Assorted thoughts update #8

[fitia]

Had a huge scare two weeks ago when my laptop suddenly died on me... I rely on it for so much at the moment that losing it would've been catastrophic. Thankfully, it's fairly new, so it was still under warranty and I was able to get it fixed no problem. Turns out it had a screw loose, and I was somehow none the wiser despite hearing something rattling beneath my keyboard for several days. So that's a potential canon event (I still haven't watched ATSV...) averted, leaving me only with two weeks of annoying inconvenience. Which I spent either struggling to take notes in class or having no hobbies outside of media consumption! Anyways:

• I finally finished Basara a couple days ago! I was definitely having the most fun with it during the second half, when I had to suffer less of Shuri and Sarasa's "romantic" interactions: they work so much better as dramatic narrative foils and political rivals, honestly. But I wasn't mad when the story ended with their reunion. The culmination of their character arcs up until then and the genuinely strong writing and well-delivered emotional beats in the latter half of the manga made it feel very deserved. My experience of the story vacillated a lot throughout, but I ultimately come down on the side of having enjoyed it, and thinking that it was pretty good! There are some characters I wish had been fleshed out better, I find the series' gender politics tedious, and I wasn't entirely on board with how Tamura chose to approach vengeance and revolutionary violence-- But, I found Sarasa to be a remarkable protagonist, and her and Shuri's character arcs very satisfying, and found a lot of the character dynamics compelling and engaging! It's definitely something I'd recommend others give a try.

Another thing I found compelling about it, without really having the tools to actually make solid conclusions, was how often Tamura directly referenced various parts of Japanese history in juxtaposition with the political commentary she was making in her narrative. I was especially surprised by her acknowledging, somewhat, Japan's settler colonial relationship with the Ryukyu Islands (Okinawa specifically) and the Ainu in Hokkaido! I wish had a better grasp on that history to better appreciate the depth of the writing.

Also, despite me not agreeing entirely with Tamura on violence, I'm really glad she was adamant on having no "Good Monarch" bullshit. A low bar to clear but apparently still a difficult one, as far as I've seen!

• Speaking of narratives of systemic oppression and revolution, I'm slowly making my way through Les Misérables right now, which was a funny book to start at the same time that I was reading Basara. Nothing much I can say on it so far because I'm scared of looking stupid about one of the most famous novels ever written by one of the most celebrated authors of all time I'm only on the third book, but I've always loved Victor Hugo's writing. All I've read by him so far has been Le dernier jour d'un condamné and Claude Gueux (plus an aborted attempted to read Notre Dame de Paris several years ago), but I admire how militant he is in his convictions and how rhetorically effective he is at conveying them. And he's romantic/sentimental without being melodramatic, which, given the concerns he writes about, is a fine line to tread! I really loved the Jean Valjean chapters, he managed to paint a fantastic portrait of an undeniably sympathetic, unquestionably societally wronged and yet believably miserable and unpleasant man. I have like several hundred pages still ahead of me but I know I'm going to have a lot of fun reading them!

• Next manga I decided to read was Banana Fish, and it's got me hooked! It's been a while since I've read anything I've had a hard time putting down, so I've been enjoying myself a lot. I was kind of surprised to see that Ash and Eiji's relationship takes up significantly less of its time than the fandom had led me to believe, though honestly, you'd think I'd expect that sort of thing by now, lol. It's still very good and very moving, though. But I'm not really vibing with how the series treats race, and the fact that it has no prominent female characters even though this is the sort of narrative (one concerned with the exploitation of the most vulnerable, especially children, and hypermasculinized environments and the violence that comes of them) that would benefit from it. Otherwise, it's been a fun ride! I've been spoiled for a lot of the major plot beats, including the ending, through a friend who's talked about this series a lot to me, but it's a sign of competent writing that none of those spoilers have really "ruined" my experience so far. The way it's looking, I'm probably going to be finished with this manga in the next week, and I'm really digging the themes, so I'm hoping it'll inspire some meta-writing out of me-- and maybe even some fic writing, eventually!

I tried to write this post yesterday but felt annoyed with everything I was writing and dropped it, lol. I'm glad I'm feeling a lot better today and could update my journal a bit. Also, I wrote 1000 words of fanfic, so I'm feeling pretty good about that too!