MYTHCOMICS: “THAT SERIOUS GUY IS A CRIMINAL?” LOVE HINA (2002)

I’ve discoursed several times on Ken Akamatsu’s LOVE HINA, summarizing its series concept here and condensing its joined themes of female sadism and male masochism in CROSSING THE LAWLINES5, thusly:

Ken Akamatsu's LOVE HINA, though, seems to be one of the few works that eventually admits to the sexual nature of the trope, if one can trust the Tokyopop translation. In the last volume, after innumerable incidents in which Keitaro intrudes upon Naru and gets beaten on for it, the two protagonists confess their true feelings to an interlocutor. Keitaro doesn't precisely say that he gets off on masochistic treatment, but he claims that he loves peeping on Naru so much that he doesn't care that he gets beaten for it, while Naru explicitly admits that she loves both his attentions and getting to beat on him for crossing the lines.

While keeping in mind that this sort of wacky, semi-eroticized violence is not identical with syndromic sadism, the question arises: since Ken Akamatsu himself is (I will presume) a biological male, does his idea of masculinity start and end with the vision of the male as a hopeless goof?

 

My answer is, “almost.” Keitaro Urashima begins the LOVE HINA series as a klutzy twenty-something who’s failed his college entrance exams three times. When he gets the job of managing an all-female dormitory owned by his aunt Haruka, he becomes the proverbial “rooster in the hen house”—though only if the rooster was crossed with a punching-bag, since Keitaro is forever blundering into compromising situations with the girls and then getting clobbered by them.

 

Further, Keitaro is almost the only male character in the whole 14-volume series. The only other masculine character is thirty-something Seta, who roams the world doing archaeological digs and who occasionally teaches a course at Tokyo U, the college to which Keitaro has repeatedly applied. In addition to these admirable aspects, Seta is trained in kung fu and occasionally has friendly bouts with “kendo girl” Motoko. He also tutored Keitaro’s principal love interest Naru, who had a strong crush on Seta in previous years. Yet Seta is unaware of Naru’s crush and often proves just as maladroit as Keitaro, so that he never really presents Keitaro with any real competition for the love of Naru or any other of Keitaro's other potential hookups. In the story considered here, the self-questioning “That Serious Guy is a Criminal?,” Seta does not appear, but his daughter Sara does. Sara joins the other dorm-residents in constantly belaboring Keitaro, though she’s only a “bitch-in-training” being that she’s about ten years old and not actually involved in the erotic aspects of the situation (which was probably a distinct relief to most readers).

 

 As the story commences, Naru and the other girls are enjoying a hot springs bath. Naru cautions their visitor Mutsumi that while residing at the inn she may get peeped at by the “beast” Keitaro. Naru sees Keitato approach the bath and prepares, with a look of predatory anticipation, to slug him when he trespasses once again. 

But Keitaro passes by the women's bath, goes back to his room and immerses himself in studies for his next entrance exam. Sarah and the equally mischievous Kaolla break into his room to gratuitously whale on him with blunt objects. To their surprise, Keitaro dodges their attacks without even seeming to notice their presence, because he’s so completely focused on his studies. When he does notice the girls’ presence, he remarks, with complete innocence, “Don’t you normally run in and try to jump-kick me?”

 

Soon all the girls observe that Keitaro is so focused that he isn’t making klutzy blunders anymore, nor giving them any reason to clout him. Akamatsu never makes any direct reference here to philosophical or religious precepts, but surely the artist means for his audience to understand that Keitaro has unintentionally tapped into a unique mental state, possibly one in line with the Taoist idea of “doing without doing.”

 

 

Kitsune takes up the challenge to femininity, declaring, “I’m going to use my feminine wiles to magically change Keitaro back into the pervert he deserves to be.” Clad in revealing clothes, Kitsune waltzes into Keitaro’s room during his studies. Yet he’s so focused he doesn’t notice her at first, much less getting flustered by her lady parts. If anything, Kitsune becomes attracted by Keitaro’s new aura of male reserve, and Motoko chimes in with similar sentiments. “It’s good to see him so focused and not tempted by the lure of the female.” Kaolla and Sarah want Keitaro to go back to his dipstick persona, so that they can continue to rag on him. Gentle Shinobu, the next-oldest, is the only one who doesn’t want to abuse Keitaro, but she too wants him to go back to “normal,” apparently because he seems too inaccessible in his quasi-Zen state of mind.

 

Naru is the last to behold the new Keitaro, and though she somewhat appreciates his focused attitude, she’s offended that he no longer reacts when she flashes him some tit or leg. The nubile eighteen-year-old even starts worrying that she’s losing her sex appeal.

 

At the conclusion Keitaro himself re-asserts the status quo. He bursts in on the girls while they’re bathing and explains to near-naked Naru that he’s finally solved an involved problem he’s been working on for days. However, once he solves the problem, his Taoist reserve disappears, his normal personality returns, and he becomes flustered by seeing all the girls in their birthday suits (except, happily, Sarah, who’s wearing a onesy). It’s certainly another of Akamatsu’s humorous jibes that at first the girls all ignore Keitaro’s trespass because they think he’s in his “serious guy” mode, but that, once he reacts to their charms, he again becomes a “criminal,” and thus fair game for a beating.

 

Keitaro never again gets into “Zen master” mode, but there are other stories in which he shows signs of maturation, and these signs of masculnity inevitably prove attractive to the age-appropriate girls of the dormitory. Thus Akamatsu does imply that women still like the image, if not the reality, of “men who take charge”—though in this comic universe, strength principally signifies durability, as in being able to endure any abuse doled out by the “gentler sex.”

CATEGORIES OF STRUCTURAL LENGTH PT. 4

 Prior to posting my second mythcomic review for the month of January 2021, I find that I need to add a new category to the ones set forth in the original STRUCTURAL LENGTH essay.

In that essay, the first four categories I mentioned were “the vignette,” “the short arc,” “the short story,” and “the long arc,” I further stated that the short arc could take the form of a subplot within a greater context, be it a novel or a continuing feature, though the short arc did not always take the subplot form. This quality of “relatedness” is the main thing that distinguishes the short arc from its relative-in-length, the short story. A short story by its nature suggests an item that can read apart from any greater context, as per Edgar Allan Poe’s encomium on the form. Though his three “Dupin” stories qualify as a series, a reader need not read them all to understand any single story. The short story takes a moderately different form in a more regularly published series, such as a Batman comic book. Any given Batman short story makes more sense if the reader does know something about the Batman mythology, about the ways in which he battles crime and the types of criminals he encounters. That said, before one reads a particular standalone story of Batman fighting the Penguin, one does not have to read any other particular Batman-Penguin story to understand what’s going on. However, not every medium handles the short story identically. It’s rare, though not impossible, that anyone ever issues a prose short story in installments, but the practice is fairly common in the comic book medium. A relevant example appears in the two-part QUESTION story “Saving Face.” As much as any prose short story, “Face” has a definite beginning, middle and end, though it’s extended over the course of two serial issues. I would say, however, that there’s a limit on how much an author can extend a short-story continuity within a comic book format before said continuity morphs into something else. I would tend to say that in comic books three issues would probably be the upper limit.

Now, a short arc has similar length-restrictions, but it parts company with the short story in being more intimately tied in to a greater continuity. A relevant example is the three-part TOMB OF DRACULA narrative I’ve entitled “Where Lurks the Chimera.” The plot also has a beginning, middle, and end, but the events of “Chimera” are not independent from other ongoing TOMB stories as the events of “Saving Face” are independent from other stories in the QUESTION series. The main plot of “Chimera” revolves around the vampire-lord’s search for a mystical relic, and it concludes with Dracula failing to obtain his goal. Yet the narrative also intertwines with other events from previous narratives, such as the Count’s ongoing conflict with another villain, Doctor Sun, and his ongoing romance with a young woman, Sheila Whittier, and the reader who has not read previous or subsequent Dracula-tales dealing with these characters has missed a lot of content.

Going by my original list, the “long arc” would be the next category, but I’ve come to think that a new category is necessary, to signify an arc that’s a little more involved in terms of both length and story-content. This I’ll term the “medial arc,” and as far as installment-fiction is concerned, I would say that it usually lasts from six to eight installments, while its narrative is much more strongly imbricated with the ongoing continuity. One example of the medial arc is the five-part arc “Motherland” from the series Y THE LAST MAN. Now, “Motherland” was published late in the history of the ongoing feature, and it happened to solve a lot of the mysteries the author propounded about why almost all the males on Earth perished. But it’s just as possible to see the same level of continuity-involvement in a medial arc published at the beginning of a series. “The Black Pearl” occurs near the outset of the INU-YASHA series and serves to establish one of the dominant plotlines of the narrative: the relationship between the heroic Inu-Yasha and his more ruthless brother Sesshomaru.

At present I would not seek to fix a length of chapters for a long arc. I mentioned in LENGTH PART 1 that long arcs were best known to audiences through the form of the television soap opera. Since the only soap opera I’ve seen in its entirety is the 1966 DARK SHADOWS, I would tend to regard each season of this program as comprising a long arc—which, in the case of Season One, came to 135 30-minute episodes. With such a quantity of episodes, there’s certainly no sense of a unifying beginning, middle, and end. Every time a given story-conflict is resolved, some other conflict emerges from the metaphorical wings to take its place, and the final episode of the season is usually just a stopping-point rather than an organic conclusion.

Long arcs in comic books are rarely that long. In practice, I would say that they rarely exceed twenty installments, allowing for variations in story-length, before the author shifts to another arc or short-story. The events of the plot are not as strongly focused as those of the shorter arcs, though there may be an overreaching purpose unifying all the events. In the NISEKOI long arc I’ve entitled “Limit,” all sixteen installments are principally concerned with the teenagers rescuing their classmate Marika from an arranged marriage. Given this expansive narrative, each of the principal characters is given some feat to perform that serves the aim of rescue, and, given that NISEKOI is a comedy, many of these feats draw upon running jokes in the overall series. For instance, one such joke involves the erratic cooking skills of Kosaki, whose meals are almost always vomitous in nature. During the rescue operation, the operation’s planner assigns Kosaki to cook for the guards attending the wedding, with the humorous result that any guard who ate the girl’s meal become sidelined by virtue of stomach pains.

I mentioned in the cited essay that some comic-book serials are unified enough that they could function as “episodic novels” in the vein of Melville’s MOBY DICK. I noted that some long serials, like Akamatsu’s LOVE HINA lacked a “structuring principle,” be it related to plot or to theme, and thus I did not regard these as episodic novels, only as assemblages of arcs and short stories. NISEKOI, however, qualifies as such an episodic novel, in that it combines several of these structural forms into a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

LOVE OVER WAR (FOR NOW) PT. 3

In this essay I'll explore the application of my concept of megadynamicity to a selection of comics-narratives that I've more fully analyzed in my mythcomics essays. The common ground for all five stories is that they are all "love-narratives." As I noted in ACCOMODATING ACCOMODATION, such narratives are a subset of the total set of "accomodation narratives," so I've already specified that I'm not claiming that these are the only form in which the accomodation patterns appears. However, since I've put forth the proposal that "love-narratives" are "female" while "war-narratives" are male, this point will be brought forth better by focusing only on examples that concern the theme of heterosexual love (and not, say, homosocial affection, as one can find in Dave Sim's "Guys" arc.)

To reframe my question: my first premise is that in real life, sex, like violence, is an activity that often (though not always) involves at least two subjects. In literature both activities can be portrayed as being exactly as the reader perceives them in real life, or they can be exaggerated or enhanced by tropes of what the reader considers "fantasy." I've stipulated in previous essays, such as SUBLIMITY VS. MYTHICITY PART 3,  that phenomenality makes no difference to dynamicity. In that essay all of my examples were "confrontation narratives," but the principle holds true for "accomodation narratives" as well, as well as for any potential portmanteau combinations of the two patterns (such as one might find in an anthology-film).

Here are my examples of accomodation-narratives with a theme of heterosexual love:

THE FALL (2001)

RITE OF SPRING (1985)

SHE TRIED HER OWN ON (2008)

TO BUILD A FIRE (1988)

SISTER SYNDROME (2001)

At the end of Part 2 of LOVE OVER WILL (FOR NOW),  I remarked that the end of Yeats's poem "Solomon and the Witch," it is suggested-- though not made definite-- that Solomon and Sheba have such great sex that the world seems to have come to an end. Even if this is just Solomon's metaphorical reading, this is still a representation of sex that goes beyond the limits of what real-life sex can do, and thus aligns itself with metaphenomenal narratives. Isophenomenal narratives can only portray the real base action of sexual activity, and so it follows that all such narratives can only be "sexually megadynamic" if they portray two or more sexual participants who are really, really good at shtupping, even though they can't cause the world to end. 

This is certainly not the case with the ambivalent romantic pair of THE FALL, Kirk and June. In a probable emulation of a "film noir" trope, June plays the femme fatale and manipulates good-hearted schmuck Kirk, not for any grand design but just to enjoy a sense of power. They don't ever get it on within the space of the narrative, though the possibility of romance is suggested at the conclusion. Thus they provide a sort of "negative example," in that one has no reason to think that the universe would have stopped, even if they had made it.

SHE TRIED HER OWN ON (with the words "Balls and All" in a subtitle), is my best illustration of a nearly naturalistic situation, although the particular story has metaphenomenal content. The basic situation is certainly bizarre even for a comedy: high-school boy Takeshi is more or less forced to live in the home of an eccentric Japanese family, the Dominas, because their daughter Hikari lied to her parents and claimed that Takeshi was her boyfriend. Hikari only did so to get out of an arranged marriage, but the longer she's forced to remain in Takeshi's company, the more she becomes intrigued with him as a potential consort. The self-contained story deals with Hikari dreaming an erotic fantasy about Takeshi's balls, imagining them as enormous, even though her waking mind knows better. Hikari's witchy grandmother enspells her so that the girl temporarily obtains male equipment, enabling Hikari to see how the other half lives. After this trial ends and the young girl goes back to normal, she apologizes to Takeshi for having injured him in his sensitive spot. But her dreams still play havoc with her conceptions of human genitalia, for her next dream is an absurd megadynamic exaggeration of real sex, as Hikari imagines that she again meets Takeshi and engages in a contest of "dueling phalluses." Though the magic spell is real within the story's confines, the overall implication is one that could have been enacted within an entirely naturalistic phenomenality, using dreams to portray Hikari's weird projections about sex.

(Note: though Takeshi's prowess in this particular story is only imagined, some of the DOMINA stories suggest that he forms an uncanny erotic devotion to Hikari, and to Hikari alone, so that the entire corpus of stories implies an eventual sexy culmination for their wack-a-doodle romance.)

RITE OF SPRING is a more explicit exaggeration of sex, given that the act is dominantly mental, taking place between human woman Abigail Arcane and the penis-less Swamp Thing. Alan Moore's script and Steve Bissette's art are at their best, as Swamp Thing gives Abigail a unique form of communion, by having her devour one of the hallucinogenic tubers growing from his body. Their shared mental experience has megadynamic potential, but I hesitate to include this one, simply because the idea of the combative focuses on two extraordinary willing subjects joining together, either in combat or in cooperation, and unfortunately, there's nothing extraordinary about the human participant in this "hieros swampos."

RITE is an accomodaton narrative within a series that is dominantly confrontational, and the same is true for TO BUILD A FIRE. Amara, one of the New Mutants, is stranded in the Amazon jungle with a sometime enemy, Manuel. As they forge through the jungle, trying to reach civilization, the two of them never precisely fight, but they are in conflict due to their mutual attraction-- though some of Amara's erotic feeling toward Manuel may stem from his mind-control powers. As I point out in the main essay, Amara, who knows the jungle better than city-boy Manuel, often assumes the "male" role in their travails, and Manuel is relegated to "feminine persuasion," as he argues that she should use her mutant fire-powers to signal a rescue-party. Ironically, the moment when Amara more or less gives in to Manuel's demand may or may not be a response he has coerced-- even Manuel is not sure-- and yet Amara's surrender is marked by a note of defiance rather than acquiescence.

SISTER SYNDROME is a few chapters away from the romantic finale of the LOVE HINA series, but the arc is crucial to the accomodation of main characters Keitaro and Naru. For many stories previous, the most-reused joke in the series is one in which (1) Keitaro somehow offends Naru, usually by catching her half-naked, and (2) Naru punches him. Though technically neither one is "super-powered," comic exaggeration allows Naru to hit Keitaro so hard that he flies into the air, and also allows Keitaro to survive incredible falls and huge objects striking him. Though there are minor metaphenomenal entities in the stories, Naru and Keitaro are only supernormal in being "slapstick gods." SISTER SYNDROME has a confrontation-element, in that Keitaro's adoptive sister Kanako arrives and nearly undermines Naru's relationship with Keitaro. However, toward the end, even Kanako gives way to their romantic mystique, which culminates in the elusive Naru finally deciding to commit to her persistent boyfriend. The coda implies that the violence between them has become eroticized, and that their eventual nuptials will be preceded by a bout of erotic violence-- with the female on top, of course.

The three narratives that qualify as examples of megadynamic sex-- the ones in DOMINA NO DO, NEW MUTANTS, and LOVE HINA-- all depend on channeling the sexual nature of their principal characters through exaggerations of real human abilities, iu much the same way that examples of megadynamic combat deal with powers not commonly within the sphere of human ability.

Section Four will focus more on the question raised in Part One. 

MYTHCOMICS: "SISTER SYNDROME" (LOVE HINA BOOK 12, 2001)

I've already written a long summation of the LOVE HINA manga here, and so will write this essay as if the reader has already acquainted himself with the basics.

More often than not, manga-serials are written with a definite conclusion in the author's mind. This doesn't mean that every story that has a well-conceived ending necessarily has "unity of action." Still. I did regard the completed story of HELLSING to comprise one big myth, and though DANCE IN THE VAMPIRE BUND is still a "work in progress," I judged that the most recent addition to its storyline suggests the high amplitude of a mythcomic.

LOVE HINA ends with the culmination of the romance between young lovers Keitaro and Naru. However, the stories leading up to that culmination are much more episodic in nature than, say, those of HELLSING, or even another comedy-romance like BECAUSE I'M THE GODDESS. Author Ken Akamatsu breaks up the forward progress of his main plot with countless wacky escapades, sometimes for the purpose of expanding on character-traits, and sometimes just for fun. Thus LOVE HINA as a whole does not meet the mythcomics test. However, I've analyzed one particular episode, SECRET OF THE MYSTERIOUS GIRL, as a story that shows high mythicity. The same principle applies to one of Akamatsu's more cohesive arcs, which I've titled "Sister Syndrome" after one of the story-titles used in the Tokyopop English translation.

If the underthought of LOVE HINA could be boiled down to a binary statement, it might read something like, "The lover who is not the guy's sister triumphs over those who are almost-sisters." Of all the women in Keitaro Urashima's "harem," Naru has the least resemblance to a sibling, and so from one point of view, she would seem to be the best possible mate for Keitaro. "Sister Syndrome," however, deals with one of the greatest threats to Naru's romantic hegemony-- Kanako, who has formed a passion for her adoptive brother Keitaro. She appears in the previous arc, showing up at Hinata House at a time when Keitaro is away studying archaeology, and she uses the Urashima name to take control of the dormitory and force everyone to obey her whims. Even before Keitaro returns, Kanako regards Naru as her primary rival, while for her part, Naru;s insecurities are brought out by the prospect of meeting a female with a more profound connection to Keitaro-- that of family-- than she Naru has.

Volume 12 begins with Keitaro returning to the dormitory. At this time he has confessed his romantic devotion to Naru, but she has not made a full reciprocation, due to her ongoing insecurities. When he first sees Kanako, he doesn't recognize her as his adoptive sister, since he hasn't seen her in years.

For her part Kanako mirrors some of Natu's own insecurities, reflected by her penchant for assuming complicated disguises. Uncertain of making open advances on Keitaro, she masquerades as Naru in order to get close to him and to find out what Keitaro thinks of his sister.

Keitaro has no conscious desire for Kanako, but her constant attentions start to wear him down somewhat. Strangely, even though Naru is rather repulsed by the idea of even adoptive siblings becoming intimate, she sympathizes with her rival, telling Kanako "I know you're siblings, but sometimes you just have to come right and say what's on your mind." This, as much as Kanako's masquerades, suggests a mirroring-effect between the two characters.

Keitaro starts having dreams about marrying his sister, but as if to prove his fidelity to Naru, he renews his attempts to court her. He invites her to the "Hinata Annex," an isolated building on the same grounds as the dorm. The Annex,, which in earlier days served as an inn, has acquired the aura of legend, in that any romantic couple would become bonded if they spent the night there. However, Kanako gets there first, and in the darkness Keitaro more or less pledges his troth to her, following the myth-trope of "the statement that can't be taken back."

Then weird things start happening to Naru, as if the legendary magic of the Annex is trying to keep Kanako and Keitaro together. Keitaro fights for his true love by trying to give Naru an engagement ring, but through the usual crazy antics, it lands up on Kanako's finger.

Naru responds to this setback by fleeing Hinata House and all of her friends. This allows Akamatsu to unleash yet more goofy antics as Keitaro and his harem give chase. This leads to an outright battle between Naru and Kanako, which Kanako, a real martial artist, wins easily. Note that the engagement ring seems to take on the aspect of a Tolkienian "ring of power."

However, Keitaro's conscientious rejection of his sister's erotic feelings finally has a reverse-effect on Kanako. She seeks out Naru and badgers her to declare her true feelings to Keitaro.

Still, to give Naru more time to sort out her feelings, Kanako uses her disguise-talents to make herself look like Naru, while Naru takes the appearance of Kanako. A more obvious example of the mirroring-trope would be hard to imagine.

Finally, Kanako surrenders to Keitaro's unconquerable passion for Naru, though she hedges her bets by telling him that she's not totally giving up on him.

And then there's a big climax in which Naru and Keitaro finally get it on-- though their differences keep driving the romance for two more volumes-- and even the women who wanted them to get together become inflamed with jealousy and try to kill them both.

In conclusion, I'll note that my assignment of the phenomenality as "marvelous" is dependent mostly on elements that are nominal in the story, like Kaolla Su's super-science toys and a species of flying turtle.

THREE FORMS OF ANTI-TRANSGRESSION, PT. 2

The terminology of "types" that I introduced in this preface can now be brought into line with the terminology of "forms" that I introduced in Part 1.

My main reason for bothering with all of these highly specific terms relates to my fascination with the idea of thresholds as they relate to both real and fictional experience. Earlier I've quoted Philip Wheelwright with respect to his assertions about "the intrinsically threshold character of experience." For me this means that there are certain crucial points, at least in fiction, where one phenomenality shades into another-- as with the naturalistic into the uncanny-- or where a subcombative level of violence can, with just a little extra *amplitude,* be transformed into the level of the combative. The same dynamic also applies to the shadings in between age-related clansgressions.

I gave one example of this subtle shading in this section of CROSSING THE LAWLINES PART 2:

However, even in real-life culture the spectre of clansgression can appear with respect to age-appropriate pairings, even when the subjects involved are not physically related, nor are they raised in circumstances of regular propinquity (cf. "neighbor-kids who grow up together.") In fiction this motif is most frequently seen in the trope "high school girl dates college boy," or (more rarely) the reverse situation with respect to gender assignment. Typically no more than four years separates the collegian from the high-schooler, so it isn't feasible for such pairings to carry the "May-September" vibe. Yet the sense of boundaries traversed is clansgressive, usually because it's assumed that one member of the couple has already had sex and will be initiating the other. 

Looking at this observation through the lens of the "chronophilia" article referenced in the preface, one might assume that even though there's not a large span of years separating "high school girl" from "college boy," the former aligns with what I've called the "E-type," the late adolescent usually aged from 15-19 years of age, while the latter often (though not always) aligns with the "M-type," the functional adult, even though the average collegian would not usually be all that much older than the high-schooler. Still, a sense of transgression, and of clansgression, pertains because there's the sense of mixing "clans" that ought to be separate.

For instance, in Rumiko Takahashi's long-running MAISON IKKOKU, the principal relationship is that of Godai, a college-age young man and a slightly older woman, Kyoko, whose age is cited as 22 on one wiki. However, one barrier to the relationship is the fact that Kyoko, who married her first husband when she herself was in high school, is a widow, and so the potential romance between her and the college student seems slightly out of balance, even if the age-discrepancy is not a great one. However, Takahashi erects other barriers as well.One of these is the above-pictured high-school student Ibuki, who sets her sights on the twenty-something Godai. Ibuki is never successful in her romantic campaign. But since Godai registers as an "M-type," any association with a "E-type" seems massively inappropriate, and Godai always gets in trouble with Kyoko whenever she suspects him of pursuing a high-schooler.

Yet age doesn't always confer the semblance of maturity. In the same LAWLINES essay I wrote this of the manga-series LOVE HINA:

The set-up for LOVE HINA is that nebbishy loser Keitaro Urashima finds himself managing a girls' dormitory for middle school and college-bound high-school students. Naturally, in the long-running tradition of harem comedies, the girls are winsomely cute, and eventually all of them become enamored on some level with Keitaro, the only male living with them. A modicum of adult supervision is provided by Keitaro's aunt Haruka... but most of the time the girls are free to tease and torment Keitaro, who gets no points for being a little older than the oldest of them, since he's failed his college-entrance exams three times at the series' beginning.  The clansgressive vibe generated by the series eventually develops along the lines of an older "brother" being forced to put up with the hijinks of a band of capricious "sisters," all of whom take on a sibling-vibe partly because they share a house...

So even though the Keitaro character is in the same age-range as Takahashi's Godai, Keitaro is often treated as being an "E-type." so that there's no sense of age-based clansgression when he tries to make time with high-schooler Naru. However, I mentioned above that the "clan" in LOVE HINA included middle schoolers.

One is a wacky "foreign" girl. Kaolla, who likes to torment Keitaro both physically and quasi-sexually.

The other is a serious but shy Japanese girl, Shinobu, who's honestly attracted to the older male but becomes easily embarrassed in his presence.

Predictably, though Keitaro doesn't make any moves on either "H-type" girl, he's constantly placed in situations where it seems like he's guilty of this particular age-transgression.

In the Preface I also mentioned that age-based clansgressions might occur even when a particular character only "appeared to be" within a particular span of years. There are quite a few of these in Japanese entertainment, but for variety's sake, I'll give as example the American DC Comics character Arisia Rrab.

When first introduced, the character-- an alien Green Lantern, and a member of the same Corps as Hal Jordan, the titular DC hero-- looked very much an "H-type." She had a schoolgirl crush on M-Type Jordan, and that was all there was to that.

One online reference puts her age at 13 in this introduction, though in a later comic, Arisia argues that even though she looks like an immature Earth female, she's actually much older than her looks because of the longer span of time that her planet revolves around its sun. Jordan still rejected her as a potential lover, urging her to seek out boys "her own age." However, Arisia's inner torment caused her to subconsciously advance her own body in age, so that she became, in effect, an "M-Type" like Hal Jordan.  And at that point, Jordan acquiesced to her logic.

The story in GREEN LANTERN CORPS #206-- in which Arisia became "a woman" in more than one sense-- was entitled "In Deep," and writer Steve Englehart may have chosen this title knowing that he was going to get "in deep" with fan-reaction. He even anticipates the general reaction in the following dialogue:

It's hard to say whether or not the writer had any notion of breaking down this particular clansgressive stereotype, but the story had no such effect. Instead, the trope of "Green Lantern, Child Molester" has become an ongoing joke. Arisia did not last long as Hal Jordan's inamorata, and later continuity seemed to have papered over Englehart's scenario.

To bring the analysis back to the three forms--

The Primary Form would be best represented by Keitaro's romance with high-schooler Naru. Though she's part of the "sorority" in the hotel, and she actually knew Keitaro briefly when the two of them were pre-schoolers, she's the least 'sisterly" of the cast-members.

The Secondary Form is represented by the romance of Godai and Kyoko, whose transgressive association is filtered through, and somewhat inverted by, the interaction with Ibuki. One reason Ibuki becomes obsessed with Godai results from his having been a substitute-teacher at her high school. This institution happens to be the same one where Kyoko, in her high-school years, fell in love with the older man whom she married. Thus, even though Kyoko is older and more experienced than Godai, Godai's apparent flirtation with a high-school girl resonates as a reverse-recapitulation of Kyoko's history with an older man.

The Tertiary Form is represented by the "brief candle" of love between Hal Jordan and Arisia, who attempt to use sci-fi rationalizations to justify the clangression between an "M-Type" and a character who had at most been a "E-Type" before she wrought the Change of Womanhood upon herself.

ADDENDUM: I'll note that one reason Keitaro doesn't seem an "M-Type" despite his age is because he's failed his college entrance exams so often, thus consigning him to a sort of "immaturity limbo."

MYTHCOMICS: "SECRET OF THE MYSTERIOUS GIRL," LOVE HINA (1999)

(I date this story "1999" because that's the date given for the whole volume of translated stories in which the story appears, but it may or may not be the actual date of first publication. The entire story is online here.)

A few months back, I was talking about manga with a fellow comics-fan, when he asked me, more or less out of blue, "What's with all the INCEST in Japanese comics?" (Or words to that effect.)

Since this is the sort of question for which no one-- not even the Japanese people themselves-- can provide a definitive answer, I gave my acquaintance a speculative explanation. I observed that the closest Japanese analog to the Judeo-Christian "Adam and Eve" are Izanagi and Izanami, two divine siblings who mate in order to produce most if not all of the created world. I hypothesized that it might have made a great difference in European culture if Adam and Eve had been literal (as opposed to figurative) siblings-- and that possibly Japanese culture was simply more prone to using this transgressive set of tropes than many other cultures because of their traditional mythology. I addressed some other aspects of this cultural predilection here.

I've already written about the Ken Akamatsu series LOVE HINA here, from which I borrow the following series-analysis:

The set-up for LOVE HINA is that nebbishy loser Keitaro Urashima finds himself managing a girls' dormitory for middle school and college-bound high-school students. Naturally, in the long-running tradition of harem comedies, the girls are winsomely cute, and eventually all of them become enamored on some level with Keitaro, the only male living with them. A modicum of adult supervision is provided by Keitaro's aunt Haruka ... but most of the time the girls are free to tease and torment Keitaro, who gets no points for being a little older than the oldest of them, since he's failed his college-entrance exams three times at the series' beginning.  The clansgressive vibe generated by the series eventually develops along the lines of an older "brother" being forced to put up with the hijinks of a band of capricious "sisters," all of whom take on a sibling-vibe partly because they share a house....

In this essay I analyzed the dynamics of the clansgressive "almost-but-not-quite-a-sister" fantasy found in LOVE HINA, but "Secret of the Mysterious Girl" is focused on the character of middle-schooler resident Kaolla Su, an energetic girl from an indeterminate, quasi-Indian realm. I touched on her most mythic aspect in the essay:

...though [Kaolla] too is a middle-schooler who would be age-inappropriate for Keitaro, Kaolla possesses a magical ability to "age" herself temporarily, so that she can become closer in age to the beleaguered dorm-manager.

"Mysterious Girl" is the first story to show that Kaolla can magically transform herself to a girl more suited to Keitaro. LOVE HINA is generally a very silly comedy, mingling fantasy-material with mundane reality with no particular rhyme or reason, but here the author touches very artfully on the topic of feminine maturation, though of course without neglecting the farcical elements. At a time when only Keitaro, Naru and Kaolla occupy Hina House, a massive storm creates some weird meteorological phenomena, including making the full moon appear to turn red. Keitaro, who hopes for a romantic encounter with Naru, finds himself frustrated by Kaolla's interference. As if to mock his needs, the middle-schooler-- whom Naru jealously calls a "child"-- invites Keitaro to visit her bed-- as long as he brings food, that is.

Keitaro sees the "older" Kaolla at the story's beginning. He doesn't believe the girl's story of being able to transform until he sees her a second time.

Akamatsu's image of the "red moon" probably owes something to traditional associations between femininity and the lunar cycles, though I admit that the artist doesn't dwell on the matter. Since this is a light comedy, naturally Keitaro is made ridiculous for his having contemplated even a kiss with a "too-young-to-kiss" female. Yet I think there's something serious beneath the silly humor. Unlike the male of the human species, the female radically changes her form during maturation. Nabokov's Humbert Humbert was fascinated with the image of the "Lolita," the female before the onset of maturation. But I theorize that even though the Japanese produce a great deal of "Lolicon" material, both in their mainstream entertainment and in their actual pornography, it may that they're really interested in is the magical transition between the child and the maturing woman-- which in turn, may also play into the transgressive allure of both literal and figurative forms of incest.

Theories aside, "Secret" is at the very least a more psychologically suggestive use of fantasy-tropes that one sees elsewhere in Akamatu's slapstick universe.

CROSSING THE LAWLINES PT. 5

I'll probably wind up my essays on clansgression for the time being with this entry. There are a number of other subtle ramifications of the theory, but by next week I plan to work on some new angles regarding the NUM theory and the concept of freedom.

In THE CLANSGRESSION FORMULATION I mentioned in passing that violence as much as sex could function, under the proper circumstances, to provide the reader with "the sense of being "caught up" in the experience of having boundaries broken in an explosive, irresistible state of being." Yet I have not explored the element of violence in respect to clansgression, for all of my examples have primarily focused on clansgressive sexual interactions: OEDIPUS, FANTASTIC FOUR, THE MOONSTONE, and GONE WITH THE WIND.  Given that my essay LEAD US INTO TRANSGRESSION details the ways in which the two kinetic elements can either remain separate or become melded into "impure states," the element of violence requires some exploration.

Now, as Bataille has observed, violence is essentially any activity that disrupts the workaday world, and for that reason he viewed sexuality as an aspect of violence, with which statement I do not agree. One of the most significant differences is that violence is not surrounded with nearly as many arbitrary codes as sex is, though there are some. In Part 4 I wrote:

The principle of transgression, however, stems from both the diegetic world of the narrative's characters, as created by the author, and the extra-diegetic world of the audience.

Where violence is coded into a very simple form of transgression-- Criminal A threatens Victim B with violence but is thrashed by Hero C-- there's not a lot of distinction between what the characters think about a fictive act of violence and what the audience thinks about it.  But in the "impure states," violence does become almost as complicated a matter as sex.

The two impure states as defined in the TRANSGRESSION essay were "erotic violence" and "violent sex." Although these are frequently confused, they can be best distinguished by close reading of the motive imputed to the one who commits the violence, to wit: is the agent of violence more concerned with injuring or with screwing?

Of the examples used thus far, only one of the four utilizes either of the impure states, and this is GONE WITH THE WIND. In PART 2 of my essay-series THE ONLY GOOD RAPE IS A FAKE-RAPE, I observed that Scarlett O'Hara's deeds earned her opprobrium from both various characters in the novel and from at least some readers:

Scarlett commits many sins for which readers will want to see her punished, as do her detractors within the novel-- but for many readers this will be her worst sin: failing to love the man devoted to her, and forbidding him from her bed simply because she does not want more children. 

It seems obvious to me that generations of female readers did not take Mitchell's novel to their bosoms because they thought that it advocated spousal rape, or rape of any kind, as a general policy, though some modern ideologues have expressed such opinions. The only way that these female readers can possibly forgive Rhett's action-- or even take vicarious pleasure in it-- is if they are convinced that Rhett's motivation is honest passion, not violence. Violence certainly does shade into the rape-scene: Rhett is clearly trying to humble her, but not to cause her injury as such, even though prior to the rape he openly fantasizes about crushing her skull like an eggshell. And as I noted, Mitchell herself is implicated in the fantasy of rape, or else it would be impossible for her to portray Scarlett in post-coital bliss-- a bliss that implicitly goes beyond whatever functional, baby-making sex the couple has had before.

For a contrasting representation of "erotic violence," where the intent to injure is paramount, I turn to the novel that I cited here as an ideal example of the "bizarre crimes" trope: the Marquis de Sade's JULIETTE. Sade's violence, of course, is always aimed at inspiring erotic satisfaction through violence, but one particular scene relates, unlike the Mitchell scene, to both transgression and clansgression. Juliette, an orphan raised in a convent, escapes the world of righteous morality and becomes a happy convert to the philosophy of torment expounded by a male mentor. There follow many somewhat rote descriptions of Juliette and her fellow sadists getting off on pain and death, but only one strikes me as noteworthy. Late in the novel, orphan Juliette meets M. Bernal, her birth-father. She determines to transgress against all laws of parental respect by killing him, but first she seduces him. Then, having shown that Bernal is a massive hypocrite by society's lights, she binds him, verbally torments him, and then shoots her father through the head. To his credit as the father of a Sadean woman, M. Bernal doesn't beg for his life before he dies.  Although sex certainly figures into this episode, clearly Juliette's intent is always to injure, not to screw.


These two examples are reasonably clear-cut, but others can be confused by the question, "Is violence being used in place of sex?" In SHOOTING THE SHIRT I pointed out how often Japanese comedy-manga made use of the trope in which irate females clobbered the guys they secretly liked when said guys stepped over, or appeared to step over, some lawline. I observed:

the beating may be deemed a symbolic displacement for the sex-act, since the female is almost always hot for the male.

Often these comic versions of Juliette don't admit that violence stokes their engines. Rumiko Takahashi makes frequent use of this trope throughout URUSEI YATSURA, RANMA 1/2, and INU-YASHA, but as far as I can tell through translations, the female protagonists never express any reaction beyond feminine pissed-offed-ness-- an oddly demure reticence from an author who includes so much sex and violence in her work. Takahashi only touched such overt Sadean territory once to my knowledge, in a comic short story about a modern married couple who displayed a peculiar fetish for having violent fights in their home-- but though comic sexual stimulation is suggested, the principal emphasis is on the neighbors giving the couple hell for their disruptive ways.

Ken Akamatsu's LOVE HINA, though, seems to be one of the few works that eventually admits to the sexual nature of the trope, if one can trust the Tokyopop translation. In the last volume, after innumerable incidents in which Keitaro intrudes upon Naru and gets beaten on for it, the two protagonists confess their true feelings to an interlocutor. Keitaro doesn't precisely say that he gets off on masochistic treatment, but he claims that he loves peeping on Naru so much that he doesn't care that he gets beaten for it, while Naru explicitly admits that she loves both his attentions and getting to beat on him for crossing the lines.

If, as I tend to believe, Akamatsu's sado-masochistic representations explain much about the popularity of this trope, then into which "impure state" do they fall? Since intent to injure is the predominant factor, they belong principally to the domain of "erotic violence." However, unlike Juliette's unlucky papa, these victims of female violence always survive their ordeals, so they may eventually have actual sex-- although, like Akamatsu's Keitaro, even "getting the girl" in the end may turn into "getting it in the end," so to speak.

CROSSING THE LAWLINES PART 2

In this essay I said:

When people voice the familiar cliché, “X is old enough to be your [parental unit],” it’s not because they literally fear that every May-September liaison will result in corporeal incest. Rather, aversion to such liaisons seems more rooted in a quasi-religious sense of the proper order of life: young with young, old with old. These are just two examples of what I term “incorporeal incest.”

The terms "corporeal incest" and "incorporeal incest" are henceforth subsumed by the term "clansgression," implying, for fiction, a narrative action that confuses the proper hierarchies of familial and quasi-familial relations.

For some time I've contemplated the consequences of this statement. I still hold to the idea that May-September heterosexual pairings may recapitulate strong "daughter-father" or "son-mother" connotations. But does that necessarily mean that pairings between heterosexuals of roughly the same age are inevitably closer to the model of "right relations"-- even if, with Bataille, one believes that even the closest that humans can get to that model is still transgressive in nature?

The obvious answer is that it ain't necessarily so. Even age-appropriate status between two given subjects does not nullify the possibilities for clansgressive activity. One can find some suggestion of the potential for the symbolic reading of "sister-brother" clansgression in the familiar joke: "If all men were brothers, would you let one marry your sister?" The joke is primarily a play on the different connotations of the word "brother," but its logic is irrefutable: if all males and females were siblings, sibling incest would be the only way to reproduce the human race.

However, even in real-life culture the spectre of clansgression can appear with respect to age-appropriate pairings, even when the subjects involved are not physically related, nor are they raised in circumstances of regular propinquity (cf. "neighbor-kids who grow up together.") In fiction this motif is most frequently seen in the trope "high school girl dates college boy," or (more rarely) the reverse situation with respect to gender assignment. Typically no more than four years separates the collegian from the high-schooler, so it isn't feasible for such pairings to carry the "May-September" vibe. Yet the sense of boundaries traversed is clansgressive, usually because it's assumed that one member of the couple has already had sex and will be initiating the other. The motif appears prominently in the 2010 film EASY A, in which high-school protagonist Olive, tired of having a friend bug her about her virginal status, makes up a story about losing her cherry to an unnamed college student. Making her imagined seducer a college student suits Olive's purposes of anonymity, so that no one at her school will contradict her tale, but every high-school student immediately finds it credible that a collegian makes a likely enough seducer. It's an interesting detail that in Olive's fabricated tale, the person who introduces her to her seducer is none other than her college-age brother, a character who does not appear in the film, any more than does the collegiate suitor.

Earlier I mentioned the motif of propinquity with respect to the backstory of Reed and Sue of the Fantastic Four. That narrarive isn't the best illustration of the motif, though, for the circumstances of Reed and Sue's meeting are delivered as an explanatory toss-off in the original Lee-Kirby comics. In general those stories tried as hard as they could not to acknowledge a significant age-difference between Sue (young enough to have a teenaged brother) and Reed (old enough to have served in World War II). A better illustration of clansgressive propinquity might be Ken Akamatsu's LOVE HINA.

The set-up for LOVE HINA is that nebbishy loser Keitaro Urashima finds himself managing a girls' dormitory for middle school and college-bound high-school students. Naturally, in the long-running tradition of harem comedies, the girls are winsomely cute, and eventually all of them become enamored on some level with Keitaro, the only male living with them. A modicum of adult supervision is provided by Keitaro's aunt Haruka (the dark-haired woman at far left), but most of the time the girls are free to tease and torment Keitaro, who gets no points for being a little older than the oldest of them, since he's failed his college-entrance exams three times at the series' beginning.  The clansgressive vibe generated by the series eventually develops along the lines of an older "brother" being forced to put up with the hijinks of a band of capricious "sisters," all of whom take on a sibling-vibe partly because they share a house, with special emphasis on the arrangement of Keitaro's room being located directly beneath that of Naru Narusegawa (the girl at extreme right holding Keitaro's arm). Naru, it will eventually be revealed, has a connection to Keitaro than neither of them remembers when they meet, for they were the children of neighboring parents-- a connection that plays a large part in the development of their romance.

The young girls seen on Keitaro's left-- wacky Kaolla, shy middle-schooler Shinobu, aggressive Kitsune, and diffident Motoko-- are also not really related to Keitaro, any more than Naru is. However, they relate to Keitaro in ways that suggest sibling kinship. Even though Keitaro is older than the oldest girl, Kitsune, she gives the impression of having had sexual experience whereas Keitaro has none, which may be the reason why she chooses to call him her "younger brother." Shinobu, who like Kitsune has no siblings that are mentioned, relates to Keitaro like an older brother, though at the same time she has a mild crush on him, which brings down on Keitaro the righteous wrath of Naru, as she accuses him of trying to get jiggy with a middle-schooler. Motoko's backstory involves her convoluted relationship with her sister, a relationship that may have involved Motoko coveting her sister's never-seen husband, who is Motoko's brother-in-law. Finally, Kaolla frequently stresses that Keitaro reminds her of her brother-- also never seen in the manga series-- and though she too is a middle-schooler who would be age-inappropriate for Keitaro, Kaolla possesses a magical ability to "age" herself temporarily, so that she can become closer in age to the beleaguered dorm-manager.

None of these sibling-constellations would be remarkable by themselves, but it seems quite significant that brother-relationships are the only ones mentioned for all of the girls. This almost excludes Keitaro's aunt Haruka, but then, because she shares Keitaro's last name, she can only be the unmarried sister of Keitaro's never-seen father-- so even she is partly defined by a brother-relationship. Keitaro's parents, and those of the young women, are referenced obliquely if at all, with only Haruka and her sometime lover Seta providing adult input-- but they're essentially the "fun aunt" and "fun uncle" who don't interfere with any of the adolescent hijinks. The lack of parental influence might indicate that LOVE HINA actually is a "world of siblings," devoted to almost every conceivable take on sister-brother clansgressive relations, except for relations between biological siblings.

Late in the series Akamatsu introduces Kanako Urashima, who is Keitaro's adoptive sister, but she's even more aggressive than Kitsune, for she earnestly plans to seduce Keitaro. Keitaro is not willing, since he does think of her as the same as a biological sister, but given that LOVE HINA is a comedy, his consent is not important. What is important is that Naru, the romantic front-runner in the Keitaro Derby, is finally forced to put her affections on the line to prevent a forbidden level of clansgressive activity-- though as noted earlier, Naru herself is implicated in the sibling-clansgression vibe by virtue of her childhood association with Keitaro.

Having shown that sibling relationships can be potentially just as clansgressive as those between "age-inappropriate" subjects, in PART 3 I'll move on to the subject of a form of sibling relationship that manages to be exogamous and endogamous at the same time.