HARUM SCARUM

 My next mythcomics post concerns a rather atypical "harem comedy," so it behooves me to advance some general rules for the typical kind.

The baseline definition for the subgenre involves a protagonist continually interacting, usually in close proximity, with three or more uncommitted individuals, all of whom said protagonist finds attractive. Though some variations include a hetero female surrounded by hetero males, or focus upon assorted gay/lesbian permutations, the prevalent pattern is that of a single hetero male becoming the center of attention for three or more hetero females. The dominant pattern is also that of the domestic comedy, though there are also Japanese harem franchises oriented upon horror or adventure.

Most "harem-histories" start with the most popular serials produced by Rumiko Takahashi: URUSEI YATSURA (1978), MAISON IKKOKU (1980), and RAMNA 1/2 (1987). However, none of these serials stress ongoing female romantic competition for a male as do the stronger exemplars of the subgenre. URUSEI clearly takes advantage of what I'll call the "beauty pageant trope," in which, for whatever reason, a male character finds himself virtually besieged by a panoply of gorgeous females. However, of the couple dozen women who populate URUSEI in its nine-year-run, very few of them are interested in protagonist Ataru. URUSEI does begin with a Betty-and-Veronica struggle between Earth-girl Shinobu and alien beauty Lum for Ataru's love. But soon Shinobu deals herself out, and it becomes evident that Lum is the only one who loves/can stand Ataru. The lead female of MAISON never really has any serious competitors either. And while a small coterie of hot girls pursues Ranma Saotome from time to time, thus annoying female lead Akane, the RANMA series doesn't focus purely upon the presence of romantic rivals. All that said, at least one URUSEI tale by Takahashi includes Ataru fantasizing about having a harem consisting of all the females who have continually rejected him-- and that one scene might have had a major effect upon all that followed, considering Takahashi's status as a major moneymaking mangaka.

Closer to the harem-pattern were 1988's OH MY GODDESS and the 1992 OVA TENCHI MUYO (which in turn begat a manga and a teleseries in that decade). However, I don't think the subgenre became dominant until the international success of Ken Akamatsu's 1998 LOVE HINA, in which a harried male student finds himself managing a girls' dormitory. All five of the nubile female residents vie for the male's affections, and that's not including two other irregular sources of competition. 21st century Japan then began producing a titanic number of similar concepts, and I've seen no evidence of the trend slowing down.

This arrangement has led to HINA and many similar franchises as being nothing more than appeals to male sex fantasies. I've no stats regarding what serials are read more by females than by males in Japan or anywhere else. However, I don't think HINA in particular lacks for female fans. Though no reader of either sex experiences the sort of farcical situations of HINA, in real life hetero females certainly do compete for males, albeit more subtly than male competitions. A series like HINA allows female readers to identify with female characters seeking validation of their own feelings, even when a given character is unlikely to be selected as the male lead's destined partner (e.g. middle-schooler Shinobu, whose affection for twenty-something Keitaro was not likely to be confirmed by serial's end).

I mentioned that various permutations existed, and this includes a few harem-like narratives that revert back to the non-harem resolution of URUSEI, surrounding the male with comely females who don't desire romance with him. This is definitely true of the anime PRINCESS RESURRECTION, though at present I've not read the entire manga series. And the mythcomic I'll next explore diverges into even newer terrains.     

TSUNDERE, TSUNDERE

 (Apologies for the above pun to Blur and their nineties song, "Sunday, Sunday")

On this blog I've written quite a bit about the appearance of sadistic tendencies in various fictional characters, particularly of the feminine gender, who as a group are better known for "giving" than for "taking." Jordan Peterson has noted that females are generally more "agreeable" than males and less given to overt confrontation. Yet I think there are often currents of aggression that become intermingled with the most agreeable temperaments, and one might say that many of these have, in Japanese culture, manifested in what has been termed the "tsundere"-- the understanding of which is crucial to my impending conclusion to my ongoing GHOST SWEEPER MIKAMI analysis.  

So what's a tsundere? Grokipedia and Wikipedia agree on this basic definition:    

A tsundere (ツンデレ) is a character archetype originating in Japanese anime, manga, and visual novels, depicting an individual who initially behaves in a cold, hostile, or irritable manner—known as the "tsun" phase—before gradually revealing a softer, more affectionate and vulnerable side, referred to as the "dere" phase.

Grokipedia also adds a categorization I don't find in the Wiki essay:

The archetype has evolved to include variations, such as "Type A" (harsh exterior dominating initially) and "Type B" (affectionate by default but with tsun outbursts)

I for one have only seen the tsundere term used for Type A: the sort of character who projects hostility or indifference, whether to many people or to one specific person. I can see at least a chain of logic for Type B, though, and I can also see how readers of manga, and of fiction generally, will particularly have a tendency to use the term interchangeably for (a) those that project an aggressive vibe but have some level of agreeability hidden beneath a tough exterior, and (b) those that project an agreeable temperament but also evince aspects of aggression on occasion. Neither Type A nor Type B are intrinsically feminine character-types, and indeed I can think of prominent male archetypes along roughly the same lines. However, in this essay I'll confine myself to feminine examples, because traditionally aggression becomes more problematic, psychologically and socially, for females than for males.

Grok and Wiki also agree that the term "tsundere" was not coined until the very early years of the 21st century, though there had been several fictional progenitors of both types. Takashi Shiina's Reiko Mikami is unquestionably a member of Type A, and if the online translation of Mikami's final story, circa 2011, is an accurate one, that story might be among the first manga-stories to incorporate the newbie term. Rumiko Takahashi's Lum is sometimes labeled as a Type A as well, though I deem her a Type B based on the above description. But Lum may be the first major manga-female who intermingled agreeability and aggression so thoroughly that she's often deemed the first of the type, though she appeared over 20 years before the term was coined.

              

Shiina's indebtedness to Takahashi has been mentioned in online interviews with the two of them and is played for laughs in one of the late SWEEPER stories, "GS Mikami 78." This tale depicts a demon-battle in the career of Mikami's youthful mother Michie and includes a cute in-joke wherein young Rumiko Takahashi witnesses the fight and is inspired to create URUSEI YATSURA. Shiina is very careful to make sure his readers know that the joke has Takahashi's approval. That said, Michie is a closer analogue to Lum than Mikami is, and the "GS 78" arc even shows Michie winning over a reluctant male lover with her passion-- a thing Lum repeatedly seeks to do with Ataru, though with far less success.

Actually, in her very first appearance Lum does have some strong character-traits in common with Mikami. An alien race, strongly resembling the traditional Japanese ogres called "oni," threatens to conquer Earth. But the ETs offer a deal: they will withhold all attacks if a randomly chosen Earthman engages their champion in a game of "oni-tag." Lum is the champion, and she's totally okay with helping her people conquer an unoffending planet. Earth's champion can only win the contest if he tags Lum's horns, but her ability to fly makes that difficult. Ataru only earns Lum's wrath-- her "tsun" characteristics-- when he manages to pull off her bikini-top, which might be viewed as a deflected defloration motif. Lum then begins fighting Ataru on a personal level, the female responding to the male's crude advances, and she even sneers at his lack of toughness when he's knocked out by a fall to the ground. However, the moment Ataru defeats Lum, this time using her stolen bikini as bait, Lum shifts into the "dere" phase, and for the rest of the series she tries to convince Ataru to marry her willingly-- which is precisely where Lum's resemblance to Reiko Mikami ends. 

One assumes that on some level the Lum character knows she's not really Ataru's wife until they have the ceremony, but she reacts to his dalliances with other women as if he were a cheating husband. This leads to the series' most familiar trope: Lum violently punishing Ataru for his fickleness. In this she's certainly a revenge-figure for every woman who dealt with a trifling male, even though the comedy stems from both (a) the fact that she doesn't have any literal claim on Ataru, and (b) the fact that, if only because of their propinquity, Ataru does come to love Lum better than any other appealing woman-- though, much like Shiina's perpetual victim Yokoshima, Ataru always wants as many women as the world offers. But Lum generally projects an agreeable "Type B" personality no matter how many times she's moved to violence.

Shiina's final SWEEPER story appeared in or around 2011, the year that a great earthquake devastated Japan, prompting several manga-artists to contribute special stories .to generate revenue for victims. Possibly, had the earthquake never taken place, Shiina still might have found some other reason to present this capstone to his original series, which had concluded in 1999. The cover highlights Mikami's comeback by mentioning that Shiina's profit-seeking ghostbuster had "arrived in the 21st century"--though thus far this two-part tale has remained the last hurrah for Mikami and her crew. It does show that by 2011 the term "tsundere" has become accepted by manga-practitioners, enough that Shiina expects his audience to understand the context. And in the final SWEEPER story, Shiina pokes a little fun at how the term's meaning might, or might not, apply to so extreme a personality as Ghost Sweeper Reiko Mikami.

               

MIKAMI MEDITATIONS PT. 3

 The other day I finished reading the last of Takashi Shiina's 1991-99 manga GHOST SWEEPER MIKAMI. The series is very much like several serials by Rumiko Takahashi, whom Shiina considers a symbolic "sensei" (though he never apprenticed under her) -- by which I mean that MIKAMI is a combination of utterly wacky comedy antics and of moments of sentimental insight into the complexities of the human heart. Anything I will write about this shonen series must take into account how Shiina chose to sell his unique heroine to his readers.

When I wrote the first part of MIKAMI MEDITATIONS in early March, I was probably a little over half through the series. I raised the question as to whether the domineering Mikami would ever reveal a deeper "I-thou" relationship to her bumbling assistant Yokoshima, as opposed to just using him as a tool, an "I-it" relationship. I was fairly sure, though, that Shiina meant to tease the readers on the subject for most if not all of the series, much as Takahashi did with the relationship of Ataru to Lum in URUSEI YATSURA. He threw in lots of little moments-- Mikami being jealous whenever Yokoshima received attention from another attractive female, obviously-- but he could have brought the relationship to a close, as Takahashi did with another series that Shiina probably encountered, MAISON IKKOKU. I can now say without doubt that Shiina chose to emulate URUSEI rather than MAISON, but also that all Mikami's protests, in which she claims not to need or want Yokoshima as anything but a tool, prove empty. She's more or less the "Ataru" of the series, managing to confess without confessing, as occured in the final URUSEI manga-tale, BOY MEETS GIRL.

In the first MEDITATIONS, I also wondered if Shiina was building to some big revelation as to what psychological attitudes led Mikami to become so extraordinarily greedy. However, to the very end Shiina kept that set of cards to himself. He does, in the arc "Message from Mother," demonstrate that neither of Mikami's parents knows how this attitude came about, and an even later arc, "GS Mikami '78," provides evidence that greed was not a major feature of either Mikami's mother Michie in her youth, or of her father, whose backstory is for the first time expanded for the reader's delectation. She's like neither of them in that regard, but I don't think Shiina had no opinion on the matter. He just wanted to keep readers guessing, which I'll explore in another post.

Also, though I've not mentioned it here, I was hoping to get at least two mythcomics posts out of the MIKAMI series, since March is "Women's History Month," an event I sometimes like to celebrate-- though often not in a way any ultra-feminist would recognize. And to my immense pleasure, Shiina provided a second concrescent work in this serial-- though it required an earthquake to bring it forth.   

            

MYTHCOMICS: ["KIKYO'S LIGHTS"] INU-YASHA (200?)

 This analysis of this long arc (18 chapters) is thematically tied to the one I arbitrarily titled KAGOME'S HEART, so reading that essay before this one is recommended. Chapter 17 of this arc is entitled "The Lights," and since none of the individual titles summed up what I wanted for an umbrella-designation, I'm using the overall title, KIKYO'S LIGHTS. Although the manga ran for roughly another two years, it's in this arc that Rumiko Takahashi brought to a close the romantic triangle between the undead priestess Kikyo, the living mortal girl Kagome, and the half-demon who loves them both.

In HEART, Naraku the demon-human hybrid launches a complicated plan to both eliminate his own human side's reluctance to kill Kikyo-- whom he once loved, and who has the power to exorcise him-- and to utilize Kagome's hostility to the priestess as a psychic (and psychological) weapon. Naraku's failure to do so in HEART merely moves him to a new elaboration of the same gambit. Takahashi also introduces, previous to LIGHTS, a subplot in which the heroic monk Miroku is poisoned in such a way that, though his life is saved (by Kikyo), he's in danger of imminent death whenever he utilizes his wind-tunnel power-- so naturally, throughout the arc he keeps being put in a corner, usually in defense of his beloved fighting-mate Sango. Also, the wolf-demon Koga, Inu-Yasha's rival for Kagome's affections, joins the demon-fighting team.

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As the arc begins, Naraku possesses most of the shard of the Shikon Jewel. However, Kikyo has the power to banish the evil influence of the jewel, which would exorcise Naraku's evil as well. To compromise the undead priestess' power, he entraps her in near-invisible webs of mystic silk, webs that will also reach out to enfold Kagome and Inu-Yasha.

Kikyo attempts to get Kagome to purify her of Naraku's corruption by shooting the priestess with her own magic bow. Unfortunately, Kagome still holds a deep resentment of Kikyo's involvement with Inu-Yasha, and the mortal girl's divided heart causes the bow to break, so that it's useless. Kagome, Koga, Shippo, Sango and Miroku travel to a shrine atop Mount Azusa, where they can seek a new bow for the purification ritual. Inu-Yasha guards Kikyo, and in a separate subplot, Kohaku, brother of Sango, flees the agents of Naraku, seeking to capture him for the Shikon shards in his body.

     

  However, Kagome is separated from her freinds and taken into the shrine, which tests her to see if she's truly capable of the ritual. An illusion of Kikyo appears to Kagome while she hangs off a cliff, bearing the magic bow, though it seems incredibly heavy in her hand. The spirit taunts Kagome for her human failings. However, Kagome defeats the spirit's logic with her own: asserting her absolute conviction in the reality of the love between her and Inu-Yasha, which even his old love for Kikyo cannot sunder. As a result of Kagome's defiance, she gains control of the bow and is expelled from the shrine. Significantly, Inu-Yasha arrives on the scene in time to succor her.

 

 However, Kikyo is present at Azusa as well, and Naraku appears to sweep her up, taunting her with the nearness of her extirpation. Koga, who like Kohaku possesses Shikon shards in his body, assails Naraku, and Kikyo hopes she can use Koga's shards to purify the evildoer. Inu-Yasha and Kagome arrive, and while the half-demon battles Naraku, Kagome starts to purify Kikyo's wounds. But Kikyo tells her to hold off, and Kagome sees a vision of the Jewel inside Naraku's body. however, the Jewel then disappears, so that when Koga assaults Naraku again, he has no hope of exorcising the demon. 

   Kagome then realizes that Naraku transported the Jewel into Kikyo's body. The intrepid girl is able to shoot Kikyo and give her enough power to exorcise the Jewel, but Naraku withdraws the gem before the ritual can be completed, and he flies off, the Jewel still partly corrupted.

 

But Kikyo, who already died once before, has reached the end of her second life. She and Inu-Yasha say their farewells to one another, while the other heroes think about what she's meant to them. Her artificial body dissolves into a congeries of lights. allowing her the ability to say farewell to all of her noble allies.

In the final chapter of the arc, Koga has been stripped of the shards that gave him special powers, so he resolves to leave the group and return to his people. He shows his respect for his rival by irritating the hell out of the mourning Inu-Yasha, the better to snap him out of his funk, and he even loosely approves of Kagome's romantic choice. The chapter then winds up with the beginning of a new arc concerning Inu-Yasha's half-brother Sesshomaru. He, like Kohaku, has been kept out of the main action, and he accidentally-on-purpose becomes Kohaku's new protector in the wake of Kikyo's passing. I have not yet finished the entirety of the opus. Still, I'm guessing from this narrative's tone that for Takahashi this was the definitive end of Kikyo's story, which should make for a more complete arc for both Kagome and Inu-Yasha at the epic's final conclusion.   

        

MYTHCOMICS: ["KAGOME'S HEART"] INU-YASHA (200?)

 I won't devote any time in this essay to detailing the basic setup of Rumiko Takahashi's INU-YASHA serial. I outlined those basics in both of the other essays on this property: THE BLACK PEARL and SECRET OF THE TRANSFORMATION. Further, the long arc I've chosen to label as "KAGOME'S HEART" commences only a handful of installments after TRANSFORMATION, so the INU-YASHA status quo remains largely the same, at least in terms of who's chasing who and the stakes of the seesaw battles of good and evil. 

In my analysis of TRANSFORMATION, I noted that it was made up of two long arcs-- each labeled according to one of the story-titles (according to the Viz translated editions), "The Third Demon" and "Secret of the Transformation." These two had in common Inu-Yasha's progress toward mastery of the magical sword Tetsusaiga, though they were interrupted by three other story-arcs only tangentially related to that theme. I simply chose to use the title of the concluding arc as an umbrella-title for both.

An additional complication is that the story translated "Kagome's Heart" is one of the installments present in the intervening arc "Kikyo's Crisis," in which, to repeat myself, concerns how "Kagome is tormented by seeing Inu-Yasha's feelings for his former lover," i.e., the dead priestess Kikyo, restored to a semblance of life by magic. Takahashi does not devote a lot of space to this "Crisis" arc, for she chose to let the emotions invoked in "Heart" simmer for quite some time, coming to a boil a little while after Inu-Yasha passed one trial by fire, only to face another with regard to the human girl he loves. Below are three illustrative pages from the "Heart" story:

The culmination of the "Crisis" arc is that Kagome tries to resign herself to Inu-Yasha's divided heart, obliging him to love both a living woman and a dead one. HEART-the-long-arc then comes back to this psychological conflict and combines it with the five heroes' efforts to destroy their nemesis Naraku and to gather together all of the shards of the Shikon Jewel. The group's sometimes allies-- Sesshomaru, the wolf-demon Koga, and Kikyo-- also have reasons for pursuing Naraku, though predictably enough Kikyo's entrance will unleash emotions that Kagome has tried to tamp down. As the arc begins, however, the five heroes only know that Naraku has somehow secreted himself so that they cannot find him, either to kill him or to take possession of his stolen Shikon shards. Their only clue seems to lead them to the legendary Mount Hakurei, alleged to have been the dwelling-place by a great monk, Hakushin. But Hakurei is so pervaded with spiritual energy that both Inu-Yasha and Shippo are adversely affected when they come close. So how can the evil Naraku be concealed therein?    

In addition, it's quite evident that Naraku has been busy, for seven dead mortal mercenaries have been restored (via Shikon shards) to undead status, implicitly to run interference for Naraku. Though Takahashi devotes a lot of space to Inu-Yasha's group battling the seven revenants-- each of whom has a deadly specialty-- I'll pass over them quickly, since the warriors are just there to keep up the needed level of spectacle for a shonen series. The revenant who has the most personality is the perverted Jyakotsu, who forms a homoerotic desire for Inu-Yasha, a desire that will only be satisfied when he cuts off the dog-demon's head. However, arguably the dog-demon really gets curbed by Kagome.

For some readers, it might be easy to mistake this scene for just another of Takahashi's many "irate-female-clobbers-insensitive-male" schticks. But there's a deeper dynamic here. In the short tale "Heart," Kagome confesses that she'll try to put aside her negative feelings toward her competition just to remain in Inu-Yasha's presence. But the rash hero wants to be held blameless for any pain he causes her, and that's what unleashes Kagome's ire. She's a woman in love who wants her loved one to be true only to her, and when he reacts to her sublimated resentments as if she had found fault with him, she uses her "sit command" power to punish him.     

 

 Takahashi eventually parallels Kagome's attempts at self-sacrifice with those of the Buddhist monk Hakushin. Once Kikyo manages to access Mount Hakurei, she meets Hakushin, who sought to become a "living Buddha" in order to help others after death. However, self-doubt infected the monk's resolve, and later Naraku suborned him, persuading him to let Naraku stay within the holy mountain. But Kikyo is able to assuage the monk's weakness, so that he's able to find peace.   

However, though the spiritual shield around Hakurai dissolved, Naraku accomplishes his purpose there: splitting off a part of himself, a sort of demon-baby. The baby, later named Hakudoshi, then seeks to take control of Kagome in order to utilize her ability to sense Shikon shards. The evil infant at first can't find darkness within the young girl's heart, until Kagome's negative feelings toward Kikyo come forth. However, even though Kagome feels resentment that Inu-Yasha left her side to search for a missing Kikyo, she successfully resists the demon-baby's spell with her love for Inu-Yasha, moments before he arrives on the scene. 

The spawn of Naraku escapes the hero's retribution, and once he's alone with Kagome, Inu-Yasha swears to never again leave Kagome for Kikyo. However, she realistically judges him to be incapable of deserting his former love-- who of course has further appearances to make in the ongoing series-- but the heroine manages to negate her natural irritation with her complete conviction in her own love. 

The INU-YASHA series takes place in a fantasy-version of Sengoku Japan, where Shinto gods and demons (or fictional versions thereof) intermingle with Buddhist monks seeking to transcend the physical world. I suspect that Takahashi's primary interest was the conflicts of the human heart. This is why, though she's respectful to Buddhist precepts, the artist is more concerned with Hakushin's failure than with his ascension to nirvana. But this is the core of her art, for in the words of G.K. Chesterton, Takahashi is, first and foremost, a poet who's in love with the finite, rather than a philosopher, whose abiding love is the infinite.   

    

OUTSTANDING EPIC FANTASY COMICS

 I've been thinking about the appeal of epic fantasy-- which usually includes the subgenre of sword and sorcery, and includes at least mystical marvels even if some version of science fiction may also be present-- and then wondering about the best examples of this super-genre in comic books and comic strips (not that there are a lot in the latter medium). 

My main criterion is an epic sweep showing either a made-up world or some version of Earth's archaic past, but magic does need to be present to make it fantasy, so "sword and planet" stories like the John Carter series are out, unless magic is evoked alongside science. Mike Grell's WARLORD, which is an "inner Earth" SF-world in which magicians and demons run around, would qualify if I thought any of its arcs were outstanding in some way. For my purposes I'm also thinking only of long comics runs or arcs; no one-off short stories set in fantasy-worlds. I tend to rule out serials in which characters are too jokey or too homey, which would probably let out CEREBUS in addition to its being a domain where magic is only occasionally important to the story. Ditto ASTERIX. If someone had done original-to-comics versions of Peter Pan or the Oz books I might tend to exclude those too. I'd like to have included ELFQUEST but I'm pretty sure all of its miracles fall under the rubric of science fiction, even with all the archaisms.

So far I've come up with:

PRINCE VALIANT-- I've only read a smattering of these reprints, but I would say Hal Foster may be the only guy in newspaper comics to master the form, though I've read that the only usages of magic occur early in the strip's history

THE WIZARD KING-- technically only the first part of Wally Wood's opus is really good; he was pretty ill when he rushed out a quickie second part

CONAN-- maybe the first fifty Marvel issues. Barry Smith was the best exemplar of Conan art though John Buscema did a lot of impressive work up to that point.

KULL-- more scattershot in its first Marvel incarnation, but the second one, titled KULL THE DESTROYER at times, included some imaginative Doug Moench scenarios

CLAW THE UNCONQUERED-- a Conan ripoff, but with more emphasis on magical fantasy, with some cool Keith GIffen artwork

BEOWULF-- DC only did six issues of this character, who was a little jokey at times but still had some epic sequences

RED SONJA-- most if not all of Frank Thorne's work with the character

GHITA OF ALIZARR-- Thorne again, and the first of two albums is very good while the second is still pretty good

INU-YASHA-- medieval Japanese fantasy with an epic sweep

VIKING PRINCE-- gorgeous Kubert art in the feature's more fantastic incarnation

MYTHCOMICS: "ON THE HORNS OF PASSION" (URUSEI YATSURA, 1980)

There was a time when I would have deemed Rumiko Takahashi's URUSEI YATSURA "mythic" just because the creator was so skilled at creating bizarre characters. But over time I've realized that only in a handful of cases did Takahashi use those characters for what I deem a "symbolic discourse." 

The first adventure, given the English title "A Good Catch" in translation, was rife with such discourse about adolescent sexuality and the ways of Japanese "oni" demons (albeit reworked into science-fiction aliens). Ataru Moroboshi, the typical horny youth who wants every pretty woman he sees, is selected to save Earth fron an invasion of these alien oni, but only if he can defeat the aliens' representative, the vivacious babe Lum, in a game of "tag." Despite false starts, Ataru attempts to be a good guy and win the contest, in part so that his girlfriend Shinobu will marry him. By somewhat crooked means, the young fellow "tags" the elusive Lum, but he makes the mistake of yelling something about marriage. This causes Lum to think he's proposed to her, and the story ends with Ataru due to be frog-marched off to Lum's planet and put through a ray-gun wedding.

The second URUSEI story doesn't mention Lum at all, but by the third, the creative/editorial decision had been made that she was to be added to the cast. Lum comes back to marry her "darling," but he denies that he ever proposed to her. Legalities mean nothing to the lovestruck alien, and for assorted reasons she talks her way into staying at the Moroboshi house, decorously occupying Ataru's closet. No matter how many times Ataru proclaims that they're not married, Lum maintains that they are so bonded-- though over time she makes a point of trying to drag him to the altar, to make it official. 

"On the Horns of Passion," the twenty-fifth story in the manga, is the closest Lum ever comes to trying to wring a "secondary promise" out of her love-mate. At the time of this story, Shinobu-- who for half a year tried to get between Ataru and Lum whenever possible-- finally gives up on her inconstant Romeo. Not long before "Horns," Takahashi introduced to Ataru's class rich-boy Shutaro Mendou, who's just as girl-happy as Ataru but has both wealth and good looks with which to enchant high school girls. Shinobu is one of those who admire Mendou, though they're not yet dating in this story, and Mendou seems more interested in laying claim to Lum.

Lum, who has not yet enrolled in Japanese high school, flies to Ataru's classroom looking for her "darling." Informed that he was last seen in the company of Shinobu, the jealous alien goes looking for the couple. As she departs from a high window of the school, Mendou just happens to be in the process of showing his great wealth by parachuting onto the school grounds. The two of them get entangled and fall.

It just so happens that on the ground beneath, Ataru has been trying to talk Shinobu into forgetting Mendou and coming back to him, slamming Mendou for the upper class refinements that separate his kind from ordinary people. Shinobu buys the argument, but then the tangled bundle containing Lum and Mendou falls atop Shinobu and Ataru. Mendou in particular lies prone upon Shinobu, and though he doesn't make a pass at her like he does with Lum, Shinobu seethes with juvenile passion for the handsome millionaire and runs away. Ataru, deprived of his conquest, storms off, linking Lum and Mendou together in his mind as people far beyond the workaday world. Mendou tries to further the rift by telling Lum that she and he are "above the mundane world." However, for all her faults Lum isn't conceited, and she thinks of herself as an "ordinary girl" who just wants love and marriage. 

It's hard to credence that Lum's never noticed how often Ataru is turned off by all the weirdness she brings into his life, but as far as this story is concerned, this is the first time the thought occurs to her. So the affable alien dons a school uniform and uses a chemical to make her horns retract into her skull. She shows up at class next day, and no one recognizes her, so that all of the boys, particularly Ataru and Mendou, are mesmerized by the "new girl." Shinobu apparently thinks she still has a claim on Ataru despite having refused him earlier, so she gets furious at him, and then at Mendou, even though, as mentioned before, Mendou hasn't even asked Shinobu out yet.

Lum keeps the deception going a little longer, but Mendou, again seeking to undercut Ataru, mentions the fact that to date this new girl (whose name no one even mentions) would be "cheating" on current girlfriend Lum. Ataru, who can only focus on one hot girl at a time, offers to let Mendou take custody of Lum. 

Even though Lum's tigerskin bikini is concealed, it doesn't take much effort to see the "tiger" struggling to burst forth from beneath the facade of the "ordinary girl." There can only be one compensation for having heard her love-mate offer to callously trade her to another man like a baseball card. She must get him to willingly "swear to be faithful unto death," and Ataru, still besotted with passion, does so without a second thought.

Ataru pays for his lustful nature when Lum reveals her true nature, her normally tiny horns elongating three times their normal length, just to signal how mad she is. Yet she doesn't shock him or even punch him, but only pins him to the floor, repeating the promise he's now made to her, "Unto death, darling! Unto death!" The similarity to the English phrase "until death do us part" may not be in the original Japanese. But her act of pinning him down suggests that this time he's bound himself to her, as if she were a demon who had to be invited to take possession of her victim. And she's triumphed over Shinobu as well. At the start of the story, Shinobu may not be actively trying to win Ataru any more, but Lum sees that the Earthgirl has an advantage in being what an Earthman considers "ordinary." Lum's masquerade screens out all the extraterrestrial aspects that "alienate" the boy she's chosen for her own, and this proves that Lum can beat Shinobu in a contest of purely ordinary feminine charms. 

On a semi-related note, the last panel also sets up future "eternal quadrangle" action, in which Lum pursues Ataru, Ataru pursues Shinobu, Shinobu pursues Mendou and Mendou pursues both women, but Lum more than Shinobu.

In all likelihood, had I the ability to read Japanese, I strongly doubt that I would find a single later reference to this story anywhere in the rest of the URUSEI corpus. Takahashi has continuing characters noodle over past actions in her more soap-operatic MAISON IKKOKU, but not here. Still, though HORNS makes absolutely no reference to Ataru's non-proposal in the first tale, the overarching history of the characters makes HORNS more mythic than the average "current girl pretends to be new girl" folderol. I won't say that Takahashi felt the need to "justify" Lum's almost unshakable devotion to, and obsession with, her Earthbound choice. But I think it suited Takahashi's perverse sense of humor to put Ataru in the position where he has an immediate response, almost on an instinctual level, to Lum's insuperable glamour, once all of the associated weirdness is put out of the way. The very fact that Lum  affects Ataru so deeply may be part of the reason he keeps chasing women who can never mean as much to him.