domicile of the man-eating cape

((ETA: added stuff about another plot arc that just came to mind.))

Now, before anyone gets the idea that certain authors are my darlings and are free from my bilious eye of scrutiny and death: they are not.

Because as much as I'm going to fangirl Kazuya Minekura's Saiyuki in this chunk, I'm also going to crit bits of it.

That said, if the idea of a little nobody dilettante like me criticizing a published author bothers you, don't read on.

Those of you who are interested, have an LJ cut! Big bad spoilers all the way to Reload 9 and beyond lurk here!

So. Saiyuki! The title is a pun! It has four bishounen in it! The wikipedia page is woefully stupid, but what else is new for wikipedia! The anime has epic filleritis! The Tokyopop translation is extremely middlin' and its take on the dialogue gained a lot of fratboy-homophobe nonsense for no reason I can discern! Hey! Why am I talking like Fred Milton?

Okay, now that I have all the nonsense out of my system (mostly), on with the srsbzns. Saiyuki has, thus far, two manga 'chunks' to its storyline. The first, titled just plain Saiyuki, covers how the crew got together, gives you a bunch of stuff on their pasts, shows you how they interact, and throws all kinds of villainy at then, from a Taoist-looking stalker shikigami to a crazy little !priest with a castle full of creepy toys to a noble youkai prince with one hell of a spazzy little sister -

That would be Kougaiji, incidentally. Kou is one of the 'good youkai' in that he's still sane and unaffected by the bizarre minus energy wave that's sweeping across the land and making a majority of the local youkai flip their shit and start attacking humans willy-nilly. There is also eating of humans, which is a big fat hairy taboo. (Kou's dad, Gyuumaou, got turned into a big damn rock for such tomfoolery). Kougaiji is not interested in humans, he just wants to save his also-currently-a-rock mommy. And he inspires massive loyalty in his subordinates by being plain awesome. We find out in Saiyuki Reload, the second manga chunk, that he has FANGIRLS... But I digress. Kougaiji is all-around awesome.

Unfortunately not all youkai come off as well. While Kou and his posse (Dokugakuji, Yaone and Lirin-the-spazzy-little-sister) are invariably nifty people, a lot of the grunt/redshirt youkai seem to be assholes in going about their mission to get the sutra off Sanzo and frag him. Even so, Sanzo, Hakkai, Gojyo and Goku comment on the sheer loyalty of these guys. There are also youkai who have lost their shit completely and just gone berserk killy-stabby-yay. it struck me as interesting that these youkai who have totally lost their minds are regarded with no small amount of sympathy by Sanzo and Co., none of whom have clean hands.

We discover in Reload that even the youkai who seem to go utterly around the twist sometimes come back to sanity through its rear entrance. Reload is also the series that deals more explicitly with the prejudice issue. In the Burial arcs - stories dealing with the charcaters' pasts - Banri, Gojyo's ex-roommate and fellow former street kid, brings up the topic of youkai power limiters (jewellery that makes youkai look human) and comments that there's never truly been peace and balance between humans and youkai in Togenkyo; humans look on youkai with suspicion. Now, anyone looking at BANRI with suspicion is smart, but then - ah - THEN we run into the 'Even a Worm' arc, and we meet Hazel.

Hazel is a bishop. He speaks with a Kyoto accent, he is bishounen, he is proper and fussy and very much Sanzo's foil, and he is the lens through which we really start to see the discrimination against youkai. There are hints about such things as early on as the arc with Rikudou/Shuuei waaaay back in volume 2 of the original series, but Hazel kicks it into high gear. Hazel, you see, hates youkai. Universally. Sane or non-sane doesn't matter; to Hazel a sane youkai is a walking, talking pointy eared ticking bomb scenario. Hazel would as soon have his bodyguard, Gato (or Gat, depending on how you want to romanize it) dispatch them with a quick head or heart shot than look at them. (Gato is much more open minded than Hazel, but has reasons for not arguing with the little bum.)

Hazel also does weird things with souls. He can, and does, use the souls of dispatched youkai to revive their human victims. Unfortunately said victims get as violent toward youkai as batshit youkai are toward everything. We can imagine how well this goes over when Sanzo's team is involved. Hakka, Gojyo and Goku are youkai AND human in various ways but Hazel's reanimated weirdos don't discriminate. Or maybe they do. Hazel sure does. ...I'm not funny. Anyhow, a one point Sanzo asks if Hazel could do his trick the other way, reviving a youkai with a human soul. Hazel's response, "Why would I want to do that?" goes over like a lead zeppelin for Sanzo.

Sanzo does not discriminate. To Sanzo, everybody is annoying. Hazel becomes doubly so for him when he ends up having to travel with the bishop in order to locate someone whom he reeeeally hates. Hazel knows where this man is, so Hazel must get followed. While the team is divided, both groups end up aorund the same area, though on opposite sides of a mountain range. On one side, where Hakkai, Gojyo and Goku end up, we have a desert climate and a town of youkai who are busting arse making a living. (Their city looks pueblo-like.) On te other, it's much less arid, and there's a big bustling town of humans who seem antsy about these youkai over there. Hazel is immediately sympathetic to their cause, and throws himself into protecting them.

When the spit hits the fan, guess who turns out to be the choad loaders? If you said 'the human side', BING. You are corright. They actively bait the youkai into attacking them, utterly massacre the attackers (or so they think), and then burn the youkai town to the ground when there's no one there to defend it. Hazel, to his credit, is appalled. It's a testament to Minekura's skill as an artist, the spread where Hazel sees the human casualties and youkai casualties (one side laid out respectfully, the other in a haphazard stack like cordwood) in the scene where he's asked to resurrect the human soldiers who died. Hazel looks completely horrified. This is, after all, HIS fault to a great extent. Whether he likes youkai or not, he's aided and abetted the killing of innocent people who weren't doing anything, and who were indeed the wronged party!

Sanzo's response; 'it took you long enough to clue in, dumbass.'

Ultimately, the human village gets theirs - the youkai start to overwhelm the human soldiers, and it's this chaos that Sanzo turns his back on and walks away from. It is not, after all, his fight. He's unusually PASSIVE in that arc, functioning mainly as the one who swings the cluebat to really drive the point home to Hazel. he doesn't attempt to stop Gato and Hazel's killing of straggling youkai, which begs the question: how come? Then again, COULD he have? When I first saw Gato, I made like UltraJMan: "Aw man he's huge. *pause*...HOLY CRAP, he IS freakin' huge!!" it's hard to say, in the end.

So. Why do I think Minekura's youkai work better than Harris and Whedon's attempts?

She does not explicitly set the youkai up as symbolic. The youkai are just that - they are their own 'other' group, they are not a stand-in for another 'other' (though they can be read that way). There is still the question of what the true nature of the youkai is - a lot of the ones who come back to sane now see humans as wolves see deer. So there IS that, but then - how DO wolves see deer? Well, as food. There's no malice, no specific targeting - humans are just really easy food. A predator goes for the easy pickins because that way there's no energy wasted and major injury sustained going after the difficult stuff. Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom: Togenkyo version. Also, the youkai aren't depicted as innately malicious. They're like humans: some nice, some assholes. When attacked, they retaliate. They can have close families or batshit ones. They can despise people, and they can definitely love. Kougaiji is not necessarily the exception to the rule. He's not one of the rare good apples - he's just Kougaiji. And there is pity on the part of the Sanzo party for the youkai who go batfuck; they will not truck with the needless killing of youkai who weren't doing anything.

So now another question: WHAT took Minekura so long, when it comes to addressing the human-youkai issue? I mean, the easy answer is pace of storytelling, but why wasn't it addressed a bit more often sooner? Rikudou (vol 2-3 or the original series) lives in a waking nightmare killing youkai wholesale to feed the miasma in the talisman on his chest - whether they're sane or not doesn't matter, he kills to feed it because the alternative is screaming agony. The regret, though, might be much worse than the pain. He DOES regret; while his talisman-possessed self spits out all kinds of venomous shit about dirty souls, the person Rikudou WAS utterly loathes that 'self' and is constantly pleading with it to just fuck off for a second. So there is that, and there is Gojyo's abject fucking FURY about what Kami-sama (7-9 original series) does to Kinkaku and Ginkaku, who are twin youkai kids. They're about six to ten years old, and Kinkaku is INCREDIBLY innocent. He's very naive, easily duped, and Kami just uses him until it's borng, then murders him. And Gojyo is livid. The first time someone leaves the quartet happens here - Gojyo goes alone to make Kami pay for that shit. So yes - Gojyo does not like the ill-treatment of the unfortunate. At all. But the issue of active shittiness directed at youkai is not addressed explicity until Hazel comes on the scene.

There are plenty of negative portrayals of youkai in the interim - Hyakuganmaou comes to mind, but again, his uh PROBLEMS are not directed solely at human women. Yaone works for Kougaiji because he intercepted her en route to Hyakuganmaou's joint. Cho Kanan isn't so lucky. (Saiyuki, like lot of shonen manga, suffers from occasionally-spotty protrayals of women.) Hyakuganmaou's son is NUTS, but growing up in that house I doubt he could have ended up any other way. Minekura's treatment of THAT issue impressed me, because the basic opinion of Yisou seems to be "Yeah he has a right to be pissed off, but what the FUCK man he's going WAY too far looking for revenge!" He is not absolved from blame - both he and Gonou are portrayed as batshit, and guilty of sin - but he is allowed to be angry at the loss he experienced. Yisou hated his father (he calls him a monster or bastard, depending on the translation, and he's not speaking in an ironic Hakkai-mimicking tone, there's no sign of that sort of a thing - you don't speak ill of the dead, but Yisou doesn't care, he HATED the man), but there were other family members who died. Wholesale massacre was not justifiable, and Hakkai doesn't pretend it is either. So yeah. Yisou is fantastically creepy and falls square into the Medea 'TOO FAR, DUDE' category of revenge plots. But he is not depicted as a natural-born monster. Something of a dick? Yes. But so is Gonou at that point. Whether or not someone becomes a monster is just as often depicted as a conscious choice.

There's another plot arc in which Sanzo and Co. come to a town run by a swindler of a taoist priest. We learn that the village occasionally sacrifices undesirables (or people like Sanzo and company) to the local youkai in return for going unharassed, and that sets up the same problem as did the fact that Kanan ended up dead because the villagers sent her to Hyakuganmaou - and did so because she and Gonou had no other family. Both are orphans. Kanan was an 'acceptable sacrifice'. What humans do to survive is not always savoury, and is definitely not depicted as such. Whether it's right or wrong, no one can say, and Minekura doesn't anvil us one way or the other. Although she does bring up the question; is there a such thing as acceptable sacrifice? While the youkai are willing to die for Kougaiji, we don't see them doing this in the desert. Water is scarce, but what little there is gets divvied out to everyone. So - what is 'acceptable' sacrifice?

Fascinating to me, though, is the interval in which Kougaiji's true nature is suppressed. Kougaiji's default mode is that of a compassionate, big-hearted sort of an utter badass who adores his family and would do anything for them. With his true nature suppressed, he becomes a cold, callous, pointlessly-violent asshole. How's THAT for a reversal. When I put this up against how Angel's portrayed, it's even more significant. Kougaiji is the 'other', and his true nature is compassionate. Dokugakuji and Yaone are the same - and Yaone, though she starts off iffy, blossoms into an AMAZING character. In another interesting reversal, it's Yaone who whaps Dokugakuji one when he starts babbling self-defeatedness after they meet suppressed!Kou. The WOMAN keeps it together.

I am digressing a lot. I think I'm trying to discuss too much at one time! Back to the quux of the matter. Minekura's portrayal of youkai works in ways that other authors' portrayals of supernatural beings as the 'other' does not because the youkai are not set up to be symbolic. Like Hazel says, youkai are youkai. They're not 'supposed to be' anything else. You can, if you wish, read them as something else, and at times it's hard not to. But at the end of the day, they're youkai. And they're not always wrong - sometimes they are the wronged. AND the question of 'true inner self' is answered quite well with Kougaiji. Anyone can be compassionate. Anyone can be cruel. Kougaiji, arguably the 'bad guy' (I call him the antagonist because he is; he's not 'bad' at all!), is a whole hell of a lot kinder to his subordinates than Sanzo EVER is. That's the final interesting reversal. Your heroes are sometimes blatant asses. Your opponents ain't.

In spite of its flaws*, I really do like Saiyuki. I can recognize the flaws and still enjoy it. so it is with a bunch of my friends and Whedon's stuff; I won't begrudge them that! I will NEVER read a Hamilton book, and Harris and Butcher unfortunately fell to the wayside of my fickle attention span, but plenty of people I know enjoy THOSE books and I'm not going to insult them for that.

But I will say this: if you're going to do something with a metaphorical 'other', don't use those four as your template? Please? XD

*For example: Sanzo IS very assholey to the scorpion youkai in volume 5 - though he's an asshole to everyone, that scene still makes me wince because we did not know until Minekura stated right out that the youkai is a crossdresser; while his tone is NOWHERE NEAR as transphobic as Tokyopop made it out to be, Sanzo's hugely catty comments about her makeup are way below the belt, even if they're just a means to an end and very typical Sanzo jabbing at cracks in armour. It;s significant, though, that Sanzo is not picking on Ranri for being gay. He never ONCE calls her any slur near 'fag' (the insult he uses, okama, implies a theatrical vegas drag queen) - he's picking on her for having bad makeup. Which is incredibly nasty to do to someone like Ranri. For all Sanzo knows, Ranri is a woman with bad makeup who thinks she's ugly, so that's where he targets. Still - yeah. Argh.

There aren't a lot of active female characters either. The incidental women in the early volumes are just that, and Yaone at first is very dull. I adore Lirin, but she rather quickly gets sidelined. Kanan and Gojyo's mother are dead before the story begins - they're part of backstory more than characters. Yeah. not - real awesome. A lot of shonen manga have that issue.

In spite of the issues, i do enjoy the mnga a LOT. I just enjoy it while aware of the issues.