NERD POST ALERT – POSSIBLE SPOILERS
I’m reading Negima!: Magister Negi Magi from Ken Akamatsu and his team. The first time I picked the first book up, I thought: “Oh my God. This is SO, SO lame”. It was a mixture of Love Hina (which I didn’t especially like) and elements totally ripped off from Harry Potter and Enid Blyton’s school stories. Starting with the protagonist, who is a nine-year old good British magician (… with glasses) who, for no apparent reason, is sent to Japan (?) to work as an English teacher (?) in an all-girls school (of course), which actually has an island and monsters in it and seems bigger than Tokyo. Then, the plot was little more than the beginning of the classical love story between this little boy and a girl older than him, who started out hating each other’s guts (duh). What was left were lots of scenes of the girls either: a) getting nude for no reason, b) falling off and accidentally showing their panties/butts to the innocent (my ass) main character for no reason, or c) either jumping to this character’s neck because he’s soooo cute or doing weird stuff that always started or ended up with them half-naked.
It seemed the quintaessence of the male fantasy, and therefore not a manga I’d want to read. For a person who doesn’t read or watch anime on a regular basis, doing it means having to adjust his/her head to a different type of narrative and style traits than Western tradition (not a bad thing at all, but you have to learn how to switch), not to mention having to deal with horrendous misogynous, racist and homophobic stereotypes that most of the Western series tackle with care nowadays (and I defy any otaku to solidly deny this!). Also, Ken Akamatsu makes shônen manga and sexploitation is bound to be included in any of his works, just because he owes himself to his public.
But— there was this “but”— there were those elements almost plagiarized from the British literary tradition, which I can’t help but love, and they combined them with Japan’s rich tradition of school stories so well… It’s Japan, and the manga, what’s been saving most of Europe’s classic YA books’ ass in the last decades. Who made the TV adaptations of Anne of Green Gables, Little Lord, Polyanna, Heidi, Marco and (my God) The Twins at St. Clare’s? Who made Read Or Die? There’s much to owe to these companies who were keen at taking their inspirations from Western books.
And there was something more. Apart from all the nude scenes, you could tell that the team really liked the characters of the girls. There were 31 of them, and still, they’d tried to make them all so different. Some of them are deliciously Blyton-ish. And they’d even gone one step further and added many supernatural elements like, this girl is a ghost, this one is a vampire, this is an android and this other is a powerful ninja! Hehehe, melikes!
The story went on, and once you get accustomed to the gratuitous nude scenes and forget about the funny spells in "Latin" and the accumulating plotholes —it’s fun how often they make the characters explain why they didn’t do this and that, as if they felt guilty—, the stories start thickening and the characters become more three-dimensional and human. I even like Negi rather much now, and I don’t mind that he always gets to see the girls naked or have them touching him (although he should explain the trick to the rest!). With the girls, what’s used here is a kind of a Lost technique, where different archs of the story reveal more and more about the past and personality of a character. It’s fun, and it really hooks you up the way Lost did.
And, besides all this, there’s even sapphic subtext and some shôjo ai. Of course, you’re bound to have a little bit of this when you’ve got 31 girls running around naked and one single little boy who seems purposedly emasculated. At the point where I am now, there’s a lesbian relationship in the making (with a cute younger version of Haruka and Michiru as the suffering ultra-tough girl and the clever ultra-feminine girl), but also many hints of girls kissing and liking each other, fighting for them (or for Negi :)) and sharing diverse degrees of intimacy. Yeeeeah, fun.
What amazes me is how a manga like this, which kind of started like a joke and an excuse to draw breasts and butts, can get pretty good in some time and still don’t lose the “just for fun” air, like it shouted out: “hey, we still do it for the breasts and butts!”. How I wish I was able to do the same! No, I didn’t mean continuously drawing breasts and butts, but— or, wait; on second thought…
Posted by Elenis at February 2, 2008 11:15 PM