon at one point (more of a meeting between friends, really), I found myself spinning off a side story where rivals in love Tezuka and Akiha team up to follow Umeda on his date, although it's really OOC for any version of Tezuka to do something like that, get discovered and chased away by Umeda, and end up having a serious heart-to-heart talk where they discover that they actually have a lot in common even though their personalities seem like total opposites. And they end up having a one night stand to console each other, sort of acting like substitute lovers for each other, like Takumi and Usami in Empty Heart from my first post. (Now that I think about it, it's sort of like Takeshi and Ash's one night stand in Aftermaths in my Always series, when Takeshi was trying to get over Aric.)
It was only supposed to be a one-time thing, and in the story--which still exists only in my head--Umeda is eventually able to get over his first love and fall in love with Tezuka, and Akiha realizes that he's been pursuing his unrequited crush on Umeda as an excuse to avoid being in a real relationship, and is finally able to open his heart to Ebi, and everyone lives happily ever after. But the evil AU plot bunny is still not satisfied--no, it has to whisper, "What would happen if Akiha and Tezuka got together instead, and Umeda finally won over his first love?" So of course now I have to mentally write a totally different ending in which the substitute lovers become real lovers. And maybe a third, where they end up as a threesome, although that usually isn't my thing.
I do think in canon that Umeda is pretty hung up on his first love, and although he has other relationships, I often wonder if they don't work out because he can't completely let go of Kijima in his heart. I can't stand Kijima, whom I think is a real bastard for stringing Umeda along and toying with his feelings by doing things like ordering Umeda to keep a certain night free for them to meet, then canceling at the last minute. Of course, I ought to feel some sympathy for Kijima, since he has his own family issues--a cold and unloving father--and at least in a flashback that looks at his and Umeda's school days, he has a lot of pain that he hides beneath his cold and manipulative exterior. The only person he seems able to love is his foster brother, Masato, who has been emotionally broken by his own dysfunctional family situtation. In school, Kijima used to put on a nice, friendly act that only Umeda was able to see through, and I suspect that he strings Umeda along because he likes the security of having someone who loves him for his true self, even though he can't quite bring himself to open up enough to return Umeda's feelings. Which is rather sad...though I still think he's a bastard. ;) But if a true rival ever came along and he was in real danger of losing Umeda, then maybe that would finally motivate him to get off his butt and confess his feelings.
Or maybe it's all in my imagination. Which we have already established is rather overactive and prone to flights of fancy. ;)
***
Bleach is another title where my imagination went into overdrive. It's a very popular shonen action-type manga, where the main character Ichigo, a young man with the ability to see ghosts, gains the powers of a shinigami (literally, "death god" but translated as Soul Reaper in the Viz manga and anime). When the soul of a deceased person lingers too long in the world of the living, they turn into monsters called "Hollows" that devour other souls, living or dead. It is the job of the Soul Reapers to battle the Hollows and send them on into the afterlife.
The story is very entertaining, with a good mix of action, humor, and drama, and I do like Ichigo, who has a Leon-like personality: brash and hot-tempered, but also generous and compassionate. However, my favorite characters were Uryu Ishida, Ichigo's classmate, and Sosuke Aizen, Captain of the 5th Division of the Soul Reapers.
Ishida--his classmates always refer to him by his last name, and vice-versa, even though Viz has them calling each other by their first names--is the last of the Quincys, humans who battled Hollows with spiritual energy formed into the shape of bows and arrows. However, the Quincys actually destroyed the Hollows, while the Soul Reapers merely purified them and sent them on into the afterlife, eventually (I think) to be reincarnated. The destruction of the Hollows threatened the balance of the universe, so the Soul Reapers destroyed most of the Quincys, except for Ishida and his grandfather. The grandfather wanted to work together with the Soul Reapers to protect humanity from the Hollows, but they rejected his offer. However, they apparently let him live, although they were keeping an eye on him. Ishida hates the Soul Reapers, not because they exterminated the Quincys, but because he saw his grandfather killed by Hollows in front of him when he was a little boy, and the Soul Reapers arrived too late to save him.
Ishida--a serious looking boy with dark hair and glasses--was very kind and idealistic while his grandfather was alive; he wanted to become a Quincy to protect people. By the time Ichigo meets him, he has become very closed off and cynical.
Captain Aizen is a serious but kindly-looking man with brown hair and glasses, and I immediately fell in love with him when he first appeared in the manga (and the anime fansubs I saw). He's so kind and gentle and all around nice, that it's hard to imagine anyone not liking him. He also warns another character about a possible conspiracy in the Soul Society when Ichigo's Soul Reaper friend Rukia is arrested and sentenced to death for the crime of (somewhat accidentally) giving her Soul Reaper powers to Ichigo in order to save his life.
I'd been wondering why Ishida was allowed to live after all the other Quincys were killed, and I assumed that someone in the Soul Society must have been protecting him, possibly a Soul Reaper who was friendly with his grandfather. And even though Aizen has no contact with the human world, at least as far I'd seen up to that point in the manga, it was natural to assume that someone as kind as him might have befriended a Quincy and protected the young Ishida. So I created a story in my head where Aizen and Ishida's grandfather were friends, and little Uryu adored Aizen. I came up with a comical little scene where grandpa is trying explain what marriage is to a 5-year-old Ishida, saying that when two people love each other, they get married. So Ishida immediately says that he wants to marry Aizen, and is confused when the two men laugh. Aizen jokingly tells Ishida that he'll marry him after he's grown up, if he still wants to, thereby using an old shojo manga cliche and setting up the stage for future romance. ;) After the grandfather was killed, Aizen sent Ishida into hiding and had to cut off contact with him in order to avoid leading the killer of the Quincys to him, although at the time, Ishida didn't quite understand and was hurt by his friend's apparent abandonment.
Since Ishida is living alone when Ichigo first meets him, I assumed that he was an orphan, although this is later proved false when we meet his father, whom Ishida detests. The older Ishida is cold and materialistic, and wants Uryu to become a doctor like himself, because there is no profit in becoming a Quincy. The grandfather once told Ishida that someday he would understand his father, and I suspect that the father, in his own way, wants to protect his son--besides being unprofitable, being a Quincy is also extremely dangerous, after all. However, at this point, Ishida does not understand, and hates his father. He appears to have had a much warmer and loving relationship with his grandfather. His mother is never mentioned, as far as I've seen in the Viz-released manga.
Ichigo and his friends, including Ishida, travel to the Soul Society to rescue Rukia, and I got a major shock when Aizen is apparently murdered in vol 12. I remember wailing, "Noooo, how can they do that to Aizen?! He's such a nice guy!" to one of my friends, who was kind enough to put up with all of my ranting and raving without giving me any spoilers about the rest of the series, which he'd seen in fansubs and scanalations.
I truly thought he was dead, but I created an alternate storyline in my imagination where Aizen only faked his death to investigate the conspiracy. However, he had to invest most of his Soul Reaper powers into the fake body in order to deceive the killer, and they ended up being destroyed along with the body, leaving him as little more than an ordinary human. Which would then free him to leave his post for the human world to provide guidance and training to Ichigo, and also to resume his relationship with Ishida. They wouldn't immediately strike up a romance, though, as I find the adult/teenager thing a little squicky (moreso since Aizen is probably older than Ishida's grandfather, since the Soul Reapers age very slowly!) but he'd watch over Ishida in a fatherly way and their feelings would slowly change over time as Aizen realized how much Ishida has grown up.
I guess whenever I see a character who's reserved with hidden layers of angst beneath the surface, like Ishida (or Snape, for that matter), I always want to break through that reserve and give them some loving! ^_^
However, once again, I was totally off the mark! Ishida was not being protected by anyone, and in fact, needed no special protection. Captain Mayuri of the Soul Reapers, an evil mad-scientist type, was the one who killed Ishida's grandfather (and many other Quincys), in order to dissect them like lab rats and study their powers. By that time, he believed that he'd learned all he could from them and grew bored, so he never bothered to go after Ishida. (He later has reason to regret that when he meets Ishida in battle and is defeated, at the cost of Ishida's Quincy powers, though Ishida later finds a way to regain them.)
And Ishida has no special relationship with Aizen, which I didn't really expect in canon, anyway. However, I was utterly shocked when I found out that not only was Aizen not dead--he was the villain of the story, and the one behind the big Soul Society conspiracy! The nice guy act was only an act, and the true Aizen is cold and ruthless and power-hungry! (At which point I wailed again to my poor put-upon friend, "Noooo, how could they make my Aizen the bad guy?!")
Although I must admit that evil-Aizen is really handsome in a, well, evil sort of way.
Bleach is another title where my imagination went into overdrive. It's a very popular shonen action-type manga, where the main character Ichigo, a young man with the ability to see ghosts, gains the powers of a shinigami (literally, "death god" but translated as Soul Reaper in the Viz manga and anime). When the soul of a deceased person lingers too long in the world of the living, they turn into monsters called "Hollows" that devour other souls, living or dead. It is the job of the Soul Reapers to battle the Hollows and send them on into the afterlife.
The story is very entertaining, with a good mix of action, humor, and drama, and I do like Ichigo, who has a Leon-like personality: brash and hot-tempered, but also generous and compassionate. However, my favorite characters were Uryu Ishida, Ichigo's classmate, and Sosuke Aizen, Captain of the 5th Division of the Soul Reapers.
Ishida--his classmates always refer to him by his last name, and vice-versa, even though Viz has them calling each other by their first names--is the last of the Quincys, humans who battled Hollows with spiritual energy formed into the shape of bows and arrows. However, the Quincys actually destroyed the Hollows, while the Soul Reapers merely purified them and sent them on into the afterlife, eventually (I think) to be reincarnated. The destruction of the Hollows threatened the balance of the universe, so the Soul Reapers destroyed most of the Quincys, except for Ishida and his grandfather. The grandfather wanted to work together with the Soul Reapers to protect humanity from the Hollows, but they rejected his offer. However, they apparently let him live, although they were keeping an eye on him. Ishida hates the Soul Reapers, not because they exterminated the Quincys, but because he saw his grandfather killed by Hollows in front of him when he was a little boy, and the Soul Reapers arrived too late to save him.
Ishida--a serious looking boy with dark hair and glasses--was very kind and idealistic while his grandfather was alive; he wanted to become a Quincy to protect people. By the time Ichigo meets him, he has become very closed off and cynical.
Captain Aizen is a serious but kindly-looking man with brown hair and glasses, and I immediately fell in love with him when he first appeared in the manga (and the anime fansubs I saw). He's so kind and gentle and all around nice, that it's hard to imagine anyone not liking him. He also warns another character about a possible conspiracy in the Soul Society when Ichigo's Soul Reaper friend Rukia is arrested and sentenced to death for the crime of (somewhat accidentally) giving her Soul Reaper powers to Ichigo in order to save his life.
I'd been wondering why Ishida was allowed to live after all the other Quincys were killed, and I assumed that someone in the Soul Society must have been protecting him, possibly a Soul Reaper who was friendly with his grandfather. And even though Aizen has no contact with the human world, at least as far I'd seen up to that point in the manga, it was natural to assume that someone as kind as him might have befriended a Quincy and protected the young Ishida. So I created a story in my head where Aizen and Ishida's grandfather were friends, and little Uryu adored Aizen. I came up with a comical little scene where grandpa is trying explain what marriage is to a 5-year-old Ishida, saying that when two people love each other, they get married. So Ishida immediately says that he wants to marry Aizen, and is confused when the two men laugh. Aizen jokingly tells Ishida that he'll marry him after he's grown up, if he still wants to, thereby using an old shojo manga cliche and setting up the stage for future romance. ;) After the grandfather was killed, Aizen sent Ishida into hiding and had to cut off contact with him in order to avoid leading the killer of the Quincys to him, although at the time, Ishida didn't quite understand and was hurt by his friend's apparent abandonment.
Since Ishida is living alone when Ichigo first meets him, I assumed that he was an orphan, although this is later proved false when we meet his father, whom Ishida detests. The older Ishida is cold and materialistic, and wants Uryu to become a doctor like himself, because there is no profit in becoming a Quincy. The grandfather once told Ishida that someday he would understand his father, and I suspect that the father, in his own way, wants to protect his son--besides being unprofitable, being a Quincy is also extremely dangerous, after all. However, at this point, Ishida does not understand, and hates his father. He appears to have had a much warmer and loving relationship with his grandfather. His mother is never mentioned, as far as I've seen in the Viz-released manga.
Ichigo and his friends, including Ishida, travel to the Soul Society to rescue Rukia, and I got a major shock when Aizen is apparently murdered in vol 12. I remember wailing, "Noooo, how can they do that to Aizen?! He's such a nice guy!" to one of my friends, who was kind enough to put up with all of my ranting and raving without giving me any spoilers about the rest of the series, which he'd seen in fansubs and scanalations.
I truly thought he was dead, but I created an alternate storyline in my imagination where Aizen only faked his death to investigate the conspiracy. However, he had to invest most of his Soul Reaper powers into the fake body in order to deceive the killer, and they ended up being destroyed along with the body, leaving him as little more than an ordinary human. Which would then free him to leave his post for the human world to provide guidance and training to Ichigo, and also to resume his relationship with Ishida. They wouldn't immediately strike up a romance, though, as I find the adult/teenager thing a little squicky (moreso since Aizen is probably older than Ishida's grandfather, since the Soul Reapers age very slowly!) but he'd watch over Ishida in a fatherly way and their feelings would slowly change over time as Aizen realized how much Ishida has grown up.
I guess whenever I see a character who's reserved with hidden layers of angst beneath the surface, like Ishida (or Snape, for that matter), I always want to break through that reserve and give them some loving! ^_^
However, once again, I was totally off the mark! Ishida was not being protected by anyone, and in fact, needed no special protection. Captain Mayuri of the Soul Reapers, an evil mad-scientist type, was the one who killed Ishida's grandfather (and many other Quincys), in order to dissect them like lab rats and study their powers. By that time, he believed that he'd learned all he could from them and grew bored, so he never bothered to go after Ishida. (He later has reason to regret that when he meets Ishida in battle and is defeated, at the cost of Ishida's Quincy powers, though Ishida later finds a way to regain them.)
And Ishida has no special relationship with Aizen, which I didn't really expect in canon, anyway. However, I was utterly shocked when I found out that not only was Aizen not dead--he was the villain of the story, and the one behind the big Soul Society conspiracy! The nice guy act was only an act, and the true Aizen is cold and ruthless and power-hungry! (At which point I wailed again to my poor put-upon friend, "Noooo, how could they make my Aizen the bad guy?!")
Although I must admit that evil-Aizen is really handsome in a, well, evil sort of way.
***
So what is it about me, anyway, that makes my brain jump ahead and try to fill in the story, when I know it will probably be contradicted by canon? I guess it must be the thing that makes me a fanfic writer, that makes me constantly wonder, "what if?" And you know, I am the type who when watching a detective show on tv, will always try to guess who the killer is. (While my sister grumbles, "Can't you just shut up and watch the show already?" ~_^)
I considered writing down the above AU stories, but I'm not sure if fans of those series would enjoy reading something so AU and OOC, and I still have a ton of Snupin and Petshop plot bunnies to write, so for now they'll just stay in my head. If I ever have a surfeit of free time, then maybe someday I'll work on them. (Yeah, like that'll happen! But one can dream...)
God, those plot bunnies breed like...well...bunnies! As soon as I deal with one, a dozen more pop up in its place! ^_^
So what is it about me, anyway, that makes my brain jump ahead and try to fill in the story, when I know it will probably be contradicted by canon? I guess it must be the thing that makes me a fanfic writer, that makes me constantly wonder, "what if?" And you know, I am the type who when watching a detective show on tv, will always try to guess who the killer is. (While my sister grumbles, "Can't you just shut up and watch the show already?" ~_^)
I considered writing down the above AU stories, but I'm not sure if fans of those series would enjoy reading something so AU and OOC, and I still have a ton of Snupin and Petshop plot bunnies to write, so for now they'll just stay in my head. If I ever have a surfeit of free time, then maybe someday I'll work on them. (Yeah, like that'll happen! But one can dream...)
God, those plot bunnies breed like...well...bunnies! As soon as I deal with one, a dozen more pop up in its place! ^_^
Well, for now, I'm working on the "Snape and Lupin watch porn videos in the love hotel" story that I promised
myene_01, and a Petshop bunny in my Daiki universe. But it was fun to rant about my random manga/anime bunnies for a change, and it was fun to write down my plot bunnies, even if only as summaries.***
And on a closing note, I just realized that I must have a fixation on guys with glasses or something. Daiki (Dolls shop owner), Tezuka, Umeda, Ishida, and Aizen all wear glasses. (Although Aizen sheds his glasses once he turns evil.) Oh, and also Watanuki from XXXholic, mentioned in part 1. *scratches head* I dunno, maybe there's something kind of sexy about glasses...?
And on a closing note, I just realized that I must have a fixation on guys with glasses or something. Daiki (Dolls shop owner), Tezuka, Umeda, Ishida, and Aizen all wear glasses. (Although Aizen sheds his glasses once he turns evil.) Oh, and also Watanuki from XXXholic, mentioned in part 1. *scratches head* I dunno, maybe there's something kind of sexy about glasses...?
no subject
http://community.livejournal.com/fanficrants/
but i admit it sounds interesting. i normally read Petshop fics or other
http://community.livejournal.com/psohfanfiction/
great stuff :D
no subject
And thanks for the link to psohfanfiction--I'm a member of ds_petshop and psohdrabble, but I wasn't aware of the Domino community. I've just joined, and am looking forward to reading the fics there! ^_^